Are you actually proposing incorporating elements of the BR genre (choosing drop locations, looting, encroaching zone time limit, limited respawning, etc) or do you just want bigger arenas and more players in your regular Twisted Metal death match? Cause I don’t actually think Twisted Metal is as suited for the BR genre as you say, but I could be convinced otherwise if you have a take.
This feels like a response to a question I don’t know enough to ask. What’s the context?
You’re doing yourself a disservice if Blood 2 is the only Monolith game youve played. No One Lives Forever, AVP2, and FEAR are all really well done pre-CoD4 shooters.
That’s because OPs article is citing the second annual Teens and Screens report from the UCLA Center for Scholars and Storytellers. Your NPR article from 2023 is citing the first annual Teens and Screens report.
It’s a holdover from the early days of Rainbow Six would be my guess. You had like a dozen or so operatives with mild differentiations in stats and traits. Each guy had a “service record” of sorts, which gave a little more context for what was, in essence, the games’ lives system. If I remember right, some of these names were either pulled from or incorporated into the Tom Clancy Universe of novels and adaptations. It was a practically free way to inject some story and character into games that were pretty light on those details otherwise.
Of course, modern Rainbow Six has no need for these things, but inertia is a bitch, and you can be sure some grognards would piss and moan about a “feature” being removed if they stopped including these details.
In essence, that is what she did. Her letter, which is an excellent read if you like detail oriented logical takedowns of transparent corruption, only “offers” her resignation, conditional to the AG refusing to meet with her to discuss the issues she raises in the letter.
She says that dismissing the charges would be, in the first place, unethical, as the prosecution is based upon an indictment rendered faithfully by a grand jury. Furthermore no one (including Adam’s defense counsel) has called into question the conduct of the prosecution. In addition, dismissing the case would also be illegal, as legal precedence states that a court may decline the Government’s request to dismiss charges in instances which run contrary to the public interest. She concludes that, in light of those points, she cannot and will not comply with the request. At that point, she offers her resignation.
Despite really enjoying reading her arguments, I’m certainly no law expert. I would imagine that she would open herself up to some pretty serious charges from the Department of Justice if she refused to comply with their order. I mean, considering the brazenness of the corruption on display by the very order she is protesting here, it wouldn’t shock me if she’s wondering if they’d try to charge her with fucking treason or something, a crime which could result in the death penalty. Of course, something like that would only be plausible if there was demonstrated evidence of an authoritarian, Tammany Hall-style political machine situation developing at the federal level with the tacit approval of the judicial branch. Good thing there’s no evidence of that happening, right?
Which is to say, I think the folks in here whining about how she isn’t doing enough to fight fascism should maybe get off their pedestals a bit and have a little empathy for the position she had forced upon her by the ACTUAL villains in this story.
4 was something of a departure from the formula, wasn’t it?
HoMM2 was my game from the series. For whatever reason, I never really progressed past that one, even though I had heard 3 was the consensus favorite.
Yes. The United States Board on Geographic Names is the group within the Department of the Interior which handles these matters. They are a part of the executive branch. I suspect that you can follow a chain of delegated authorities through that board, up the civil service hierarchy, landing on the desk of the President.
This is an example of the system not accounting for, or being ambivalent about, the election of someone to that office with a fascist ideology.
I’m speculating, and certainly not a business expert, so heaping handfuls of salt comes with this statement: I think part of the problem that led to this is that each game was published by a different entity. Square published 2016, then put the devs up for sale the following year, citing underperformance. IO buys itself out and becomes independent, but needs capital to get Hitman 2 across the finish line. Enter a publishing deal with Warner Bros. That game proves successful enough that Hitman 3 is able to be self-published.
Considering IO’s concept of this World of Assassination trilogy was always that it would have certain online-only or live servicey features, and I assume that publishers often provide the necessary infrastructure for these things, I wonder if the rotating chair of publishers is to blame for making this process so much more obtuse than it needs to be.
Please do not connect multiplayer shenanigans into my Doom campaign. It seems vanishingly rare nowadays to get a AAA shooter with as much, if not more, love put into its campaign mode, if it has one at all. Have your death match LAN parties all you like, keep the dream of the 90s alive and all, but I’m not too proud to beg that it stay its own disconnected thing.
Cause it doesn’t matter if they are still profitable. If you aren’t MORE profitable than your last outing, then you aren’t growing, and if your business isn’t growing, it’s dying.
However, I wonder if the premise is flawed here. In 1999, you could probably get a somewhat accurate idea of a game’s profitablity by comparing dev cost vs units sold. However, with live service being the AAA fascination du jour, and Call of Duty in particular having a whole game mode siloed off into the free to play space, I question if “units sold” is indicative of financial success anymore.
“I came to (Sinegal) once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty," Jelineck said, according to 425 Business. “We are losing our rear ends.’ And he said, ‘If you raise (the price of the) effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.’ That’s all I really needed.”
I don’t have a dog in this race (I’ve never had a Costco membership), but this quote makes me feel like Costco’s leadership has at least one of their priorities straight.
Remakes are not inherently devoid of creativity. And, frankly, Capcom seems to have a pretty decent track record when it comes to revisiting their IP, at least as far as the Resident Evil series. Case in point, the remake of RE1 from way back in the GameCube days is, arguably, the definitive way to experience that story. It retained the core features of the OG game, but expanded upon them, and remixed certain aspects to keep the experience fresh, even for a diehard fan of the OG. I would like to have seen the face of someone who played the hell out of RE1 watching a dispatched zombie resuscitate as a Crimson Head for the first time.
More recently, the RE 2 and 3 remakes offer a wildly different experience from their original blueprints, what with the change in perspective and what not. However, rather than overhauling everything about those games into RE4 style action games, as the perspective would imply, they maintain an emphasis on inventory management, puzzles, and evading danger rather than confronting it. This keeps the remakes feeling like the games that they are based upon, but offers a different gameplay experience, one that is less of an ask for modern players to adapt to.
So, idk man. Call me a simpleton lining up to suckle at corporate teats if you like, but I’m pretty fucking excited over the idea of a Dino Crisis remake.
Complaining that Borderlands 3 has a juvenile tone, while praising the first two games great stories, feels disingenuous. Or, at the very least, it reads as excessively nostalgic.
Offline play? It’s SOLITAIRE. Offline play should be the ONLY play, by default.
Feeling like I took crazy pills this morning…
He was dismissed for “gross misconduct” following an investigation into his involvement in sexual harassment. One of the articles has the guy’s lawyer saying it was a sham investigation because he was not involved in it (as in, was not questioned). Which, if this were a court of law, where a defendant has the right to confront their accusers, then sure, he’s got a point.
But it wasn’t that, and clearly Sony/Bungie felt that he was a greater liability than an asset. That leads me to believe that they DID find evidence of wrongdoing on his part, convincing enough that questioning him was unnecessary, and severe enough that they felt they could terminate him for cause. In taking those steps, I’m certain they cleared it with legal to ensure that their case was as airtight as they could make it, especially if there was a 45 million dollar payment at stake.
So, maybe he’s being truthful, and he was a convenient fall guy for Bungie to throw to the wolves during the height of the scrutiny on them. However, until there’s more convincing evidence available than, “well they didn’t ask ME if I harassed my colleagues”, I’m not buying it. Discovery will be interesting.
If your question encompasses the broader theme park tycoon genre, and you chafe against some of RCT’s legacy design elements, you might try Parkitecht or Planet Coaster. PC2 just released, though the reviews seem comparatively tepid to the OG, so buyer beware.
Not much to say about the wider conversation here, but I just want to chime in to support your position. I read that article you posted, and I was kinda chuckling to myself at the author, who seems to be at least a casual fan of deckbuilder type games, arguing that the devs are wrong, and that the cards were not a barrier to entry. Meanwhile, I’m sitting over here, looking at the copy I have in my steam library which has never been touched, specifically because I heard it was a deckbuilder and immediately lost all interest. This despite the otherwise fairly positive reception the game got, and the hundreds of hours I’ve spent in Firaxis style tactical strategy games.
Sometimes I wish I knew why I have such a mental block about deckbuilding. I think the layers of strategy become too abstract for me to visualize what I’m trying to pull off, and it feels artificial in a way that rubs me the wrong way. Even if a 3 turn cool down on an ability is no less artificial, it doesn’t irk me in the same way.
And for the record, I didn’t buy the game just to never play it, its a family library copy! I’m not that wasteful.
Not an option for most, I’d wager. Federal employees are free to unionize, however it is a felony crime for a federal employee to strike against the government. Furthermore, it’s a felony to even assert that this is right you have, or to join an organization which asserts that right. The government’s HR department, the Office of Personnel Management, is able to bar any person who violates these provisions from federal employment for life.
Laws more or less to this effect have been on the books since the 40s and 50s, but the issue came to a head in the early 80s when thousands of air traffic controllers went on strike against the FAA after contract negotiations fell through. Reagan ordered the controllers back to work, and, when they refused, summarily fired them. Where they couldn’t be replaced be scabs, he activated the military to fill in, citing national security. According to the last article I read, of the 13,000 striking employees, 11,000 were fired and barred from future employment (though I think Clinton rolled some of that back in the 90s).
Considering it’s clear that the GOP benefits from government dysfunction, and does everything they can to erode public faith in institutions, striking postal workers would be a gift served on a silver platter for them. Trump will giddily fire every last one of the strikers, be praised for being a big strong man who doesn’t negotiate with plebs, and the postal service will be de facto shutter, even if it still exists in as diminished a form as they can get away with while still satisfying whatever requirements there are to have such an institution.
Obviously striking always carries risk, but asking someone to almost certainly throw away their livelihoods for a course of action that will likely only accelerate Trump et al.'s goals is unreasonable.
Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and slap a guarantee on it, I’ll do it, I’ve got spare time, but, for your customer’s sake, for your daughter’s sake, if you want to make a quality game, you’ll buy from me.