the EA is also missing a lot of content that isn’t ready yet

Sure, but there's also plenty to explore, especially for people who haven't played PoE1 and have to learn how things work from scratch. Given you don't pay extra for EA and premium stuff like stash space you buy goes to both PoE1 and 2, you get quite a bit for your early access ticket.

But probably more important that early access characters and stuff aren't available out of early access, so you are explicitly playing temp characters. Fine if one treats their early/seasonal characters as temp characters anyway, but someone else might not want to play characters with no future after early access.

Yeah, the insistence on trading as a key part of the game (despite the garbage trading system) absolutely murders your loot, which is just a huge drag in a loot game.

Global trading means drop rates and gear quality have to be kept down across the entire playerbase, so stinginess is built in deeply on top of GGG's inherent worship of time-wasting and RNG.

BTW, PoE2 separates skill gems from gear and removes color gem slot restrictions, so that at least frees you of the way PoE1 needed a drop to be good and to get good links and to get the colors you needed on those links. On the other hand, the simplified gem system is missing some life and fun. You don't even level gems by using them anymore. You just burn a higher level gem drop to level a gem you already have.

I used to be very patientgamer, but my patience model changed after finding again and again that buying late meant devs had wholly moved on from a game by the time I got it, and would hardly ever do basic needed fixes, things that needed to have been talked about earlier in the project. I also noticed how some early access sales would take years for the price to go up and then back down again for what amounted to only a few dollars of savings. Savings that, as I watch games I'm interested in fail in obscurity over and over, I don't feel quite right about strictly withholding from the few devs taking chances on such projects for me, on top of not being around to try and help the project deliver a better game to players.

So, now I do buy some games in early access or even newly released, where I can poke the dev while they are still around, and my patience includes waiting for games to get through those after-buying growing pains instead of just waiting for them to drop into the discount bins, mostly forgotten by their devs and players both.

I'm still generally more strictly price-patient on most anything larger scale, both by devs and by audience.

And it's not even the first horror movie named Director's Cut.

but it is never too early to get on the radar

Eh... We have tons of movies we can actually see, and heaps of movies we can see very soon (especially as we enter October). Movies we cannot see for a long and indeterminate time don't do any good. When hype pushes too far ahead, it's just waiting and distraction from things that actually are relevant. It's just more noise we need to filter through, and there's so much noise.

Too early for news about this, unless you're going to theaters in Taiwan.

It was enjoyable, but that review is waaaaay overselling it. Especially as comedy.

If you want a Korean horror comedy, try Night of the Undead (2020), but don't go in expecting zombies ;) Horror Stories 2 (2013) also had a pretty fun hor-com for one of its segments.

In a world where no one speaks

Another one? Eesh, these are always such painfully contrived and badly done conceits.

Probably Ouija: Origin of Evil. Others we'd note in particular:

• Oculus 2014
• Dark Skies 2013
• The Veil 2016
• The Lords of Salem 2013
• The Hunt 2020
• M3GAN 2023
• Jessabelle 2014
• Dashcam 2022

Depends on your horror tastes, of course. We have no interest in Martyrs or A Serbian Film type stuff even if Baskin was pretty redeemable on general weirdness, and we all know there's plenty worse than any of those out there.

Maybe most people who watch Baskin tend to venture even further out, but it seems like a notable watershed point to me.

Get a controller with underside buttons. I also consider stick-clicks an abomination, but it's great now that there are under-buttons we can hard-remap to L3 and R3.

8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth controller has some awful ergonomics on several things, but the underbuttons are excellent examples.

Cactus is probably the single best mastery/arcade style twin-stick shooter out there. Don't let the cute looks fool you, while this game is solid to just enjoy, the chaining and level design offer great challenge if you want it, and the way each character changes both the basic play and the way you chain a level show a just fantastic design level.

It usually goes $5 in sales, but it's still crazy we can get games that good for so little.