They just made bribes legal and made the president above the law.
I'd just as soon call this the death of co-op games. How many can be played without an internet connection? Split-screen, LAN, direct IP connections, and private servers are super rare now, and it sucks. Plenty of games in that chart from 2018 might not even be playable anymore, and plenty more can go down when Steam servers are down for maintenance or will be unplayable when you're on a train or some other location without internet access.
Nintendo's gonna Nintendo. Plus Smash attendance at majors for Melee and Ultimate, from a cursory glance, appears to be on the decline in the wake of Ultimate's sunsetting. Evo's only going to take the 7 biggest games and a throwback, so even if Nintendo wasn't getting in the way, you might fit in Ultimate but not Melee. Smash gets its dues in other places. Like Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 3, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, etc., the scene will never truly die.
It's on GOG. Currently on sale for $3. It's the non-remastered version, but I doubt that will hold people back much.
Gods Will Be Watching is the one that comes to mind for me. It's a strategy game of sorts with about 7 or 8 totally different scenarios where you're managing a very bad situation. In one, you're holding hostages while executing a heist, and in another you're wandering through a desert with limited resources. Each one is a balancing act, and a through line forms the narrative across them all. It was probably hamstrung by its punishing difficulty at launch, which was later addressed by additional difficulty modes, but there's a lot of room to iterate on this concept without it ever getting old.
They're not. This same curve happens with PvP games. The ones that don't follow this trend are the exception, not the rule.
She was credited with a pseudonym. It happened plenty in the 90s, and this wasn't long after. That means probably Hollywood talent. Someone prestigious who thought taking this role would be bad for her career, or maybe her agent thought that. But times have changed in the past 20 years, so maybe we can know who it is now.
But will they credit Eva's voice actor by her real name this time? Whatever stigma there may have been in 2004 for being in a video game has got to be gone by now.
There's also a new 3D factory game called Foundry. Having bounced off of Satisfactory, that one seems more promising as a fan of Factorio.
Potentially true. Or it was an accident that proved more lucrative than they thought it would. At the very least, it got there first and showed everyone else how to ruin multiplayer games.
It's a great game, but it's hard to argue that it didn't change the genre, and all of multiplayer video games, for the worse. Multiplayer games can no longer be designed to just be fun. They must also be addictive, they must retain players, they must keep them coming back, etc. using every manipulative trick in the book like XP bars and unlocks. You might say MMORPGs did this first, but this was the application of that feedback loop to a competitive action game.
I'm still moving forward slowly in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Not much else to report there without spoilers.
I beat Fallout 2 for the first time. It got off to a rough start by only really allowing you to use melee weapons, even if you didn't spec for them. It also ended in a rough spot by similarly not giving you tons of options for how to get through the final area, and the ones that were there reminded me a lot of 90s adventure games, with very specific solutions that you'd wonder how on earth you were possibly supposed to know that. In fact, once you get to the final step of retrieving the GECK, through to the end of the game, the game suddenly does a very poor job of pointing you toward what you're supposed to do next, which stood out because the game had been really good at it up to that point. The progression was also really strange. Most of the power progression is going to come from armor, but they're really stingy with letting you amass enough money to buy better armor, and armor and weapons rarely drop from enemies at all. Your lack of ability to take on combat encounters for most of the game limits how much XP you can earn, to the point where I spent 3/4 of the game at or below level 8, and then the last quarter of the game very quickly got me to level 18. Those issues aside though, the middle chunk of the game that forms most of your time with it was some of the best RPG stuff I've seen in the genre.
I then immediately moved on to Fallout 3, which I had played before over 10 years ago, and the last time I played it was before I played the classic Fallout games. Especially with Starfield fresh in my mind, I was expecting this to have aged worse, but so far, it really hasn't. Bethesda made a lot of smart choices with how they changed the progression, like giving you fewer SPECIAL points up front and letting you put points into what you want with every level up; plus they flattened the progression on big guns and lasers, which were previously (in Fallout 1 and 2) a stat you could put points into and then never use until the back part of the game. Plus, the quest design is miles better than Starfield. Sure you take a quest that looks like it's just a simple fetch quest, but when you get there, not only are you in the middle of a minefield, which already throws a wrench into the works of how the game typically plays, but then there's a sniper trying to detonate them on you too. Just purely by the game's systems, I get into a shootout with this guy, and my bullet happens to shoot the sniper rifle out of his hand, really showing the power of the sandbox in Bethesda games when they're at their best. That interesting thing that happens along the way in your quest is the thing Starfield needed so badly. Fallout 3 sure isn't perfect; the shooting feels bad, and they're too content to let you follow objective markers instead of using your head more, but it's good to be back.
I also started Life is Strange: Before the Storm ahead of Double Exposure. The opening scene was so bad that I almost put the game down then and there, but I'm told it gets better soon, and I did like the original Life is Strange.