The problem is that it flat out isn’t a space exploration game. Space is more or less a glorified loading zone. You can do some dogfighting if you want, but you’re mostly just going to fast travel from planet to planet while completing modern, bland Bethesda quests.

If you really just love Bethesda games, and have enjoyed your time in Fallout 4 or 76, there’s not anything wrong with it structurally. The gunplay is about as good as the Creation Engine allows, and there’s some actually cool new game+ additions to encourage a replay. The problem is that if you’re someone who saw both of those games as signs of Bethesda faltering, Starfield is your proof that their open-world design is outdated, and their writing can’t compete in the same arena as someone like Larian.

ngl, I look at it the same way I do FromSoft games. “It’s called what now? sorry, it was an Estus Flask in Dark Souls, that’s what it gets called forever.”

The Sims 2 Castaway is basically the proto survival crafting game. It’s kinda cool to see the classic Sim stats get used in such a different way. I sometimes wish EA would return to those days of selling spinoff Sim games like Castaway and the Urbz, rather than just dumping every single new idea they get into one game as DLC.

I mean, sure, technically. They’d have to know English, know the programming language that was used for the probe, know the transmission frequency that the probe accepts, know the boundaries and limitations of the probe so that they don’t actually force any errors, and presumably would need to crack the encryption preventing anyone else from reprogramming Voyager 1. They’d also either need to be able to generate incredibly strong radio waves through space in order to transmit their code, or they’d need to be close enough to us that we’d be able to detect their presence.

While that’s all technically possible, the odds of it happening are pretty low.

There certainly was a “golden age of gaming,” where the cost for a studio to exist and make a game was pretty low and they were more willing to experiment. The thing people forget is that there was so, so, so much trash and shovelware made during that era as well. We remember the incredible game that innovated and drove the medium forward, and we forget the movie tie-ins and genre knockoffs.

These days, AAA has forgotten how to innovate, and nearly all of it is being driven by indie titles. This is because, once again, the cost to develop is now so low that literally anyone can do it. The amount of trash and shovelware we’re getting is almost ludicrous though, so it’s a lot harder to find the great titles that are overlooked, but extremely high quality has a remarkable way of cutting through the noise.

To be fair, many universities are making these steps. They have a dialogue with their students and are going to work towards divestment, even though it will take time, and those student bodies are happy to accept that. It’s very important to note that the schools facing protests are either unwilling to attempt divestment at all, or are refusing to even entertain the possibility of divestment by completely ignoring the request.

I’m not claiming that you cannot tell an effective story when you know the fates of the characters, just that Rogue One was particularly ineffective. Usually to make those plots compelling you need to have interesting well written characters with motivations you can understand and care about. The most compelling character Rogue One has is a funny robot.

I’d even go further, people have seriously just forgotten the first 2/3rds of Rogue One. The characters are stiff and boring, the plot is meaningless because you know nobody survives, and the few action sequences before the big battle are nothing to right home about.

Once you get to the big battle, it’s bombastic and exciting, and you even get a little tension from “but how exactly do all these people die?” I don’t even think it’s just nostalgia talking, the battle really was executed incredibly well. It’s like ~45 minutes of the greatest sci-fi war porn ever made. It’s so high quality that it makes you forget the other hour and a half of your life that the movie wastes on Jyn Erso’s angst.

Hey the first like, ~40 minutes of the fourth Matrix isn’t that bad. It’s just after the Wachowski’s were finished making fun of the concept of lame milquetoast sequels trying desperately to do more of the same, they actually went and made one.

It’s a good thing there’s like 12-15 different scenes with stormtroopers who can’t aim in the original trilogy then.

Okay I gotta go on a rant here.

One of Paul’s big defining character traits is his undying love for Chani. When presented with the option to commence a bloody war across the galaxy, or lose Chani, Paul picked the war. He fully neglects his wife, the previous emperor’s daughter that he claimed at the end of the film, in favor of putting all his affection toward Chani. The man is as loyal as they come, and yet he’s being compared to a guy who strangled his wife and tried to murder his best friend.

I really hope Villenue gets his third movie. I don’t dislike the direction he took Paul and Chani’s relationship, I think making Chani a foil to Jessica was quite inspired, but as it stands Paul looks like a complete and utter monster at the end of Dune 2. The choice between Chani and the jihad that he is making isn’t really communicated clearly, and her running off into the sunset away from him makes it look like Paul has betrayed her and used the Fremen so he could chase power.

AI happened. Beyond the immediate issue of decabytes of garbage articles that now show up any time you search something, information on the internet has now crossed the line to “inherently untrustworthy” because anything could be AI generated. If you’re not able to confirm that a real human being wrote the information you’re looking at, you just have to assume it’s wrong.

The internet was definitely a sketchy place in the past, but there were at least a few places you could go to get reliable information. Those places either don’t exist anymore, have become buried in the avalanche of AI garbage, or have become AI garbage themselves. Bookmarking a place when you do find it, like OP is suggesting, doesn’t sound like such a bad idea now.

Very interested in how much money they’re willing to throw at this. The broad strokes plot of Neuromancer makes for a pretty compelling heist story, but it’s a heist that takes place in space, mostly from the perspective of cyberspace, and all of it reads like it would cost a lot of money to recreate. It’s also near certain that all of the subtext is going to get scrubbed out of the show, because Wintermute is the kinda dangerous AI that spooks people, and to my understanding Apple doesn’t like negative portrayals of AI.

It might have some pretty visuals, but it’s hard to trust Apple to make anything punk.

The answer is a lot of companies made dumb decisions during COVID-19. A lot of tech CEO’s saw a massive increase of profits during the COVID lockdown, and they decided there was no possible way for the gravy train to ever slow. The tech sector expanded way beyond its means, and now that COVID restrictions have inevitably ended and most everyone has returned to normal, their profit margins have shrunk back to normal. Since tech CEOs all have a brain parasite that compels them to increase growth always and forever, they have to now cut all those employees they hired during the pandemic to make the line go up.

You’ll notice that none of the tech CEOs are going to face any consequences for their pants-on-head stupid belief that they’d continue seeing the same revenue as when people were trapped in their homes, and the only ones who are going to suffer are all the employees who have now wasted ~3 years at these companies.

Look I love Dark Souls; it is an incredibly flawed game, and Demon’s Souls is even moreso. Dark Souls was so far ahead of it’s time that it still needed time to bake in the oven. Then with how claustrophobic DS2 and DS3’s worlds were by comparison, I don’t think FromSoft really surpassed Skyrim until Elden Ring.

Both games are some of the greatest of all time though, so a lot of it will just come to preference. I think a lotta Dark Souls players have been spoiled by the remaster though, the original release struggled hard under the weight of Miyazaki’s ambition.

People in the future will realize that Skyrim was made in a perfect sweet spot at Bethesda. It was made recently enough that the controls make sense and it feels good to play, but Skyrim was still so, so ahead of it’s time when it came to an open world RPG. Back then, Bethesda’s writers really had a knack for making incredibly interesting settings, and just seeing an entire digital world so wonderfully realized was considered ground-breaking.

A decade later, and the same model has become stale. The gameplay is still there, but the soul is not. Idk if most of those old writers have just left Bethesda or retired after so many years in the industry, but the magic has left the studio. I’m not even really looking forward to ES6 as much as I am the upcoming Avowed from Obsidian, because their games still have plenty of soul.

Into the Spiderverse was pretty stellar though, and Across the Spiderverse was a good sequel. I’d say both are on par with the original Sam Reimi trilogy, with the caveat that they are fully animated productions instead of live-action.

You’re looking too hard for a controversy that isn’t there. This is a Sony live-action Spiderman adjacent film. All of them have been terrible. Madam Web is terrible too.

People criticized Venom, Venom 2, Morbius, and now Madame Web. People will probably criticize the solo Kraven movie whenever that comes out too. It’s not a conspiracy against women, it’s that Sony seems to fundamentally not understand how to make a good superhero flick.

US seems to make a lot saving throws regarding the Constitution, so it’s less out of date and more timelessly relevant.

Wait but…but that means I’m supposed to pronounce it like the sound of slamming metal doors? but it’s for the C language!

am I seriously getting gif’d again?