Mark Stevens

Didn’t expect Electronic Arts AND Game Pass to both commit suicide in less than one week.

Still trying to reconcile the fact that Alien: Earth is both an intriguing TV show but also a terrible entry in the Alien franchise.

As much as I don't want to see EA gutted, I'm struggling to recall anything of theirs I've played over the last 5 years, except for the Dead Space remake, the two Jedi games, and some of the F1 games.

Okay, well actually it's the relatively contemporary KEX engine, but you know what I mean.

I mean, seriously, this is a 30-year-old game engine!

A tip of the hat to the level designers at Machine Games who worked on the new Quake levels. Dimension of the Machine has some amazing environmental design, lots of great verticality, use of color, etc. If you've overlooked their new maps for Quake, Quake 2, and Doom, definitely check them out.

Imagine Alien Isolation getting multi-regional versions, with the UK enjoying the Creative Assembly version and the US getting whatever this is.

If you were in the US, you would have played this slightly inferior version of Aliens on your C64, developed & published by Activision. Oddly enough, this version was also released in the UK, which probably led to a number of Christmas present slip-ups, but the UK version didn't release in the US.

If you were in the UK you would have played a version of Aliens developed by the imaginatively-named Software Studios and published by Electric Dreams.

Another good example, although I seem to remember being aware of it at the time, was the tie-in for Aliens, which received a completely different set of ports on either side of the Atlantic.

To be clear, I'm not talking about the wildly different ports of a game we would get across multiple platforms, which were almost always entirely different games, but the slightly rarer occurrence of two mutually exclusive regional variations released on the same platform.

A bit of digging around revealed the existence of two versions of the game, which got me wondering about just how many other games from the 80s were essentially leading a double life. Not a significant amount, it turns out, but enough to cause confusion in retro gaming circles.

I'd always assumed that only one version of the game existed (the UK version), so it confused me when decades later I discovered so many conflicting, divided recollections of the game.

If you were in the US, your version of Ikari Warriors on C64 was programmed by Quicksilver Games and published by Data East. It was a pretty terrible arcade conversion. It looked like this.

If you were in the UK, your version of Ikari Warriors on C64 was programmed by John Twiddy and released by Elite Systems. It was a pretty decent arcade conversion. It looked like this.

What's wild about 80s gaming is that it wasn't unusual for different regions (eg, USA & UK) to have their own unique version of a licensed game on the same platform. Take Ikari Warriors on the Commodore 64 for example.

I'd like to think that in an alternate reality I'm running an im-sim development studio called Imposter Syndrome.

Like, every week. I guess if you've got that much money to throw around then you can afford to treat purchases as demos, try something out for a short while, and then move onto the next thing. Me? I'm still working on AC Shadows, SW Outlaws, CP2077 and The Witcher 3!

Maybe it's just the people I'm friends with on PSN (a mixture of real life friends, online friends, and random people who friended me after "bonding" over an extended multiplayer session), but I notice that a good number of them buy This Week's Big AAA Game and only ever play it for about 10 hours.

Someone tell me I'm overreacting for having lost all faith in Xbox as a platform and publisher. I really want to be wrong, so please tell me where the silver lining is in all of this. What should be looking forward to? Not spoiling for an argument, I'm genuinely curious.

Sea of Thieves was the last dangling thread that kept me attached to Game Pass, but I play that on PS5 now, so I'll be canceling Game Pass and it's highly unlikely I'll ever buy Xbox hardware again. Godspeed id, Obsidian, Playground, and what remains of Arkane and Rare. You deserve better.

This is the last straw for me as a consumer. The Xbox brand was a in a great position in 2018, but since then all that potential has been squandered away by mismanagement and a fundamental misunderstanding of the strength of their studios.

(Switched to playing Sea of Thieves on PS5. I hope the likes of id, Obsidian, Playground, and what's left of Arkane and Rare somehow survive all this.)

It was the only reason I still had a Game Pass subscription. I've just lost all faith in Xbox at this point. They were in an amazing position in 2018 and just squandered all that potential, completely failing to capitalize on the strengths of their studios and IPs. Never touching Xbox again.

I've used em-dashes extensively in my writing, be it technical, journalistic, or fiction, for the last 30 odd years. I've some of my em-dash-ed works through AI detection software and it always passes as 100% human with no mention of the em-dashes.

Can anyone show me a screenshot of AI/plagiarism detection software specifically calling out em-dashes or parenthesis as evidence of AI generation? I'm about 99% convinced this whole "em-dashes = AI" nonsense is simply perpetuated by lazy-ass professors who heard that somewhere on the internet.

Threads Gamers currently getting mad at video game publishers and developers releasing games “to make a quick buck”. How is this even a gotcha? Yes, that’s what consumer products are designed to do — make money. 🙄

I mean, at least work an optional solution into the remastered version. But literally copying a much derided mechanic that caused most players to give up on the original is a weird move. At least PC players can mod around it. Console players are fucked.

Despite it literally being a bullet point in some of the pre-release marketing, they apparently didn’t fix the leveling issue in #OblivionRemastered after all because “authenticity”. Oh well, here’s me not going back to it then. I don’t have the patience for tiresome workarounds. 🤷‍♂️

I wish Clair Obscur’s long-press windows for flee and skip were just a teensy bit longer. Twice now I’ve set up a character to deliver a deliciously buffed 9 AP attack only to accidentally trigger flee.