Liam Deane

I think this is a bit harsh on There Will Be Blood but this is pretty much exactly how I feel about The Master, one of the dullest films ever made which I note everyone has now decided to politely forget about rather than maintain the pretence that it was good.

Also insane how little attention most companies pay to their Wikipedia pages considering it's where people are most likely to find information on non-famous companies. Generally it's either painfully obvious insertion of marketing copy or (more often) completely ignored.

Having a familiarity with the Ikea product range really ruins your enjoyment of Airbnbs

The a weeb world now and I'm just living in it

I've never seen Scarface which is weird because I like mob movies.

But it increasingly feels like my biggest generation-specific hole might be never having seen any Studio Ghibli film (which five years ago I'd heard of).

Would be crazy if the experience strained but ultimately strengthened and deepened their relationship

Also his teenage daughter is there for some reason

Sad dad reboot of Ratchet & Clank would slap though

*guy firing up Astro Bot*

Great, another brutal tale of betrayal and vengeance

That it got rave reviews from British outlets and universally panned in Ireland tells you all you need to know really.

Side question: what's happened to Tyler Cowen? He's always been very right wing but until quite recently generally came across as smart and thoughtful.

Brain melted by AI? Or Trump? Or just old-fashioned neurological degeneration?

We proud h-pronouncing Irish have been living with this curse for generations

11. Don't Get Your Hopes Up

Lovely little game of househunting in Amsterdam turned into a demented fever dream. A lot of delightful local touches if you know the city but should be relatable to anyone who's interacted with a major city property market in the last decade. Completely free on Steam!

10. Mafia: The Old Country

Deeply derivative in many respects, though the setting is somewhat novel at least. But it looks great, is well written and generally well made and demands very little of you (including crucially of your time). Plenty to like overall.

Yes, finding good non-mainstream games is hard and that's a problem. But it's a problem that exists just as much for other media as it does for games, and if you're not at least aware that serious games *exist* then sorry you're just incredibly incurious.

The fact the the most common reply to the post was RDR2 certainly supports that thesis

Yeah, absolutely true that *individual* independent films are just as invisible as indie games, if not even moreso. But the fact that someone, somewhere is presumably making sophisticated and intellectually challenging cinema is something everyone is aware of.

I mean it's also true that arthouse films get less media coverage than Hollywood blockbusters but everyone is nonetheless at least vaguely aware that high concept film is a thing that exists

I think if it was ever going to happen it would have to include the South African (and I guess Italian) sides. It wouldn't be a B&I league but an everyone-but-France league. That seems like a fairly likely consolidation long term as the Top 14 continues to pull away from the rest financially.

Something similar is true of the gaming arms of Tencent and to a lesser extent Sony. The overall trend is definitely towards less and less public visibility of what's actually happening in the games industry.

This trend has already been going on for a while. E.g., while Activision Blizzard is still technically part of a public company, it's now such a small part of Microsoft's overall operations that we know how hardly anything about its financials anymore.

EA is about 3% of the global games market so it going private means a modest but meaningful reduction in the level of transparency in the industry overall.

Roughly half of the games market is fairly financially transparent in that it's made up of publicly traded companies that mainly or exclusively produce games and so have to publish fairly detailed information about their revenue, costs, headcount, etc.

And all the replies from people who have clearly only played 3 games in the last decade

Easy to forget for those of immersed in games that plenty of people out there are still asking incredibly tedious questions like this

You'd think the giant letters G, D, and C would be some hint

Not triggered by any specific event but it tracks a broader shift in elite European opinion on Israel which is only now catching up with a shift popular opinion that happened some time ago.

The messaging around the rebrand has admittedly been incredibly unclear, but on this point people are just being deliberately obtuse.

GDC clearly is not changing its name to "Festival of Gaming". It's obviously just a new tagline.

If you want to make a game where the main character shoots hundreds and hundreds of people dead I feel you should have to set it in a context where that isn't a completely insane thing to be happening