Ian

I will say that the solo mode is very good. One of the better ones I've played.

I think I still prefer the Ark Nova/Sanctuary "puzzle" style solo, where you're racing against time, but for a draw cards/do actions solo, SETI is good.

Played a solo round of SETI this afternoon. Played w/o the majority of the expansion content to see if complaints I'd heard were justified (mainly that it's a bit slow to start).
And yeah, I like the game a lot, but I'll be doing the quick start stuff from now on.

Hunter Gathering deserves criticism.
It's Sony not only forcing a IP that's had minimal success in spinoffs, but also forcing more GaaS titles into their anemic software pipeline. People have very little faith in Sony doing this, because their support of these types of titles has been bad.

Sammy from Pushsquare and Snekboy being out of touch dumbasses thinking the criticism of Horizon Hunters Gathering means that you never really understood the PS brand or the PS3 era and dawg the fuck are either of you two idiots talking about.

I just want to go on record and say that neither of these guys know what the fuck they're talking about.
You can cherrypick stuff like MAG or Starhawk, but the people that loved the PS3 loved it because Sony actually made games and took chances. They didn't constantly chase trends

The Federal ads were largely fluff, but the Ontario Gov't ads were propaganda mixed with misinformation. Doug's been off work since Christmas, so he probably doesn't even know what the ads were, he just gave our tax dollars to a friend to make it.

As a Canadian, I'd say I'm glad that I missed out on a lot of the AI slop ads that the US saw... but we were subjected to tax payer funded political ads off an election cycle... and I don't know what the purpose of them was other than some national pride circle jerk.

I am freed from having to watch the Super Bowl

This has been the most interesting part of the Super Bowl, which doesn’t say a ton.

shrek from the movie shrek is smiling and looking at something ALT: shrek from the movie shrek is smiling and looking at something

All of it’s so bad it belongs on Xbox.

Every year when forced to watch the Super Bowl, I’m reminded how fucking corny America is.

Shitposting, and boycott aside, the rumours surrounding what the next Xbox is sound kind of terrible.

"You can run Steam" isn't appealing when the entire design philosophy of the HW is "we don't really know what people want so lets just be everything"

an artist 's impression of a futuristic city with flying vehicles Alt: an artist 's impression of a futuristic city with flying vehicles

The world if devs optimized Switch 2 games for handheld, rather than docked.

I still have to go back to Yotei. These huge open world games have beat me down.

I think they'd already started working on 3, after Forbidden West released, but I think they probably need to rework a lot of narrative stuff since they had indicated they didn't want to recast Silas.
I beat HFW and the DLC, and honestly I'm in no rush for more of that.

Anyways.
NiOh 3 has multiple types of cats, so it's clearly an early GotY nom. Up there with Cairn, which featured random Pikas

First 2 zones in NiOh 3 mostly cleared.

After dying quite literally 40+ times to the boss that comes before the title screen, I have proceeded to accomplish the following in NiOh 3 while only dying once.
No summons, and a couple of world boss-y type things.

I haven't managed to table the copy of SETI I traded for... but I bought the Space Agencies expansion today anyways, because a board game acknowledging that the early game is slow... even if fixing that costs money, is something I'm ok with.

I'll add that Pragmata, at least in the demo, seemed better than it had any business being.

Wolverine, from Sony's best Studio should release.

And there's a ton of promising looking indie stuff.

Also, Marathon has a solo queue.

Me: 2026 is gonna be a sort of dogshit year for games.

Games:
Cairn is an all timer
NiOh 3 is a lot of fun
Mewgenics is actually real
Slay the Spire 2 drops in March.

Every major geopolitical issue is the trolly problem, but there’s only one track with a switch that doesn’t fucking do anything.

I don’t fully understand the situation, but the appearance is that one side is supporting atrocities in the name of religion and the other side is ushering in the imperial war machine that will also commit atrocities.

As with most geopolitical issues, it feels like there should be a 3rd option.

Every time I see anything about the Iranian protests happening in Ontario, I can’t help but feel like both sides are cheering on catastrophic Ls for the people that actually live in Iran.

The local protest has people with Trump signs and Israeli flags.

Dawg, they still want you dead…

My expectations from Capcom were that Pragmata on Sw2 would be a tired fire, and Monster Hunter Stories 3 would be fine... but it seems like the opposite has happened.
MHS3 doesn't have great IQ, and isn't locked fps... and Pragmata, while not as crisp as on PS5, seems to look and run pretty ok.

Nioh 3 pretends that it’s a Souls game, and maybe the bosses are, but I keep running into enemies and bases and fearing for my life…only to body them in the most embarrassing way.

Nice. That boss is before the fucking title dropping.

After about 40 tries I beat the first boss.
As it turns out, I was mostly just impatient.

Reminder that the stock market is not real, and building an entire economy around speculative nonsense is absurd

Why does a PDF viewer have an AI assistant.
I'm opening a doc.
What fucking questions could I have.

My Friday Hot Take is that at least some of the enthusiast gaming press would likely find more success if they didn't opt into constantly writing about the same 5-10 games that every other big site is writing about.
The best sites are the ones that find a meaningful niche, and lean into that.

What if we didn't promote IPs tied to MSFT, given all the awful things that company is doing right now.