TwinIon

Bungie has been hiring and working on a new game for a long while now. I have to assume that much of this acquisition is because of that. Given that it hasn't even been announced, I would bet that it becomes a Playstation exclusive. Then again, while Sony has been dipping its toes into the multiplatform waters lately, maybe buying Bungie is just a way to push those experiments much further. Not sure how you go about leveraging Bungie's expertise in cross platform live service games, but maybe Sony is looking into the far future and not seeing single platform being the way. As someone that has (and continues to) sink untold hours into Destiny 2, I'm hopeful that at the very least this means Bungie gets the resources they need to fulfill their vision for Lightfall and beyond. Also, for some reason I actually believe some of the talk about independence and self publishing a bit more here. Between their experiences with Activision and Microsoft, I have the feeling that Bungie wants to remain as independent as possible, so I'm guessing that either they got the deal they wanted or the money just became too good. Hopefully it was both.

After finally finding a fix that worked for me, I was able to get the campaign working on PC gamepass, and I had a good number of hours to put into it over the weekend. While Combat Evolved will always have a very special place in my heart, I think this is the best single player Halo to date by a wide margin. Halo has always been at it's best when you're given a bigger combat arena to play around in, and Infinite offers so much more of that. Besides simply having more open areas, each open area feels like it offers so many real options. You can often go through some caves, approach from above, storm the front gate, or just do anything you like. I love going into an area and feeling like I can approach it however I want also knowing that there are probably other options if I look around a bit. The combat loop is different from previous games thanks to the equipment, but I think the changes are generally for the better. The game feels really excellent, so it doesn't matter that I'm not killing enemies for XP or loot, because the combat is just fun. Obviously the stand out is the grappling hook. Infinite is far from the first to implement it, but the execution is really wonderful. Between traversal around the map, movement during combat, going in for a melee stun, and taking over vehicles, it's just the best. It was very easy to spend all my upgrades points in it before anything else. I think there are legitimate criticisms that could be made as to how Infinite uses its open world. The story structure doesn't really encourage exploration, the in game benefits for clearing everything on the map often feel limited, and there just isn't all that much to do. Also, while I think the map is well designed, it's not all that big. Overall though, I just enjoy the combat so much that none of that is too much of a probleml. I don't need significant incentives to do much in this game, because I just enjoy doing stuff in it. I do wish I could bind each piece of equipment to a different key. I pretty much never use half of the equipment because swapping between them is annoying and the grapple is so good. I often throw the tracking puck into an area, but other than that it's right back to the grapple. If I could press one button to dodge or throw down cover, I might, but as is I've hardly used them. A few other very minor improvements I think they could make involve the FOBS. I wish FOBs all had ammo boxes (which themselves are a great addition) or automatically refilled your ammo, so I didn't have to go and select my two weapons again if I just want a refill. I also wish that you could set default weapons at the FOBs, so I could show up, have my 4 favorite weapons available, but still select a different one if I wanted. Overall though, I'm enjoying it much more than I expected, even having put a few hours into the multiplayer. I'll definitely be looking to replay this in co-op.

Oh no, they got nudity and profanity in our story of genocide. Even though I very much grew up with it, the puritanical American "values" continue to baffle me. Also, isn't this about cartoon mice? Is the school board unaware of the internet?

I think this is mostly a demonstration as to how desperate they are to find dev talent. Here we have a storied dev studio that very rarely launches a new IP, and while this isn't a full announcement, it's still seems like it should be a big deal. Instead of a Blizzcon announcement we get a careers page.

My wife and I have been together since we were pretty young and neither of us have ever really wanted to have kids. Both of our families would be very happy if we were to have kids, I think we'd make pretty good parents, and we make enough money that it wouldn't be an undue financial burden, but as long as our desire isn't there, none of that really matters. We're now up to six nieces, and that is more than enough interaction with children for me.

It's certainly a start. I'm for anything that increases ISP competition, but so much more needs to be done.

While I enjoyed the Gears games, I'm not sure I have sufficient nostalgia to bother replaying them, even if the MCC style collection came out in a sufficiently playable state.

I think what threw me off on some of the rankings was that this is on IMDB score, which often has an different perspective than I would expect. Like, I was surprised that See was generally favorable when I'd not heard the best things. That's not to say that IMDB score isn't a fine way to do this exercise. A few that I saw on Metacritic that might fit in: Ongoing: The Handmaids Tale Undone (haven't seen, but seems well liked) Russian Doll The Tick Completed: Legion (I guess you said no comic book stuff, but it's not exactly connected universe stuff) Eureka Chuck

So he starts off talking about the problem with NFT interoperability, which is obviously impossible. I don't think he even covered half the problems with NFT items existing across games, but I think he covers the problem well enough. I think the same is true of his issues with play to earn. I think he brings up a lot of good points, but doesn't cover all of my issues with the problems that arise. The core issue he has with P2E is building in a deliberately not-fun grind so that people that have more money than time will pay to skip it, and that creates poor incentives on both sides and a bad gameplay experience. I don't think that's all P2E games, but I think that is a lot of them, and I think he's right that it just amounts to a bad game. I think there's also a third category of NFTs in game problems that I think he skipped over, which is pretending NFTs allow for something entirely new. Play to earn games can exist without NFTs. Allowing players to create in-game and make money can exist without NFTs. Interoperability of items between games can exist without NFTs. Essentially all of the many of the promises of NFT gaming are perfectly possible or already in practice without the blockchain, so in order for the blockchain to bring value to gaming, it needs to both do something worthwhile and prove that the blockchain is even a good way to do that thing, which it almost always is not.

I wouldn't want to extrapolate too far into the future, but I think we can be confident that the follow-up to the Switch will be portable. I do think it's worth remembering that the Switch hardware was rushed out and that even at the time and for the money the Switch was under-powered. I wouldn't be surprised if the Switch 2 is a bit closer to state of the art. It won't be state of the art, because Nintendo still wants to make money selling hardware, but I think it'll be closer.

I think this is perhaps the best example of the problems with both "smart contracts" and centralizing the decentralized that I've seen yet. Apparently when you want to list an NFT at a new price, you need to pay a gas fee in order to cancel the old smart contract. However, people found that if they transferred an NFT between wallets, OpenSea would only show the new contract. So OpenSea would show that you've listed your dumb ape for $200k, but on the blockchain there was still an old contract listing it for $5k. Some guys figured this out, bought out a bunch of NFTs at the old, very low, contract price, and then sold them at something closer, but far below what it was previously listed at. At least $1.1 million worth of NFTs were sold this month through this method. Like I said, it's a great example of both the failures of centralizing a platform that is decentralized is a problem, as Moxie noted. If OpenSea wasn't so synonymous with NFTs, it's possible that people would have understood what was actually happening with their smart contracts. It's also a problem with smart contracts in general, especially when you're dealing with lots of money. If I was selling a car and accidentally left four zeros off the price, basically no one would legitimately expect to still receive that car. We see it happen periodically with online goods and accidental listings that get canceled. With "smart" contacts, theoretically, you shouldn't have to worry about people taking advantage of anything, but any small issue in the code or your understanding of the code, and suddenly a small loophole can mean you're out a lot of money, and there's nothing you can do about it. Now, I'd feel really bad for these folks if they were losing their house over something like this, but since it's all still stupid pictures of apes that they're still free to look at, I don't feel too bad about it. This is my consistent conundrum. I don't believe in the vision of cypto as I simply don't see the utility catching up to the money anytime soon. However, I do believe that there are still a number of years left where people will continue valuing crypto very highly. So yeah, I see a dip like this and think it's probably a reasonable investment and that people will end up making a bunch of money, even if the crypto hype is largely insane.

It's not too hard to decipher roughly how much indies matter to Nintendo. Look at the last investor report. They break down that digital game sales make up ~23-24% of their revenue. During a period where they do not have a major first party releases, download only software, add-on content, and Nintendo Switch Online make up about 50% of that total. (When they do have a first party release, it's more like 40%) So all digital only releases make up ~10% of their sales. They don't break that down any further, but the images they used showed Nintendo Switch Online, the Smash Bros Fighters pass, and one indie game. If I were to take a complete guess, I'd wager that indie games make up at most 50% of that number. So all indie games combined probably make up a maximum of 5% of their revenue (when they don't have a major title releasing), but likely it's closer to 3% or less. However, it's probably even less important to them than that. Even if it's 5% of their revenue, it doesn't move the other numbers at all. When they release one big game, their hardware and software sales jump up so much that it dwarfs nearly every other concern.

What a scumbag. By far the best part of the MS acquisition will be finally getting rid of Kotick. Very happy to see that the narrative forming is that he was terrible, so MS was able to buy them out.

While I do expect to see this FTC be a bit more bullish on anti-trust, I also don't expect them to stop the MS deal. Yeah, Activision/Blizzard does have their own launcher/storefront, but they're not really competitive with MS in that way. The games industry will still be left with a bunch of competition at various sizes, and it's unlikely this has any real impact on consumer pricing. The most that I can imagine is the FTC putting some kind of limited conditions on the sale, forcing MS to continue publishing on other platforms for a time, but even that seems unlikely.

Really weird hearing a very similar voice over to what we've heard in the movies.

I did notice that one of the first things said in the announcement video was that even after the merger MS would still only be the third largest video game company, after Tencent and Sony. I'm sure that was aimed at regulators. Hopefully this new FTC can change the way we think about anti-trust in this country, though I won't hold my breath.

I picked up Mars Horizons and played through it recently. It's a game where you manage the space program from the first satellite to landing on mars. It seemed like an interesting idea and had good reviews, but I don't think it's great game. Each area of the game is too distinct, and there's too little insight into everything going on, which makes each area feel isolated. You select what to research, build out your launch facilities base, plan your missions, build your rockets, and execute your missions, but none are that compelling. For example, lets say that I'm thinking a few steps ahead and want to over-build a few rockets so that I can level those up for some more important missions to come. Well, it's not that easy to figure out what rockets you actually need for those future missions. There's a tool to help you figure that out once you've already begun the mission, but you can speculate on future ones. You can just do the math, but it really seems like there should be more insight there. Same goes for building out your base. I don't know how big different buildings are until they're built, so while I'm building out my shuttle program and researching the landing strip, it would sure be nice to be able to take that into account while placing buildings, I can't really do that without looking up the numbers online. You can move buildings after the fact, but I really feel like I should be able to plan ahead better, since that's really the name of the game. Likewise, the game is structured around the idea of a race, but there's little info on how the other participants are doing. No, I shouldn't have perfect insight into what the USSR is doing, but maybe an overall view of what they've accomplished versus what I have? Later in the game the Mars preparedness number is kinda helpful in that, but it's still not great. I beat the game and don't rightfully have a perfect idea of if I crushed them or just squeezed by. The missions themselves are little mini-games that I did not find challenging or rewarding, but thankfully you can skip them. I'm sure if I did them all by hand I'd have done better, but they just were not exciting enough to bother. I ended up getting about 10 hours of of my 10 dollars, so I can't really complain, but I'd probably have been better off buying an expansion for Surviving Mars.

I liked Roku for a while as they seemed like an ideal platform agnostic set top box provider, but they've long since transitioned to an ad company, which brings with it the same burdens as any other platform. They aggressively sell data, they make (or fail to make) deals with content providers over that data, and they do stuff like this. There's no way I buy a Roku anymore.

I know that the announcement throws the word "Metaverse" in there like it means something or matters to anyone other than Zuck, but I think there is actually some relevance here worth thinking about. Most conceptions of the metaverse entail a rather complete interoperability. If I move my avatar between spaces, it should be consistent. This is obviously one of the biggest stumbling blocks of the whole idea, but I do think there's more possibility for some various siloed metaverses. Microsoft is building up quite the collection of valuable IPs where people spend a lot of time. Should any stripped down version of a metaverse happen anytime soon, it's easy to see MS having an advantage in being able to carry things over between all these IPs. I'd still say that even that kind of stripped down, siloed metaverse has yet to prove to be a worthwhile idea, but MS may well give it a go anyways.

This is a mildly hopeful take. We've seen MS willing to let studios do their own thing to some degree. I don't think there's ever going back to "the old Blizzard," but if the structure of Xbox Gaming post acquisition has Blizz out from under the pressures of Activision, it could be really good.

Bill Gates did a TED talk in 2013 and planned to spend $5 Billion to videotape teachers in order to get feedback and figure out what made some teachers more effective. I don't know if that went anywhere, but today it's an idea that certainly comes off as misguided naivete at best.

As I've been going through a new game+ of HZD, I've come up with a short list of things I'm really hoping to see improved in the sequel: Traversal is just bad, while on foot and mounted. Mounts are too slow, too limited in how they climb, and just not as good as they should be in such a big game. The on-foot experience is much worse though. If you're on flat ground or going through a very specific path that's been laid out, it's fine. If you have to deal with any terrain or want to explore, it can be painful. Thankfully this looks like something that Forbidden West has really put effort into, so I'm excited to see how that goes. Another thing they've already mentioned improving is the hand to hand combat, which is basically non-existent in HZD. Basically any effort at all would be a big improvement. A small weapons related thing I'd like to see is more weapon customization. Mods are fine, but I feel like I should be able to select which arrows I use on which bows. I'm sure that the weapon selection will be different, so maybe this won't even be needed. One other small thing that makes a big difference is the collection aspect. The game wants you to constantly loot everything or else risk running out of materials for crafting stuff, but also throws in a bunch of junk. What's worse is that so much of that junk is potentially useful, so you kinda don't want to sell it. The inventory should be bigger, looting should be faster, automatic, or less necessary, and inventory items should either have a clear purpose or be clearly marked as junk and easy to sell in bulk. Also, while I don't really mind the animal parts being necessary for capacity upgrades, the drops are way too rare. I bet I'll finish my newgame+ save (having done most of the sidequests in my first go and very few on my second) without having upgraded all my stuff completely, but having spent a decent amount of time hunting. How many freaking raccoons are running around without skin or bones!? Overall though, it's still a wonderful game. A highlight of the generation, with a unique setting and aesthetic that also manages to be really fun to play. Really looking forward to the sequel next month.

So, will the F2P GTA mobile game be GTA 5, GTA 6, or a whole separate endeavor? Since I don't have a ton of interest in GTA multiplayer, I might prefer them separating the two. Build GTA 6 as a typical AAA single player game, and then build a separate GTA Online that's free to play across mobile/consoles/etc. Basically what Halo Infinite did, but with mobile. I'm sure that existing GTA Online players don't like the idea of moving to a new game, so maybe the existing GTA 5 Online experience will just evolve into a mobile game. Not that R* needs Zynga to either build the mobile version or show them how to monetize it.

I don't have a single starting word. I just go with whatever comes to mind.

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