The irony of this article ending with a link to the author’s Twitter.

If the existence of a gay klingon is the worst day of your life, I can’t even begin to explain how good you must have it.

A certain amount of this seems to be happening anyway just because the culture at AAA studios is so inimical to gaming in general. Looking at a game like Peak, I don’t see any indication that the devs went out of their way to reduce hardware requirements, but it’s less intensive than major releases anyway. Companies not having the resources to spend years working on super detailed massive environments may end up working in their favor.

Honestly, I think something like Peak ends up feeling more intentional and well executed than something like Cyberpunk 2077. Peak’s jank feels like it’s just part of how the game is supposed to be, whereas Cyberpunk they put so much effort into some aspects that it’s weird and jarring when you run into those things that break verisimilitude. But if Cyberpunk looked like it was designed by an indie dev with good enough but not state of the art graphics? I probably wouldn’t notice some of the issues as much. Also I feel like there wouldn’t be as much corporate involvement leading to the kind of hand-holding that shows up in Phantom Liberty.

This is headed toward devolving into me complaining about feeling like I’m not in half the scenes that revolve around Idris Elba rather than V, but you get the point!

There’s a lot to cover there, but it’s worth noting that while libido may change, it’s still possible to get erections and orgasm with your original genitalia. I’ve heard people say that if you stop orgasming entirely for an extended period of time it can be difficult to get there again, but I can’t really substantiate that. What I can say is that orgasming with your original equipment after years on HRT is very much possible, but it’s a little different than if you weren’t on hormones. For example, you’ll likely find you produce little to no fluid, but you’ll also likely find that you have no refractory period, that orgasms feel a little different, and that the period after an orgasm feels pretty different too. Personally, I find it feels quite a lot better.

If you find an informed consent clinic it shouldn’t be an issue to start and see if it helps. I personally found a lot of really notable changes within a few months of starting. The skin changes are profound and in my case happened pretty quickly. Breast development tends to take a little longer, anyway.

On the upside, the evaporation of availability for high-end consumer hardware might lead to a renaissance in more reasonable hardware requirements for software. There’s a lot of stuff we managed to do 20 or 30 years ago without anywhere near as much overhead. The indie gaming market already shows there’s plenty of room for companies to work with more modest overhead.

I love the idea of reversing the incentives for pacing. Giving players a reason to keep pushing instead of struggling to rest feels a bit more organic and less focused on adapting to what is ultimately a very gamey way of handling rest. I’m sure it has its own issues, and it does seem very combat focused, but I really like the idea of how it affects the cost benefit analysis of pushing forward versus resting.

Gimme that!

If you told me in the 90s that Kid Rock would somehow have become even more cringe, I would have needed a minute to adapt to the anachronism. But once I had I wouldn’t believe you.

I’m just going to stop looking at articles with remotely sensational headlines.

Definitely not AI. Definitely not the kind of thing we’re probably going to keep seeing a lot of, to the point that it would be justified to make a community around it.

Street Fighter did have a bit of a weird naming thing where we were all like “when is one of these going to be called 3?”, but those are all different games on different cartridges. Same with MK3 versus Ultimate MK3. Like, yeah, they’ve got a lot of the same bones but they didn’t release one broken, update it for 10 years and then never release anything else.

The SF2 situation wouldn’t happen in the same way today because those would all be DLCs or updates. Or like, paid alternate skins and new characters.

Do you know how many Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games we had in the 90s?

Before the current era of endless updates, games had to be ready to go when they shipped. If it was broken, they’d delay and fix the worst issues. Early iterations of a series tended to be a little more feature-light than later iterations, but that’s how you ended up with multiple installments per decade.

Compare this with the modern model where it’s half expected that games will be broken on release and it’s all but unheard of to get a sequel within a few years.

Having lived in both environments, the old system had way better results. Without it we wouldn’t have some of the well developed genres we do today.

Imagine if instead of making piles of DLC and remasters Bethesda had just started working on Elder Scrolls VI right after Skyrim. We’d probably be on like VIII by now. Instead they went from horse armor to rereleasing everything they’ve ever made, with a shitty MMO in between.

Updates suck. Gaming was better when they didn’t exist.

Honestly I think this is where the industry is falling flat. Games used to be a thing where they’d put one out and once it was out that was it. They didn’t spend the next 10 years adding features, that’s what a new game was for.

I don’t think a world where a company like Square releases dozens of great games in a decade can coexist with the model of continuing to add features to a game that’s already out. Personally, I’d rather see the evolution of an idea across several iterations than a constant replacement of parts.

It used to be if you liked a game you could see what led to it by playing earlier games in the series. Now those games seldom exist and instead you have the most recent version of one game and no access to any previous version.

The idea of buying characters is itself wild. Games as a service has really screwed up player expectations.

This is legit. I remember playing Soul Calibur 3 I think on PS2 pretty regularly with a couple of friends. One of them owned the game and would stomp us until I asked to borrow it for a while so the other two of us could get good. A few weeks later I was doing bomb and air grab loops with Taki and we were pretty evenly matched, while other friends who would play occasionally were pretty easy to beat. There was no big competitive online play, we got better by figuring out how to counter each other because we had similar amounts of experience with the game.

I’m not sure how you replicate that experience with randos.

It’s much easier to build momentum around a franchise when you release 7 games in 10 years than 2 games in 7 years.

You can watch several seasons if you’re willing to play them at the same time. Or if it’s Lower Decks.

Honestly, that kind of makes sense given the era the NES came out in. There was a fair amount of unplayable shovelware for the Atari, so having some oversight was probably good marketing at the time.

The practice of going after emulators and trying to establish exclusive rights to game mechanics that they didn’t actually invent is a bit further.

O Log, you are big!
O Log, you are heavy!
O Log, you are wood!

Let all the people know this of our Log!
It is better than bad! Yes I say! Better!
It is good!

From Blammo.