It's no secret that I hate The Game Awards. It's the same twitter rant from me every year. Some years are lucky and I mostly manage to ignore it, but a lot of twitter discourse got me thinking...

Now, I'm generally pretty anti-Award Shows in general. Not because I think Awards are bad (I especially love small community awards!), or industries celebrating their own is dumb but because most of them either fall to capitalism or have been cynical cash grabs from the start. Even events that seem...

This seems to be the type of cranky ass old person take that cohost loves so lets go.

There are a lot of shitty things about gaming. Exploitative and predatory micro transactions, terrible DRM schemes, addictive but shallow gameplay loops to feed point 1... But most problems we have in gaming are inevitable. Not that they can't be fixed, or overcome, but no one person or company could stop these things from initially happening. Ideas born from market forces.

... But Achievements, for something so unfortunately ubiquitous now... are kinda a weird idea? That we needed a... platform specific list of arbitrary accomplishments with their own, universal sound and popup message? It's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and arguably, it happened the only time it could happen.

When the 360 came out, we didn't have any idea what online services should look like. What did it mean to have a profile and friends on your console? Microsoft had an idea for "Gamer Score" (which, while it is a still existing niche is... something only weirdos talk about now) and needed a way to give that relevant, but neither of these things were inevitable. Nintendo still doesn't have them (Notably actually saying 'Achievements don't actually solve any kind of problem games have') and Sony seemed to only do it since it was a point used against them in the console wars. If Microsoft never added them, as they blindly stumbled around trying to figure out early online systems, it's easy to assume that they never end up happening. Despite this. Achievements are very much in the popular consciousness. And they suck.

So Lies of P had patch that adjusted difficulty and I haven't played it, but I have played though AC6 who had the same thing happen and the discourse seems to be... about the same and it really just got to me how poor the nuance around difficulty discussion can be. Maybe it's more accurate when talking about Lies of P, maybe it's the same crud, but whatever.

Now, I'm very much on record saying the AC6 patch stuff is massively overblown. Only one thing really seems like a significant nerf and...

Back with Spec Ops: The Line I said I was going to try and make these more informal, but they always seem to spiral into something review-esque, which was never my intention. So this time we're going to go even further. I'm going to start to bust out the bullet point lists to try and get my thoughts out without having to worry about how one point leads into another. I'll have my paragraphs (reading this back, I have a lot of them), but I just need to dump thoughts sometimes. Also, whil...

Gonna babble for a bit and hope this is coherent:

I was weirdly saddened today reading Strive's patch notes. A removal of the character weight system. A younger version of me would be SO RELIEVED by this. "Oh god I don't have to memorize a million different combos"! Yet now, an older me, is oddly sad?

Now, I'm not gonna hate on or argu...