The sooner we can move past this phase of promoting or encouraging a game's "failure" and the media's bizarre habit of amplifying those who do, the better.

The forced PvP in Marathon is such a bummer sometimes. Most of my interactions with other players have ruined an otherwise great experience. I'm not saying the game should be PvE only, but at least give us the option.

“Unfortunately, the 13 and a half-hour battery life of this $600 Apple laptop falls short of the 15 hours you’ll find in this $1100 one.” Motherfucker, do you hear yourself right now?

One thing that gets overlooked in all these AI tools people keep getting forced into using is how frequently the UI changes from day to day. It’s like having the floor continuously shifting under you as you walk.

Requiem feels like the most consequential game in the series since Resident Evil 2.

I haven't played it yet, so I can't speak to the gameplay, but Marathon looks so fucking cool.

Seems like an awful lot of red flags at Wildlight before Highguard even saw the light of day: a 100+ person studio working on a debut game, murky goals attached to funding from Tencent, not incorporating feedback during testing, etc.

Fun fact: Microsoft makes doing literally anything on a PC at least five times harder and more frustrating than it needs to be.

It feels like such a colossal fuck-up for Sony to have had Bluepoint working on a live-service game of all things and not a Bloodborne remake?

Every now and then I get the urge to play ARC Raiders again, but the feeling of being left behind after several updates and the fact that I'd be thrown into lobbies of people who never stopped playing it is super discouraging.

I'm currently working through the most enjoyable assortment of games I've played in a while. Unicorn Overlord, Arknights: Endfield, and Dispatch. They're all great in different of ways, and I don't feel overwhelmed bouncing around a bit.

I'm begging for more games to add a "mark all as read/seen" function to bestiary-like database or archive pages. My brain makes me go through and click on everything to get rid of all the little badges and highlights dozens of times in a playthrough and I hate every second of it.

Folks, every game you played on other consoles three years ago is coming to the Nintendo Switch 2™ with slightly worse graphics and frame rates. Rejoice.

Yves Guillemot and all the dudes in his inner circle seem like out-of-touch losers? I'd be stunned if Ubisoft is still around five years from now.

While playing Endfield yesterday, I pulled Laevatain, Ember, and Khravengger all within a 10-minute span.

I feel like I’ve reached a bit of a turning point with Zenless Zone Zero. I wasn’t a fan of 2.0 overall, and Arknights: Endfield has raised the bar in almost every way. ZZZ 3.0 might be a make-or-break for me.

It would be great to have some kind of à la carte bundle option for all these killer worker-owned news sites that are popping up. Maybe a new Ghost feature?

It requires a substantial lack of brain cells to reply to an artist on social media and let them know you used AI to adjust their art to your liking.

It's wild to me how many hurdles Apple still puts in front of developers who want to build and test browser extensions for Safari.

The idea of someone having to sit through ads to play games they've already paid for is fucking insane.

Zuckerberg has enabled Meta to buy and copy its way to continued relevance, and any attempt to break that pattern has been a miserable failure because he has no clue what users want or need. Now his employees are the ones dealing with the consequences.

I struggle to believe a Mastodon instance started by a couple of dudes with a podcast will have the earth-shattering effect on the internet that others are claiming it will.

It's crazy that Apple and Google aren't more eager to kick Twitter off their stores. Pre-porn ban, Tumblr was constantly threatened with removal for far less.

I tried starting a new playthrough of Code Vein, and for the life of me, I cannot understand how that game got a sequel.

Not surprised Microsoft would rename the "Office" app to "365 Copilot". This is the same company that can't figure out what to call a fucking Xbox.

ROUTINE might go down as one of my all-time favourite games. The fact that it completely lived up to what I’d hoped for all those years ago when I first saw it on Steam Greenlight is kind of insane?

The Xbox recap was the one I was genuinely curious to see after doing most of my gaming on the Series X, and they're not even doing it this year because they blew their marketing budget on Copilot.

If you make AI "art", I think you forfeit the right to tell people not to use the output without your permission.

Lots of new content and nice QOL changes in the ZZZ 2.5 update. I'm stoked to see Grace getting a boost, she fell off my team as some of the newer, stronger characters were released. Hopefully, this evens things out a bit.

New Mega Man in 2027, Dead Island 3 in 2028, Old Republic in (maybe) 2030, ES6... eventually? Did studios always reveal games so far in advance?

Whenever a company makes a change or pushes an update that seems user-hostile or counterintuitive, it's because of money. It’s always because of money.

I've decided to park my BookWyrm usage for now. It’s such a hassle having to add practically every book I read. Instead, I threw together a browser extension to quickly create new items using Indie Bookstores, the Canadian version of Bookshop.org.

I’m not sure if the absurd number of crypto ads on Tumblr reflects the poor state of the platform or just crypto in general.

This holiday season, why not treat your friends, family, and enemies to some MissingNo horror fan fiction?

I've overhauled the way I browse online yet again. I was using Reeder to consolidate RSS and socials into one list, but found I was missing a lot as I scrolled. I've reverted to Reeder Classic for RSS and the native apps/sites for socials.

The way I look at big first-party Nintendo releases is that they're usually the best-in-genre by Nintendo. Breath of the Wild is the best open-world title they've ever made, and Metroid Prime is their best FPS. I struggle with the praise heaped on the company because there are often much better games in those categories made by other studios that are conveniently ignored by the media and the public.

I genuinely don’t understand the hype behind Expedition 33 and it practically sweeping The Game Awards nominations. It’s a good game, but I played better stuff this year that wasn’t even nominated.

I’m at the point where, if I see that the social media account where someone shares their art was created in mid-2022, unless they clearly state otherwise, I assume their work is largely AI-generated.

Microsoft paying $70 billion for Activision and then cranking out the worst-performing Call of Duty in recent memory is so fucking funny.

First Demonschool and now Moonlighter 2? I don't have time to play everything, guys. I will play everything, though, don't worry.

Our kid had his first run-in with losing a save file in a game. We let him do whatever he needed to get past it, so we're having pizza for the second time in two days and buying some DLC.

I love that there’s a community dedicated to MissingNo horror lore.

Reading through solicits for new comics and the complete absence of new ideas in mainstream books makes me never want to read one again. More Spider-Verse books, yet another Hush story, Queen in Black, a Long Halloween sequel... why?

I'm so over the Game Awards. Their refusal to acknowledge the state of the games industry while claiming to champion game devs is fucking bizarre. The whole show is just smoke and mirrors to sell ads to companies that don't need more airtime.

Kind of mind-blowing that Microsoft spends any money marketing Cloud Gaming when it runs so badly on everything I’ve tried it on.

14,000 people lost their jobs today because $70 billion in profit wasn't enough. There's something fundamentally wrong with that.

Nintendo having a character who streams in their game when they themselves have been such pricks about people streaming their games is a bit too on the nose.

Hard to overstate how crazy Halo on PlayStation is. I remember the days of Killzone constantly being marketed as a "Halo killer". If you told me then that we'd eventually see Halo on other consoles, I'd have never believed you.

Crazy to think I owned the only version of the iPhone Air Apple’s ever going to make.

I swear I wasn't trying to go for the record of most phones owned in a three-month period, but I think I hit it anyway. I swapped my iPhone 17 Pro for a Pro Max.

I wish the Pokémon games were smarter. For example, if I have 200+ hours of playtime across other games, maybe I don't need the newest game to explain to me what a Pokémon is or how to catch one?

I was worried there would be performance issues with ZA like we saw with Scarlet and Violet, but so far, that doesn't seem to be the case. Gameplay is fun, and I really dig the setting. A modern Lumiose City is more my jam than the Hisui region from Arceus.

I realized I never looped back around and buttoned up the iPhone Air saga. Apple online support told me there would be no issue going into a store and doing an exchange outside of the 15-day return window, but the in-store support said this wasn't true. In the end, they did end up making an exception and let me swap for a silver 17 Pro.

I’m digging Silent Hill f, but I wish it did a better job with wayfinding so I didn’t have to open my map every three seconds to figure out where I'm going.

Less than a month into owning the iPhone Air, I'm growing increasingly disappointed with it. It's the epitome of form over function: it's gorgeous but has by far the worst battery life of any iPhone I've ever used.

Glad I never bought into the hype around Framework. After falling in the trap with TRMNL, I'm becoming more and more convinced that the majority of companies producing niche electronics, unless they explicitly state otherwise, are run by racists and transphobes or have little issue supporting people who are. Beyond disappointing.