Good reminder that EVERY c-suite now has brainworms, there are no exceptions none of them will save you

Also maybe why I'm much less bothered by gachas than most, I just kinda assume that I ain't getting anything until "pity" hits, and everything up to that point is mostly just a flashy grind

Maybe it's just that I have no interest at all in slots

Make it PachinkoPit, then we'll see

Even with the protagonist, what you saw was pretty much what you got, roughly the same dude throughout.

Same with the rest of them, which was surprising for Chinese Room after Everyone Gone to the Rapture.

SWtD has great environments, though, and the rig had a sense of place. Give it that.

...so instead I'm rolling 'em on Still Wakes the Deep. Much more svelte experience.

Liked it okay, but it feels like indie devs really are as formulaic as the AAA ones sometimes. I could predict pretty much every plot beat, and you could see that ending from orbit. And aside from plot, felt thin.

Shot. Chaser.

One of the reasons why game journalism is withering on the vine is that game companies are notoriously tight-lipped. You never hear anything, it's all behind NDAs.

So why not break from that? Be more public and open, actually do interviews and tours?

Fix the coverage gap. Nominations will follow.

It's funny that the replies are usually "it's all Disney dreck" when the letter name drops fantasian, which reinforces the Western v. Eastern problem

But my spicier Take is that the actual issue is that game journalists usually influence this stuff, and they don't cover mobile, ever.

So fix THAT.

Not JUST about China, the most prominent gacha game in pop culture this year was Uma Musume and that's Japanese

But kind of a lot of people hadn't exactly covered themselves in glory on that front in the 2010s either

Wonder how many "Fish was right" articles I could find in the Internet Archive

(I don't know how far you got before but either you know or trust me you WILL know)

True, but still big enough for neat faux-documentary pans and zooms

Also for The Single Coolest Moment on TV Ever, if you know you know

I mean it ain't THAT little

...but more formally, it's the simple fact that voters utterly fucking despise top-down neoliberalism and generally want boring welfare state Social Liberalism instead

Social Democrats will also do in a pinch as long as they don't get weird about it

Clinton won by saying "I feel your pain"

Meanwhile 2024 was a morass of the least likeable dorks on planet Earth busting out charts and telling people they're "entitled" for being worried about rent

Voters didn't have a ballot option for "huck that guy into a bog", so picked "punish Dems" instead

"Don't lecture people about how, actually, everything is fucking great and they should be grateful because no improvements are possible ever"

That was less the Biden admin than its various proxies, but I suspect that what voters truly despised more than anything were the smug proxies

Yeah they're at least vaguely aware that Canadian elections exist as a concept

Not so much with Mexico

...what the fuck is "hememonic", god autocorrect is such shit now

Yes Harris lost but Sheinbaum won handily and there is a hilarious reluctance among Americans to even think about that fact when they're bloviating about voters

They aren't either really "center" or "hememonic", though the way they sailed through the anti incumbent wave of '24 puts the lie to "Buhhhhhh Harris couldn't possibly win"