It’s on GOG. Currently on sale for $3. It’s the non-remastered version, but I doubt that will hold people back much.

Gods Will Be Watching is the one that comes to mind for me. It’s a strategy game of sorts with about 7 or 8 totally different scenarios where you’re managing a very bad situation. In one, you’re holding hostages while executing a heist, and in another you’re wandering through a desert with limited resources. Each one is a balancing act, and a through line forms the narrative across them all. It was probably hamstrung by its punishing difficulty at launch, which was later addressed by additional difficulty modes, but there’s a lot of room to iterate on this concept without it ever getting old.

They’re not. This same curve happens with PvP games. The ones that don’t follow this trend are the exception, not the rule.

She was credited with a pseudonym. It happened plenty in the 90s, and this wasn’t long after. That means probably Hollywood talent. Someone prestigious who thought taking this role would be bad for her career, or maybe her agent thought that. But times have changed in the past 20 years, so maybe we can know who it is now.

But will they credit Eva’s voice actor by her real name this time? Whatever stigma there may have been in 2004 for being in a video game has got to be gone by now.

Better than the people giving it a bad review for difficulty, it would seem.

There’s a revolving door of hundreds of players in the community at any given time. You can find a game in quick match with absolutely no skill-based matchmaking at most times of the day, so it’s a total dice roll in that regard, or you can hit up the Skullgirls or Mix Masters Discord servers to find one at your skill level. Hunter Half Hands runs beginner tournaments, there are the Get Gr8 events to help learn the game, and there’s a community danisen league to fill in for the game’s lack of ranked mode that runs about 3 times per week in North America. This year, at Combo Breaker, the bracket was larger for Skullgirls than it was for Dragon Ball FighterZ. As far as I’m concerned, it’s more alive than I’d need it to be, but I’m happy it’s this alive.

The quest bugged out a few times, but with a bit of reloading old saves, I managed to transport some brahmin for about 3k caps, so I think I can afford that armor now.

I can’t speak to how Halo does it under the hood, but it’s very common to have a separate skill rating for unranked and to just not surface it, which is exactly what you’d want here, since that’s what prevents the brand new player from getting decimated in their early matches. You’re saying that the social playlists affected the same ranking as the competitive modes? That would be strange. In my experience though, a lot of new players bounce off a game when they get matched against people who are only marginally better than they are, which can be a matter of that other player understanding one thing that the loser does not. I’ve seen people call their opponents smurfs, and then when you check the replay, you realize, no, that player really is only a tiny bit better.

So sometime since I last played Call of Duty, they got rid of unranked modes?

No, I’m playing with the one that isn’t labeled “classic” in my GOG library. As far as I can tell, it may have cleaned up how that game interfaces with modern displays and maybe not much else. I’m level 7, and I just got to NCR with my posse of three companions. I had some encounters in the Wanamingo Mines and Vault 15 that wiped the floor with me, so I left them for now, though maybe with some guns I just picked up, Vault 15 would go better at this point. I’d love to get some better armor, but I have yet to find any in drops from enemies.

Is social matchmaking some synonym for skill based matchmaking? Because the latter is what it says they’re implementing, and it really shouldn’t be controversial.

Like everyone else, I’ve been playing Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. It is more challenging than the base game so far, but not dramatically so. The game gives you plenty of tools to deal with it, including situational loadouts to give you more damage or defense depending on what’s giving you trouble. Maybe a lot of people got too complacent with a single build that handled it all in the base game.

When I wasn’t playing that I was playing Fallout 2. It’s continued to be just what the doctor ordered after watching the Fallout TV show, but now I really feel bottlenecked by my gear. I don’t know if guns exist in the game that will do enough damage to take down some of the tankier enemies I’ve found, but if they do, I definitely can’t afford them. I haven’t even managed to find any armor to equip over my starting Vault 13 uniform, and there’s always a huge money sink for certain unique items or quests that eat into my savings just as I became a thousand-aire. I’ll have to find some ways to earn more caps quickly.

And when I wasn’t playing either of those, I was playing more Skullgirls, but I’m always playing Skullgirls, so that’s basically the free space on my bingo card.

Well, the reason I suspected it was this instead was because, with ray tracing turned on high, it looked like shader stutter, but that problem had actually been solved a long time ago.

They enabled ray tracing on high by default, after I hadn’t played it in months. It wasn’t there before. When I turned it off, performance was back to where it ought to be.

Nah, man, I’m a capitalist, and this is stupid.

It’s not the engines’ fault that game development got longer. It’s that most AAA games over scope and go open world when they don’t have to, which not only takes longer to make but often results in a worse game. Make games smaller and iterate on them quickly, like the industry did 20 years ago. That’s how you make this make sense.

If you like Fallout: New Vegas and wanted to like Starfield, you will like The Outer Worlds. It’s compact and satisfying.

Celestial bodies that orbit a star, but there are lots of ways to represent them in video games, and KOTOR’s implementation was not what most people would call open world.

Gotcha. Yeah, if the season passes aren’t paying for that, then what’s the point? Though to be fair, Street Fighter does the same thing, and all of that stuff is in a part of the game that doesn’t appeal to me, so I hardly see it.