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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • A review bomb is a collective effort to lower the score of something, abusing systems meant to reflect an average opinion by gathering people who would not normally leave a review, often people who haven’t even played the game. It is intentionally creating sampling bias. “Review bomb” is a meaningful term being applied correctly here. I don’t like modern blizz, but Overwatch 2 is not the worst game on steam as its review average would indicate.




  • BG3 is one of my favorite games, but there is nothing technologically groundbreaking about it. As hardware improves, studios often prefer to use the new leeway to neglect optimization, which is a nightmare scenario for consumers who are forced to upgrade endlessly for no reason. It’s understandable that smaller studios may need to make that sacrifice, but there should be SOME penalty for it or it will get out of hand. The series S parity requirements provides some small penalization that I hope continues for generations to come.


  • The PS1 also sold the N64 3:1, But FF7, the highest selling FF game, only sold about 9m to OoT’s 7m. Relative to console sales, oot thrashed final fantasy 7. Of course, it helps that they cranked these games out way faster than Zelda back then.

    The current situation is similar, except the switch is wildly more prevalent than the PS5. There is almost 1 TotK sold for every 6 switch units, which is utterly insane when you consider how many ignored/lost/broken units are probably out there. By contrast, there is about 1 FF16 for every 10 PS5 units out there.




  • Whitehead also dashed away one of the big points of speculation among Sonic fans: that Sonic Mania 2 falling through was the result of bad blood between Sega and members of Evening Star. “Contrary to any rumors, we maintain a friendly relationship with Sega and hope fans are pumped to play both games once they release,” he says.

    These responses do not leave me with the same impression as the article’s author. Both parties maintain professionalism, but they also both dodged the direct question of why Evening Star isn’t making a sonic game right now. I still think there is bad blood, and history makes me wonder if it was Iizuka wanting to seize more creative control than Whitehead’s team was willing to give.






  • An early win is a well-documented technique known among gambling researchers and clinicians as a catalyst for addictive play, because it creates an early dopamine hit that gamblers are then eager to recreate, even as their subsequent losses mount.

    You meant to say “Because it tricks someone into believing the continuing experience has more value than it does.”

    I agree with the premise of the article, but the overuse of “dopamine” to explain predatory commercial behavior is exhausting. Your brain does stuff when you experience stuff. Dopamine isn’t some evil drug that you GeT a hIT oF. 90% of the time I see the dopamine used to describe some phenomenon, it is literally just a worse, more pretentious and sciency-sounding way to explain it. Like trying to describe how microsoft excel works to someone by describing semiconductors.

    I remember more than a decade ago when (because popular things are evil) online articles were preaching the dangers of World of Warcraft vanilla, a game with a fixed subscription cost and no way to monetize big spenders. “When you level up there’s a big gold explosion, that’s to help with the DOPAMINE release and keep you HOOKED on your MMO DRUG.” Jesus christ people, it’s just strong visual design that made people feel accomplished.

    These games are different, of course. They are predatory. But you don’t get closer to understanding why these tactics are effective by pretending you’re a neuroscientist talking about some highly objective medical phenomenon.

    And before I get accused of being uneducated or disrespecting science, I’m a published researcher in cognition and cognitive neuroscience. I don’t have a phd because I left the field sick of a lot of the same fakeness I’m complaining about now.