I continued a bit in Fallout 3. It still holds up, much to my surprise, especially after playing Fallout 2. The shooting still feels bad though, which I know is vastly improved in New Vegas and 4.

With Double Exposure around the corner, I finally got around to playing through Life is Strange: Before the Storm. It could be slow at times, and the story was otherwise just fine. I think not having the missing person criminal conspiracy really harms the pacing, and I’m glad that angle is coming back in Double Exposure.

I also got back on the grind in Street Fighter 6 a bit. I hit a wall with Zangief and struggled to find the answers in neutral, especially against the two newest DLC characters, to the point where I considered changing characters, but I do think I got over that hump. I’m at about 1400 MR right now, and I’d like to get to around 1700 sometime this summer.

In trying to finish Before the Storm, I didn’t make much time for Elden Ring, but I do want to get back to that DLC now that I have; that and The Thaumaturge.

They do it because if you have to be online, connected to their servers, you have to look at their store and be tempted to buy something else for the game. It’s also just straight DRM. The industry spent the better part of 20 years complaining about piracy and used game sales, and now they’ve found a way to defeat them by just designing their games to disappear when the servers are gone. That does come with a catch though. Building and maintaining the online infrastructure costs a lot of money, and given how many of these games just instantly flop and die, customers are less willing to invest their time and money into a game unless they know it’s a winner, which has less to do with the game’s quality and more of how many other people perceive it to be quality. This looks to me to be why the industry is crashing right now.

As egregious as horse armor was decades ago, that doesn’t offend me the way server requirements do (you can always just choose not to buy the horse armor and still have the game you bought in perpetuity). If the game requires an online connection, don’t buy it. There’s always another game out there like it without the requirement. A game that requires an internet connection is just a worse version of a game they could have sold you without it, and the online requirement gives it an expiration date. If multiplayer requires an online connection, make sure it supports LAN, split-screen, direct IP connections, or private servers. This information is very hard to find just by store pages, perhaps intentionally so, but I usually check on the PC Gaming Wiki these days; otherwise you have to hope the developer responds to a question about those features in the Steam forums.

This has happened before, for games from other publishers, as per the article. I don’t remember all of the reasons for it, but if I’m not mistaken, this is why Shogun: Total War 2 has a blood DLC for a few dollars, so that they can make everything but the DLC available in Japan.

It’s far easier to explain the world with historic precedent than it is with conspiracy theories.

What you might call a memo, I’d call a poor explanation to confirm your biases. Do some reading on how economists came to their conclusions, and you’ll see why we arrived at an ideal environment of some low inflation. If economics reporters were only serving at the behest of billionaires, we’re in an age of unprecedented access to information, and economics is almost entirely math. If someone wanted to be a whistleblower and show the math to back it up, it would have gone viral by now, and that still would have to contradict a working model of reality that makes sense for what we all understand about inflation. There will always be some percentage of people who don’t thrive in whatever our economic conditions are, and that sucks, but I don’t think anyone’s been able to show a system where we can save literally everyone, because as human beings, our flaws tend to get in the way of that. Still, that low amount of inflation tends to be the best we can do.

We have history that we can learn from where we’ve had deflation and could observe the effects. The wealthy are the ones not buying products in deflationary environments, or otherwise big ticket purchases for the rest of us. Those big purchases involve a lot of money changing hands, but above and beyond that, there’s also a lack of capital investment, because the investor has no incentive to do anything except to put their money under their mattress, once again not circulating it. If there’s constant low inflation, the investor is guaranteed to lose money keeping it under their mattress but has a good chance at making more money by investing it into companies who use it to hire people and produce things that people want to spend money on.

Do you think that every article written about inflation just happens to forget that prices are still rising? Or do you think there’s a reason there are basically no economists anywhere arguing that deflation is what we should have instead?

They’re not missing it at all. In normal circumstances, we’ve always got some low amount of inflation. If prices fell, we’d have an entirely different and much worse set of issues.

Traditional roguelikes may frequently pair with bad graphics, but it’s not a requirement. There are games like Tangledeep and Jupiter Hell, for instance. But thanks, these sound interesting.

What’s the hook to each one? I hear people mention Caves of Qud a lot, but the low-fi graphics aren’t grabbing my attention on their own.

I’m sure it would if I thought more highly of it.

I didn’t personally care for it, but I know I’m in the minority. In fact, one of the reasons I didn’t care for it is because it felt far less replayable than many of its peers. Even Zagreus will call out “the butterfly room”, because there are so few permutations to see.

Tons. There’s an entire roguelike genre built around this; some of my favorites are Vagante and Streets of Rogue. There are games with procedurally generated worlds like Terraria, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, and Factorio. There are RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that have so many ways to spec your characters and so many permutations of how events could unfold based on what you did that you’re unlikely to see them all.

That comment seemed squarely about the legacy of a system designed to benefit white men, which it was.

I’m still moving forward slowly in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Not much else to report there without spoilers.

I beat Fallout 2 for the first time. It got off to a rough start by only really allowing you to use melee weapons, even if you didn’t spec for them. It also ended in a rough spot by similarly not giving you tons of options for how to get through the final area, and the ones that were there reminded me a lot of 90s adventure games, with very specific solutions that you’d wonder how on earth you were possibly supposed to know that. In fact, once you get to the final step of retrieving the GECK, through to the end of the game, the game suddenly does a very poor job of pointing you toward what you’re supposed to do next, which stood out because the game had been really good at it up to that point. The progression was also really strange. Most of the power progression is going to come from armor, but they’re really stingy with letting you amass enough money to buy better armor, and armor and weapons rarely drop from enemies at all. Your lack of ability to take on combat encounters for most of the game limits how much XP you can earn, to the point where I spent 3/4 of the game at or below level 8, and then the last quarter of the game very quickly got me to level 18. Those issues aside though, the middle chunk of the game that forms most of your time with it was some of the best RPG stuff I’ve seen in the genre.

I then immediately moved on to Fallout 3, which I had played before over 10 years ago, and the last time I played it was before I played the classic Fallout games. Especially with Starfield fresh in my mind, I was expecting this to have aged worse, but so far, it really hasn’t. Bethesda made a lot of smart choices with how they changed the progression, like giving you fewer SPECIAL points up front and letting you put points into what you want with every level up; plus they flattened the progression on big guns and lasers, which were previously (in Fallout 1 and 2) a stat you could put points into and then never use until the back part of the game. Plus, the quest design is miles better than Starfield. Sure you take a quest that looks like it’s just a simple fetch quest, but when you get there, not only are you in the middle of a minefield, which already throws a wrench into the works of how the game typically plays, but then there’s a sniper trying to detonate them on you too. Just purely by the game’s systems, I get into a shootout with this guy, and my bullet happens to shoot the sniper rifle out of his hand, really showing the power of the sandbox in Bethesda games when they’re at their best. That interesting thing that happens along the way in your quest is the thing Starfield needed so badly. Fallout 3 sure isn’t perfect; the shooting feels bad, and they’re too content to let you follow objective markers instead of using your head more, but it’s good to be back.

I also started Life is Strange: Before the Storm ahead of Double Exposure. The opening scene was so bad that I almost put the game down then and there, but I’m told it gets better soon, and I did like the original Life is Strange.

They just made bribes legal and made the president above the law.

I’d just as soon call this the death of co-op games. How many can be played without an internet connection? Split-screen, LAN, direct IP connections, and private servers are super rare now, and it sucks. Plenty of games in that chart from 2018 might not even be playable anymore, and plenty more can go down when Steam servers are down for maintenance or will be unplayable when you’re on a train or some other location without internet access.

Nintendo’s gonna Nintendo. Plus Smash attendance at majors for Melee and Ultimate, from a cursory glance, appears to be on the decline in the wake of Ultimate’s sunsetting. Evo’s only going to take the 7 biggest games and a throwback, so even if Nintendo wasn’t getting in the way, you might fit in Ultimate but not Melee. Smash gets its dues in other places. Like Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 3, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, etc., the scene will never truly die.

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.