I’ve spent a good chunk of my childhood playing Tekken 3 with my brother and our friends. I just suck at fighting games :D

I love the character design of this game so much. Too bad that I’m not good at this type of game…

I’m Italian. School explains all there is to know about sex and stuff, so I never needed the “talk” with my parents. I also had a bigger brother that would tell me everything way before the time lol

About drugs, I think I already got everything from TV? I certainly didn’t need my parents explaining to me that drugs are bad.

EDIT: For those curious about how/when SexEd is taught in school in Italy: I had SexEd in my 5th year of elementary school (10yo), 3rd year of middle school (13 yo) and again in high school (I think it was the second year, so 15 yo, and then in my fourth year as well, when I was 17 yo). My parents were required to consent to the school teaching us SexEd only in elementary school; no consent form was required from middle school onwards, it was mandatory.

And I think that drugs were discussed in school as well. I think in middle and high school, around the same time as SexEd.

Phil Spencer underperformed for 10+ years and yet he’s still there.

Must be nice having the peace of mind that no matter how you fuck up, other people will pay in your stead.

And most of those people keep playing anyway lol

Yeah, the price hike is fair, I don’t think any developer has any problem with that.

The problem is that they broke the trust of developers, and I don’t think that they’ll ever recoup from that.

You either die as a hero, or live long enough to become the villain.

This generation is already pretty weak, and it was hard to justify the original PS5 which, after a whopping four years, still has too few exclusive titles to justify the increased price point. Now they are asking for $700 (and they increased the controller’s price, too), but there’s still too few next gen titles, and it doesn’t even come with basic features like a disc tray and a vertical mount. Not even a better form factor, it’s the same old ugly case, but somehow bigger.

The only premium thing about this thing is the price tag. $700 dollars but €800, because apparently they are dominating the European market so much that they don’t even have to try to sell it at an honest price point. With all those money you can just buy a PC. I honestly don’t think that many people who are interested in the console market (which, historically, has always been a “low budget” entry into modern gaming) would be willing to spend so much money on one.

I guess we circled back to the PS3 era, when Sony got drunk with overconfidence. Only, this time they’ll get away with it because their main competitor is somehow even more incompetent than them. I wonder if the handheld PC market will pose a threat to their dominance in the future - at the moment, it’s a very small niche.

Oh don’t worry, they hate foreigners playing soccer as well.

https://www.euronews.com/2019/11/09/racism-in-football-are-italy-s-ultras-the-problem-or-the-solution

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240120-milan-s-match-at-udinese-halted-after-racist-abuse-of-maignan

I haven’t seen it nearly this bad until this year. This is the worst year I’ve ever seen for it, and Hoyo games are by far the worst

Congrats for lasting this far. I quit the anime world years ago when it became clear that that shit was becoming the norm, and 95% of products specifically catered to that demographic.

The fact that capital-G Gamers are still hell-bent on the GamerGate-era war against Kotaku is deeply amusing to me.

Gaming journos bad, something something.

I seem to remember MS claiming they were opening the “first AAAA dev studio” (The Initiative). Since then, the studio has been radio silent, lost a bunch of talent, and needed help from Crystal Dynamics to work on their first game (Perfect Dark reboot).

If that’s the reason, it doesn’t paint MS in a good light. Bullying small indie devs out of spite. Especially considering that, after saying that in March, Jyamma spent time and money to release the game on Xbox the same day as the other platforms.

But I honestly doubt it. Corporations are NOT people (even if the law would like to pretend otherwise) and they don’t think the same way as people. They don’t play favourites, they don’t play nice or bully others because they feel like to. They chase money, and that’s it. A game releasing on their platform is literally free money. This is just a fuck up on their part. If I had to guess, MS cut jobs and replaced them with AI and left a skeleton crew working on this.

You seem to really love Rockstar games.

Europe is in a very sorry state lately. A lot of far-right parties are gaining ground and/or winning the elections. Italy has elected a far-righr politician, France and Germany are very close to electing one.

I feel like the 2016 US elections have had a profound influence on ours as well. (Not faulting Americans for how the situation evolved, of course; it’s our fault in the first place).

The beauty of Final Fantasy is that, with each entry being different from the others, every game of the series ends up resonating differently with different people.

The “best” Final Fantasy varies greatly depending on who you ask, for a combination of factors, including nostalgia and subjective opinions on the different aspects of the game (story, characters, gameplay).

It’s what I love about this series. You may play ten games, but the eleventh will still surprise you in some way. Even if I don’t like a specific entry, I can still appreciate that they tried something new and unique, and I always look forward to playing the next one.

I started playing during the PS1 era when tank controls were the norm. I have no qualms with tank controls in other kind of games. To use your example, I genuinely think that REmake is a lot better with tank controls; modern controls conflict with fixed camera angles, because you may turn a corner and suddenly left becomes right, and the control scheme is clearly not designed with that in mind.

But in a platform game with very precise platforming sequences, tank controls and unresponsive camera were horrible. It made playing it frustrating to the point that, despite playing it a lot, I never actually finished the game, because I would always give up somewhere through the game. The farthest I went into Croc 2 was the fourth world (still don’t know how many there are), and iirc third world in Croc 1. As opposed to Spyro and Crash which I replayed dozens of times from beginning to end.

I won’t say that my experience is universal and I can definitely see people enjoying the control scheme, but I gave it a lot more than a fair shake and it never convinced me. I always had the impression that the game was fighting me and genuinely wanted me to fail.

I played the original countless times as a kid! It was a great platformer hindered by the tank controls, which unfortunately led me to prefer Spyro. If there ever was a game in need of a remaster (as opposed to a remake), it’s this one. Update the controls, and the game itself is still a lot of fun.

At which point can the market be considered saturated?

Like, I would imagine that there’s a finite amount of coomers willing to drop their wallets on skins or PNGs of their favourite waifu.

Honestly, the true ending is nothing to write home about. Sea of Stars is probably one of my favourite JRPG ever, but the entire last arc and both endings were a huge letdown.