Villanova Grad

Feel free to message me any time you want to compare stacks of diplomas & career achievements.

lol. Yeah, that would have worked out better if I had bothered to proofread. Oh well.

Lol, the old DVDVR standby “WWE fans aren’t as smart as me.” Must be a month since I’ve seen this trotted out.

Finished Lies of P last night and really enjoyed it. Probably one of the more memorable PS4/PS5 games I’ve played in awhile. I think I enjoyed it more than Bloodborne (which is a clear inspiration). Rise of the Ronin previews have me in the mood to dive back into Ninja Gaiden (2004). One of my favorite games, but I’ve never finished the original release. I have rolled credits on Ninja Gaiden Black multiple times & played through NG Sigma once or twice, but it’s time to beat the vanilla version.

Apparently he didn’t get the memo that renting is great for the industry.

WWE makeup artists aren’t doing Bagley any favors these days. Caught the sitdown from this week’s Smackdown and was kinda perplexed by the garish makeup job (weird hair seems to be a staple on the women’s roster these days). And she’s apparently a new babyface, I guess? Is their some backstory story there or is it just a debatable creative decision?

Personally, I enjoy the Twitter experience more since Musk bought it. Not much really changed in my small corner of the Twitter-verse except the algorithm finally started pushing content I am actually interested in my way. I feel like there’s a more even balance of conservative and liberal opinions, which is probably why some people are upset. Mostly, I just ignore the culture wars blather. Don’t have any real interest in engaging with Trumpers or progressives.

Lol, I’m all in for Ricochet-Gunther at WM. I mean, I’m probably the only one, but…. Ricochet being dusted off for the match makes me thing they could only come up with five names and Keyser Soze’d the sixth guy.

Unreallstc dev cycles? How so? The most unrealistic thing I see is management giving in when project leaders tell them they need another year or two and 50 million to finish a game already over deadline, 15 years ago, we got three Uncharted games in a single gen. Also got three Dead Spaw titles, the Gears of War trilogy + a spinoff, three Bungie Halo titles plus a couple spinoffs by other studios, at least four Ratchet and Clank games plus a couple spinoffs (can’t remember if All 4 One was developed by Insomniac or not. I could go on. There’s a lot of blame to go around here, but a lot of it rests with studios who can’t hit deadlines, stay within budget, etc. Sony’s president says a lot of the blame rests with studios not hitting deadlines or staying within budget. That’s not the whole story, but I doubt it’s total bs. In 10+ years, development cycle length has more than doubled for big games. Lol, it’s been over five years since indie darling Hollow Knight: Silksong was announced. So seven years or so since development began? That’s more nuts than anything Sony has done. Lotta blame rests with studio heads too. Microsoft and Sony have basically abandoned the AA market over the past ten years. Yeah, that didn’t work out too well. And I’ll blame gamers all days long for the sake of the industry. Dudes want cutting edge games and no reused assets but cry over the first price increase in 40 years? Lol, I’m sure that couldn’t turn out badly. And you’ll never convince me training your audience to rent instead of buy is good for the industry. Lotta blame to go around, I think the better publishers - Sony - will adapt. The companies that don’t will become Sears or Blockbuster. But, yeah, it’s all evil managements types and eviler corporations. Though, honestly, I’d be surprised if this site ever took a centrist position in that regard.

Sony layoffs are no surprise if you paid attention to the last earning call. Sony’s gaming division has 123 million people logging into PlayStation Network and is reporting record revenue, but probability is as low as it’s been in at least a decade. Sony’s operating profit - basically, the amount of profit earned before taxes & interest - was 6 percent. Sony Interactive Entertainment/PlayStation Studios usually has an op around 12 percent. Several analysts thought Sony.’s operating profit would be closer to 20%. Nope. It’s getting damn expensive to make AA & AAA games and the longer your game is in development, the longer you have to wait to start making your investment back, Additionally, the incoming president/ceo of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Hiroki Totoki, has made several subtle comments about SIE needing to streamline and become more efficient. I read his statement about the last earnings report and thought he was subtly hinting Jim Ryan wasn’t being frugal enough. No business grows forever. Growth and shrinkage are generally cyclical. Personally, I feel like the industry peaked creatively 10 years ago or more and we’re just now seeing the fallout from that. Games are getting prettier and more complex, not necessarily better. It seems fairly obvious that development costs and the time it takes to developed a finished product are getting out of hand. My professional self is also kinda put off by the idea that want bankrolled for five years or more without minimal oversight, then don’t expect to shoulder the blame if the finished product is a bad game that doesn’t sell. A lot can happen in the 5+ years you’re working on a game. The Rocksteady Studios that finished Suicide Squad wasn’t the same studio that made the Arkham Games, or even the same studio that started work on Suicide Squad. When the going got tough, the studio’s founders left the company. A lot of the key staff followed them when their contracts expired. lol, that’s another argument against very long development cycles. Also doesn’t help that development costs are 10-30 times (or more) what they were years ago, but the price of a game hasn’t rises in 40 years or whatever. We should probably be paying $100 for Triple A titles by now. But, yeah, studios are gouging us when they ask for a $5 price increase.

Probably thought they were dealing with a reasonable person who would respond to an annoying question like an adult. Common mistake.

It was worth my $50, for what it’s worth. I didn’t play the original, so it was new to me & I had a blast with it. It’s on the short side & not terribly difficult but it’s also fun and charming. The art style is gorgeous and will probably hold up for quite a while. Nintendo’s on a roll right now with their first-party games. Lol, I am even looking forward to the Princess Peach game and I did not expect that to happen. Bought Lies of P over the weekend, so i will probably start that this week. Been quite a while since i looked forward to a PlayStation or Xbox game this much. Not a huge Bloodborne fan (it’s fine), but Bloodborne mashed up with an un-Disney-fied take on Pinnochio is a concept I can get behind.

Maybe? I’m not convinced that the rumors were entirely fake. Maybe they pivoted their strategy a second time after seeing the reaction to the rumors. Or… they are going third-party but want to ease into it slowly? The podcast was pretty much what I expected. Veery reassuring, very friendly, nothing to spook the hardcores. Honestly, it was so inoffensive & contained so little news that there wasn’t much reason to do it. I used to be in public relations & Phil and co. seemed to be very much in damage control mode. I could be wrong though. We’ll see. The door is open to take other titles third-party. i’m more interested in what the play is here. Growth doesn’t seem likely to come from console sales this generation and while 34 million GamePass subscribers sounds impressive, that figure includes the XBL Gold members who were folded into GamePass. GamePass has apparently missed its last two growth benchmarks. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of growth. Maybe none at all? I think GamePass had about 25 mil subscribers two years ago & Gold had around 14 mil. So..maybe they lost 4 or 5 million? In any case, at one one point, they forecast almost 50 million subscribers by 2024. They’re not selling as many consoles as they’d hoped, so that makes it hard to grow GamePass without getting it on other consoles. So where is the growth going to come from? They’re in a position to make a sizable turnaround with the Activision deal and they seem to have a good number of exclusives in the pipeline, so…?. Going to be interesting to see where they are in a couple years. Good to know that the next console will be the most powerful ever. I was afraid next Xbox was basically going to be Colecovision 2. Ok, I am being snarky here but that was the sort of empty promise Xbox has specialized in over the past ten years or so. What else are you going to say? That your next console will be less powerful than this one? That the PlayStation 6 will eat its lunch? Raw power has never been Xbox’s problem. All of their consoles have edged out Sony in computing power and three of the four have still lost the market to Sony by a fair margin.

The incoming president also hinted that Sony will be more aggressive about getting games on PC. That went over about as well as you’d expect. Bizarrely, people are interpreting the comments to mean SIE won’t be releasing any games over the next 14 months. i’m mostly burnt out by the gaming industry these days, I find the fanboy arguments infiltrating my Twitter feed exhausting. Honestly, if you’re so invested in a games company you do not work for that porting games to other platforms or not releasing a Triple A system seller in the next twelve months sends you into a rage, you should probably go to therapy. Lots of therapy. I say that as someone who doesn’t even believe in the value of therapy, really. Games are supposed to be fun. I am really skeptical the console warriorz and influencers are having fun. One of the Nintendo Life guys said on Twitter that the best console is the one you enjoy. This. Oh so f***ing this. My idea of favorite consoles changes at least a few times a year. My answer to that question now might be different from my answer an hour ago. There really aren’t any major consoles from the past 25 years that I do not like a lot, usually for different reasons. i stopped in at a mom-and-pop retro game shop last weekend and got to discussing where the market is going. The owner thinks we are going to see $100 games soon. Lol, that’s one of the few emerging trends I do not hate. Games have been $60 for decades. Inflation and budgets have skyrocketed in that time. Silent Hill 2 - on my short list for best games ever - cost less than $10 million to develop. Spider-Man 2 cost $300 mil. If we want games to continue pushing the envelope, we’re going to have to pay for it sooner or later. The rest of the industry leaves me cold right now. Development cycles are way too long & there’s not enough experimentation because no one wants to spend five years and $100 million on a weird arthouse game that might flop when you can pour that money into Call of Duty or a live-service game. Remember the PS3 generation? 4 Halo games and a remake. Four Gears of War titles. An entire Dead Space trilogy. At least four or five Ratchet & Clank titles from Insomniac. Etc. Now Sony studios struggle to get one double or triple-A game out the door every seven years. Ugh. Halo 3: ODST is great and it was developed in less than a year. The Peter Jackson Halo game was canceled, leaving half of Bungie without a project. Developers pitched ODST and got it greenlit with the caveat that it had to be done in twelve months so the team could join the rest of Bungie to work on Halo: Reach. Also, people who won’t buy games that aren’t 60 fps because “it doesn’t feel good” don’t need to talk to me. Ever. Okay, rant over, I feel better.

I have mixed feelings about the Wii, but I kind of like the experimentation of the Wiimote & nunchuk, even if the implementation was kindl of gimmicky. At the end of the day, you have to admire Nintendo for doing their own thing. And I’m a big fan of Nintendo ips like Mario & Metroid. Wii library gets overlooked a bit, imo. Good percentage of third-party titles supported classic controllers & Wii produced a few great titles. Super Mario Galaxy is one of the more interesting twists on the Mario formula. Sin & Punishment & Metroid Prime 3 are absolute bangers. The Last Story is a great game constantly ignored. Motion control remasters of games like Metroid Prime & RE series aren’t necessarily better, but are worth experiencing. I don’t have a large Wii library, but that’s true of most retro consoles I own. Wii also has perfect emulation of GameCube titles and even supports all controllers. Without that, I would probably be harder on Wii. But GameCube produced at least five titles in my personal top 12 or 20, so it’s hard to dislike it for that reason. Actually, maybe more than five, Killer7 and Reside Evil Remake might make my persona top 20. I’m not a ranker. Never given it much thought. I’ve been realizing lately that I slept on early 2000’s Capcom a bit at the time. Their sixth generation catalog is rather large, really varied, and has a lot of very good games that went under the radar for one reason or another. Would like that Capcom back. They still make a fair number of good games, but are a lot less experimental and a lot more hit or miss.