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Villanova Grad

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Everything posted by Villanova Grad

  1. Feel free to message me any time you want to compare stacks of diplomas & career achievements.
  2. lol. Yeah, that would have worked out better if I had bothered to proofread. Oh well.
  3. Lol, the old DVDVR standby “WWE fans aren’t as smart as me.” Must be a month since I’ve seen this trotted out.
  4. 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.
  5. Apparently he didn’t get the memo that renting is great for the industry.
  6. 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?
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. Probably thought they were dealing with a reasonable person who would respond to an annoying question like an adult. Common mistake.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. lol, someone started a rumor that President Biden is going to attend mass at our church when he’s in town and now my parish email address (i am on parish council) has 1,200 unread email in it. Sigh. I take parish council pretty seriously, so I would like to respond to people personally, but I simply don’t have that kind of time. Also, it’s a ridiculous rumor. The Diocese would probably never recommend our parish to the White House for a variety of reasons. Our priests are traditionalists, so it would likely be an embarrassing photo op for everyone involved. i would like to talk to Biden about his faith & get some insight into why he claims to be Roman Catholic, but I’d probably be polite and not ask even if I did somehow meet him. Not really enjoying this week so far. Am acquaintance I’ve known for about 30 years showed up in my office yesterday to ask for my help. Basically, he’s making terrible personal decisions right now and they’re impacting his work and likely will get him fired. He’s relying on his friends to save him. I maybe have enough clout to intervene, but he deserves what is coming to him, imo, so I don’t know why I would. I’m usually a “make your own bed, lie in it” type of guy. When I was a kid, my dad would tell me “if you don’t want to be embarrassed in public, don’t do anything embarrassing”. It’s still good advice. Not sure what to do. Probably will do nothing, though I don’t quite feel right about that either.
  17. Stumbled across this earlier and immediately thought “This will be Taylor Swift at midnight tonight”
  18. Edit: not worth it. Far easier just to log out.
  19. edited. Decided against against sharing the story.
  20. I enjoyed Hitman: Absolution quite a bit (hardcore fans mostly hated it for being more story-driven and less sandbox-y). Other than that, I occasionally have fun with the more recent games by trying to be the worst assassin possible. I really only enjoy the game if I can do targets in with ridiculous Rube Goldberg death traps and silly setups. My favorite Hitman memory is recreating the toilet kill I saw in a YouTube video. Lured target into a room with a large hole in the floor. In the room below was a commode. Target walked over to the edge of the hole, I set off the plastic explosive I had planted in the room below, explosion sent the commode flying up through the hole. Toilet came whizzing out of the hole and wiped out the target. i also enjoy hiding on the pier and shooting support cables so that billboards shaped like a marlin fall on the target and impale him. Really never been able to get into the series when I play it as the developers intended.
  21. I’m already tired of the Xbox story. It’s out of hand. As a former PR hack, I’m stunned Microsoft is going to let the story run wild for a week. Messaging has never been Xbox’s strength, but nothing good is going to come from waiting a week to address the rumors. Unless, of course, the response is going to be the nuclear option (get out of console business & just publish?) and will make the situation worse. I don’t think they are going that far, but who knows? Tom Warren says this is out of the hands of the gaming division & even most Xbox employees don’t know what’s coming. That’s probably not good. Count me in as a Nintendo controller fanboy, I like the GameCube controller quite a bit, Don’t love any of the Wii controllers, but they are interesting attempts to do something different. Same with Wii U. I’ve never thought too hard about it, but I’ll take Wii U & Switch Pro controllers over most modern Xbox & PlayStation controllers. ‘Course, I like the Duke an awful lot too, so… ymmv. Been messing around with an og Xbox, a PS2, and a Wii. Nintendo was ahead of its time with backward compatibility. Anyway, such an interesting generation. 90% percent of that gen doesn’t hold up for me. Most of the rest are bangers. Not a lot of middle ground. If I put together a list of my top 20-50-100 games, most would probably come from that gen. And it was the beginning of the end for big companies experimenting. Development costs started getting too high, and it would only be a few years before everyone realized sequels and bare-bones remasters were cheaper and easier. Going to spend this year playing through some of my favorite titles from that gen. Been a long time since I played FF X, Kingdom Hearts, etc. on original hardware. Next game is going to be Rule of Rose, Clock Tower 3 or Haunting Ground. All are interesting experiments that never quite caught fire but still hold up reasonably well.
  22. Really curious to see where this goes. I think it’s going to be a more sweeping change than a lot of people expect. I’m ambivalent on whether we get Halo and Gears of War on PlayStation, but I definitely think most of their new releases will be timed exclusives then show up on other platforms a few months later. I think that’s probably a good thing. Xbox install base just isn’t big enough to support triple-A gaming costs. i’m more interested in the why (assuming the rumors are true and Xbox is about to become a third-party publisher). The Bloomberg article is going to be wild. Seems likely that, if Xbox is pivoting their strategy, it’s not Phil Spencer’s idea. Timing is really strange if third-party is where we are going. Xbox was still trumpeting exclusivity at their showcase a month or so ago. Xbox is a,so finallly developing new games that are generating some buzz and has the potential - thanks to acquisitions - to keep some system sellers like CoD from PlayStation. Speculation is Microsoft is dictating strategy to the gaming division. Can’t blame them. They’ve poured an enormous amount of capital into the gaming division and the room has been less than hoped. From a business standpoint, I think becoming a third-party publisher and starting to transition away from consoles to whatever digital model will replace consoles is a smart idea. But I’m not at all sure it will work. Xbox has a devoted fanbase. Third-party publishers don’t tend to engender the same fanaticism as console makers. Sega became an afterthought after they got out of the console market. Market is very different than it was in 2000, but I’m not too optimistic. Microsoft Flight Simulator is rumored to be in among the first wave of games going to PlayStation. I normally dislike ports and stick to whatever console the game was developed for, but I’ll gladly make an exception here. Legit excited about the prospect of having MFS on PS5. Fingers crossed.
  23. Judas is a Ken Levine game, so…. 2024? 2034? 5 min after the heat-death of the universe? All are equally likely. I’m one of the guys that think BioShock Infinite was genius, but development was a disaster and the game might still not be done if 2K hadn’t brought in outsiders to finish the game and get it into a releasable state. Dude is the protypical creative genius who has no management skills. Thought the State of Play was very strong, but I’m in a retro mindset now, so the only thing sorta exciting me are the new Kojima games. And, honestly, I’m more excited for whatever the Xbox project is than a sequel and unbranded Metal Gear. DS2 will probably be great, but I hope Kojima moves on to a new ip. He’s 60 years old, so I’m not counting on him directing too many more games.
  24. I’m starting to think about whether or not I need to keep buying new consoles. I am increasingly out of touch with the current gaming scene and don’t follow the trends all that closely anymore. Last year was an objectively great year for new releases, but I had little interest in most of the big hits and GotY candidates. I bought more games for seven different retro consoles (Wii U and earlier) than I did for Switch and new PlayStation/Xbox titles were barely on my radar. Realistically, I’ve got more games on my retro wantlists than I’ll ever have time to play, so subscription services and digital consoles might be enough to dissuade me from buying a PS6 or whatever. Currently playing Half-Life 2 on the original Xbox. My playlist for the next several months is basically GameCube, Wii, and Og Xbox titles. When I finish Half-Life, I’ll probably dive into Epic Mickey or the GameCube’s Resident Evil remake. Lies of P might be the only newish title I play between now and early Summer.
  25. Apparently Xbox laid off its entire physical games division, so those rumors about Xbox going all digital and the next console not even having an optical drive are probably true. I’m not opposed to digital gaming - I usually buy digital first, then go back and pick up a retail edition if I like the game - but I am not particularly excited to be forced into an all-digital future either. Sony and Nintendo are probably going to be slower to embrace digital exclusivity, so the end result will probably be me giving more money to them going forward. Sony and Nintendo also have larger install bases, so it makes more sense for publishers to keep releasing physical editions on those platforms. A Best Buy employee recently told me Xbox retail games mostly sit around at his store, with PS & Switch physical editions outselling Xbox by 20:1 or so. Not idea if that’s true at other stores, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
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