You might want to look up why the luddites hated technology.

Winter 2026, got it.

Once again mashing Total War with a franchise that has war in the title and utterly refusing to do the obvious.

Probably because leftists use “communism” like it’s an immediate and obvious goal, but dismiss any criticism of past efforts to actually get there. It effectively becomes an unquestionable fantasy.

Striking while the iron is present.

Too Many Cooks!

Dolphin is still blocked because recompilation is restricted to web browsers.

Hit Apple harder.

Or their goals are weirder than making customers happy.

This isn’t like Microsoft telling whole studios to jump through their ass and bring them a whole new market, on pain of death. Sony has reasons for pushing this shit in the first place - and they’ve done the math on how much that’s worth to them, versus profits and goodwill on PC. Suffice it to say their don’t give two shits about goodwill on PC. They’d like the money, but only if it does not threaten their grip on a completely separate platform they own and control and shave for an entire third of its revenue.

Or as shareholders phrase it, the PS5 lost eleventy zillion dollars, and heads must roll.

IIRC, Wario Land 3 has no health or lives. Enemies can only modify your state. Wario Land 4 walked it back a bit by adding hearts, but most of the game is still a movement puzzle, where you have to get flattened to walk under narrow passages, lit on fire to turn to ash and fall through gratings, stung by bees to swell up and fly like a balloon, et very cetera. And then every level ends with a timed dash back to the entrance.

Superman 64 still blows my mind, because they nailed the Timmverse vibe with the N64’s typical untextured polygons - while the character was so damn popular that the box art has no text. And then it’s a series of unforgiving time-trials. Just a heaping plate of green-fogged frustration. It came out in 1999! It wasn’t some launch title. Blast Corps had nonviolent property destruction two years earlier. The system was lousy with collectathons. Replacing bad guys with robots was infamously A Thing for at least the Turok games.

The game should have been a GTA prototype where you’re only capable of doing good things, contextually. A power fantasy where of course flying toward a crowd swoops over them, and of course you can only throw cars at locked-on evil robots, and of course there’s no possible way your character, who literally Superman, needs a god-damn HP bar.

How is the first character to properly explore the mechanics of an invincible protagonist… Wario?

The clever workaround for players being trying to be dicks is to say Bizarro’s on Earth, and obviously thinks he’s Superman. So any time you go completely over the line or fuck around beyond excuse, you get a soft game-over where you catch your reflection and it’s not Kal-El.

What I’d pitch is a fairly short game with replay value in optimization. It’s a day in the life. Superman has the ability to solve every problem in the city, that day. Superman has the ability to solve several major natural disasters happening around the globe… and still solve every problem in the city, that day. You, the player, are going to jump through your ass trying to schedule or predict more than about half. It has to be fair. There has to be a way, on every single playthrough, without memorization or guesswork. But it can be obscenely hard. It can be controller-through-television levels of difficult, both intellectually and mechanically, because that’s in-theme. It underlines how good the man himself must be, in order to stop every mugging in Metropolis, instead of just the ones he comes across. And it lets you feel his frustration when even one slips through the cracks.

Anyway, escalate through a few specific “heavy” days, spread across a month or so. At first you’re handling petty crime across town, with an invitation to rescue people from rooftops when a dam bursts in another state. By the end you’re fighting Brainiac atop the Daily Planet, and while he limps away from having all three of his dicks twisted, you find a quiet moment to help a child climb out of a tree. High-level play involves hearing about a disaster before it happens, so you can stop the dam bursting in the first place. Or throw a tornado back into the clouds, or redirect the faultline from an earthquake, or whatever the problem is on this playthrough. It’s variable enough that you can’t just fly somewhere pre-emptively (most times) but frank enough that you might prevent it the first time.

Knowing what’s right to do isn’t easy, but it’s simple. Knowing how to do all of it at once is neither.

They might’ve just realized they’re a medium-sized publisher with a hardware business on the side. Or they will be, if every game is on every system. They finally started porting to PC as a rule - because that’s more money from more people. But now they’re stuck in a dilemma between pursuing that money and undermining the concept of consoles. If they fuck this up then the PS7 is a Steam machine.

Please don’t give money to either of these companies.

Voice-to-voice is going to be fantastic, because you still hire Steve Blum, but you have him do six characters who sound nothing alike. But only for the important bits. If you need a thousand lines about mundane background nonsense then you have the devs record themselves and filter it to sound like the character. You’d mimic the serious voice actor’s performance… not their voice.

Modern RTS games are just (mostly) sloppy, unfinished, cashgrabs with no vision.

As were many classic RTS games. I fondly remember Machines, a fully 3D example from the late 90s. I recently noticed the CD case describes it as “3D Real-Time Startegy.”

Comparing apples and turds.

It has never been easier to make A Game. The only thing getting harder is meeting shallow expectations imposed by empty suits. What a small team can accomplish in a few months keeps expanding, and unless you chase some zillion-dollar trends, what they can do is plenty.

Shareholder puppets like Microsoft should figure this out - they demand instant turnaround. They own enough studios to have several of them try cranking out six games in two years. If you want it to happen faster, use fewer people. I dunno, build a friggin’ pipeline for indie devs to slap together a killer idea that gets fixed-up, art’d, and polished by different teams. Then you can sell more things to more people for more chances to trip into a brand new trend. You don’t have to perform ritual sacrifice when a decade-long project makes a shitload of money! You can still get angry when the actual profits are less than the number you made up in your head! Just-- put money behind cool things that cost $20, instead of constructing situations where people have to spend $140 each or you lose. It’s like a fuckin’ Mad TV skit. Spend less, sell more.

Word salad.

Aww, I was hoping for a Hardspace Shipbreaker kinda deal.

Computerizing the console space. That was always the goal. And I think it worked.

Everyone sees Microsoft’s losing “the console war” and I ask you: what war? There’s two identical AMD laptops with different colored branding. Just like last gen. Upgrades keep launching in lockstep, so patience doesn’t mean better hardware. Most games are on both brands, looking basically the same. Even diehard PS5 fans joke about having no games, and what they mean is, the only games Xbox fans don’t get to play are the ones Sony bribed into existence.

The original Xbox was literally a PC. The 360 was a compiler target that made ports easy. The Xbone was both. Whatever this one’s called is a pretty straight upgrade. There’s no special sauce, anymore. It already doesn’t matter which console you own.

Microsoft’s not teasing Halo on Playstation out of desperation. They’ve nearly ended consoles. Yeah, Sony will sell you a box specifically for video games, but most of them can be run on any other box. Or your damn phone. The fact you need a specific box to play Spider-Man or Zelda or whatever will not be enough to sustain a brand. Even Nintendo knows that - that’s why they actively avoid competing, and try goofy shit nobody else offers. (Still not clear how “tablet with buttons” was an unexplored space. But now even that is competing with the Steam Deck, which is proudly just a PC.)

I’m not sure Microsoft gives a shit if you buy an Xbox. Like game devs making everything multiplatform, they see platforms as obstacles to selling you goods and services. (At least, other people’s platforms.) They want to sell Xbox services on Playstation. Watch them suddenly push against the 30% cut for first-party stores, and loudly opine about Apple’s monopoly on iOS.