1998 and 2004 have strong cases, as other comments have mentioned, but I think 2007 has got to be up there as well. The Orange Box alone was massively influential, even for just the new-to-'07 releases (TF2, Portal, HL2EP2), and was almost entirely unique - I don’t think we’ve really seen anything like it before or since. Beyond that, you have stuff like Halo 3, CoD 4, Assassin’s Creed, Super Mario Galaxy, Mass Effect, Uncharted, Pokémon Diamond/Pearl, and Guitar Hero 3.

“Subtract 4 wishes”

I like how RealD looks well enough, but the glasses tended to give me a mild headache after a while. I’ve been able to wear VR headsets without much issue in the handful of times I’ve been able to try them, so maybe that would work better, but I don’t think I’ve actually worn one for multiple hours at a time, so who knows.

The thing that I think a lot of people forget about the first Avatar is that it was pretty much the first big blockbuster to be available with those RealD 3D glasses. I distinctly remember wanting to go see it so I could check out RealD and find out if it lived up to the hype.

Of course, it had the James Cameron name recognition, so it was probably going to be pretty successful regardless, but I don’t know if it would have been quite so record-shattering if it weren’t for the novelty of RealD, combined with the higher ticket price of 3D showings.

The longer dems can keep the Epstein issue in the public consciousness, the better. If it slips from the news cycle for too long, the average voter will forget about it, and at that point the whole thing will be moot. It doesn’t matter if they actually succeed, the longer they can draw this out, the more damage it will deal.

I love the gameplay of Dead Rising, but the time limits and save point restrictions really do not mesh well with how I want to play it. The game has the perfect setup to be a sandbox where you could just fuck around with finding silly ways to kill zombies, but the time limits - even if they are as generous as people say - just give me constant anxiety and I can’t really relax and screw around with it like I’d want to.

It was a self-imposed challenge.

I’ve always been curious about Arma, but I’m not sure if I’d like it… It appears to have a lot of depth, but the learning curve always seemed rather steep.

Starfield faked me out for a bit when I took the character creation perk that gave my character living parents that I could go visit and would show up from time to time. They were funny and adorably charming, and I thought it was an inspired touch. Little did I know that was the absolute best part of that game…

I’m stateside, and I torrented something once without a VPN and got an email complaint from my ISP not long after.

Ceci n’est pas une pomme.

deep sigh

upvotes

I get the joke in the title, but not the one in the image. Is “cat sank” a homophone with something in French?

I’d say most of them are protestants, but there’s been a trend of a certain type of far-right “RETVRN TO TRADITION” wingnuts converting and becoming hardline tradcaths in the last decade or so. Those people absolutely would seethe over a black pope.

I think “mandatory physical versions” kinda misses the point of the issue, tbh. It’s bad digital rights laws that are the cause of the problems that you’ve mentioned, not a lack of physical media. DRM has been around a lot longer than digital downloads of games, and shutting down a game’s online services affects purchasers of physical disks just as much as digital downloaders.

Besides, mass-producing physical media is expensive, and I’d rather not give publishers another excuse to make games even more expensive than they already are.

Idiocracy gets the causes of its particular type of dystopia pretty catastrophically wrong, to the point of basically being inadvertently pro-eugenics (“society collapsed because stupid people wouldn’t stop breeding” implies that intelligence is exclusively tied to genetics, which is… a very bad take), but it sure seemed to be an indicator of just how brazenly dumb things could get.

Why does everything have to be so fucking stupid? Is it really not enough that we have to watch the destruction of democracy happen before our eyes? Must it really be carried out by a group named after an early 2010s internet meme featuring a Shiba Inu with bad grammar? Do we really have to read serious reporting about the criminal connections of a 19-year-old government employee called “Big Balls?”

I just never imagined the fall of American democracy would be so… inane.

Is “really frosts my behind” an actual saying anywhere? I’ve never heard that in my life.

Well, I guess “making your country such a shithole that no one wants to come here” is technically one way to stop immigration…

The spread of “skill-based” matchmaking and ranked competitive ladders largely took away a valuable communal aspect of online multiplayer games, IMO. Getting dropped into a match with a bunch of random people you’ll probably never see again just makes things so impersonal, which can cultivate a lot of toxicity.

Some of the best times I’ve ever had with online gaming were from finding a dedicated server with settings I liked, hanging out there often, gradually getting to know the regulars, and becoming part of a community. I’ve never had that kind of feeling from a game with automated matchmaking.