I think Sion should have never been reworked. Imagine all these shonen protatgonists running around getting one-shot by a guy who looks like Klungo from Banjo Tooie. It would have been the funniest shit in the world.

I am going to confess something that will forever change our relationship: I love League of Losers. I started playing in 2013 and it was the most exciting multiplayer game I had ever played. I played a shit ton of games as Shen and Skarner and with friends it was electric. Eventually I went to college and, living in the corn fields of Iowa, the internet conmection on these Iowa campuses was so rotten that playing League online was simply not a possibility.

So, I spent a few years Not playing League, working full-time jobs that meant that after a brutal 9 hour shift I was NOT even interested in getting screamed at by a 16 year old Udyr in my chat. I briefly tried going back to the game in 2021, but this was the time Akshan was released and I found his kit despicable. Which is nothing new: every new champion is released hideously broken and able to solo games because that is how you sell them. But that overloaded kit? Give me a break.

But, you know what, you can't stop me from playing Renekton, so I have been playing it the last month and I have a couple thoughts about the game that made me reflect on it. My first thing is: How do new people get into League? It seems impossible. If you show even the slightest competency in a win you will instantly get paired against Team Smurf who will make you go 0/15/4 as fucking Kennen or something. If I was brand new and I saw Yasuo owning my team while my team unearthed ancient slurs to tell me to kms, I would say, "Ah, this game is for fucking morons." The fact Riot is so incapable or disinterested in figuring out the smurf problem or actually banning people who abuse chat is insane. It has been a problem since the day I joined the game and has not even moved an inch.

Riot's general ineptitude is it's own essay entirely. They are a poorly run Boys Club that fails at even the simplest of tasks when it comes to operating one of the largest games of all time, and half their financial model has to be based around smurfs buying Yasuo skins on new accounts because it seems impossible to me that new people successfully are retained. It's like the Burger King that is ALWAYS hiring because the pay is shit and customers are fucking morons.

The amount of rage in this game is kind of astonishing. For the record, I think shit talking opponents is fine. They are your enemy! Shit talking teammates is insane to me. No one's play has ever improved because they got told to hang themself in the most grammatically alien way every written. I had someone rage at me in ARAM once! The fucking casual mode! What is wrong with this playerbase?

So, my recommendation for any new player is: mute EVERYONE. Do not assume that something someone types in chat will be worthwhile. It won't be. Pings can do enough. Watch good players online play, and they will regularly communicate their thought process during objectives and team fights, and a lot of those thought processes can be applied to your own game. Do NOT pay for a fucking course for the love of fucking God. The game is about map awareness it is not rocket science save your money. You should also avoid bot lane, as bot lane in this game is the most useless role I have ever seen in a Moba.

Historically, the ADC was great at pushing lanes and snagging kills, but now EVERY champion is hyper lethal and mobile, so the fucking Ezreal dinking around bot lane is just a relic of the past. He will never help nor hinder your game; he is just a sitting duck fr. Your Zed or Lee Sin or K'sante are the ones who will carry you to the finish line due to their ability to explode enemies and not die doing it. Supports are also the whiniest, most pendatic fucking crybabies in the history of gaming. If you, as a level 1 Vayne, don't engage in the most brainded fight in history, they WILL rage and probably AFK. Botlane needs a severe rework because it is such a useless and not fun lane.

So, after ALL this crying, how can I possibly like League? The thing is that sometimes it all works. Sometimes it comes together and you get the kind of excitement and thrilling plays that define great multiplayer games. Sometimes you'll lane against bloated characters like Yasuo and Yone as Renekton and just blow them the fuck up with your empowered W. 200 years of game design vs. a Pissed Off Crocodile. I wish there more beast characters being made, as every new champion is designed to appeal to Main Character Syndrome in ways we haven't yet seen. So just shutting those Main Characters down with really simple characters like Ren and Garen? M'wah, perfecto.

Other complaints: Voice actors are terrible anime dub actors. Mute them instantly. Nasus and Renekton sound awesome though. Unmute them. Whoever designed Akshan should be sent to a prison camp, and I'm not just saying that because my Akshan mid the other day AFKd after dying once since it prevented him from being the Main Character. Riot is so bad at making a game that they are still making it 10 years later.

Play it if you dare.

considering WotC and chimera squad were already Figurative Marvel Shit, the pivot to Literal Marvel Shit is about the least surprising thing ever; if you didn't see this coming I suggest staying out of the entrail reading business. the real surprise here's that everyone buried the lede blubbering about deckbuilding stuff so thoroughly that I had no idea this was Meet n Fuck Marvel

not since borderlands 2 has a game's dialogue filled me with the primal unease of an ape seeing a particularly snakelike vine. started this up while my wife was in the shower and when she texted asking if I could make some coffee I knew the choice was to smash ALT+F4 or risk being divorced on the spot

the cardgame bit I'm kinda whatever about. I think I'd like it more if the camera was positioned anywhere else and it didn't lean so hard into Epic Cinematic Presentation that even the most basic actions take a century to unfold. it's cool you can do the type of MTG blue deck bullshit where your turn lasts so long the person on the other side of the table regrets being a nerd, but not cool enough to endure the simpering player worship, cutscenes after cutscenes, and psychotic tutorializing that make up the bulk of the game

have to imagine you'd have a considerably better time stuffing hulk hands in your ass while playing slay the spire

Well, mathematically speaking, it's just as good as McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure.

I didn't give Prey a fair shot back when it released. 2017 feels much further away than it actually is, so I can't explain exactly what had me so distracted that I couldn't invest myself in "the best immersive sim of all time," but those opening few hours didn't hold me. I found myself meandering around and bounced off right around the point where you do your first spacewalk.

But here's the thing, if you're friends with Larry Davis, you can't just be like "oh I didn't enjoy Prey." That doesn't fly. You'll start getting texts while you're out that are just pictures taken from inside your apartment, some of which show you sleeping. He lives halfway across the country, how did he get in there? When was he there? The only way to stop the threats is to acquiesce to his demands. Play Prey or else. I always negotiate with terrorists, I'm a huge coward.

And I'm glad I did, because Larry's right, this is (probably) the best immersive sim ever made. I do, however, have to dock points for not having any Art Bell, something Human Head's Prey has over Arkane's. I'm aware that these games are not related at all outside of a very ill-advised, corporate decision to cash in on Prey's red hot brand name, but the least they could've done is throw in a few Midnight in the Deserts as audio logs. Not a problem, I just played a few in the background while making my way through the wreckage of Talos 1, bashing Typhons with a gnarly looking wrench while listening to Art's guest drone on about collecting and selling Big Foot scat.

Art: When I was in high school I ate erasers. No erasers on my pencils. I guess you could call that a strange addiction. When I went to erase something, I'd just scratch through the paper. Mmm... Erasers. That flavor has faded as an adult.

Ah, the true Prey experience.

That omission aside, Prey checks all the right boxes for me. Talos 1 is a great setting populated by interesting characters and engaging side quests that command your attention from the mission at hand not because they supply you with a list of things to do, but because Arkane has crafted a world so interesting and so fun to occupy that you want to delve into every nook and cranny. I see a locked door and I find myself compelled to know what's inside, even though the last three rooms I busted into had like, a corpse with a single discarded lemon peel in their pocket. Why did they have that? Every body tells a story...

Some of those side quests are going to stick with me for a while, which is both a sign of solid character writing and good mission structure. The fake chef booby-trapping fabrication machines and entry ways after you let him go adds a fun twist to revisiting old locations and makes your revenge that much sweeter when you finally catch up to him, and it's hard to imagine what shape the end game would take if you ejected Professor Igwe from his derelict storage container and skipped his multi-part quest. Which, you know, I initially did because I wasn't patient enough to hear him out. It's fine, I had an autosave, Igwe is totally okay!

That's just the way I play these games, with a dozen backup saves so I can test the boundaries of every moral crisis my character finds themselves in. I'm the kind of dude who will release a Typhon halfway into an inmate's cell just to see what kind of reaction I can get while turning over the long-term consequences of pushing the big red button. Not enough mirror neurons in my head, that's my problem.

Early in the game, you're presented with a personality test, an ink blot, and several variations of the Trolley Problem. An excellent way to establish what Prey hopes to accomplish with the player long-term, as so much of the game is affected by the choices you make both on a macro and micro level. The ending you get is clearly delineated between one of two set paths, but how those play out on a more precise level is affected by the small choices you made along the way. Take that chef, for example. You did get your revenge, but what of his other victims? Did you help them? Did you even try to find them? And what of your brother, Alex? So much of what happens aboard Talos 1 is his fault, but does your love for him win out in the end? Can you condemn him to his fate, or will you spend 30 minutes trying to wrangle his limp body in zero-gravity because the game won't trip one of the god damn objectives, which are clearly bugged-- oh wait, shit... I put him in a grav lift and it snapped his neck. Problem solved.

One area where I deviated from my typical immersive sim habits was combat. I often build my characters around stealth and avoid direct confrontation, but the Typhon abilities you're given work so well in concert with your weapons that turning Morgan into a violent powerhouse felt much more satisfying. There are also a few "survival" modifiers you can toggle at the start of the game, and I went with allowing injuries and suit damage, but not weapon degradation, because weapon degradation always sucks and is not as fun as getting concussed and needing to take "brained pills."

These modifiers add an extra layer of tension to resource management, something you'll be doing a lot of as you lug around literal garbage in the hopes that you might be able to squeeze a few extra shotgun shells out of whatever hard drives and bananas you have on your person. Fabricators are far between in the early parts of the game, often requiring you to loop back to your office for resupplies, which is a smart way of teaching the player the ins-and-outs of the game's resource economy while drilling in how Talos 1 is interconnected.

Is Prey the best immersive sim ever? Look, it takes a very boring man to admit when he's wrong, but it may very well be. Everything from the setting and story, to combat and the larger ways in which the game questions the player's morality is fantastic. My only complaint outside of some technical issues like the aforementioned problem with tripping objectives and a few crashes/freezes on the Xbox version is that there's no Art Bell. A whole .5 off the top of the score, I'm afraid. What's that? Art Bell was dead at the time? Nonsense. If Arkane only opened up a time-traveler's line, they could've booked him. Not an excuse.

It's hard for me to complain too much about my issues (glacial combat speed, massive RNG influence, questionable class balance) because I still mostly had a good time with this game. Early on it's a multilayered resource management game; proper attack placement and spell management is necessary both to avoid falling victim to attrition, and to make sure you don't spend so much money on healing that you can't afford the next set of gear. Once your party becomes strong (and rich) enough to break this dynamic, it shifts into a globe-trotting dungeoneering adventure more focused on labyrinthine dungeons, trying to blow through encounters as quickly as possible and not falling prey to that one encounter that can stunlock your entire party if it feels like it. It’s satisfying to realise that you aren’t actually in as much danger as you used to be, that your fighter can hit multiple times for some reason and blast any enemy into low orbit when they feel like it, and that there’s nothing stopping you stuffing 99 potions in your back pocket to make your white mage really sad for the rest of the game. The stripped-back presentation and story lets these mechanics bring your own personal triumphs and failures to the forefront as the driving narrative. Even something as simple as watching one of your party members hit level-ups a bit slower than everyone else can call back to that one time where they got instakilled or stunned for eight turns in a row three dungeons ago.

While I didn’t find the game incredibly engaging once the earlier parts were over since the combat itself never gets any more interesting (or faster), it's still hard not to respect it. Almost everything weird, dissatisfying or ‘loose’ makes a whole lot of sense if you consider there’s a good chance it’d be one of the first RPGs you played if you had it back in the day, and was likely designed around that idea. The fact that I was measurably underleveled despite fighting everything I saw is uniquely interesting if considering that failure could have been intended in its design - losing characters and running back to revive them means gaining more experience on everyone else in the process. And while it’s not a particularly hard game - speaking as someone who *was* measurably underleveled - a lot of the friction it threatens is probably far more present for someone playing an RPG for the first time. While I can’t say if the whole ‘built for new players’ assumption is actually true or not, operating under it makes the game come off as extremely confident in how it can make itself approachable without compromising the experience it's trying to provide. It’s a beginner-friendly game built to be able to onboard people into a simple RPG system, but it’s still a heavily player-driven adventure with a lot of room for failure and discovery.

This game felt like it was 1000 hours long to 9 year old me. Thats a shit ton of podracing. Why did I do so much podracing?? I must have raced through the ceramic mosaic water world of Choot Chumba 100 times, somehow enthralled and also bored to tears as I piloted Kirtl Jonkta and his giant twin swamp cooler ass pods. I raced through the battle marshes of Terkwue, served my sentence in Anikins home desert of Bhutupo-3, and through the magma halls of Mount Dooq, all for a chance to unlock Darth Vader, the only Star Wars character anyone really cares about.

But in all honesty I do think I gravitate to Star Wars alot more when its focusing more on the “Star” and less on the “Wars”. Pod Racing isnt exactly the most mystical or sexy thing in a Jedi universe, but it actually presents an interesting cultural exposee with the fact that pod racing itself is an exotic popular sport. You race on planets that dont typically feature in Star Wars media and get a more involved look at how these societies might construct themselves - in some cases you can even see how they engage with the sport itself through contestant racers. Its alien Gran Turismo and thats still got more going for it than regular Star Wars.

Man, I'm in a real rough spot. Family members are getting older and sicker, I'm overworked, not getting enough sleep... I need a real pick-me-up, something that's easy to play and has a lot of charm. Help me, Hello Kitty!

Gets cracked in the nose by a disc travelling at 95MPH, completely caving in my facial bones.

hello kitty ,why. ..........?

Like Tetris Battle Gaiden and Windjammers, Sanrio World Smash Ball! is a game I was first exposed to through Giant Bomb, where it ended up in their rotation of competitive multiplayer games on more than one occasion. And I can see why. Even sticking to the single-player mode, Smash Ball's head-to-head Breakout-inspired gameplay is addictive, and in its later stages, weirdly demanding.

You have precisely two moves: hit disc and hit disc harder, and while the early game is such a breeze it can be played on autopilot, the later stages will see you smacking that disc around an inch from your opponent's faces - which the stage itself is designed to resemble, as if Keroppi's smug visage was there to mock you - all in a frantic bid to keep it from your side of the court, which has progressively been designed to put you at a disadvantage. This is still a kid's game at its core, so the difficulty never excels to the point of brutality, but there's a curve here that keeps Smash Ball surprisingly engaging.

I hope one day I can find someone willing to sit down and actually play Sanrio World Smash Ball! with me, I think that'd be cool, I wish I had friends like Hello Kit-

Gets hit in the mouth by a charged shot that ricochets off of and back into my teeth several times

uuugh i thinki n eed to go to the hompsital

Indika is a nun who clutches the charm on her rosary beads til her left hand bleeds, knows how to drive a steambike, and may or may not be talking to the Devil.

From the couch, INDIKA--the game--can sometimes recall The Last of Us, both in how you explore the world, listening to conversations and rummaging through houses torn asunder, and how it spaces little puzzles and set pieces organically throughout its world. But it's also not at all like Ellie and Joel's adventure. It's more profane, and way more Russian: a quixotic mix of philosophy and psychedelia.

That said, like many walking sims, it isn't always fun to play. One of your very first tasks involves refilling a bucket from a well five times. On PS5, the 5.1 audio is unbalanced, the controls are finicky, and the (frequently awe-inspiring) visuals are jerky and unoptimized. Call it Eurojank, I don't mind--a frictionless gaming experience isn't one that can truly explore suffering, and like Disco Elysium, Indika can often be laugh out loud funny while it twists your arm.

So y'know...buy it.

Theres really only 2 things I can say about this game, and its the same 2 things everyone else can say about Mosa Lina: its (1) very fun in a kinetic, flow state brain improv kind of way and (2) its very pointless as a game (as a statement). People have a strange and delicate relationship with RNG, and some people might hear “your ability to complete a level is randomized and not at all guaranteed by the games systems” and think “this will straight up piss me off”. More and more lately I personally welcome opportunities to hone my sense of instinct and intuition when it comes to physically playing games I think are interesting and fun to pick apart, to strengthen my connection to “the flow”.

But its just impossible to avoid the feeling of directionless-ness when games dont have intrinsic goals. You could absolutely make the argument that gamers have addled, unimaginative minds that have been spoiled by reward systems and that we are no longer able to just be present with games - but this is also an inevitability in a world where theres just so many games to play. I can do my part and come up with a few extrinsic reasons to play Mosa Lina for more than 30 seconds and once I accomplish those few extrinsic goals I gotta move on unless Mosa Lina wants to sweeten the deal. Sometimes its just a matter of a game providing excuses to continue playing and Mosa Linas all-or-nothing principled stance leaves it hard to engage with as anything other than a very clever toy.