As of today, the venerable comedy concern CollegeHumor Media is mostly dead. In the words of Sam Reich, its chief commercial officer, IAC “has made the difficult decision to no longer finance us,” he wrote in a Twitter thread this afternoon. “Today, 100+ brilliant people lost their jobs, some of whom are my dear, dear friends.” That means the cuts hit every vertical: CollegeHumor, Dorkly, Drawfee, and Dropout — only five to 10 people are left, according to Bloomberg.
The news, however, wasn’t all bad: IAC agreed to let Reich become the humor company’s majority owner. “Of course, I can’t keep it going like you’re used to,” Reich wrote further down in the thread. “While we were on the way to becoming profitable, we were nonetheless losing money — and I myself have no money to be able to lose.”
They said they are going to try to save the various shows and channels, but I'm not sure how they are exactly going to do that since they have let go nearly all of the performers. My wife and I are bummed by this as we really enjoyed their content. This is just the latest example of internet comedy sites that has all but shut down over the years as the landscape changed with the evolution of social media and streaming services. Cracked used to produce a ton of video and podcast content before they went through a similar round of layoffs that gutted the company. Funny or Die before that.
Just like the previous year, 2019 has been a great year for gaming overall. There are a few honorable mentions that didn't make this year's list simply because they weren't technically 2019 games. Blade And Sorcery is an early access VR sandbox game that has the most amazing melee combat of any VR game. Obra Dinn is technically a 2018 game, but it was some of the most immensely satisfying 9 hours I've ever spent on a video game. Not a factor in the ranking, but it also doesn't hurt that it's probably the best tech demo for ray-tracing out today.
But going into 2019 I have to pick what, for me, might be an unusual choice: Control. I say it's unusual because at a glance it's a fairly standard Remedy third-person shooter/platformer with superpowers a la Quantum Break, but when you dig in you find some pretty tight action gameplay surrounded by some rich X-Files/Twin Peaks inspired world-building that's incredibly engrossing and often hilarious. "The Oldest House" may be a single location as the setting for the game, but the non-linear progression (and often non-Euclidian architecture) keep the game interesting throughout. In spite of a slightly underwhelming ending, this game makes the top of my list for the year because even after I beat it, the first thing I wanted to do was go back and close out every sidequest I could find and max out every ability. I haven't wanted to do that in a game since last year's God of War.
After that, the rest of this list gets a bit interesting. While I mourn the loss of the Silent Hills we never had the opportunity to be traumatized by, Kojima leaving Konami at least means he can make the games he really wants to make. And the result? We got the most Kojima game that has ever been Kojima-ed. A regular day in Death Stranding's world entails climbing mountains and crossing rivers to deliver packages in a supernatural post-apocalypse while fending off ghosts with poop grenades, all while trying to keep my bottle baby ghost detection system from crying. Also, you'd occasionally stop to urinate on mushrooms.
In spite of how meandering and often uneventful this game can be, it's kind of all I can think about when I'm not playing it, so that's why the game that has a bizarre focus on going to the bathroom gets my "Number 2" slot.
From out of nowhere, The Outer Worlds became one of my favorites this year. It raises an interesting question: Can a game be really good even if it doesn't necessarily do anything new? The answer appears to be yes, provided that all of the familiar stuff it does is done as well as it can be. I had hoped for something that deviated more from the Bethesda RPG formula, but what Obsidian put together is a tight and fleshed out a microcosm of a Fallout-style game, but in a more interesting setting than another irradiated wasteland. It's nice to play a retro-themed sci-fi game that is capable of displaying more colors than brown, grey, and green.
The Resident Evil 2 Remake ended up being far better than it probably should have been. In all honesty, it's about as good as a remake/re-imagining of a classic horror game could be, even if I don't agree with them bringing Mr. X into the A scenario in the new game. In the original, he didn't show up until your second playthrough and the game suddenly throwing an entirely new terrifying adversary at you out of nowhere was one of my most memorable gaming moments.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is really fun, and I look forward to beating it, but it came out late in the year and I haven't had the time to devote to it yet. At its core, it's essentially Force Unleashed but with more exploration and less "being a somewhat awful game," which is absolutely what Star Wars games needed right now.
Disco Elysium should probably be higher on this list, but it came out late in the year and I haven't had the chance to put too much time into it with everything else in my queue. This game is the antithesis of Outer Worlds, as it breaks the mold of what an RPG is in nearly every way. By the time I beat both games, I suspect this game will have ranked higher in my list but I have to give a shout out to a game where on my first playthrough I damaged myself turning the lights on too brightly while hungover and I tripped and died of a heart attack.
Asgard's Wrath is a new Oculus game that just beat out the James Bond-themed Defector as my current favorite VR game (besides Sairento, which I will never stop playing). VR needs more games that feel like real games and not linear story experiences with a handful of gameplay elements thrown in as seasoning. Asgard's Wrath has that AAA feel that we got with Lone Echo and Robo Recall, and it's a very creating mix of different gameplay elements.
Simulacrum: Chapter One is a bit of an unknown, but for any Silent Hill fans, it's a must play. Dubbed as a "spiritual successor" to the series, this free indie game may look like a blatant rip off of my favorite horror series, right down to the fonts and menu-style. But if you look deeper, it's clearly a very sincere homage that really nails what I enjoyed about the best games in the series--which includes great lore and puzzles plus a pervasive sense of dread.
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is one that I'd been salivating over for a long time prior to its release. Even though there wasn't much gameplay footage ahead of it dropping, the promise was for a game that filled that gap left by Wing Commander: Privateer so many years ago, and in that department, it did not disappoint. A space sim that's a little light on the "sim" elements, it delivers on exploring an open universe without long boring stretches.
Finally, Shenmue 3 makes this list. Not because it's a good game but because for all its mediocrity and complete lack of keeping up with modern gaming standards, it’s the game that I wanted for decades and never thought I'd see. So yes, I will grind my way through hours of terrible minigames and wooden dialog because the fact that this game even exists is frankly a miracle.
(12/20/2019: Please note that this blog was edited by the GameSpot staff)
Harebrained is one of my favorite studios. I wasn't involved in most of these Kickstarters, but I have become a huge fan of the products they have been producing. Three complete revivals of the Shadowrun RPG titles on PC that pay proper homage to the original pen and paper games. They also came out with their turn-based Battletech game that follows the same ideals of the board/PAPRPG that I used to play in my younger days.
I've recently gotten back into Battletech, and trying to manage my way through mech repairs, monthly merc company expenses, travel costs, etc and it's great. I recently completed a mission in that game where I "won" and earned rep with the client, but several of my mechs got mangled. Here is the stuff I had to deal with as a result. 450k mission payout plus salvage rights, but here were my costs:
Mech repairs were around 400k. Not counting the destroyed components I had to replace from my inventory.
Repairs took about a month to complete.
3 out of 4 pilots where injured. Two took a couple weeks to recover and one took more than a month.
The whole time my mechs were being repaired and my mechwarriors were recovering, I wasn't earning money.
I have to pay monthly expenses regardless of if I'm earning money or not.
This game is awesome because this is all the kind of stuff I have to worry about. Winning a mission isn't all that's important. I have to modify my tactics to try to minimize the amount of repair costs I'll pay because they erode margin. The idea that a game can force you to keep this many factors into account is something I absolutely love.
A while back I posted a thread about how I was considering solar power for our house. After a -lot- of research, number crunching, etc I decided to pull the trigger back in January. After permits, approvals, and everything else involved the install finally went in April 4th. I got the following:
30 Tesla/Solar City solar panels rated at 325 watts per panel. 9.75 kilowatt maximum capacity.
1 Tesla Powerwall 2 13.5kw battery backup and accompanying hardware.
Ignore the hole in the wall. That was there when I moved in.
So after all this got installed it takes a while to get it up and running. The city inspector needs to sign off, which takes a week or so. Then you need to sign some docs with the utility company, who comes out and installs their own meter to measure how much your solar panel system generates. The whole process can take 6-8 weeks after the actual install, but I lucked out and the utility company installed their meter today, a little fewer than 3 weeks after the initial install.
Today was my first day of actually generating solar power. I turned the system on at about noon and I was able to generate 35.2 kwh during the remaining daylight hours. Now that it's nighttime the whole house is running on the Powerwall so we are still not using the grid. Surplus solar goes back into the utility company and stored as credit I can consume at a later date. Even though my electric use is a bit high I suspect that I'll be net positive between solar production, running on battery at night, and credit stored with the utility company.
Anyone else install solar? How was your experience? Good? Bad?
This is my old gaming notebook. Once upon a time, back in the PS2/360 era, some games had a puzzle/difficulty level that required taking outside notes in order to beat them. My roommate and I kept a dedicated notebook for writing down clues and trying to sleuth out the solutions to various puzzles. This was more of a scratch notebook for jotting down and visualizing ideas rather than a journal, so looking back today I only have even vague notions of what games these various pages of chicken-scratch are even supposed to be for.
Gallery
In the earliest days of my gaming, games were not designed to "hold your hand" in the slightest. Old school PC games (pre non-Atari console) were just about creating something for the player to solve, all other aspects of "fun" or "playability" weren't even real considerations yet. Infocom text adventures were among some of the most brutal, as games like Zork would let you take an action right at the beginning of the game that would prevent you from finishing the game and not even tell you.
Incidentally, the oldschool Infocom games have just had their source code made available for anyone interested to check it out.
At least Arena and Daggerfall would warn you if you killed an NPC that might be necessary to beat the storyline. Oblivion and Skyrim just didn't allow you to permkill anyone you needed for the main plot.
As games got better and more evolved, the idea that a game would force you to utilize "outside knowledge" was something that they moved away from. Everything you should need to beat the game would be provided -somewhere- in the game, even if it was hard to find. Silent Hill 3 on Hard puzzle difficulty was one of the first modern games to move away from that (requiring some knowledge of Shakespeare for one puzzle). Most games would never require you to look beyond the data provided in the game to solve a puzzle, unless that was specifically the game's gimmick.
So, this comes back to my old gaming notebook. It could be argued that the streamlining/simplification of games that resulted in them being developed as multiplatform titles (i.e. PC and consoles) contributed largely to this simplification. It's been a very, very long time since I felt like I might have needed to take notes outside a game to beat it. The closest I have come in recent memory is Obra Dinn, but in the end I was able to solve the fate of all 60 crew-members and passengers without needing to take my own notes.
So what do you think? Is this simplification of games good to make them appeal to a wider audience or has this more mainstream approach created an industry of games that lacks some of the sheer challenge of yesteryear?
I've noticed in movies that there are a lot of things that (hopefully) most people know just literally aren't true but they are so often wrong that we just accept them for the sake of enjoying the movie. Some of these things include:
Various legal plot devices, like "oh, you didn't read him his Miranda Rights? He gets to go free then!" which is completely horsecrap.
What hypnosis can do. In movies it's tantamount to mind control, when in reality it's nothing even remotely like that.
Various firearm tropes:
"Silencers" in movies which are basically fiction. Suppressors exist but they are nothing like the magical movie silencer that reduces the sound of a gunshot to a mere whisper
People getting blown off their feet, through windows, etc by gunfire. It sure looks cool though.
How much ammo a gun holds. This is almost never based on the reality of the firearm but rather the drama the story calls for.
Cars that explode when you shoot at the gas tank.
Subliminal messaging. Specifically the idea that inserting single frames of certain images can influence people on a subconscious level. The whole idea was a hoax perpetrated by a guy names James Vicary as a marketing stunt, and he admitted it when nobody could reproduce his results. Interesting side note: Even though it's crap, the FCC still made it against regulations and anyone who tries it might lose their broadcast license. Their logic is that regardless of whether it works or not, it's "contrary to the public interest" so it's not allowed regardless.
Pretty much anything that has anything to do with computers and hacking.
The idea that you use a defibrillator to restart a stopped heart. That's literally not what they are for, but that's how they are used in nearly every movie and TV show. But goddamn if that scene in The Abyss wasn't one of the best movie scenes ever.
There are of course additional technical ones like "that's not how you pick a lock" or "that's not how you make a bomb" but obviously most movies aren't trying to teach you how to do those things so a little bit of in-authenticity isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Are there any ones that you can think of? Not minor technical or continuity gafs but something that fundamentally works differently in movies to how it works in real life.
Space combat sims, particularly open "world" ones, has been a topic I've followed often over the years. They were among my favorite genre of PC game in the early days and they fell out of popularity for a long time.
The X series has always been one of the more complex of the single player offerings in this genre. Later installments featured the ability to eventually own and pilot nearly every ship you could encounter in the game, up to and including capital ships. You could maintain entire fleets, buy space stations, and take part in a dynamic economy. Most of the games in the series were solid except for an ill conceived reboot called X: Rebirth that abandoned everything that people actually liked about X games.
X4: Foundations is a proper sequel in the series, bringing back much of what fans really wanted: epic scale and no restrictions.
I've been having a blast with this game since it came out. It's obtuse as hell, and they only recently posted an instruction manual as a wiki but the depth is pretty amazing. I started off with one ship, ran missions until I earned enough for upgrades, and eventually bought a dedicated mining ship with its own crew. I left it to run while I did more missions. Got a law enforcement license from a few of the factions, participated in fending off invasions, bought more mining ships, got my own station, etc. I leave the game running overnight so my ships can mine. I used the profits to buy even more ships and replace my main ship with a heavy fighter fitted to the teeth with shields and guns.
At one point, I flipped the mined material from silicon to nvidium, which took my trade runs from 50k a pop to 500k a pop per ship. This was great, for a couple hours at which point I stopped making money. I looked at all my trade ships and they were just sitting there with cargo bays full of ore. I thought the game was bugged so I took to the forums. Turns out, this new more valuable is only bought at trading stations and isn't consumed as a resource by factories/refineries. Since it doesn't get consumed, the trading stations fill up with it and eventually stop buying it. Such is the downside to a game that features a real in-game economy, so I took to exploring the universe in search of more trading stations that would buy it. The second I located one the AI captains of my ships mass exodused in my direction.
I've got a Synology SAN at home, which is a big disk array that stores all my media. I was shopping for more storage and I came across an expansion device for my SAN that normally runs around 400-450 for about 270. Since it was a 3rd party seller, I checked them out as best I could. They'd been around for years. They had over 5000 feedback, and while it wasn't the highest satisfaction score I'd ever seen it was still in the mid 90% range. There hadn't been a lot of feedback in the last few months but it was obviously an established account.
So I placed my order, and turned a co-worker of mine who agreed that the price was unusually low but since it was through Amazon he also figured he'd give it a shot. This was on the 22nd.
A day or two later I got my tracking info. The item was on its way. By the 24th it had reached a distribution center in Ohio (I'm in Colorado).
Fast forward to today: My tracking has my item arriving by Friday. My co-worker got his "delivered" according to Amazon's site, but to a different state/address than the one he had provided and the seller wasn't getting back to him. This got him suspicious, so he checked out the seller and it was showing as 3% positive instead of in the 95% range. He wondered if we had somehow switched sellers and he asked me to check it out.
I jumped on and found that while it was the same seller, their feedback had gone from 95% to about 3% literally overnight as they got flooded with over 600 negative reviews from customers claiming that they paid for a product that never arrived or that got sent to the wrong address.
From what I could tell, someone using a legit seller's account (maybe their's, maybe one they took over, maybe one they hacked) dropped the price of the whole store's product line by about 40-50% to generate a flood of purchases. Then they generated bogus shipping data or maybe shipping worthless items to the wrong addresses on purpose. Since they only offered "standard" shipping, it would take about a week for anyone to realize anything was wrong, and by that time they could have transferred the money out of the account Amazon uses and made off with it.
I contacted Amazon support and explained the situation, and pointed them to the store in question. The guy on the phone acknowledged it was almost definitely a scam and filed a claim, which launches an investigation and takes several days to resolve. The claim came back immediately and offered a refund (before I even got off the call) so obviously this has already been reported by a few other people.
I've seen some shady stuff on Ebay and had a guy try to scam me for an Xbox 360 back around launch but I caught it immediately and got PayPal to reverse the transaction. I've also had a few people try to scam me on CL ("Yes, I'll buy that from you but I need to mail you a check"...) but this is a first for me on Amazon. Has anyone else had a similar experience on Amazon or another re-seller site? Were you able to easily get your money back?
So anyone familiar with the Initial D anime/manga series about drift racing in the mountains of Japan may or may not be aware of the dozen plus video game versions they made of this anime series if you don't live in Japan or China. Very few of these games got home versions and even fewer of these games ever made it out of Asia. The majority of the games released (including just the racing games and not weak tie ins like card games or mobile titles) were arcade racing cabinets and they only ever made a PS2 game, a PSP game, and a PS3 game of a few of the earlier editions (games 2, 3, and 4, respectively). The arcade series is actually still current, with a total nine different titles.
All of the games use memory cards that let you "buy" cars, upgrade them with points earned in-game, and track your progress. ID 1-3 used magnetic strip memory cards, but ID4 and up switched to integrated chip cards because magnetic strip cards are horribly unreliable.
The two most current versions are Initial D Arcade Stage 8 which was released in 2014 and Initial D Arcade Stage Zero which came out a little over a year ago. The latest, ID Zero, uses Sega's Amiibo memory card which is an NFC card and can store data for a number of different Sega games and not just one Initial D game. ID8's online services were shut down the same month they released the latest game (apparently there's some complex licensing designed around the online services where arcades actually pay Sega on a per-play basis) but ID Zero's online services are active today and popular.
Where I live, a Japanese style arcade/bar opened up with a ton of Versus City cabinets (head to head cabinets ideal for fighting games where each player has their own screen/controller facing each other) as well as several other types of cabinets that never released outside of Japan like Pop'n Music, Taiko Drum Master, and Groove Coaster 3. We also got a couple ID8 head to head arcade cabinets and a bunch of us have gone nuts on this game. It's a really, really arcade-y racer (to be fair, it's literally an arcade game) but there's an astounding amount of depth to it in spite of that. ID8 has 16 courses which can be raced uphill or downhill (the anime is about drift racing in the mountains), at day or night, and with varying weather conditions. The story mode follows many of the events and races from the anime, and is ridiculously long (also all in Japanese). I've "beaten" it by going through probably 100 races but even then there's an endgame where you can keep doing randomly generated story missions, plus there's local multiplayer and time trials which are the most fun once you get some experience in the game and see how insanely low you can get your course times. The game sets very aggressive targets for the highest rankings that you can achieve after hundreds of hours of play if you manage to get really, really good.
When I visited Hong Kong a few months ago for work, I hit every arcade I could find on both sides of the bay. I found ID8 in most of these arcades, and the newer/bigger arcades also had ID Zero cabinets (sometimes as many as eight of them head to head for multiplayer racing and team multiplayer racing). Sadly, my memory card from my local arcade was region locked to Japanese ID8 cabinets, but I bought a new memory card for Chinese ID Zero and made some progress on it before I had to go home.
So anyone else here every play (or still play) and of these games?
Note: Anyone who's into the Initial D scene may be aware of some additional ways that these games can be played outside of finding them in an arcade. The rules of Gamespot's forums do no allow such discussion. So if you play these games in any format/method outside of the officially released home versions, or the arcade versions, let's not get into any "forum rule breaking" detail and just say that you play these games and leave it at that.
I switched over to an EV about a year and a half ago and I've been extremely happy with it, but I'm curious to know how many people in OT have taken that particular plunge. While I love my car, I can't pretend that it's all advantages and no disadvantages compared to a comparable gasoline vehicle. For my particular situation, the pros far outweigh any cons to the point that I really don't have to deal with any cons on a regular basis. They definitely are not practical for everyone's situation, though. Here are some of the Pros and Cons as I see them:
Pros:
Never having to go to a gas station. I charge my car at home in my garage at night as needed.
Lower "fuel" cost as they are more energy efficient and electricity is (generally) cheaper than a comparable amount of gas. My car will go about 260 miles on $8 worth of electricity where I live.
Quiet and non-polluting.
They tend to be more technically advanced cars with extra features you might not get in many gasoline car, such as remote climate controls. In my car, I can turn the heater or AC on from a mobile app and leave them on for days if I wanted to.
EV charging stations are becoming super common all over the place. There are apps that help you find them. In many cities they are actually more common than gas stations.
High torque means better acceleration than comparable gasoline cars, particularly from a complete stop. This makes accelerating to pass more effective.
You never have to worry about discharging your 12 volt battery. Some EVs don't even have a 12v battery anymore.
Cons:
You pretty much -have- to charge at home in your garage, carport, driveway, etc. Relying on public chargers like you do with gas stations might work, but can be problematic for a lot of reasons (see below). This means that you need to be in a living situation where you have control over where you park at home. At a minimum a regular outlet is required for cars with low range (more on that later) but for cars with larger ranges you need to install a high amp circuit or your car won't fully recharge even if left overnight.
They tend to be more expensive than comparable gasoline cars, which offsets the electricity cost benefit.
Some have very poor range (100 miles or so). Obviously these tend to be the less expensive models.
Electricity costs can be relative expensive depending on where you live. That $8 I mentioned to recharge my car would be closer to $28 in Hawaii during peak hours.
Charging takes much longer than putting gas in a car. Even with the fastest chargers it could still be 30-45 minutes to bring the battery up to full from near empty. Slower chargers can take much longer (hours), which leads to my next point...
EV charging stations are wildly inconsistent. With a gas station you pretty much know what to expect (unless you have a diesel car, in which case you have to make sure they have diesel) but EV stations are all over the map. Some are fast, some are slow. Some use a J1772 plug, some use a CHAdeMO plug, some use a new third type that's big in Europe that I forget the name of. Some chargers are free, some are expensive. Some are fast, some are really, really slow (like 3-4 miles of range per hour on my car) and are no good for charging back up during a road trip. That plus different chargers are run by different companies. I have like 4-5 RFID cards and mobile apps for different EV charging companies because I may not know what I'm going to find should I need a charge.
Extremely cold weather affects battery output and can have a severe effect on range, reducing it to almost half. That means if you have a 100 mile range Nissan Leaf and the temperature drops to well below freezing, you may only get 50-60 miles before you have to charge again. For cars that have low ranges already, that's a huge problem.
Having a super quiet car can be a negative. I can't tell you how many peoples I unintentionally crept up on people walking down the middle of the lane in a parking lot because their backs were to me and my car makes no noise. Note: They changed the law so that in 2019 going forward all EVs will have to make some kind of noise while driving uner 18MPH for safety.
Finding chargers in rural areas can be problematic.
Neutral:
High torque means that some of the normal tech you see in modern cars like Limited Slip Differentials and transmissions. Slip may be controlled electronically but top speed will be limited compared to other high performance cars.
People park gas cars in EV charging spots constantly. Hell, even some EV owners use those spaces as "EV Parking" and don't bother to plug their cars in.
Some people like messing with EVs by unplugging their charging cables when they find them.
Power output is technically affected by battery charge level. However, the amount of difference you'll get generally isn't significant unless you're going for 0-60 or 1/4 mile records.
Higher carbon cost to produce EVs, mainly because of the battery. This offsets the environmental benefits of a non-polluting car.
The cons list seems long, but I'm very pro-EV provided it makes sense for someone. Anyone else have an EV? What do you like/dislike about it?
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