Source? The article only confirms that he is Israeli, doesn’t mention his religion at all. Because it’s not fucking relevant.
Russian citizens who refused to condemning the Ukraine invasion have faced similar consequence. There’s plenty of precedent internationally for these sorts of decisions. The only difference here is that Israel has been purposefully supplying propaganda for decades to conflate antizionism with antisemitism.
Why are you assuming the religiosity of an Israeli person?
Seems like confirmation the whole Elon v Trump falling out earlier this year really WAS just pure theater.
The Souls games is another good example I considered bringing up. I’ve only played Bloodborne so far and while I did enjoy it one of my criticisms is that it’s pretty monotone. Even the few NPC’s there are tend to not be very likeable. Everything is dark. Everyone is bad. It’s not even clear whether anything the player experiences is “real” even within the game world, or whether anything the player does accomplishes anything. While I haven’t played the other games I get the impression that they are similar.
I can also think of games that only lean into one side or the others but they do it in a way that I dont mind. “Cozy” games have made an entire genre of this, like Animal Crossing.
Or games where the tone of the game is always dark, but the player and player character both know that there is an “outside” world they can escape to. Resident Evil, Portal, BioShock, etc.
You brought up Metal Gear Solid because it has moments of levity within a gritty military espionage setting, but I think it’s also helped by being set in the real world. If I remember correctly, the end of MGS2 has a boss fight on the roof of a building in Philadelphia and we are shown in cutscenes that the streets below are filled with normal people going about their business, completely unaware of the threat. It’s a reminder of what the player character is fighting for.
Uncharted is another series worth discussing. The first 3 games all kind of blur together in my memory so I could be mistaken, but I remember the first game felt too isolated. I don’t think you really spend much time in a non-hostile environment: it’s all either jungles or ruins or the enemy base. 2 and 3 did a better job of putting Nathan in more mundane and civilian settings: museums, tourists sites, cities, etc. There’s moments where you need to put away your fun and act like a normal person, and that contrast makes the action sequences hit that much harder.
A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.
I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.
By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.
I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.
They could be in a similar phase of life. I was still 17 when I started college and had a full-time job. A 20 year old could still be in high school if they were held back. This is kind of the range where you can start counting months or talking about how different school systems have different cutoff dates that can mess with things.
I would not recommend 20 year olds and 17 year olds date in general. But it’s very possible for two people of those ages to date without being creepy or having problems.
Can dwarves survive such prolonged periods so far removed from rock, stone, and dirt?
Honestly there were some food points back then. A lot of people simply are not able to wear headphones responsibly. It’s only gotten worse with noise cancelling technology. The ability to ignore the outside world is great when you’re in a safe space to do so, but people doing it out in public or while driving are absolutely mad.
The quotes about “breaking societal connections” or whatever are funny to me though. Because that was happening at the time, but it had far more to do with the erosion of 3rd places and the rise of car-centric infrastructure than it did headphones.
“Are you tired of your AI spouse getting reset after every update? Well, for just $19.99 a month you can have access to our new LLM model wAIfu!”
I have to wonder… Are these real humans mourning the loss of their AI companions, or AI bots mourning the loss of their AI bots? Did the “lost” bits ever exist in the first place?
Is this all a viral marketing scheme to get people to use a specialized AI bot for their artificial companionship?
I’m saying all this just because I’ve never actually talked with anyone who has admitted to having a relationship with an AI chat bot. I’ve never even heard of a friend of a friend of a cousin of a coworker of an acquaintance. That doesn’t mean these people don’t exist - there’s probably some sampling bias involved simply because people who fall in love with AI probably don’t talk to a whole lot of real people. But my years of experience on the internet have taught me to be skeptical.
I see two possible explanations:
Class warfare. The same people banning porn are the ones banning abortion, banning homosexuality, banning gender transitions (although they never seem to ban the same therapies for cis people), banning sex education, banning contraception. All of these attacks on individual sexuality are to try to push people into unprotected heterosexual sex. At the same time, these same political groups have been attacking both parental support systems and child labor laws. They want parents too desperate to rebel. They want children working. They want a larger supply of labor: more supply means more competition amongst workers for wages, which means the labor is cheaper.
Power. Maybe these payments processors don’t actually care about pornographic games. But attacking pornography in the name of “defending women and children” is easy to sell to the public and sets a precedent for these payment processors violating neutrality. So eventually they will move to banning games that are too violent (well, they’ve already been trying for decades). Then it’ll be games that are too “extreme” or promote “terrorism”. If these payment processors don’t see any consequences soon, I expect in the next 5 years they will try to take down any games that are anti-Zionist. Maybe games that are pro-Ukraine. In 10 years it could be any sort of left-leaning game. Disco Elysium for promoting communism. Horizon for depicting climate change. Stardew Valley for allowing same-sex relationships and being anti-corporate.
Notice that these discussions never seem to apply to copaganda. It’s perfectly fine to be violent and bloody as long as that violence is authorized by the state. The US Military offices have a well-documented relationship with Activision for Call of Duty, so you aren’t going to see any of these groups call for CoD to be banned.
I mean, that’s just diving into the classic Console vs PC arguments that have been going on for years. My point is that it’s gotten worse for both. We can argue all day over which is the best way to go in 2025.
What I think we CAN say for sure is that buying any sort of gaming device in 2019 is better than any option in 2025. I’m using 2019 because that was the year I built my PC for $1k total, and that holiday season I bought my PS4 - a slim model that came bundled with Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and The Last of Us 2 all for $199.99. Either of those deals blow pretty much anything today out of the water.
I guess profits are up, the PS5 is selling well so far, and it looks like the Switch 2 is tentatively on place to be one of the better-selling units of all time. Maybe the average consumer just doesn’t care about the bang for their buck- they just want the new shiny thing.
I can’t name a single PS5 game I’d want to play that doesn’t already look and run better on my PC
The keyword here is “my”.
It’s not just the console generation that is suffering. PC gaming is dying too. Crypto dealer the first blow, now AI. I’m still running an RX580 that I bought for $180 back in 2019. I was planning on buying a 9700XT at launch this year. Still not a great value- an MSRP of $600. Adjusted for inflation that’s still ~2.6x the price and it’s not going to give me 2.6x the performance. But even then it was impossible to find a card for $600 - even months later the cheapest one on nowinstock is $700, and those are hard to find. That’s JUST the GPU - you still need another grand or more to build a decent PC around it. Even with this price increase, the base PS5 is $550.
I’m not trying to make this a console vs PC thing. They all suck right now. The only good values for gaming is on the fringes. The Steam Deck was an incredible value when it launched, and only looks better today. Other cheap, low-powered solutions like Chinese handhelds and android TV boxes loaded with pirated old ROM’s. Mini-PC’s that are good enough to handle 5-10 year old PC games… At 1080p or less with the settings turned down bit. Maybe an Xbox Series S might be a decent short-term value, especially if you are a person who loves game pass or just wants to play free games like Fortnight.
It’s looking bleak. Not just videogames but everything. Food, medicine, clothing, housing.
So back during COVID when restaurants complained, that was enough pressure to justify jeopardizing the entire health of the planet to allow them to re-open. I was told that economic activity was worth the death and destruction and suffering.
So that means these same people are going to be calling for an end to this military occupation, right?
So Mario Kart World was the big launch title with bundles, and they already released a new Fast game, the series that seems to have basically replaced F-Zero.
Seems like a lot of racing games early on from Nintendo.
I think the Switch 2 will do well, as it’s already had a better launch than the WiiU or 3DS. But it’s kind of in an awkward spot. The community reaction seems to be “yeah Mario Kart World is great, but it’s still just a Mario Kart game at the end of the day, and it will need some DLC to catch up to the level of content of MK8”. Donkey Kong was received well but doesn’t seem to have the staying power of a game like Super Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild did. Pokemon Legends Z-A is probably going to do well, but I don’t think these kind of spinoff games are going to drive console sales like the main games do (especially when there is a Switch version coming out too).
My point is that a few months after launch I still don’t see a game where I say “wow that’s worth grabbing a Switch 2 for!”. It almost feels more like the “Switch Pro” that was rumored for years rather than a true sequel- the main reason to upgrade right now is that Switch 1 games run better. That is enough to launch, but I’m looking through the list of announced games and trying to find what the big system seller is going to be. What’s going to release this holiday season that makes parents stand in line to buy the latest Nintendo for their children?
Maybe this is by design? Maybe Nintendo has purposefully left a bit of a drought to avoid having a ton of cross-gen games, and plans to start announcing more projects in 2026?
Fair enough. Personally I’m old enough to remember when my parents upgraded the living room TV from a CRT to a flat screen (I think it was a plasma?) and the upgrade so so drastic I’ve never had any urge to go back.
I think part of it is that the only CRT’s left in existence are the ultra-high-end models that retro enthusiasts covet. Models that I never would have seen back in the late 90’s unless I had an ultra wealthy friend or visited a local TV station. The old console-style CRT with only a single coaxial input, with the faded phosphorus and the weird spots where someone got a magnet too close to the screen… I’m fine leaving that in the past lol.
Demo disc? I had (and still have) the whole game. My older sister beat it, but I never got around to it.
The last few years as I’ve gotten into emulation and retro gaming, I find this is a game I go back to more often than most. I have an RGB10MAX- a cheap Chinese handheld that has a 16:9 screen but is too weak to play modern HD systems.
Luckily there were somewhere around 44 PS1 games with widescreen modes. Unfortunately it looks like 27 of those are racing games (and some of those are only slightly different variants of basically the. Same game). 7 more are sports games, including soen annual entries. 4 are just a single Visual Novel series. 2 more are just 2D (Worms and Galaxian), and Bloody Roar is technically 3D but like… It’s a fighting game so it’s not very 3D.
So if you’re looking for a very videogame-ey videogame, that can run in a PS1 emulator, but still upscale nicely to a 16:9 screen, without using fan-made patches… You only have 4 options:
Tenka and GitS are both shooters, which aren’t really my thing (especially on the PS1 before analog sticks were ubiquitous). Mrs. Pac-Man is arguably more of a 2.5D game. So Pac-Man World somehow ended up as my go-to for testing out Widescreen on devices. I still go back to it occasionally on my Steam Deck and maybe one of these days I’ll finally finish it off.
I will say that while I like Alan Wake so far (I think 3 chapters in), it’s nowhere near as good as Control.
Playing on PC with a controller, AW is clunky and slow. It’s a stealth/adventure/survival horror game where the systems seem to be designed to take on 1 or 2 enemies at a time, but the game routinely throws 3+ enemies at you at once even on the lowest difficulty. They are stingy with ammo, but the enemies tend to be bullet sponges. The levels are designed so that you killing the enemies is usually mandatory- I keep trying to stealth or run past them, but there is inevitably some mandatory fight or a puzzle that requires combat. The story and characters are good, but so far not as good as Control’s were. Honestly I wonder whether they would have been better off re-making Alan Wake instead of FBC.
I am still enjoying Alan Wake and intend to finish it, but I’d say it’s a C tier game. Ironically what I was expecting from Control. I’ll probably play Alan Wake 2 eventually, though I may need to upgrade my PC first to get a better experience.
I had picked it up on sale for $10, left it in my backlog until 2024 when I was looking for a little palate cleanser. I was expecting a quick little shooter, maybe 10-20 hours, something to occupy a couple of weekends. I ended up spending 100 hours to get it 100% complete, watching lore videos with my wife, and now we are going back and playing Alan Wake.
Still have no interest in a multiplayer live-service game though. These companies all convince themselves that THEY will be the next “big thing” and it usually fails.
These games should have been like maaaaybe $5 each on the 3DS a decade ago. Maybe $30 for a physical cartridge with all of them bundled.