I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?

The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.

I feel it’s important

Genuinely, why?

That might be exactly part of why gaming journalism is irrelevant.

If the “news” about an upcoming game is just repeating developer hype, then it’s just useless noise. At that point the only thing that matters are reviews, and independent YouTubers are beating the professionals in quality and trustworthiness.

So what’s left? Actual dry industry news? I suppose some small amount of people care, but not enough to support the amount of gaming journalists out there.

Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.

Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.

I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.

Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.

The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements, and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need? (Or more importantly: How many of those people can it financially support?)

As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There’s about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven’t felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.

I can’t be certain, but I suspect a lot of gamers are completely burnt out on the professional gaming journalism industry.

A wrinkle to this case is that Federally marijuana is in the most restricted category. It’s above meth or cocaine.

Obviously a lot of people consider those drugs more harmful than marijuana, but if we are playing the legal game then marijuana is legislated as being more dangerous and that’s what the court has to work with.

SCOTUS I think has to decide if controlled substance use as a whole can prohibit legally buying a gun or not. I’m not sure if they can just make a carveout for marijuana. (Also the person taking the case up had cocaine too, so it can’t not be brought up.)

You’d be surprised how many 2A people, who are across the political spectrum, are fine with removing that category of prohibition entirely. However I wonder if it will make SCOTUS more hesitant to make such an “extreme” ruling.

A surprising amount of people don’t understand that if they live in a state where weed is legal that doesn’t mean Federal laws on it don’t apply.

The case is about overturning an existing restriction, not adding new ones.

This case is not about imposing new restrictions.

Weed is already prohibited. The case is about overturning that.

The case is about overturning existing prohibitions. Reading the article would clarify this.

I wish people would read the articles. Weed is already Federally prohibited. The case is an attempt to overturn that.

The case is not about implementing new gun control, but looking at if an aspect of existing control is unconstitutional.

The case in front of SCOTUS is not about implementing a new restriction. It is about if a long standing restriction on the unrelated use of controlled substances is a Constitutional violation. Weed is grabbing the headline, but the restriction applies to a vast range of substances.

I don’t consider anything I watch a guilty pleasure, since I’m pretty open about watching B and bad movies.

I enjoy movies where a director has made a surprisingly successful cult movie and on the back of that got creative freedom and a big budget from a studio, which they then used to create something beautiful and terrifying. My exemplar movie for this is Southland Tales, which I absolutely love on all possible levels.

I really like movies that commit to a sharp genre turn. The Guest (2014) is a great example.

Lastly, spaghetti westerns. This seems like a maybe more mainstream choice, but had a conversation in real life not too long ago with somebody who had no interest in any kind of western and didn’t know about the distinction between classic and spaghetti. When I was articulating the difference I was able to boil it down to classic westerns being nostalgia and romanticization of the American west, while spaghetti westerns were made by people with no nostalgia for it. It creates a subgenre which is grittier and more morally grey than the John Wayne era movies. My favorite is Once Upon A Time In The West, though I’d recommend people work up to that by watching other genre movies first.

Can you dry fire it and rotate through every position? From what I’ve seen on revolvers sometimes a cylinder can be binding somewhere specific to the cylinder rotation.

You might also want to take every screw out of the frame to check and make sure none of them are broken which could be causing inconsistency.

I think the original trilogy (plus Reach and ODST) work because while there’s a ton of lore, the really convoluted stuff is kind of at the background to the moment to moment feel of the game. The most forward facing content is a pastiche of other easily digestible scifi that’s all mixed together in a fun, interesting way. You’ve got conventional humans who feel like a straight expansion of the colonial marines from Aliens up against a diverse and interesting array of aliens. The Covenant are a refinement from Pathways Into Darkness and then the Marathon games. You’ve got the flood as a space zombie change of pace.

It all mixes together well and the more detailed lore can be built on top of it. There are many intentional gaps and hooks which can suggest things without having to be addressed explicitly, leaving room for some mystery.

After those games, the series kind of imploded under the weight of its own lore since the developers/writers chose to bring all of those mysterious elements to the forefront. It gave less interesting enemies to fight, and less motivation to care. I doubt many people have moments from those games burned into their memories the same way moments from the original trilogy are.

The MCC Halo had a graphical remaster on the original engine, that’s why you could swap between original and remaster visuals on the fly. The upcoming project is a remake on a new engine with changes to gameplay and design.

No I only played 3.

It very much appeals to what I like, so that’s a big help for it.