We used to be surprised when we got 2 Spiderman franchises in the same decade

(year+1 month, give or take)

"One of the good ones"

It's like Kill the Justice League was genetically engineered to piss off as many people as possible. pic.twitter.com/2c5yFf9TIa

— Kung Fu Man (@KungFuMan316) February 1, 2024

Here I will outline my thoughts

Overall found it less enjoyable than 1 and sometimes not enjoyable at all. At the same time it served me well for killing time which is ultimately why I played it. Ultimately reminds me of the relationship between Deus Ex HR and MD, where one is a great game and the sequel is just meh and look even worse on the glorious backdrop of the former

The good:

• Combat is better than first game, no questions asked. The addition of many non-lethal takedowns actually makes a whole new playstile of assault pacifist possible.

• The whole concept of black markets as well as the ability to not play by the rules and just rob them, which isn't as straightforward and basically a small mission by itself is really cool imo.

• Having two different playable characters allows for experimenting with a different skillset and adds replayability

• The upgrade trees are better and feature interesting ultimate upgrades (though I do feel they come in too late to matter)

The bad:

• While I think the premise behind the story itself is passable if not interesting, the presentation is absolutely horrible. The dialogues are bad, the character motivations are vague and not expanded upon, the events that transpire just feel like they happen without any deeper thought or reason. The big """twist""" at the end of ship captain being Billie Lurk is something I considered since the very first mission and never really let go of.

• The game is short, or at least it feels like it's shorter and with less things to do. This includes side content like optional objectives or extra missions.

• The level design is poor. Not only does it often require you to backtrack back and forth but it also makes this chore extremely simple and boring because almost every level will have a very obvious and very straightforward high route that is easily found, getting you from point A to B without you encountering any obstacles or enemies. I legitimately think that every outdoor map in this game had this problem, which is why I didn't like a single one of them. You can basically get by with ease only ever using blink and maybe the occasional doublejump

The annoying and mediocre

• There is a lot of bonecharms and save for some special ones they feel unimpactful. Never did I feel the need to swap them based on a situation or level, or God forbid- to craft new ones. Also you can't view which ones are new or freshly picked so good luck going through the list in alphabetical order every time you want to look at them.

• Karnaca just isn't as interesting of a setting as Dunwall imho

• The enemy variety wasn't that good in first game either, but here it is extremely apparent. There's like 2 levels where you will see witches, 2 levels with clockworks and the occasional bloodfly nest and hounds near the end. By far the majority of enemies are regular guard or bandits. The couple of times you run into overseers don't feel special in any way either cause they behave just like the guard does. Walls of light, towers, rats and similar hazards are practically nonexistent.

• There is an overabundance in resources which can make the game too easy in certain cases

• The final confrontation and ending feel anticlimactic

Overall I give the game like a 6/10, I finished it with Emily and will probably replay it as Corvo sometime, but beyond that I'm not sure if I'll feel the same desire to revisit it as I did with OG Dishonored. Death of the Outsider is the next in the series, and somehow I'm not feeling optimistic.

STOP HAVING FUN

The first thing you need to know about Palworld, a new video game developed and published by the Japanese studio Pocketpair, is that it is ludicrously popular. According to data scraped from Steam, a digital storefront for PC games, *Palworld *became the second game everafter 2017's *PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds *to breach 2 million concurrent players last week. *Palworld *arrived on Jan. 19, so that growth laps some of the most commercially solvent franchises in the industry---the server concentrations of *Counter-Strike and Grand Theft Auto V *can eat their hearts out. All this is to say that Pocketpair has a genuine phenomenon on its hands: *Palworld, *much like *Fortnite *or *Minecraft *before it, is poised to dominate the corridors of elementary schools for the rest of 2024, for better or worse.

This is unfortunate news for me, and, really, anyone else who cares about the virtues of interactive entertainment, because *Palworld's *appeal is totally inscrutable. Rarely has a megahit video game been more repellent to good senses. At its basics, *Palworld *is a blatant looting of Nintendo's long-running *Pokémon *series: You take control of a bright-eyed preteen in a verdant wasteland that is home to a whole taxonomy of cute creatures---known as Pals---that can be tamed and subsequently deployed in battle. That is the same formula *Pokémon *has relied on for more than three decades, but Nintendo has generally treated its fiction with the texture of a warmhearted coming-of-age saga. Each Pokémon game typically focuses on a boy or girl who leaves town to explore an enchanting continent on a yearslong safari, establishing spirit bonds with the wordless Pikachus and Charmanders who join them.

*Palworld, *meanwhile, discards all of those warm feelings completely. In this game, you essentially enslave these cuddly creatures, condemning them to unpaid labor in the mines or lumber fields to gather resources, or---better yet---arm them with steely, *Call of Duty--*style machine guns so they can assist in the subjugation of their peers. In other words, *Palworld *is a *Pokémon *rip-off where you can *shoot *poor, defenseless creatures. This is another contrast to the Nintendo property: *Pokémon *never *die, *they simply fall into a state of unconsciousness before they're revived by their goodly owner. In *Palworld, *however, you can find YouTube compilations of player-hunters on the battlefield, not befriending the roaming wildlife but blowing their heads off.

Not that these indulgences are without all consequences. Players must be consistently monitoring the "sanity" meter of their incarcerated Pals. Work them too hard and you will fray their minds, causing their production to decrease. Once you've gathered a large enough legion of serfs, they will dutifully assist in the homestead you've crafted for yourself in one of the glorious hillside vistas in the game world---cooking, cleaning, building under your banner, in a project of relentless expansion. You will then conquer bosses, level up your character, and increase your coffers with loot in a quest to achieve total dominion over the land. Never, and I do mean *never, *will the Pals threaten to seize the means of production.

"It's a take on *Pokémon *that truly accepts our brokenness," wrote Dave Jones, in a remarkably salient PC G*mer essay about *Palworld's *cruel resonance. "Its smash success has perhaps proved quite how steeped in sin we all really are."

Perhaps you can read all of *Palworld's *darkness as a sick joke---perhaps some take on "cute aggression," or the strange phenomenon of wanting to mangle adorable things. Maybe Pocketpair is angling for some crude humor when it allows us to strap an AK-47 to a cartoon bird and send it into battle. (If you want to be extremely charitable, maybe you can also claim that *Palworld *is a shrewd satire of the cognitive dissonance that afflicts most g*mers as they sit slack-jawed on the couch with a controller in hand.) But frankly, there are so many other flagrant issues with *Palworld *that it's hard to imagine any of its content was crafted with much intention. For instance, one eagle-eyed Twitter user who goes by @Byofrog noted that some of *Palworld's *graphical geometry bears remarkable similarities to the renders you can find in some modern *Pokémon *games, raising the question of whether or not Pocketpair was cribbing assets from the very franchise the studio hoped to emulate. (Takuro Mizobe, head of development, seemed to deny those accusations, but Nintendo is reportedly "investigating" those potential IP violations.) Others have accused Pocketpair of using generative A.I. in the creation of these Pals---given Pocketpair's previous dalliance with the controversial technology---though those charges seem to be specious at best.

But the larger problem, speaking as someone who had the misfortune of playing a bit of *Palworld *to prepare for this story, is that the game simply isn't very good. *Palworld *is still in active development, so some of these issues might be patched up in the future, but right now the controls are floaty and imprecise, the on-screen interface is borderline unreadable, and the nuts and bolts of the gameplay are rote, unintuitive, and plainly boring. If you are the sort of person who wishes to hunt down progressively more exotic species of Pals with a variety of awkward combat systems, then you are a much more patient person than I. *Palworld *instead seems to rely on pure novelty---a meaner, more nihilistic *Pokémon, *attuned to humanity's worst impulses---covering up the bereftness of the design. As with other sandbox games, it takes forever to develop your arsenal. You will construct cowtools out of sticks and stones before unlocking slightly more impactful technologies, spread out through endless tiers. I am certainly not a prude when it comes to low art, but I certainly expected something better than this.

I am far from alone in making these critiques. Eurog*mer, forever a bastion of erudite gaming commentary, concluded that *Palworld *was "primitive and derivative, a game that appears at first glance almost to be completely fake." A second PC G*mer article added that Pocketpair has delivered a "slog" with a "bad punchline." And yet, *Palworld *has already sold more than 8 million copies since mid-January. That likely already exceeds the haul of Baldur's Gate 3---last year's consensus game of the year, and a true work of art---which is the sort of thing that confirms what a twisted business the entertainment industry is. And *Palworld *currently remains in Early Access---g*mer jargon for an extended, for-profit beta-testing period---which means we are still quite a ways out from the game's *official *release, where some of the bugs will be squashed, and finer polish lacquered on the margins. That means its cult shall only grow larger from here. A generation of young people are currently falling in love with this new incarnation of Pokémon---tuned to the dehumanizing horrors of late capitalism---where these lovable creatures are nothing more than assets from which to extract value, a means to an end. *Palworld *believes that we are a sick society, and lamentably, the numbers don't lie.

DRAGON QUEST MONSTERS: The Dark Prince (Switch)

This game was such a disappointment, graphic was such shit that I couldn't play for more than 10 min

Ff16 deserves better sales than the dark Prince

Also interesting than less than 1% of Pokémon scarlet violet bought the dlc

Also around 27 million switch sold in Japan

And 500k Xbox series

!nwahs

If you haven't been paying attention to one Ken Levine, he's undergone a quiet chuddening over the years as he became an enlightened centrist type and started liking the tweets of Quillette writers on twitter, joining Razib Khan rooms on Clubhouse, and going on Colin Moriarty's vidya podcast. We saw a trailer for his new game at last night's PlayStation State of Play:

The keen investigators at ResetEra suspect something is up:

Look forward to more seethe should this game ever actually release

You have shit taste, keep yourself safe Deminox

https://old.reddit.com/r/SaintsRow/comments/16dqgs9/anyone_else_kinda_annoyed/jzrp6bh/?context=8

https://old.reddit.com/r/SaintsRow/comments/16dqgs9/anyone_else_kinda_annoyed/jzre5w9/?context=8

https://old.reddit.com/r/SaintsRow/comments/16dqgs9/anyone_else_kinda_annoyed/jzryjjr/?context=8

"The game is absolutely garbage from dialog to pacing to gunplay. Tried it off plus and deleted it after getting 1 trophy which was completing the tutorial. I'm glad this violation shut down its not even the same devs that made saints great, 1/2. I'll take pimp canes over giant purple dildo bats any day. You can like saints 3+ sure but it's totally different and shouldn't even be called saints at that point. They lost their identity entirely and tried to make multiple different wacky games that also failed. They got what's coming to them."

Anyways r-slurs like OP who says the game has supposed redeeming qualities are clowned on

The Godot Engine reddit is once again experiencing drama as Yuri, one of the core team members makes a vague and tearful post about being excommunicated

Someone cites a follow-up tweet where he makes it clear he was booted for interpersonal conflicts

>It's frustrating that unlike in movies, where characters exist to move the plot forward, in real life people often prefer to pretend that a problem doesn't exist and move on with their lives.It works for some, but it affects me, because unresolved conflicts create pressure. The more the pressure builds up, the more the conflict festers and becomes a larger problem. But instead of a cathartic resolution, like on the big screen, you get burned and severed.If they had no interest in resolving it before, they sure as heck aren't trying now.

Who is this guy, why should you care? Well, he seems to be a very productive developer, committing thousands of fixes per year

Oh wait, he's one of 2 people allowed to commit (approve others work) and he's in 2nd place. It turns out he was hired a few years back because only the core team can approve commits, basically 1 guy does, and there are tens of thousands of bigs needing fixing. So they hired Yuri to basically jannie the codebase

This is a good example of what Godot is behind the scenes- while nominally community driven, it is tightly controlled by a tiny group of insiders (who also jannie every online godot space, so expect the reddit thread to be locked shortly). Because they don't trust outsiders, they are massively overworked (now having only 1 contributer who can approve changes to the codebase in order to fix any of the thousands of breaking issues with the software) and therefore the engine has been buried deep in Development heck forever.

Because the core team has dictatorial control, much like Kim Jong Un they cant be considered to do any wrong, so even an ex-member gets damage control:

(Duriel is sort of a core team member, he has no technical skills but I think maybe contributed to the documentation? He is permanently online and mostly just makes thousands of passive aggressive comments in the style represented in the screenshot.

(Akien is a core team member and reddit mod)

Wait.. Yuri did a heckin transfobia??

Bots and haters are claiming transfobia in bad faith? This is a good example of the r-slur simpery that defines the Godot "community."

If you are curious about haters and transfobia, here is a clue. @lillybytegames is a former groomercord jannie who is generally assumed to be trans. He publicly quit his prestigious jannie post and has been continuously sneeding about it on Twitter for literal years - why? Well, it was because of Yuri being an butthole. As it turns out, this is kind of a theme:

Source?

Golddot is a terminally online neurodivergent who cares deeply about Godot but has no technical skills, so he contributes by reporting problems. Naturally this means then core team hates him passionately. He gets a little simp flak and responds with a classic "they do it for free" moment

So getting back to the transfobia, an rdrama user shows up to agendapost. It is possible this is a Yuri alt but I think the English is probably too good. He was replying like this to every post for a while.

So in order to wrap this post up, let's revisit a screen cap from earlier which is still developing

>But I understand no one's really expecting us devs to be too versed in communicating. Maybe that's why there's always drama

This reminded me of something. Didn't Godot recently hire a communications manager?

Note, there has been no further communication in the past months. This was actually pinned on the reddit for a few weeks and then quietly removed once commenters started joking about it.

The new hire, murderveggie, comes off as kind of r-slurred. Does she think people collate survey responses by hand?

This and one other corporatespeak post about communication being good, actually, are her only Godot related social media posts to date. This is somewhat suspicious. I wonder what could explain that

Hm, a tiny, close knit core team with one member who is a notorious butthole and dogged by rumors of transfobia hires an "obnoxiously queer" comminications manager who immediately goes dead silent, and the next news we get is that the most publicly problematic team member gets "burned and severed" with no recourse but to sneed on twitter (and possibly use sockpuppets to sneed about the woke agenda on reddit)

I'm looking forward to the official statement because if my hunch is correct, there will be an unavoidable dropped in there.

Hope this wasn't too boring, check my submitted threads for previous editions of Godot Sneed

Update. Official statement just dropped. Sadly but I guess unsurprisingly it doesn't provide any clues. I think the facts speak for themselves tho. Note, it was posted and insta-locked on their official forum, jannied by the core team of course, no pin and no comments allowed🤔 which means it got forum-slid and memoryholed instantly

Oh it's coming 👀 pic.twitter.com/nY0Uttz7Vj

— Pyo 5️⃣ (@mrpyo1) January 31, 2024

IT'S NOT EVEN OUT ON PLAYSTATION OR SWITCH . The implications of this is terrifying. Microsoft is now directly funding the game to improve it for Xbox and in general. IT'S AN EARLY ACCESS HALF DONE GAME. Is it joever for nintencucks?

Also why make such trailers that basically spoils the whole game ?

Forgot that it was supposed to happen “today” was to busy crit damage max in Honkai rail

Redditors and DCcucks noooo the game ain't baaad

So a game that is online only without pvp has terrible performance her let's ad a anti piracy shit that will tank the performance

I legit was going to buy the game day one but first they announced joker dlc in march then they started hiding the reviews then the game is so buggy that it completes the whole game for you. So I just bought Tekken and Prince of Gayrsia

I bet in a month suicide squad will be half price even me who enjoy shit games won't stand such disrespect

If you wonder why I am buying frogs version of the game it's because European printing games is located in Frogistan so new full price games there are at least 10 euro cheaper than in other countries in Europe

MOGGED

When that embracer group shit started I thought wtf a Swedish company act like it's Burger or Chunk company throwing money around. So what a surprise after buying tons of studios it closed 80% of the studios. Only decent explanation would be if the owner pull his face that is a Mandi and says “Ha it's me bill gayts, I bought all those studios to get their IP under my daughter company and now they will be on my systems”

I doubt it will be worse than avengers but dev seems to have zero confidence in the game