Quite a few years ago now I went to my nan’s house for Christmas.

My cousin, I think he was about 13, had got a £50 Steam voucher for some games. Him and my other cousin who was a couple of year older went to Steam, swapped the voucher for something, and then took that to a gambling site. I don’t know if they’re still a thing. It was something to do with Counter Strike drops I think. Heavily advertised by YouTubers who ran them, with a bunch of videos showing them winning. The sort of thing they’d be sent to prison for in any right thinking society.

They took that £50, put it in, and clicked. The younger one went “what now?” and the older one just went “oh, nothing. It’s gone.” A couple of games worth of money, gone. For nothing.

He looked like he was about to cry, and only didn’t because he was going through that acting tough phase.

He’s an accountant now, and plays crown green bowling. I like to think that was a relatively cheap lesson in why not to fuck around with gambling.

The problem is that everybody sitting around that table thinks they’re skilled enough.

I stopped playing WoW because it didn’t value my time. There is a limit to how much you can spend on WoW. Sure, you can buy gold, but it honestly won’t help you that much. The upgrades come from the weekly content, mostly.

And then there’s the mobile stuff where whales rule the day.

That’s why we use Radar, etc, so we don’t have to use those sites.

If you do visit them, make sure you’re ad-blockered up the wazoo.

I only stuck with Odyssey for the legendary monster fights.

The problem with these games is you see 95% of the gameplay in the first couple of hours.

And then there’s 100 more of them.

I really like Black Flag because it had the least amount of Assassins Creed gameplay in it.

That option was a lifesaver. I don’t know why the game decides halfway through to have hard combat because that’s not the appeal of the game at all.

Sorry, best we can do is still be in early access and already trying to sell the DLC.

They’re speakers, they’re supposed to be loud.

I started using subtitles years ago, and now I can barely hear without them.

Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks were pretty cool. I played both with the stylus because the DS control pad is tiny as fuck, literally painful to use for more than a few minutes.

Same with the Layton games.

That would just be men’s sports, which in fairness is all most people seem to care about anyway…

The PS5 controller is pretty sweet.

But the PS1 Dualshock is the original version of that, and has influenced basically everything since. It’s the Ocarina of Time of controllers.

That second analogue stick fixed everything to do with cameras in early 3D games.

For VR it’s the Oculus Touch. Takes everything about the classic Dualshock design and adds hand tracking.

Gremlins 2. Not sure any other movie quote captures the absolute cocaine fuelled Hollywood of the early 90s.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x01l_jMhjVM

There’s also a terrible John Leguizamo movie called The Pest, that I’m genuinely amazed didn’t end his career right there. The wife was suprised I hadn’t seen it, and as we started she just went “you’re going to hate it”.

She was not wrong.

So did I, which is why it’s extra creepy when Glen Powell, the most generic white guy imaginable, tries to bang one of them.

I’d almost completely forget the whole movie by the next day, but my wife continued to think about it and then sent me this about the ending. Which makes it even worse than the ending you’d guess at about ten seconds into the film.

I haven’t seen the movie or read anything about it.

But the writer also wrote a sequel to God’s Not Dead, if that gives any indication of where this sits on the reality/lunatic spectrum of right wing shithousery.

If Aaron Sorkin wrote it, I’ll let it be.

This ain’t that though.

Most Will Ferrell movies would have been much better without Will Ferrell.

Twisters: Forgotten me already, huh?

200 million sounds like a lot, but it’s like 2 weeks of PSPlus money.

For all this losing, they’re sure making a lot of money. Just not out of this game.

And that money ain’t gone yet, there’s for sure a pivot towards a F2P, MTX ridden version of the game to be relaunched.

The problem is that gamers say they don’t like that sort of thing, while the success of the likes of Fortnite indicates that there’s a lot of gamers out there saying nothing, but buying V-bucks like a motherfucker.

I can’t even name another apart from Overwatch.

Unless you’re counting each hero as “soldier with a slightly different machine gun”.

I think the people that have never heard of it far outweigh the people that have and decided to ignore it. They’re chasing “normal” people, not people like us who would likely have ignored it even if it was a free to play, micro transaction riddled mess.

And “FREE!” does appear to be a key factor in making this kind of game take off. They live or die by initial player interest and retention.

These things are expensive to make, it’s not just going in the bin. I’m just not sure where it belongs. It’s clearly Overwatch’s stunt double, and even that seems like it’s on the wane.