JcDent

Got a gift card for a birthday.

Preordered Dune.

Got it like half a year after it was supposed to come out.

Played today.

I have been saying that I'd buy JoyToy (what a sex toy store name, jfc) Space Marines if they ever did Horus Heresy... and they're doing it! They're doing HORUS HERESY and starting with MKIII armor, which is HERESY AS FUCK.

[HEAVY BREATHING]

At €50(+whatever shipping and other nonsense tax you need to pay to get it from Brexit island) a pop, they're pricey, but my love for Adeptus Astartes is not based on logic.

I don't even collect Imperial Fists, BUT WHOMSTVE CARES

On one hand, the devs complain that they were forced to make the game on short notice. But on the other hand, their first (deleted) response was this:

"Funny," said ex-Infinity Ward staff member Ajinkya Limaye, in a social media post that has now been deleted. "But yeah, the metrics that Call of Duty absolutely destroys all of the God of War games (probably combined to be honest) is also equally laughable (if not more)."

"OUR GAME SOLD MORE, SO WHO'S THE BABY IDIOT???"

Also, a labor of love that results in loving propaganda, I guess:

Feasibly, in the original story, General Shepherd was a stand-in for the warmongers of the early noughties, and Russia's resulting invasion of the US could be read as a symbolic reversal of the US' own contemporary wars on foreign soil. You might already feel that's all fubar, but the goal of this new Modern Warfare 3 is to ensure it's now impossible not to think so. Here there's no system, no government, and only really the idea of Britain or the USA (the game primarily plays out in two fictional places, and Russia.) Bad guys are just bad guys - individual rotten apples to be arrested (or extrajudicially killed), with Call of Duty failing to make the hardly-demanding leap from "rotten apple" to "spoiled bunch". Again, this is Call of Duty of course. Its goal is replicating the epic, mindless action of its cinematic inspirations, and epic, mindless action, as those inspirations like The Raid or The Rock or even James Bond prove, can be very fun. Modern Warfare 3 can also be very fun, at times. The problem is those films aren't about wars. And they're particularly not about modern wars.

The inspirations that are - Sicario, clearly - don't always have to take an overt stance, but they do have to at least engage with their material (a big difference between Sicario, directed by Denis Villeneuve and something of a government thriller with a bit of action, and Sicario 2: not directed by Villeneuve; just action). The alternative, as you find with Modern Warfare 3, is an extraordinarily pretty romancing of good guys with guns - Alpha Team are undeniably likeable, all blokey camaraderie and reliably well-pitched banter - rooting out international bad eggs with impunity and lots of facial recognition cameras. Untethered from any kind of wider meaning, at its worst feels very, very close to propaganda. At its best, with that vapid story combining with hit-and-miss stealth and borrowed widgets from Warzone, Modern Warfare 3's campaign is just a muddle.

I think in an effort to make video games more realistic, protagonists should stop constantly talking to themselves about puzzle solutions and should instead remain totally silent until they eventually say "is... have I had my shirt on backwards all—god dammit"

In an effort to get around a similar issue in miniature wargaming - namely, to not present strength-testing objectives that an intelligence-focused team wouldn't be able to do - Pulp Alley requires you to draw a card and then see what stat challenges apply to the objective.

So imagine if Indiana Jones swaps out the gold idol for a weighted bag of dirt like an intelligent guy, maybe a more agile/dexterous dude might just swipe and leg it while a strong dude may push the altar out of the spot.

The card doesn't tell you the fluff of what happened when your character used their good stat to resolve the objective, so you can come up with that explanation yourself.

It neatly solves the issue where, say, in Necromunda, a Goliath team would deffo fail an Intelligence test (...and who raises Intelligence anyways?) while in infinity, the list of special qualifications that allow a trooper to Press The Button (that's how we call activating/interacting with an objective) is expanding to to ridiculous proportions.

One caveat: I guess it wouldn't be OK in a game like SIGNALIS to just be able to blow up puzzle-locked doors, but open-world RPGs like Starfield that have no stakes or narrative themes should definitely allow you to do that.