This was lovely! Are there any other communities that share interesting posts from small blogs like this?

I’ve played Risk of Rain 2 on and off for years and I’m not bored of it yet

I think BioShock just got grandfathered in through its System Shock lineage.

Except for all the small studios also struggling or going out of business because getting investment right now is really, really hard.

The megacorp closures and redundancies are far from the entire story, they’re just the headline grabbers.

Are you thinking of Spy Hunter?

Wow - Take Two shuttering this studio AND Roll7 (OlliOlli, Rollerdrome) just a month after they announced they’re buying Gearbox for almost half a billion. Absolutely catastrophic mismanagement. What a shitshow.

Sounds like you need to play more adventure games! Point & click had it’s heyday in the 90s with outstanding story-based game series like Monkey Island, Broken Sword, and Gabriel Knight, but there’s been a resurgence in recent years through games like Gemini Rue, Machinarium, and Deponia.

If you’re enjoying Syberia, definitely start looking at more point & click games - there’s a ton of variety!

As mentioned in the article, these are all union VAs and their new agreement explicitly protects them from AI being used without their permission.

If it turns out they really did use AI to rework some of the voice lines, there could be a major lawsuit coming…

I mean, that’s basically the main character’s arc in Office Space, right? Still rings true.

I still remember the first time I saw the demo video where they flip a window around and write a note on the back of it. Blew my mind.

Starfield

As a dev who has worked on mobile games:

1. The stores have a serious problem with discovery which makes it unreasonably difficult to find the good original games in the sea of shovelware, but the good stuff IS out there.

2. People say they hate free-to-play and that they’d happily pay once for access like a normal game, but the stats say otherwise. Almost no one pays for premium mobile games, and that’s why no one bothers making them.

3. People who use ‘mobile game’ as an insult are usually wilfully ignorant about the platform and just have an axe to grind.

There’s no such thing as a zero-effort port

I heard a lot of people loved it, but I wasn’t that into it for some reason! (Really enjoyed Thunder Paw, though - it was simple but perfect for dipping in and out to relax.)

I once lent a friend at school my copy of Star Wars: Demolition for PS1. Critically panned, looking back, but I loved it! … Got it back a couple of weeks later and the disk was snapped in half. Devastated.

Parents got involved, and he eventually (and reluctantly) had to give me one of his games as compensation. He gave me Mission: Impossible, disk only, no manual. Terrible game. I’m still annoyed.

The pyramids weren’t built with slave labour - common misconception.