Dan Stapleton

Thank you Brazil! Frankly I'd given up on this one and accepted that Brazil was going to elect their own Trump Jr goblin, but this just goes to show that I was super wrong and we absolutely should never surrender.

Views on content on the internet are *global*. Remember how David Hasselhoff was huge in Germany but nobody cared in the US? It’s like that on a massive scale.

I'm enjoying Mike Flanagan's Carrie series (couple of episodes left), though I have to say that the Emaline thing was so blatantly set up that I thought they might be messing with me and somehow *not* do the obvious. Kinda disappointed that it wasn't a fake-out, TBH.

Usually when a studio like BioWare shuts down it's sad but not a total loss because you could be confident that the talent there will go on to do great things elsewhere. Now? With so many laid off in recent years, there's nowhere for them to go. People go to other industries, and gaming loses out.

I bet morale on those teams is sky-high right now.

Last month we lost our jobs. This month we made new ones. Introducing X BUTTON: an independent gaming network from three ex-IGN employees. A new weekly Nintendo podcast! A new weekly video game podcast! And that’s just the start, but we can’t do it without your help! www.patreon.com/cw/XButtonShow

It’s the end of an era, but also the beginning of a new one!

Oof, apparently Activision made a lot of outlets agree to a Call of Duty embargle that extended *beyond the launch of the campaign?* When I was at IGN I set a policy of refusing anything like that. Especially with something like CoD where you can finish the campaign in a day, it makes no sense.

Love to take the kids out of school early to catch a flight and then have that flight get delayed three hours.

Dunno what they put in this year’s flu/COVID shot but it has laid me flat like nothing since ‘22. Got a total of 30 min sleep last night because I was freezing under my comforter, and now I’m still awake for some goddamn reason.

Five years after Windows 11 launched I can *finally* move my taskbar to the side of the screen instead of the bottom. Now I just have to reprogram several years of muscle memory and habit.

The silver lining of this is that, just like how piracy forced everything to become easily available online, you're going to see just about every classic game available on just about every platform. If some rando can do it overnight, companies are leaving money on the table not doing it themselves.

When Pete Hegseth is executed for his numerous war crimes (including but not limited to hundreds of murders on boats in South America and over 100 Iranian schoolgirls) I do not want to watch. I just want to know it happened.

Rewatched WandaVision and Agatha All Along more or less back to back, and dang if those aren’t some good, weird, fun, well-done shows that sprinkle in some action around the character development rather than the other way around.

As a political science professor, I can confidently say: If I asked a student to define "socialism" on an exam and they wrote that, they would get an F

Hmmmm perhaps I am not actually very good at racing games and, given that, starting on the harder difficulty for Galactic Racer was an error in judgment.

Huzzah! It really does look like half an Xbox Series X.

Hopefully they'll be able to bring back the whole team and keep doing great work. Seems like EA must not have greenlit a budget for a full Zero Company sequel, which is disappointing but foreseeable given its new owners.

There's certainly an appeal to being able to jam out a game prototype with prompts, but it's a pretty damning indictment that the trailer for this shows someone creating an incredibly bland, uninspired game that has no reason to exist. Making something worth playing would still be incredibly hard.

If Rockstar *didn't* pay for South Park to make GTA 6 coming out in November a reoccurring gag they sure did luck out. Because otherwise no one would know that GTA 6 is coming out in November.

I'm not super far into GoW E-Day yet but at some point there has to be a reference to Master Chief and/or Brotherhood of Steel power armor, right? Can we not at least get the good aspects of consolidation along with the apocalyptic?

Whoever did the default mouse/keyboard bindings in Gears of War is a full-on troll. All the actions about jumping are bound to control and all the stuff about getting low and taking cover is bound to the space bar.

Look if I wanted to play with a bunch of assholes I’d just play online.

When I was a kid we had game controllers with buttons clearly labeled as "Start" and "Select." Now we have "Y'know, the one with the lines" and "Y'know, the one with the squares."

Okay, once I sat through the ~15 minutes of pointless babbling the combat is a lot of fun. Definitely gonna be mashing that skip button whenever people start talking and maybe fire up that VR mod next time.

When I was a kid we had game controllers with buttons clearly labeled as "Start" and "Select." Now we have "Y'know, the one with the lines" and "Y'know, the one with the squares."

I remember being legit terrified by Mr. Boogedy when I was 5.

If they never made another video game I would still die without having played all of the good video games. Same is true of movies and TV and music and *especially* books.