conciselyverbose

the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years,

This is a ridiculous lie. It's not even in the general vicinity of reality.

The absolute best mainstream review of Madden in existence is a many times less competent version of that platformer review where the guy couldn't get through the tutorial. You unconditionally are not qualified to give any opinion in any context if you don't understand the mechanics and strategy of the sport.

Reviews are extremely lazily done and about game modes. The game modes have seen minimal development since the emergence of ultimate team, and people are justifiably unhappy with that.

Literally not one major outlet is evaluating the actual simulation of the sport, which very clearly has massive investment from year to year and sees serious improvements to complexity and fidelity in each instance, with stagnation only coming when it hits the wall of what console hardware can do.

I've seen football simulator. It might maybe be competitive on physics with decade ago Madden, but even that's generous. If you just want a vehicle for franchise mode it might work for you, but if you want to play football it's just not close. Madden isn't perfect as a football sim either, because the physics of football are insanely complex, but there's nothing out there that's better than "kind of close to a decade ago" technically. You're much more likely to make something tolerable leaning into the discrepancy and making an arcade-y NFL Street knockoff, and that isn't there either.

So I think there are ways that you can do it to kill the flavor of books, but the core premise that some of those books are no longer appropriate for children as written is absolutely real. They're not capable of reading critically and recognizing that some of the characterizations aren't appropriate. They just absorb. And if you did want them to engage with "this isn't right", you need to be more direct with it and deliberately make it part of the story.

Adult books IDK. I'm not really a big classics reader generally, because while historical relevance is important, I just don't think a lot of the themes translate to modern culture. I'm kind of torn on reading them in literature class for the same reasons. They do provide examples of literary techniques that most modern stuff doesn't really do, so I can sort of understand using them to demonstrate allegory and metaphor, etc, but at the same time, very few people enjoy reading them and the actual messages that don't really apply today also don't get through anyways. If you read more modern stuff you might actually engage people with reading, but updating curriculums is a slog and a half.

There are no other football games that are even respectable efforts, and despite the rhetoric, Madden is actually a very good football sim that continually gets developed from year to year.

It's not a bad game at all. But platformers and metroidvanias are just past the point where you need the backing of a Nintendo or AAA studio to do a good job. The 2D games Nintendo brings to the table (regardless of all the business structure stuff) are all competent and polished, but they just don't do anything that isn't matched by indies any more. Metroid's visuals might be more technically difficult than my examples of Hollow Knight or Ori, but the end result, while looking pretty good, isn't inherently prettier. It's polished, but so are they. You're looking at preference between any of them over anything you can point to as inherently better, and the two "indies" (I know Microsoft bought Ori partway through the process) have more content.

I'm not going to actually argue they're "better" despite my first post, but the point is that for $20-30 full price, and steeper sales, there are a lot of very competent options, with a lot of unique approaches to mechanics. It's just really hard to justify pulling the trigger, at maybe $40 at the cheapest they'll ever sell it for, with how competitive the space is. TOTK is a $70 game. Fire Emblem is a $60 game. Dread is like a $30 game that should discount to $15-20.

Still making slow progress on the Stormlight Archive. It's awesome, but long as hell, and I have limited time to do ebooks compared to audiobooks. _Edit: just got to the end of Words of Radiance part two and had the first genuine shock. There are a lot of things where you're not sure where players will ultimately swing, but you can mostly see potential paths build out. _

On audiobook, Beneath Dark Waters by Karen Rose releases tomorrow. It's "romantic suspense", and the series are mystery/thrillers viewed through the lens of a romance between the two primary characters. Each book is a new duo, though you do see a lot of familiar faces throughout the series. It's mostly broken up into arcs of 3-5-ish books that have friend/"the family you make" groups facing some conspiracy or other. I can't really speak to the romance element, because that's not really my thing, but the shared secrets as the relationships develop really build out the characters and their motivations.

There are dark villains. CONTENT WARNING: throughout the series there are multiple characters with histories as victims sexual violence, including some as young children. Unlike the consensual scenes between the main characters, which are explicitly depicted, there is almost none of that on screen, but I just can't in good conscience not mention it. If if's something you can't handle there's no shame in that and I don't want to surprise anyone with it.

Karen Rose is hands down my favorite author. I'll put any book of hers (with the possible exception of Cold Blooded Liar, purely because it's a slightly different format that pays off over multiple books and I haven't seen how it develops yet) against anything else in the mystery space, and I go start to finish on all of them a couple times a year. I just love the way she builds stories. I would start with Quarter to Midnight before reading this one, though. You don't have to read from the first book or the first sub-series within her universe, but each individual (mostly city arc) builds from start to finish. The current is New Orleans. The most recent complete arc is the Sacramento trilogy, starting with Say You're Sorry.

I guess I'll update if it's her first book I'm not in love with, but I'm expecting another great story. I've been waiting for this since the day I finished Quarter to Midnight, or about 2 days after it released.

It didn't get credit because it's a $60 game lapped by games that launch at half the price like hollow knight and ori.

It has no strengths, and the install base is shit.

The switch only gets away with being a last gen console because it's a handheld. The Series S has all the performance benefits of a last gen console with the install base of one that released 5 minutes ago.

There is no "the way they do split screen". BG3 while running split screen is not a game that should make a current gen console struggle in any way. It makes the S struggle because it's not a current gen worth of hardware.

Parity here isn't on a scale. It's a binary trait. Either they are the same or one is worse than the other. The shitty XBOX does not have CPU parity with the real one, and it's a serious limitation that effectively means that the "good" Xbox also has that worse CPU in terms of game design. It will obviously still get some games, but it's losing games that it would otherwise get because it has nothing in common with a next gen system.

Split screen being the specific thing that BG3 is struggling to do isn't the point. It's merely a symptom. For a next gen open world game, split screen BG3 is still not that demanding. The fact that all the real action is turn based makes it far easier to make run than a similarly dense real time game with real time physics demands, and the fact that the Xbox S can't handle it is a very strong example that it's a piece of shit.

The switch is a handheld and the ports it gets are for that reason. It wouldn't have sold enough to get basically anything third party if it was the same device without portability (see BOTW as a system seller when it literally already existed), and it still doesn't really get that many current gen demanding ports.

The fact that there's a worse Xbox you're required to support when the Xbox already lacks some of the asset loading tricks of the PS5 and has less units sold on top of it isn't something developers can just ignore. BG3 really isn't all that demanding for a next gen open world game, and compromising your vision to force it onto a worse console isn't something people want to do.

It's not capable.

They might have made the bed and be stuck in it, but it was a bad plan that substantially sabatoges the actual next gen console.

Yes, they should be able to say "this game doesn't run on series S" because it's significantly worse than the other options and it doesn't deserve the work it takes. It doesn't even have CPU parity, which is a much bigger deal than less GPU cores.