But I don’t think you need to go from the time when arcades were entirely irrelevant, but merely where they were no longer the main driving force. That’s at most the late '90s with gen 5 consoles and many big popular or influential game franchises like Quake, Pokemon, Age of Empires, Fallout, Diablo, and Grand Theft Auto (that’s '96 and '97 alone).

And you need to go up until at least the time when few of the largest games were available without cancerous monetisation strategies, not merely when a few games had started doing it. So you definitely need to go up to at least the launch of the 7th generation consoles in 2007.

To bring it back to the original point of the conversation, that’s not to say that it isn’t worth preserving games that did have those strategies of course. It just doesn’t detract from the sense of a period when the majority of gamers’ experience was much better.

We’ve been complaining since the 90s. I wasn’t joking earlier, “Ubisoft greedy” today is a carbon copy of “Capcom greedy” in 1997

And EA greedy in 2007. Doesn’t mean that what they were doing then was as bad as what is being done today.

But an arcade game is a physical object. The preservation needs of arcade games are very different to games distributed on cartridge or disk, which is why I suggested that a digital library would be focusing on home game consoles, especially those released at a time when home gaming was the main way gaming got experienced (i.e., after arcades were the most popular way).

[24 years is] too short of a blip to consider a golden age

Assuming that “too short” and reference to a “golden age” was meant in refutation to my claim of the 3rd–6th console generations, which lasted from 1983 until 2007. If that’s the claim, I find it absolutely absurd. When we discuss the golden age of TV we’re talking barely one decade, from the mid-to-late oughts to the late 10s.

If you meant something else by that bit, I’m sorry, please disregard the above paragraph. But I don’t know quite what you do mean.

I don’t think we’re talking about arcade games at this point though. We’re talking to a large extent about 3rd–6th generation home gaming consoles. For Nintendo, that’s the NES to GameCube. Sony entered with the PlayStation in the 5th gen, and Xbox came out in 6th.

I think a lot of people would see this (and to a slightly lesser extent the 7th gen) as the high point where games came out in a completed state and you paid once and the just enjoyed the game.

Fwiw the sequel is supposedly going to have Denuvo in it, which is pretty blatantly an executive meddling decision.

But personally, the phrase “the devs should” never bothers me. It’s pretty transparently referring not to individual developers but to the priorities and decisions of the “developer”: the company in charge of development, as distinct from, say, the publisher or the platform.

I honestly find their “historical accuracy” claims kinda comical. Yeah it’s better than most games for sure, but it still only pays lip service to accuracy in a lot of aspects for the sake of the game’s story. Henry has a completely fantastical rise from blacksmith’s apprentice to de facto military commander.

No, I did really enjoy it. I just don’t spend an enormous amount of time gaming, and the time I do spend is most often in completely different genres that I can play with friends while chatting on Discord, like RTS (Age of Empires mostly) and survival crafters (like Raft and DST).

No it’s not. It’s pretty explicitly not, by the guy who is most famous for talking about piracy as a service problem:

Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.

I just read that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has apparently said it’s gonna use Denuvo. It’s the first time a game that’s been on my radar has used it to my knowledge. I saw some comments where people said they’ll just wait a year until it’s removed and then buy it. Fuck that. You screw me over at release and I’ll just pirate it. I still haven’t finished the first game so waiting until it’s cracked is no issue.

I agree in general, but

Maybe I’m over simplifying it though, I don’t know how their org operates.

This is exactly why just sticking to the 90 day standard is better. For the supposed security researcher it’s a CYA move at worst.

90 days is just the standard timeframe for responsible disclosure. And normally that’s just a baseline with additional time being given if there’s genuine communication going on and signs they’re addressing the problem.

I just want to point out that “the solstice marks the start of the season” is not a universal fact. Here in Aus, we mark the start of summer as 1 December, and so if I were to take my perspective and apply it to the northern hemisphere, I would say that for you, Christmas is about a third of the way through winter.

The difference here is technically referred to as “meteorological” vs “astronomical” seasons. I’ve always thought meteorological seasons make far more sense because they much better reflect reality. Winter is defined by cold weather and short days. The winter solstice is already very cold and it has the shortest day. It is absurd to put the shortest day at the very beginning of winter. If you wanted to have an astronomically-based calendar, the solstice should mark the very midpoint of winter, with the season starting precisely halfway between then and the autumnal equinox.

But also, as the other user mentioned, some places have entirely different season systems. Seasons are, fundamentally, a human creation. The notion that weather patterns change throughout the year is a universal fact, but what we call those changes and how many categories we separate it into is human. Many cultures have their own systems with more or different seasons. Many tropical areas have traditionally only observed “wet” (or monsoon) and “dry” seasons. In ancient Egypt, the flooding of the Nile marked an important seasonal change. And South Asia uses a variety of different 6-season systems, such as the Hindu, Bengali, and Tamil calendars.

Was there ever any question it was going to be a soulless cash-grab?

Well, there was certainly question before we found out that Tencent was involved. Back when all we knew about it was that it would be called Age of Empires: Mobile. At a time not long after the AoE2 and AoE4 ports to console & controller had shown to be surprisingly a really good way to play the games we love on a novel input scheme. Back then, yeah I honestly thought the reason this was being done was because they thought they had come up with a good way to get a good RTS experience on a mobile device.

They’re known specifically for being pro-Russia, which is what made the comment amusing.

If they were really “the hero”, they’d follow the bare minimum of responsible disclosure best practices, and allow 90 days between privately alerting them of the issue and going public with it. Two weeks is absurd.

Yeah I find the kind of messaging in the headline here really eye-rolling. No, a new (bad) instalment in a franchise doesn’t make me stop enjoying the older entries. The Star Wars sequels don’t take away from the original hexalogy & Clone Wars.

The review itself here though is really good. The game is really, really bad, and the author of this review absolutely nails the reasons why.

It is genuinely hard to describe just how bad this is. I did the best job I could of my own review over on the official Age of Empires forums. Its worst sin is probably the simple fact that it barely even feels like a game where you make choices. You just click what it tells you to do.

It’s telling that they don’t have an official subforum for this game, although there is one for AoE1, 2, 3, and 4, and Age of Mythology. They do have a Discord, and I recently noticed on there the official devs are desperately calling for people to give more positive reviews.

I can’t think of any video game that fits that description. But I wish I got into RPGs earlier. My first role playing experience was near the end of my first year of uni. I wish I could have played D&D or other RPGs from when I was in high school. They’re such a blast.

Cadbury Bubbly does it too, though sadly I haven’t seen any of it on shelves (apart from the mint variant, eww) for a few years.

Every one of Innuendo Studio’s videos are absolutely excellent.

Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave?

Oh I see, interesting. I guess they’re named after the fact that normally they’re at a restaurant?

The Wikipedia article was…interesting. The first paragraph of the “history” section seemed like someone had removed a sentence at random. “After that initial meeting”, without ever having described any first meeting, but having set the stage where such a first meeting might take place. If someone has knowledge & sources about that first meeting, that’d be a great opportunity to improve Wikipedia.