They’re saying this is the introduction of the Elseworlds so it’s a joker but not the one from the previous games. Seems like a cheap way to justify skins and any other DLC they bolt on.

I’m in the camp of ‘I’ll wait for reviews’ on this one. Indiana Jones is a character with a controversial past and many of his character traits are not exactly modern. The puzzle stuff looked kinda fun and I’d be interested to see just how many there are in the game. Solving what looks like a blood sacrifice bowl with a bottle of wine is neat. Or it will be if that isn’t a telegraphed narrative. If there are point and click vibes where you pick up a clown nose in the first ten minutes of the game and then use It in the 9th hour, that kinda puzzle-bypass would be great.

I will say, ‘The Great Circle’ is such a boring name when they have ‘Circuli Magni’ right there. They give a clear translation in the trailer but ‘Indiana Jones and the Circuli Magni’ is significantly more interesting. SEO considerations I guess.

I grabbed Star Trek: Resurgence to fill the gap until Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. For those unfamiliar, it’s a Tell Tale- like narrative game where you switch between two characters as you’re presented with Star Trek style situations and moral quandaries.

It’s very firmly in that AA category and is a little rough in some areas, but I felt there was weight to some of my choices. There’s a decent amount of action and mini games that don’t feel too awful. A solid 7.5/10 for me.

I’m looking forward to trying Palworld based on the streams I’ve seen and will be playing Brotato on the side once it hits Game Pass.

The DuckDuckGo browser has this baked in as ‘Cookie Pop-up Protection’. It doesn’t quite get rid of them all, and doesn’t let you set a default for what you want (it’ll basically pick the most privacy-forward option) but I’ve found it works pretty well.

These are just a few random quotes I found with a minute of Googling but there are many more out there. I think people were expecting exceptional and had huge expectations because Bethesda and Microsoft were very much pushing the hype train a lot. They set up the game as one thing and what was delivered was a pale shadow of it. I agree you can’t expect for the success of Skyrim, but it was 100% presented to the world like it would be. There are many parts of the game that fall short of what Skyrim did 13 years ago and what other Bethesda RPGs were doing decades ago in terms of quest design and dialogue.

“We’ve always wanted to play the game we’re making and no-one else has quite pulled it off in what we’re doing. And we feel that once we started putting some pieces in place and playing parts of it, there’s something really… I don’t want to say too much but… pretty incredible there.”

“It’s very big, yeah. People are still playing Skyrim and we have learned from that. We spent more time building [Starfield] to be played for a long time, if you so chose that you just wanted to keep playing it. It’s got some more hooks in it for that, that we added later to a game like Skyrim… while still making sure that somebody who just wants to play it, and go through the main quests and “win”, or feel they’ve accomplished something large is doable.”

“And it has large scale goals and storytelling, but that minute-to-minute feels rewarding for you. And if you just want to pass the time and go watch the sunset and pick flowers it’s rewarding in that way too. The quiet moments feel really really good.”

As the big theme of the episode was coincidence, if that was something RTD wanted to continue the list would be:

• Some relation to the Ponds. Pond > River > Flood. Given the personality, maybe some future version of River that somehow managed to survive? I’ve seen others say Amy but the math doesn’t work out from 1938 as it would make Mrs. Flood 110~ but who knows, timey wimey etc. Also, ‘The one who waits’ is what Amy did all her life.

• Some hidden relation to Ruby. The obvious one being her mother, but then the question becomes why did she decide to watch over Ruby like that from a distance? Also, Ruby was abandoned in Manchester and they lived there long enough for her to develop an accent before moving to London. Mrs. Flood was distinctly from London and perhaps just a coincidence again that they moved in close. Future Ruby/Ruby is a bi-regeneration of X character etc too

• Some relation to the Doctor. The Master is the obvious one after the tease we just had, and the Master isn’t beyond breaking the fourth wall. The question becomes why would they aid her in joining the Doctor? The other usual suspects The Rani/Romana/Susan all would be coincidences but would we as the audience really care about it? I’ve seen someone say The Nun (the female incarnation of The Meddling Monk) which makes a little more sense as the episode is about meddling with the time stream.

Small aside: It’s potentially a fake out that the woman we see abandoning Ruby is her mother. I’ve seen others say that Ruby could be her own mother even. It’s certainly implied the character we see is her mother, but for all we know the baby from the 42nd Century and is found by Ruby during their adventures. Making a circle anyway while still keeping the mystique.

Knowing RTD and how he likes to tell stories, I wouldn’t be surprised if 1. Mrs. Flood is just someone they meet in the past and it’s a genuine coincidence. Nothing special, just someone who helps them out a bit. 2. Ruby’s history is just of an ordinary foundling girl swept up in time. The mother who abandons her is Ruby after the baby is the only survivor to some future tragedy. Not special In the way fans think, but special all the same.

I’ve said it a few times, but I feel like they could have Dr. Doom come in to kill Kang pretty easily. It’d set up a new big bad, introduce the Fox Verse, and even set him up as the leader of any potential Battleworld in the future.

Kang even before the allegations hasn’t been received all that well. A soft-reset with Doom might make people excited again. Imo all mystique of the character was already ruined in the Multiverse of Madness post-credits. A FoxVerse Vs MCU battle movie would touch on Endgame levels of hype.

Always listening is somewhat preferable to ‘Has such an accurate profile on you from the data that is available that these instances happen by pure coincidence’. That’s way scarier and just as intrusive. At least with a listening device you can get rid of it.

Sad thing is, it’s likely both.

For me, it was a lot of small moments that added up quickly. (By a few hours, I gave it at least 10 or so). One big one was I’d chosen the talent where you get a house on a planet but with a mortgage. I thought this would be a cool way to give me an economic incentive to explore more etc.

I get to New Atlantis and follow the quest for this and I find out the ‘mortgage’ has no penalties, isn’t paid in installments, and can only be purchased in a lump-sum. So, it was a talent that gave me the ability to purchase a house and be able to essentially rent it on a per day basis until the full amount was paid. When I finally do get there the house is empty, and not all that fun to be in. No special quests etc tied to it.

Another moment that soured it for me, and this is a minor quibble but again they added up, was visiting The Eye for the first time. There was this big pile of trash in a corridor used as the block to the door to prevent further exploration. It just entirely took me out of my immersion in what should have been an epic moment. So much so I actually took a screenshot of it at the time.

A lot of folks are likely happy to look past those things but they all added up + reviews from folks further along in the story and gameplay giving a bad impression made me move onto something new. Super happy other folks were able to find enjoyment, just wasn’t for me.

I also didn’t resonate with any of the companions to a degree where I found them actively annoying to be around. I know some would say ‘just don’t loot’ but their constant calling out people who like to loot was annoying too.

Whereas with Outer Worlds I immediately loved Pravati (and most of the other companions too). Starfield I felt like I was talking to puppets only there because I was playing the game. Outer Worlds I felt a connection to their stories as much as my own.

That said, many systems in Outer Worlds were underdeveloped and parts of the game felt empty. It was a game of high highs but also low lows. It did make me excited for the sequel to build on that foundation though.

Genuinely curious, but what systems did you feel added more substance to Starfield? Dialogue choices and completing quests in various ways really made Outer Worlds shine for me, particularly in the DLCs.

6.5/7 is fine if you’re not paying $70 for the base game. It might be worth it now the costs have come down, but paying a premium price for a mid game justifies some of the shit people gave it.

That said, I played on Game Pass, big fan of the genre, and could only make it a few hours in. Just wasn’t for me. But then I really enjoyed The Outer Worlds and people shit on that too.

Tbh most employees at a company this size become risk mitigation more than anything else. Once you’ve reached a certain level of success, you’re looking at what doesn’t move the needle as much as what makes it move positively. There could be a feature that is a major QoL improvement, but because in a test segment it performed 1% worse than base then it won’t be implemented.

Spotify, I believe, still works in the tribe and guild model that they created.

Chapter = people with the same skill set, squad = a group of people from different chapters focused on a single project, tribe = a group of squads focused on a large business goal, guild = a collective of folks who have a shared interest like Data Privacy.

Suffice to say, Agile is an imperfect tool and as you try to scale it, you need an increasing number of people to support it and make it run. Coders and Designers are likely just a fraction of their head count.

I’ve worked places that don’t have that support structure in place and they’ve stagnated for years struggling to get the most basic of decisions made. Decisions is what it is about too. Rarely do you get actual leadership from the c-level and especially from a CEO. So you end up with a lot of cooks trying to work out why the broth doesn’t taste quite right and lacking confidence to just add a bit of salt.

Yeah, gotta sell those toys somehow I guess. I didn’t hate it. I think it’ll take a bump or two as time goes on to lose functionality when narratively convenient like always it isn’t that big of a deal. It took the Doctor forever to do his Penny Crayon routine too. In a real emergency he’d still be best just running like usual.

I think it was purely just to set up for the new Disney+ fans he’s an advanced alien with a magic wand. And to shift as many units of the screwdriver before Christmas before it gets a downgrade.

If the show is proven popular, I wouldn’t be surprised for them to deepen the deal and to start seeing merch even appear in the Disney parks.

I really enjoyed the episode for what it was. It served as a decent introduction for the Disney+ crowd without being too convoluted. Which given this was a continuation of a 15 year old plot thread was handled about as well as it could be.

My biggest complaint was how integrated Rose was into the resolution to the metacrisis. I am not trans and don’t pretend to know even a fraction of the struggles they face in our society. The normalisation of Rose throughout the episode and an acknowledgement of how even very well meaning family work to be inclusive felt very natural. However, I did not like how her being trans seemed to have been caused by the metacrisis. It felt like it flew in the face of the normalisation. The reading in the episode is Rose is only trans because of that timelord DNA influence. It felt wrong to reduce her character to being nothing more than a quirk of fate rather than just who she is naturally.

I’d have preferred a ‘Lets all hold hands and the family shares the burden’ hand waving than what we got. Rose deserved more than what we got and certainly more screen time. It was quite weird the rest of the family didn’t go see Wilf. I get they were setting up episode 2, but in the context of the moment it felt really out of character for MumDonna.

To those confused about how Donna and Rose were able to ‘Let it go’ now rather than back then, Frozen wasn’t released until 4 years later so it musn’t have occurred to the Doctor… In all seriousness, I’d point to the scene from The Day of the Doctor where Clara opens the unlocked door for the ‘clever’ Doctors. Sometimes he’ll look for the best solution without realising a simple one is in front of him.

The new TARDIS interior was gorgeous, harkens back to the Hartnell console room. I loved the first thing 13 did was start running around. So much room to practise running haha.

All in all, a solid.episode with some flaws. I really liked the new style and you could feel that new budget while still having a Dr. Who charm aliens that looked like they’d been handmade. I’d put it around a 7.5/8 out of 10. Good foundation, interested to see if it is built on. It definitely makes me excited for Ncuti’s run.

I don’t mind the change, especially as the Davros story has been so told out now I doubt we’ll see much on-screen for the foreseeable future. However, I would question if Davros would have seen himself as disabled. I’m not familiar enough with the canon to know if we ever learned why he was in the chair, but I always assumed that Davros had experimented on himself while working on the Daleks. Him being a transitory phase between the Khaled evolution and the future evolution that would become the Daleks. I saw his chair as a reflection of this mid-way Dalek.

As I said, I don’t mind this change but I feel it is an ultimately empty thought if they don’t have people with disabilities in the ‘positive’ roles too. It’s all well and good saying he doesn’t want to associate disability with evil, but that also has to be followed by normalizing folks with disabilities within other roles too.

Given the Devs are even saying this too, I’d love them to implement a ‘recap’ system for catching back up on the story. I went back to Like a Dragon after a similar break and I was entirely lost to what I was doing in the plot. But was wayyy too far along to start again. Ended up just quitting because I was struggling to remember so much. I’ll watch a YouTube recap before this one I guess.

I’m curious what the design, and reaction to, of Starfield might say about what we’ll expect from ES6. For three games now (Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield), have been marked by Settlement building and Radiant quests.

While radiant quests were there in Skyrim, in these later games it felt a lot like Bethesda were making it a core part of the mission design structure. There are a lot of blurred lines in Starfield that make it difficult to tell them apart. (That’s more a comment on main missions being so generic than the radiant quests being so good, unfortunately).

Settlement building seems to be a core part of Bethesda’s DNA now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the narrative follows a Kingmaker style where you build up a settlement of rebels over time or similar. I imagine the other ES staples will be tied to this too, Thieves Guild = establishing a branch within your new settlement to attack Big Bad Evil Vs joining an established one etc.

I really wonder how much of this poor reaction to Starfield makes its way through to actual change, but my feeling is ES6 will have a lot of hype, but similar feelings of disappointment. I hope I’m proved wrong.

Played both, and I’d argue that Outer World’s is significantly stronger if only for its companions. Starfield I sunk a good few hours into and I struggle to remember one name. Starfield made me the Main Character and there wasn’t much room for anyone else. Outer Worlds has some pretty fun companion side-quests.

Starfield wins at the sheer quantity of ideas it threw at the wall, Outer Worlds for the decent to good quality of the ideas it threw at the wall. Neither was brilliant, but on my personal preference Outer Worlds has way stronger bones leading into the sequel.

I’m actually excited to see this one. Kamala is a fun character and Iman Vellani captured her essence really well. They have not done a good job of making Captain Marvel or Monica Rambeau as characters we care about, but through the Kamala lens we might during the movie. But a lot of folks skipped on Ms. Marvel thinking she was for kids.

However, I wouldn’t even call this dip in presales Marvel fatigue. I’m a Marvel fanboy. I watched She Hulk and enjoyed it. Yet, Marvel have done nothing to actually invest me into the current phase. It’s not a Marvel fatigue but more a multiverse/plot fatigue. I haven’t watched Secret Invasion or Loki 2 because… Why?

I find Kang to be such a damp squib of a character. They ruined most of his mystique at the end of Quantumania to the extent he is no longer a real threat. Thanos worked because he was a difficult but not impossible threat. You felt like even the Guardians had a chance against him as slim a chance as that might be.

Kang is an impossible threat. A multi-versal threat that has no limits. He’s boring because he can’t be overcome.

I’ve said it before when we were all on Reddit, this Phase would be made significantly more interesting if you use this as the opportunity to introduce Doctor Doom. Have him crush Kang as a threat setting up a more complex, potentially beatable, villain and establishing a power order in one sweep.

Once he’s established, bring in the X-Men and FF fighting off incursions, lead up to X-Men Vs MCU as your Summer Blockbuster, have a handful of arthouse y Last Days Of style movies. Go into Battleworld, have some really fun remixes of our established characters, reset the multiverse to a single world with more mundane threats and recast any character who wants out of the franchise.

Instead, this movie becomes a ‘eh. I’ll see it on Disney+ eventually’.

Yeah the DLCs made it feel like a full game. The base was a fun proof of concept, the the DLC fleshes that out. Both made me excited to see what version 2 with more time and funding could accomplish.

I hope they build on the more unique systems like the Holographic Shroud and give those systems more opportunities to shine.

It seems obvious but also: don’t drink anything with caffeine before bed and don’t eat a good couple of hours before sleep too.

I’ve had many friends who’d have a tea before going to sleep to ‘calm’ them without realising most have quite a lot still. Or guzzling down a soda too.