Xbox’s servers seem to be going through some things tonight, eh?
IGN’s Director of Reviews. Dad (so expect dad jokes). Careful: you might hear some opinions.
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Xbox’s servers seem to be going through some things tonight, eh?
My awesome wife took me to see Janine Garofalo do standup tonight for my imminent 45th birthday. She was great! Low key, but always funny and with some really smart tangent, tangent, tangent, callback stuff.
Little-known fact: the "40,000" in the title is actually a clever nod to the number of games set in that universe.
Oh it's going great. No notes. (Eggs actually have come down because they're bouncing back from bird flu but that had little or nothing to do with anything either president did.)
That's tens of thousands in New York City alone, when the population of the US was 130M. Most people aren't politically engaged or informed enough to know what Trump was promising to do or see through his obvious lies. They were just either checked out or mad about prices going up and blamed Biden.
A rally for the Nazi party filled Madison Square Garden in 1939, and the tens of thousands who were there didn't disappear after the war. Fascists have always been here, they've just been seen as uncool for the past 80 years. Most people didn't want to be seen with them. Trump made it acceptable.
Access Hollywood tape 2.0.
When you're a president they let you do it.
I'm curious if you can give an example of this, because no we don't.
Costco was still well under 20 last time I went but that was probably before the completely unjustifiable Brazil tariffs hit.
And old Sansaire that’s still kicking, despite the company shutting down in 2018. Does the job, no reason to replace it! For searing, I just use a Tramontina non-stick skillet most of the time, or an All-Clad grill pan if I want the sear marks. Haven’t gone too fancy in that regard.
I do those too, but ribeye is ~$14/lb and delicious most ways you cook it, whereas pork chops are $3.50/lb and can easily get dry and tough if you don’t treat ‘em right.
Yeah doing it manually every time would be a pain. I would think someone would’ve automated that by now!
If you are not doing your pork chops sous vide you are not doing them correctly.
Not sure what level of support you're looking for, but you can load any game you have an EXE for into Steam's UI and it'll show up in Big Picture.
You’re thinking of his cousin, Satan Teeth.
They’re literally filling in the holes with spackle
I'm slightly too old for it and thus my body rejects it completely. He's encouraged to watch all the Transformers G1, TMNT, Inspector Gadget, GI Joe, and He-Man that he likes, though.
Subbed! Based on how much I've struggled just trying to move save files on the Steam Deck I haven't dared to attempt such a thing, but I'll 100% go along for the ride vicariously.
I find the shows especially dumb and annoying and didn't want to listen to them.
"The United States paid nothing for these Shares" is an interesting way of describing "the U.S. released $8.9B in CHIPS funding intended for Intel in exchange for $8.9B in stock." Perhaps Congress could've demanded shares for CHIPS money, but POTUS adding this ad hoc is simply unconstitutional.
I like the Watch Duty app in theory, but in practice it's giving me push notifications for fires 25 miles away that I do not need to know about. I could turn off push notifications, but then I'd miss notifications for a fire that's a mile away. There doesn't seem to be a way to rein it in?
That's my secret, Cap.
This reminds me of how I had the word "pokemon" filtered out on Netflix to try to keep my son from finding it but then his nanny was playing Pokemon Go and it was all over. Your kids are gonna see stuff you don't like, and no law or filter will stop them.
Also it's dumb because we're very close to a point where many devices will be "aware" of what's on their screens and parents will be able to simply tell them not to show their kids porn or whatever else they don't want them to see. Doing this *right now* is just absurd.
This is a deeply stupid, very shortsighted law. And the people passing them don't seem to realize that any kid with half a brain can Google (or ask ChatGPT) how to use a VPN to get around it anyway. So it's pointless and destructive.
why. who are they planning to shoot.
That's exactly what an AI would say
If I were an AI, the first thing I'd do would be to create an army of AI social media bots that accused everything that isn't AI of being AI so that no one knows what's AI and what's not. Unfortunately, I think they're three steps ahead of me.
Some people like to sleep sometimes! It's 2AM in Australia.
We have one of the very best car people on staff at IGN, as a matter of fact. Sadly, no one person can write every article on the site, and we do not use AI for any of them.
I can see you never had a point.
What, for crying out loud, *is* your point?
So I’ve been over why he might not have wanted to spend the time he had with this game remapping controls. I’ve been over how him explaining that he personally wasn’t used to these controls isn’t a criticism of Nintendo. You just seem to want to complain. That’s cool I guess, if you’re into that.
I gotta be honest, this is the nitpickiest nitpick I have heard in a minute. He didn’t say you couldn’t remap it if you wanted, he just said what happened to him. If, as you say, *everybody* knows you can remap it, what is your problem exactly? Also you can remap buttons on other systems.
There *may* have been incidents where I assumed there would be no ridiculous restrictions and didn't read them closely but there actually *were* ridiculous restrictions. But not like, on purpose.
Never even messed up a time zone conversion or reversed AM/PM? If not, damn. Respect!
Better too much than not enough, right? As the dude who runs IGN reviews and prides himself on being as thorough as we reasonably can about playing all the way through the games we cover, I do like people to know the difference!
Just a heads up, that's a *preview*, not a review. Previews are based off what a developer wants to show in order to make their game look good, and they're given the benefit of the doubt that they'll fix anything that doesn't work yet. Reviews only happen once we're able to play the full thing.
To be clear, I wasn't trying to suggest that Valheim isn't good or worthy of praise. Just that the "early access" label makes no sense in a lot of cases.
You could click on my profile and find out. Don't you think it's pretty disingenuous to compare being used to a different button layout to not being able to read music? I'd say it's a bit more like being an expert at playing the trumpet but not being instantly as good on a French horn.
I like to assume that people look at the dates at the top of the review, but that's probably wishful thinking. Some of these folks wouldn't see a big blinking warning either.
You're right, we totally should have gotten someone who's already used to playing Elden Ring on a Nintendo system.
We have aspirations, but no hard policy. On a lot of them audience interest falls off a cliff long before they go 1.0, so it's hard to justify going back to them.
Valheim put out a trailer for a new update today. It's sold more than 12 million copies since it launched in 2021. It's still in "early access." This, folks, is why early access reviews are a thing.
He says right there that he mostly plays this specific game on PlayStation. That's how his muscle memory is set. If someone hands you a system to demo a game for 10 minutes you're not going to spend half of that messing with the settings. He wasn't jabbing Nintendo. He was explaining why he died.
This is literally a preview where he played for a few minutes. If he were playing for hours he would either get used to it or change it. Someone handed him a Switch and he played for a little bit.
Hugely handy! Do you even need an LLM for this functionality, though? (Maybe the intonation requires it?) There have been plugins that do this for a long time, though they always require a subscription. This does too, I guess!
I have a column set up to look for IGN mentions and I like to address common misconceptions for fun :)
Ah, it may be - it popped up on my work account, and it doesn't appear to be on my personal one. Hopefully they roll it out to everyone at some point!
A) This is not a review. It's a preview based on a few minutes of playing. B) He was just saying he got himself killed because it's a little different from what his muscle memory's used to. You have to be *really* reaching to interpret that as him criticizing the Switch or Elden Ring.
Yup, that happens sometimes. In those instances we do reviews in progress where we have our reviewer post their impressions as they go, then update with the full review when they're done. But even then, we don't turn down the difficulty just to get something done quicker.
Hi! That's not what the review was talking about.
That's what we aim for, absolutely, but we do not demand it if it's not realistic. No one at IGN is playing on easy - or if they do, they talk about why they felt they had to do that in the review. We also finish every game we review when practical, and when it's not we explain that.
They keep announcing these weird little Star Trek games! First the VR Star Trek: Infection, now a "strategy survival roguelike." Not sure what to make of either of them yet but sure, I'll give'em a go.
WOW, Google Docs just added a built-in text-to-speech reader with (relatively) natural-sounding voices. I can't recommend this enough as a proofreading tool. You'll catch *so* many instances of missing or extra words, repetition, or just stuff that sounds wrong by having your writing read to you.
Bob Odenkirk himself answered this very question! Spoilers: He does not see this going well for Hutch.
Oh my goodness this movie is stupid. Some good one-liners but man.
Oh I’m strapped in
Just started watching Jurassic World Rebirth. I’m not even through the cold open and it already makes no sense. The Snickers wrapper did what now?
One thing I didn’t anticipate is that a couple of these kids *only* knew how to play with iPad touch controls and completely rejected controllers. They would rather have not played at all because of they said they were too bad at it. Wild.
This made me miss LAN parties.
So that hamstrung things. I shifted to putting several kids on iPads, which was great except that the process of adding friends on Xbox accounts is a major pain in the ass. One of them randomly said it had been banned from joining a game, which doesn’t seem possible. Way harder than it should be.
If you’re trying to join a game on Switch (2 in this case) you can, but if you try to go into split screen you’re told that *every person* has to have a paid account. Absolutely bonkers, especially considering that Xbox allows guest players on one account.
As I attempted to get ~8 local 10-year-olds into the same Minecraft world, I learned a lot today about how various gaming platforms work together (or don’t). First, I learned that the PC version doesn’t do split screen, which is super dumb. Then, I learned Nintendo really sucks at this.
I admittedly have not done that in a minute.
LOL I played the Battlefield 6 beta last night (EXTREMELY POORLY) and it worked fine. I literally have not rebooted since then (though I did put it to sleep overnight) and now there's a problem. Cool cool cool.
Similar, except LEAF BLOWER TO THE FACE!!!
Very much the effect, yes.
In Soviet Russia, OFF beats YOU!
Parenting pro tip: if your kids are upset and fixated on something minor, try blasting them in the face with a leaf blower until they forget about their problems.
I'm actually using it more than ever recently because I finally caved and got Air Pods. I haven't noticed it being worse (it was never good) but it's certainly falling further and further behind the competition.
Sounds like he was guarding her body, as the job requires, so I don't see the problem. Do they object that she wasn't charging her protection triple the normal to stay in her hotel room?
You give it a 10. A score is about whether or not it's a good game, not if it's a good deal. And the people who made it almost certainly aren't the ones who set the price, anyway.
what an image
Unreasonably excited about this tbh. (I think I've only missed one daily challenge since launch.)
I have to say, though: – SPOILERS – (How is there not a spoiler tag yet???) "I didn't think of them as human" is so absurdly antithetical to Star Trek, where the whole point has been to seek out new life and new civilizations, presumably to treat them with some level of respect.
After tonight's Strange New Worlds I'll be sad if Paul Wesley doesn't get to play Kirk in his own followup show. He's done a good job of finding a middle ground between Shatner and his own thing. Also I think they've gone too long without introducing McCoy. Get Bones in there in some capacity!
This is very cool. Hardspace: Shipbreaker was an interesting start, it just didn't really go anywhere and became repetitive too quickly. Expanding on those ideas could end up with something special.
I think you meant decades?
I can't believe they recast Jack Black as Steve for this Minecraft spinoff.
My daughter just lost her second tooth in 12 hours and she doesn't even know how to play hockey. That has to be some kind of record!
Happens a lot, tbh. Give ours a look, though - it sounds like you're on the same page!
I'm not sure whose review you read, but it wasn't ours! Our reviewer loved it and called it "a conventional but effective return to the linear and tightly story-driven format of the original Mafia and Mafia II, and it boasts a wonderful eye and ear for detail." He didn't miss the open world at all.
Probably in the opening credits alone!
I think it's pretty funny that this is coming from Amazon because they already made The Man in the High Castle, which is basically the same story.
Love to see South Park throwing down the gauntlet and daring Trump and/or Paramount to come after them. It’s brilliant: Matt Stone and Trey Parker are set for life no matter what. If they can sign off not as retiring old dudes but as martyrs for free speech, nothing would make them happier.
Okay Star Trek SNW can do as many knockoffs of as many sci-fi classics as it wants. That’s cool. But we do have to acknowledge that this is a universe where we have weapons with an incinerate setting and effectively unlimited ammo and that’s basically easy mode when you’re doing a zombie thing.
They could’ve done a reverse Fight Club and they just decided not to. Wild.
The thing I don’t get about Dexter: Resurrection is that they obviously should’ve started out with Harrison’s story and then had Dexter show up apparently as a Harry-style ghost, then flash back to him being alive. Massive missed opportunity for a big marketing misdirect.
Love to see South Park throwing down the gauntlet and daring Trump and/or Paramount to come after them. It’s brilliant: Matt Stone and Trey Parker are set for life no matter what. If they can sign off not as retiring old dudes but as martyrs for free speech, nothing would make them happier.
This needs the Nemesis System.
Today marks 8 years at IGN for me, which feels sorta nuts. My very first assignment was reviewing Lawbreakers - @danstapleton.bsky.social DM'ed me two weeks before I even started to say "Congrats! Wanna review this game when you get here?" Time flies!
I'm sure some people couldn't find the bundle.
Nice to see Xbox backing away from $80 games - that price hike felt at least 5-10 years too soon. Mario Kart came out at $80 and sold extremely well but I'd bet they didn't sell many copies at that price. When no one had an S2 yet there was no reason to do that unless you couldn't find the bundle.
weird thing to do if your name is not in the Epstein files imo
Which goes back to my "WTF are you even doing" point.
Don’t watch clips. Watch the whole thing. Quite illuminating.
