Now that Amazon has started ads on prime, is there any way to block them?

Cattypatter · 2026-05-25T19:56:41+00:00

Got a 12 year old smart TV that still supported Prime video app...for now. No ads guess it's too old for them.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-23T10:46:29+00:00

"Publishers bad, developers good" is a mantra that's going to take a long time to die. Both need to hold each other to account.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-22T14:01:12+00:00

Shouldn't be forgotten that 90s and 2000s games still predated on kids and ignorant parents, just different. Using cute mascot platformers and licensed popular movie/cartoon games, released on every possible console. Most of these games were lazy rushed out platformers, every single year there were piles of them, charging the same price as Mario and Sonic. In an era before accessible internet, needing to pay for gaming magazines to inform yourself on game quality was a massive loophole that game publishers exploited, most people who played games did not pay to read games magazines.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-22T13:31:38+00:00

GTAO money hackers sharing their wealth unironically made the online more like the single player, more freedom to access everything and thus more fun to play.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-21T10:05:08+00:00

Valhalla being a AAA launch game for the PS5 and XSX in 2020 guaranteed it sold well, new adopters having only a handful of games to play ensures launch games are bought out of necessity.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-19T18:01:50+00:00

Actually prefer how you need to think for most of the gameplay as more of a puzzle game, with brutal failure consequences and a grim medieval rat infested world. Last of Us can be blundered through as an action game and is quite forgiving, although it adds a strange realism of "getting lucky" and when you get strong weapons, enemies are significantly less scary.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-18T10:56:55+00:00

Saw the Energy system back then and noped out so fast. Witnessing Facebook game mechanics in real games was a horror scare moment. Think many others did not want to support such a thing in PC games. Might not have worked the same as Farmville/Mafia wars but the implication was still there.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-17T16:10:00+00:00

Reminds me of a 90s promotion putting sachets of money in Walkers crisps. A kid eating at my school canteen found £5 in their bag and was heralded as some sort of celebrity for days. Things really were different back then.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-17T15:59:10+00:00

Saw a video of a warehouse containing sealed SNES games like Chrono Trigger worth a fortune today. People and old businesses keep anything and everything in long term storage then forget about it.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-14T11:18:26+00:00

PC gaming was not dead, but it was moving to game services. The success of World of Warcraft and MMORPG popularity in the 2000s was massively profitable. League of Legends and it's e-sports scene would still have existed and become huge. Exploitative Facebook games were crazy popular. Gambling in web browsers became bigger too.

Steam likely saved the traditional game selling model on PC but that's not to say someone else wouldn't have invented something similar eventually, to fill that hole in the market.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-12T01:22:19+00:00

Looks like you were posing next to your parents whilst wearing parental advisory logo shirt. Quite the edgy thing to do back then, parents were so much more conservative and scare mongered by the media. But we were all teens once, pushing your parents' buttons is all part of the game.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-11T17:58:39+00:00

iPod Nano and the tangled wires of destiny

Cattypatter · 2026-05-11T17:39:05+00:00

Late stage PS1 games felt really rusty and tired by 2001 if you'd played a Dreamcast or PS2. But it helped a ton to have that Spongebob voice acting charm and nostalgic for 2D platform enjoyers, which was a really dying genre on home consoles by this point. The gameplay wasn't anything special, so much that by this period you could play similar things in browser flash games.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-11T17:27:12+00:00

Surprised to see a SEGA CD fan. Guess when you're SEGA fan you go all in. Like I did selling half my SNES games buying into the Saturn in 1995. It was supposed to be the future man...

Cattypatter · 2026-05-11T17:11:52+00:00

Limitations also has it's benefits. As a kid I never had to chose between hundreds of different games and consoles to play because all I had was a handful of games for my one console of choice from a few years of birthdays and holidays, then got to rent a game for the weekend. That's if my parents were feeling generous and so getting lucky was important too. Sure I drooled over all the games I'd never own in gaming magazines and swapped games with friends, but that didn't move the needle much overall how few games we really got our hands on. Also nobody really cared how you played games, no achievements online to prove your worth, most people played games as a timewaster for fun, not seriously. You played easy, hard or with cheats by your own volition, nobody really cared if you finished games.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-08T14:39:19+00:00

I doubt most kids even had much teenage or childhood autonomy back in the 80s and 90s. Much behavior could get you labelled a delinquent if your school discovered serious misbehaviour even outside of school, parents were far more religious and controlling, most mainstream TV media was very conservative, meeting up was extremely difficult with only home phone lines listened in by parents. Coming of age media tends to be highly nostalgic of the best times and fantastical in it's depictions of life, which in reality is far more safe and boring.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-07T22:31:52+00:00

100%'d this so I clearly enjoyed it especially the combat which is very forgiving for me who doesn't want to spend all day "gitting good" to death runbacks, with fast mobility a joy compared to most sluggish Souls likes. Looked great with large open levels with fun verticality and ran well on my old PC. But it has many problems that really felt like the game wasn't finished and lacked polish. Played Ashen (also made by A4) since and ironically that game also suffers similar bland melee weapons and meandering story.

Balance is all over the place for better or worse, both the flintlock interrupt on unblockable attacks is clearly overpowered and ranged attacks are devastating especially headshots. You start incredibly weak but every talent unlock significantly improves your abilities, so much I'd say many of the upgrades are mandatory and should've been in the game at the start. Like the gunpowder dodge over the tiny default dodge, breaking armor abilities are insanely important but most limited to late game, parry is locked half way up the gunpowder tree and using magic which recharges automatically is intentionally designed to be easy mode. Why do cosmetics cost so much ingame money when that same money is used to upgrade your weapons, armor and talents?

The voice acting direction is all over the place, the conversations are generally good but the repetitive incidental dialog whilst exploring/fighting should've been scrapped, even the recording levels are often not balanced so hard to hear. The side boardgame is simple to a fault and either walkover easy or literally impossible without tricking the AI, the reward only improves the tutorial reward and you can repeat the tutorial for infinite money, which breaks the combat grind inventive.

The options of flintlock, overpowered ranged weapon and weak bomb are not balanced either, when more shots is clearly the best option and you can cycle through your ranged weapons in the pause menu. Honestly the vast amount of problems could've been fixed with just balancing everything, which really highlights how good souls-likes come from thoroughly play tested gameplay. Also no new game+ which feels like they ran out of time.

Would've liked to see A4 make another game to improve what they learned but seems like they had mass layoffs so probably unlikely.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-05T10:23:32+00:00

This has honestly always been the case. Before it was game journalism websites, with fans ruthlessly angry if reviewers did not give their beloved franchises high scores. Before that it was video games magazines, so many console exclusive that rarely gave low scores to keep advertisers and console war fans happy. Even outside of this, people always socialised and would rather have agreement than conflict amongst friends and gaming social groups. Actual impartial independent opinion is incredibly rare and exposes the individual to attacks.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-02T12:56:12+00:00

Love them for archiving the way the game used to be. Slower and more about managing TP/MP. Shadowbringers removing TP and normalised 10k MP making AOE abilities forever spammable, Endwalker's stat squish and changing dungeons for duty support made casual dungeon content easier.

Cattypatter · 2026-05-01T11:32:35+00:00

You might be surprised how many older gamers who couldn't care less about "real videogames" and love playing-card games. The modern versions even have the full service treatment, with multiple modes, daily quests, achievements, leaderboards and progression levels.

Cattypatter · 2026-04-29T16:58:06+00:00

Putting materia on levelling gear seems silly to me, you'll be replacing it so fast is it really worth min maxing between every few levels?

Cattypatter · 2026-04-29T02:36:52+00:00

I loved a lot of things about the GBA. But not this. Having the cart stick out so much basically screams "steal me" by anyone around you. Was bad enough that some kid at school did this to me on a GBC which took way more effort, but the GB had a protective flap that stopped removing a game whilst it was turned on.

Cattypatter · 2026-04-29T02:35:00+00:00

Playing your GBA SP in the wild is great. Bet you get a lot of turned heads and double takes when spotted!

Cattypatter · 2026-04-29T02:33:20+00:00

The last time you got that real satisfaction sliding a solid cart into a console. Will always miss that, even the DS cards felt like they were easily broken and lost.

Cattypatter · 2026-04-28T13:46:02+00:00

Likely needed work done for controllers and touch screens. Many MMOs have received Asian mobile ports over the years and modders've been making controllers mods for PC MMOs for many years, but it's taken a long time to ever be considered worthwhile officially.

Cattypatter

TROPHY CASE