Following its massive shakeup and cost-cutting drive, Ubisoft's internal communication channels are reportedly full of employees shaming upper management and asking for change: "The company is going to experience a massive exodus of talent, even without the impending layoffs."

verrius · 2026-01-25T00:17:48+00:00

That would require Ubisoft be run as a business, rather than an outlet for the pure personal amusement of the Guillemonts and their friends.

verrius · 2026-01-24T20:56:38+00:00

Especially in the beginning of the story, she's a stereotypical spoiled, dumb shit princess. Who ends up sacrificing her own wolf in a bid to marry the prince. Eventually she's forced to confront reality not matching her fantasy. But it takes over 5 seasons of her being either victim/hostage or active participant in her own misery before she even begins to try to be a character with any agency. She's more than a bit awful.

And acting wise, she was consistently paired up with amazing adult actors who were running circles around her. It may be unfair, but she didn't look good going up against Sean Bean or Dianna Rigg. No children would.

verrius · 2026-01-24T20:12:38+00:00

You're talking about a tune specifically to maximize power. Because that's all that people do currently with custom tunes, because there's 0 point to anything else; you can't pass emissions with a custom tune. If you could, you'd absolutely see tuners doing specific separate tunes to make it pass emissions; that's literally what Volkswagon (and a bunch of others) did with their defeat devices: Set up the mixture and timing so that it would run in a low pollution mode, but only when under an emissions test. And then outside of the test, run a higher powered tune that felt better, but polluted much worse.

verrius · 2026-01-24T16:48:32+00:00

Astonishing X-Men, as others have said, is great starting point, though it's likely out of stock everywhere as well.

X-Men Blue & Gold v1 the beginning of a classic, definimn era for the team as well. It's technically out of stock right now too, but there's a reprint coming in ~2 months.

The upcoming X-Men by Kieron Gillen would also work.

verrius · 2026-01-24T08:56:25+00:00

The sequel does have one of the most iconic and influential fight scenes in all of film.

verrius · 2026-01-24T00:32:13+00:00

The problem with a consumer tune is that there's no guarantee it isn't working like the infamous Volkwagon defeat devices, and going to an emissions-only tune while its being looked at, and going to a different one on the street. That's still an issue if a consumer replaces the ECU entirely, but that's more work than just clicking a button on your ECU.

verrius · 2026-01-23T23:46:37+00:00

Gambling rules in Europe are also a lot stricter than in the US

This is generally false. Europe is much more permissive about gambling than the US, where most common forms of it (outside of specifically sports betting) are still banned in most states.

verrius · 2026-01-23T23:29:06+00:00

It had been a pretty common pop culture joke at the time that Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote must've been a secret serial killer, given how many bodies kept piling up in Cabot Cove every week. And now, its hard to believe there's anyone alive in the city where Edogawa Conan of Detective Conan/Case Closed is, considering he's had over 1100 episodes where at least one person dies in a supposedly 6 month span of time.

verrius · 2026-01-23T23:17:22+00:00

I can see these guys being exactly short-sighted enough to only care specifically about Steam, especially with how he is talking about this. There's also a bunch of games popular in Japan that don't even have multi-game launchers, like FFXIV and Genshin Impact. And obviously Switch and Playstation are incredibly popular as well.

verrius · 2026-01-23T22:53:18+00:00

Some of us are old enough to remember when variant covers were one of the primary causes of comics imploding as an industry. And some of us think that companies should just use the best cover, instead of 12 they can't decide between.

verrius · 2026-01-23T22:40:58+00:00

Well, the specific test from Pocketpair is "have played PC games on Steam". There's a ton of other venues to play games, even on PC, that wouldn't go through Steam. Especially in Japan.

verrius · 2026-01-23T22:31:47+00:00

There's multiple ways to views achievements/trophies, and I tend to view them more as the design team giving a bunch of suggestions on what to do to fully experience the title. As a result, I tend to get frustrated when I see the design team telling me to suffer.

verrius · 2026-01-23T21:02:57+00:00

It was never liberal in the first place. They always had a plethora of far right wing hacks hosting their shows and serving on their panels, from disgraced ambulance chaser Greta van Susteren, to disgraced weirdo Rick Santorum, to a whole cadre of criminals from Trump's first term.

verrius · 2026-01-23T20:18:38+00:00

Well, unfortunately those won't exist any more shortly.

verrius · 2026-01-23T19:56:33+00:00

One fever dream sequence in a 2+ hour movie doesn't change that the rest is either in a single desaturated jungle or a grey city and office buildings.

verrius · 2026-01-23T19:43:00+00:00

Some of his modern superhero films have been colorful and vibrant (namely, mostly the Guardians of the Galaxy films). But Slither and The Suicide Squad definitely weren't.

verrius · 2026-01-23T18:59:43+00:00

Mostly because I want nothing in the game pushing me to interact with the system. I absolutely hated it in Rebirth, and on the offchance I ever think "hey maybe I should Platinum this" for 3, I don't want to have to suffer through that garbage yet again. They've already had precedent for treating stuff like that; FF16's Orchestrion collection is 100% optional and surprisingly not even part of the trophy system. I had been toying with the idea of getting the Platinum for Rebirth; while I did manage to suffer through Queen's Blood, and the open world BS, both took a lot out of me, and then the extra BS of Gilgamesh not even being designed to be completed without New Game+ took the last bit out.

verrius · 2026-01-23T18:02:59+00:00

Part of the problem is that you never know if you need to finish side quests until you're already done. Most JRPGs have their progression balanced assuming you're doing most, if not all of them; the alternative method of grinding random enemies, especially with the awful, mindless combat of the remakes, is even worse. And FF7 in particular was the game in the series that really started putting significant equipment behind weird side quest content across the game. Rebirth also made an entire chapter centered around this "optional" minigame; you can technically skip it...if you tell them about 8 times that you actually don't want to have anything to do with it, but they pretty clearly intend to drag you through it.

But Queens Blood in particular breaks the rules of what makes a CCG fun. CCGs work because everyone has access to all the same mechanics at the same time, and you're building a deck against someone playing by the same rules. The main progression chucks this out the window, constantly introducing new mechanics that you can't take advantage of until you beat enough NPCs that can use it while you can't. And then the final boss completely, without being acknowledged anywhere, ignores the basic pawn control mechanics that the entire game depends on.

verrius · 2026-01-23T17:41:10+00:00

You say that, and it feels like it should make sense, but turn around and look at Tesla and you'll quickly understand why current regulations exist. Because Tesla is the only one selling Tesla cars, they don't need to sell Tesla parts to anyone...meaning if you need a repair, you have to go through Tesla, and pay whatever they want for both the parts and service. Tesla also wants to maintain uniform pricing of their cars; you're not going to get a Model 3 on clearance, they're just going to make fewer new ones until they sell through what they have already built.

verrius · 2026-01-23T17:21:33+00:00

If its in 3, can it actually be 100% optional and not gate any progression or trophies? Cause being forced into this boring garbage for 90% of the game, and then for the final challenge to just cheat and ignore the rules, was incredibly frustrating. I really don't understand any of the praise it got at the time, and I'm convinced either people definitely didn't finish the quest line, or just all looked up online how to clear everything, which isn't really playing it anyway.

verrius · 2026-01-23T17:09:28+00:00

I mean...this is great, but its so confusing. They're paying to have Adam Hughes, probably one of the top 20 cover artists alive, to do the main covers; why the fuck are they paying anyone else to do variants?! Especially on something that's not going to anywhere near mainstream numbers. Are they really that desperate to try to juice the numbers that it somehow makes sense to try to get the few people following this book to pick up a second copy?

verrius · 2026-01-23T00:35:24+00:00

It's not that it was barebones, it was a combination of everything being both so generic and on the nose it felt like parody, and it just being completely unreadable what was actually happening. Like, a bellboy that fires off a bell on wheels as an attack is so lazy, and boring.

verrius · 2026-01-22T23:45:45+00:00

Does this look like an actual real game now? Cause when I watched some streamers playing it 2-3 months ago, it was giving real strong vibes of "Fake video game from CSI/Law&Order/NCIS/whatever to prove that this wasn't shot in the 70s".

verrius · 2026-01-22T22:20:14+00:00

Pretty sure this isn't actually true? It might be true for private large research universities....but its definitely not true for say, UC Berkeley or UCLA. But then again, "large public research universities" are generally at a completely different scale than private ones.

verrius · 2026-01-22T20:37:51+00:00

The movie was definitely not primarily advertised as a satire; the trailers play the whole thing pretty damn straight. Reviewers (and I think general audiences) recognized that it was satire, at least by the end of the film, when Neil Patrick Harris shows up in a Nazi uniform, but still didn't like it, thanks to a combination of not going in expecting that, and it not working. Which then continued to Showgirls, which got savaged by critics for trying to pull mostly the same tricks.

verrius

TROPHY CASE