7 euros for 20gb of data? I’m paying close to $30 a month for 1 gig and if I cross that the bill shoots up to $40 Fucking American Capitalism.

The Contortionist. It’s been a long 6 years since Clairvoyant.

Funnily enough CS1 has seen an uptick in players recently. It surpassed CS2’s daily player count. The 24 hour peak is almost 4000 more than CS2 yesterday. 10k to 6k rounding up.

Let me be clear, I don’t wish for this game to die. CS1 is my most played game of the last decade. I really wanted CS2 to be that going forward. Before Cities Skylines, the game I’ve put the most time into in my life was SimCity 4. When Sim City 2013 came along I thought just like you that there’s no way that one of the most beloved video games series of all time crumble like this.

Reality is CS2 has just as much a chance to be abandoned as SC13. It really hinges on what they do next. If it’s not a bug fix or mod support they’re doomed. If they really start pushing DLC and tie bug fixes to that, the message is clear. They don’t care about the quality of the game and it’s just another cash cow. And let’s be crystal clear. Since Paradox went public this game lasting will be more dependent on what sales look like going forward. We’ve already seen cracks in that when Paradox released their investor call and showed disappointment in CS2’s post launch performance. That will kill this game.

Ultimately this game can die not because they decided to stop working on it or Paradox breaks from CO. It will die because nobody will want to support it. It will die because modders will abandon it and move on. Investors can pressure them to leave it behind. The community that supports it will leave. A game like this thrives with a community behind it. If that community decides to abandon it, then this game will fade away despite CO/Paradox’s efforts to keep it afloat.

Everybody is looking at this game like it’s the next No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk. That blind hope is great if you like the game, but to everybody else this has the same chance to be Cities XL, or worse Sim City 2013.

Have you been paying attention to the drama surrounding the game and behind the scenes at CO? I’m not gonna recap it in full but it paints a dire picture for the game’s future. CO admits the game is in a broken state then flip flops on how they’re gonna fix it. They’ve entered crisis PR mode and have gone through the rigamarole of blaming the fan base for being toxic, saying the simulation is working as intended, moving goal posts in their roadmap, to abandoning it all together, to nearly ceasing all communication with the community, to openly admitting that Paradox called them to keep up the weekly dev talks against their will. This is a panicked dev studio.

In the actual game, we’ve figured out that almost none of the simulation is working as intended. It’s so bad we’re at the point where one of the code modders came out and shamed/corrected CO with actual math errors he found in the code on the CS2 forums. We know they’re sitting on 2000+ assets and can’t put them in the game because their own asset importer is somehow broken. Modding is months away and the longer it takes the more this game will exit the zeitgeist. People are already leaving in droves. Just check the Steam charts.

Does this game have the potential to turn around. Yes. Do I trust Collosal Order to keep this ship from sinking. No, not anymore. Whatever good will they had, they burned through it in a matter of weeks with these last few Word of the Weeks. We’ve been around the block with botched game launches a lot recently. Especially this year. This is one of the rare ones where the fundamentals of the game are so broken it might not be salvageable. The lack of meaningful communication and action from CO has eroded all trust. The communication we have gotten from them has shot themselves in the foot more than quell any animosity stirring in the community. After only a handful of patches they’ve already dumped the road map and tied bug fixes to DLC. WHICH NOBODY SHOULD BUY after the way they’ve handled this game. I don’t care how much potential the base game has. It all comes down to modding support. And if all signals from CO are we’re struggling with our own code to the point where features that were days to weeks away are pushed back to almost a year, this game isn’t gonna survive. This isn’t just some half in the bag stripped down sequel that Paradox developed to be a DLC cow. This is a fundamentally broken game. By CO’s own word this game is a mess. They shit on the grave of SimCity with CS1 only to tempt the fate of Maxis with CS2.

D4, Starfield, Cities Skylines 2, and Mortal Combat 1. D4 and Starfield are self explanatory. CS2 is my biggest disappointment in years. Paradox killed whatever good will it had left by forcing the demise of CO. Under no circumstances should CS2 released this year. There’s no mods. It doesn’t function in any meaningful way. It’s a performance nightmare. CS1 danced on the grave of SimCity and committed all the same sins a decade later. Don’t listen to anybody that says the game has potential. They’re sitting on 2000+ assets they can’t release because they can’t import buildings into their own city building game post release. That’s how bad it is. Cities Skylines 2 was dead on arrival and it took the community 4 months to realize it.

MC1 isn’t worthy of the K. It’s just a slog. I don’t know how much they fixed it but that doesn’t break the fact that cameos are a major turnoff. Or that it has the worse progression system of recent MK games. Or that it’s sitting on potentially one of the biggest rosters MK ever had but culled itself in half by reserving half the characters for cameos. Tekken 8 and SF6 have lapped MK hard this generation. Hell even Strive and DBFZ have taken steps to stay more relevant than MK1.

And you know what the kicker is? I bought all these games at the same time. I’ve been playing the clip of Totalbicsuit singing we don’t pre-order games a lot lately.

Yeah, I put many hours into it. It’s a blast.

Because Cities Skylines 2 is such a letdown I’ve been trying Timberborn and wanna start Songs of Syx. City builders are my staple but it’s been years since I’ve caught the same high as when I played Sim City 4. CS1 was great but SC4 is still the best city builder game ever made IMO.

Tekken 8. I love fighting games too. Street Fighter 6 is great but I fell off that game hard. Capcom is way to slow to do anything with the game. It’s really easy to get bored with it.

After that I really wanna go back and finish BG3. I spent a lot of time in act 1 and barely touched it after that. I don’t know why I dropped it. I was having a blast. I guess that’s ADHD or something.

Be careful with Subnautica. I lost 75 hours of my life in the blink of an eye to that game. It’s easily one of the best survival horror adventure games ever made.

Terraria is also up there. Once you play it you never really need to try another side scrolling 2D Minecraft like game again.

I don’t know. That’s just what everybody in my neighborhood calls it.

Green Belt

Wargaming. It’s given me a social life. I’ve developed new skills like painting. It has side hobbies like 3d printing. Hopefully I can make it a career too. I’ve always dabbled with 3d software like Blender. Three months ago I took the leap to learning 3d sculpting with the plan to release my own designs for miniatures. I really wanna make my own Dark Elves for The Old World.

Same but only because I dual boot Windows and was too lazy to setup grub or systemd-boot the day I installed Linux on my new setup.

I was able to pick up Street Fighter and Baldur’s Gate before I left my job. They’be been holding me for months now. Two of the best games to come out this year are real life savers when I’m stressed the fuck out.

The snow biome theme from Terraria is an absolute gem.

This is key. A decade ago I did all three days at the New England Metal and Hardcore festival. Bodies fell from the sky on me. I got punched in the back of the head. I was almost knocked out on multiple occasions. I lost my glasses and was blind for most of the trip. What hurt the most was my feet. The pain was only alleviated when I was running around in the pit and walking back to my motel. I was in my early 20s then. I can’t imagine doing that now.

Nothing is worse than my 3 piece Popeyes combo with fries and a Dr. Pepper going from $7.49 to $15 over 4 years.

This is the first Diablo game that I’ve uninstalled within a year of getting it. The fact that it’s only been a couple months and it got worse not better makes this worse. It’s a seriously flawed game, and expansions won’t help it.

Yeah, it’s amazing how quickly it came and went. By the time I graduated highschool in 10 it was already falling out of fashion. You could still kinda tell who was apart of it though. The clown makeup went away, but the bangs remained for a while.

Scene kids was a period after goths and before hipsters. It peaked before Myspace was taken over by Facebook. So like 2007-2009. By the time most of them moved on to college, hipsters became a thing and a lot of them grew into that or conformed in some way.

Same. Even as a metalhead adjacent to them, they were still a strange breed of kids. They were harmless though. I couldn’t stand the kids that shit on them for entertainment.

It’s kinda weird and heartwarming to be 30 something and see that style making a comeback. I hope they live as weird a life as we did back then.