@HalcyonScarlet: I wish my opinion of Knight improved upon revisiting it but I just find myself crapping out quicker and quicker on it each time I pick it up for another go.

But my complaints are mostly about how it doesn't feel like a true blue natural sequel to City and is doing a bunch of stuff just to tick off the boxes people expect a sequel to fill. There's been clamoring for the Bat-mobile so find a way to force that in. People want the whole city so make that happen. Everyone loves the Joker so bring him back. Wouldn't it be cool to do the Jason Todd Red Hood reveal but with a twist?

That's my issue with the game being so lazy with how much of the "new" is handled and why it doesn't sit well with me. Feels like Jason Todd just became a spur of the moment idea in the writing room and never something organically planned out which is why we needed the heavy handed handling of his backstory so people knew who the **** he was when it was finally revealed. Might have been a touch cooler if Jason was the Robin in City and his death occurs between games.

The whole thing just felt like Rocksteady had to do a sequel and so Knight was them going through the motions. Where City felt like a proper evolution of Asylum by addressing certain issues like toning down Detective Vision, giving Batman more area to play in, expanding his arsenal of gadgets to fit the situation, and putting his rivalry with Joker looming over the story as there are still fallout from the first game.

Knight at the end of the day was more of the same when it was a chance to expand being Batman in a crisis situation to doing what Spider-Man does and putting you in the shoes of Batman before everything goes south and the entire city as stake. It's the same concept as City but without the gang related textures and trash all over the place. Just gangs controlling territory for big villains. Again.

And game concepts are fine when the feel natural to the game. Riddler going from testing Batman's cunning, physical prowess, and reflexes through a variety of challenges both great and small to do all the time trials to unlock Catwoman just feels weird and wrong for the characters involved. They had defined roles and they were thrown out for no reason other than they needed another area to show off a new game mechanic... and making a handful of race tracks with times to beat is way easier than dozens upon dozens upon dozens of micro challenges strewn across the map involving all manner of ideas to complete. In other words lazy.

I play co-op with my friend group on a number of things like Deep Rock Galactic, Left 4 Dead 2, Minecraft, Project Zomboid, and so forth but don't really play anything competitively anymore because I just don't care enough to put that sort of time into a game anymore.

If my friends aren't on then I'm content to play a wide assortment of single player games where I don't have to deal with other people's shit.

@ghosts4ever: Because Arkham Knight sucked. Top to bottom. Arkham City was my favorite game that generation and Knight was awful.

For starters the story was not only a rethread of the first game (emptying the asylum/city) but you see the "twist" coming from a mile away with the remixed Red Hood storyline being "borrowed" to create the Arkham Knight. To cap that off pretty much everyone phones it in except Mark Hamill but at the same time much of his role in the game is unneeded but they killed Joker in the last game so gotta find a way to include that icon of a villain. Go back and watch Oracle's fake death scene and tell me anything about the aftermath made you think it was real. Was it Conroy's simple utterance of "no" before moving on like nothing happened?

Gameplay wise the whole thing revolves around the Bat-Tank which feels more akin to something out of Armored Core than Batman and really starts throwing things into question as to how the **** Batman isn't killing anyone despite running them down doing over 100 mph in an armored tank with a jet engine strapped to it and discharging high voltages of electricity to render victims unconscious upon contact.

This stupid thing took over the game so much not only is it used to solve nearly every puzzle like Gotham civil engineers figured everyone would have a Bat-Tank of their own to power elevators and doors but motherfucking Riddler builds entire race tracks for you under Gotham and kidnaps Catwoman who gets to stand on a square for the entire game until you do all the Riddler challenges which used to be inventive puzzles to earn trophies but are now just races and time trials because Bat-Tank.

And the damn thing isn't even fun to drive but it does really show you how much of the world map was designed to let you fly around in that with no regard to actual city layout leaving Gotham to feel like it was made to house Batman instead of Batman being made to work within Gotham.

Arkham City was superior in every possible way to Knight.

As for Spider-Man sure it takes inspiration from what Rocksteady but that's what the industry is all about. Not only is this an extremely solid outing for the start of a new franchise but it's one that gets me excited for what comes next. Arkham Knight pretty much killed my desire to see more games in that series. It wasn't supposed to reinvent the wheel, it was supposed to deliver a great Spider-Man experience after two generations of Activision missing the mark repeatedly.

Oh and the boss fights in Spider-Man are actually fun, engaging, and test your skills. The Arkham series always struggled with boss fights outside of Mr. Freeze and Arkham Knight was no different.

@dimebag667: My point wasn't that all pursuits of such fads are a waste of time, money, and resources but rather done so by teams/studios/publishers who don't understand their audiences and just look to trends for their design choices.

Crafting made sense in Last of Us with the setting and story being told. Know where it didn't make sense? Dead Space 3. But there's an entire crafting system in that game solely there to charge microtransaction fees to those who don't wanna grind for materials. Remember all the knock-off Minecraft games that used to plague Xbox Live Arcade and such? Existing to either dupe unsuspecting customers into buying something they thought was Minecraft or misrepresent what the product is because they know Minecraft is much more popular.

That's the point. Just cause the team thinks it is worth pursuing doesn't mean it always is and if the team pursues something that isn't worth it the issue isn't with the consumer because they liked something else that contained said feature or whatever. It's the team's fault for not understanding their audience and wasting time, money, and resources on things no one wants who would buy their game.

Naughty Dog took a gamble with Uncharted 2's multi-player and it paid off but at the same time including some sort of co-op horde mode wasn't really that much of a stretch given the core gameplay and how often you will fight alongside NPC's in an area where you have to outlast enemies swarming in from all over.

On the flip side of that though is something like Spec Ops: The Line's multi-player mode which is totally at odds with the story being told and the reason that story is being told. The entire mode was dead on arrival and became a point of mockery for being tone deaf when the main story is about exposing the harsh realities of war and the horrors that stay with us even when the conflict itself is long over only for multi-player to be a third person Call of Duty wannabe experience.

Teams wasting their time on that stuff have no one to blame but themselves and management.

@dimebag667: Poorly managed teams and studios wasting time/resources on things that don't matter? Same shit different generation, no different than when studios felt the need to cram in a multi-player component to make the game seem like it has more of a value. Or when studios thought everything needed survival crafting mechanics in the game. Or the battle royale craze. Or the MMO bubble. Remember when everyone wanted to be Call of Duty?

There's thinking you know your audience and then knowing your audience. Companies like 343 don't actually know their audience and thus waste time on things which people don't care about.

All those games you pointed to have come from poorly managed studios/teams/publishers which don't know their audiences. Some of them have had issues with the same crap I listed above and chasing fads.

Same shit. Different generation.

Anyone else smell bullshit?

Expectations don't come out of thin air and much of what people were anticipating from Halo Infinite came from 343 themselves showing the product off well before it was ready and they knew what they could accomplish. They had a whole god damn reveal trailer for their stupid fucking engine and talked up all this stuff that it ultimately struggled to do.

And what's worse about all this is that Halo Infinite's biggest failure is a worthless multi-player mode that doesn't hold a candle to what Bungie did on the 360 or even 343's own work on the Master Chief Collection.

If you call something a live service people expect it to be supported as such. Not receiving less content than a 360 game which relied on DLC map packs to add more content.

No one forced 343 to make their own engine and tools. No one made 343 over promise and under deliver.

It's insane how some studios out there can release games without issue or even if they are lacking content get it out in a timely manner filling those voids but the studios that can't want us to believe the problem is we expect a quality product for our money.

Color me intrigued.

I enjoy Retro Bowl now and then on my phone when I'm bored.

I've also got a Gamecube and PS2 emulator on my phone which both work great with my Xbox Core controller. Use that setup at work and enjoy playing through some classics I haven't played in years. Don't really think those count though.

Looks like it unlocked early. Did another download for me and is now playable after saying I had around two hours left.

My favorite part about this whole "Intel might shut down their GPU division!!!" nonsense is how when you do any actual looking into it that's not really in the cards and makes zero sense from a business standpoint considering they've got a multi-year multi-generation roadmap in place which investors likely won't respond well to suddenly see that all get axed.

Even the analyst firm suggesting who asked the question if Intel should says they are basically blind to the situation and it's a 50/50 guess, at best, on their part as they don't know the long term plans of Intel and are just looking at what lost them money IF they want a quick turn around to report profits next quarter.

**** even Gamer Nexus says it's unlikely that Intel walks away from this and the Intel rep even stated that, on their channel, that they were anticipating things being a rough go at first.

And yet somehow this idea keeps persisting that because the driver situation is bad Intel is gonna pull the plug on the whole thing. Pointing to Intel shutting down Optane recently when it started over 5 years ago and never turned a profit just feels dumb to use as proof that Intel will shut this operation down so quickly because of bad drivers for the first generation of GPU's.

If you thought Intel was gonna compete with AMD and NVIDIA right out the gate you're an idiot.