Count me as part of the latter, despite living here my entire life. The last Nashville ice storm happened in 1987 when I was only months old.

I don't know why our grid failed to withstand this ice storm, but blaming the GOP is probably a good starting point, given...well...everything...

I feel even better now, unsubbing to Twitch earlier this month.

Hasan and other anti-Zionist streamers get suspended for this while Asmongold gets to roam free, spouting way more heinous Nazi garbage every day?

Screw them.

I'm pretty certain it was Double Dragon on my older brother's Sega Master System when I was 5 in 1991.

I remember being absorbed by the gameplay while also being terrified by the sorta jump scare title menu, lol

Funnily enough, I got an email from that EGM Compendium Kickstarter that I donated to in October 2024, and a few other physical books with gaming related stuff.

At this point, I'm going to read those books until this online bullshit passes over.

I get the industry is bad, but Jesus Christ.

I get that the news will be shitty for the indefinite future, but I can't even escape to gaming news because too much of it is built on hate mongering, including ftom more neutral channels.

Yeah, gaming media has always talked about shitty games but often in conjunction with other things. Not this.

I only kept FB open, so people who want to speak with me directly can do that, via messenger. But otherwise? I haven't visited since the year started.

I just thought it was FB and Twitter, but now, I might need to do reddit and maybe YT where this godawful news and Highguard discourse manifested.

Yhe industry deemed the 2010s gaming blogs as the scourge behind the discourse after Gamergate, and they decided to side with "real" fans (i.e., YouTubers) as a response.

Alas, that decade since GG induced so much right-wing brain rot that the grifters became far worse than the journalists.

But no, go ahead and trot out your "Concord 2" memes as if that's going to fix this cursed industry, or even the right-wing poisoning of everything surrounding the culture.

If I told my 8-year-old self the shit show this would all be in three decades, I'm sure he would feel really sad.

Maybe if that energy was channeled to encourage others to try more great games that desperately need an audience, that might encourage more studios to make smaller scale titles with a reasonable budget and shorter dev time, so we don't wait in frustration for 6+ years for them to finish anything.

And judging by today's Steam reviews and numbers, you guys will get your wish. Congrats. You beat the small company with a game you don't like. Then what?

More layoffs, studio closures, and the industry get more enshittified as we wait for GTAVI to (not) save it by November. Well done, everyone.

But apparently, anything other than utter rejection is shilling for shit games in this age of hyperbolic criticism, and worthy of calling me "an old man off his meds" or a "chatGPT troll bot".

Fuck all the way off with that nonsense. All for a game that most of you won't care about in a month.

More to the gamer BS, look. I get that Highguard is the last thing most people wanted, but will one more f2p hero shooter ruin your goddamn year? No. The level of hate mongering surrounding this game is absurd. Either try it or don't, but move the fuck on and play/talk about literally anything else.

In other words, the Jesse Pinkman rule.

He says "bitch" more than anyone on Breaking Bad, yet never once called any female character that word on the show. Not to his girlfriends. Not Skylar. Not even to the meth head sex worker that he sometimes spoke with.

It was always men. Awful men at that.

Right? lol

I even bought his book. It was the least I can do for years of free entertainment he provided (and I'm assuming still does provide)

Even as a former Apex player who likes and understands what the devs are doing with Highguard, you're not wrong.

After the devs fix the optimization woes, the devs need to streamline some of these systems and maybe add more players. As is, HG is great for a specific type of player and no one else.

That last image looks like Trump if he transformed into a Dark Souls boss.

LOL, I was thinking of posting that very song, but I wasn't sure if it was appropriate for the situation.

My apologies, queen.