I'll add in Tokyo Xtreme Racer to your list. While it's limited to Tokyo's expressways, it does those very very well. And it features some delightful japanese jank too. Top notch game.
Also worth mentioning are the touge battles in the original GRID. Though, dissapointingly, I couldn't find this one for sale anywhere - you might have to source it on the seven seas.
This would make sense if they hadn't increased the price of their hardware twice in one year. To me it just looks like they started behaving like a monopolistic company (because they can, as xbox is in the shitter)
It's alright. Spent a few hundred hours when it launched but haven't picked it up since. It has its moments and it has the bethesda rpg dna ( for better or worse ) so if you like bethesda games there's a chance you'll like it. In short: Gunplay and shipbuilding are pretty great imo. Questlines - some good some bad, but most are very milquetoast. Base building is meh. Exploration kinda blows and all the planetside POIs are extremely repetitive.
Hey Peko! No option to change that prepper's language Peko!
That would explain the 1000 people laid off. They could be preparing the terrain. Gotta keep the mouse growing amirite?
300 million would kinda make sense, as it would mean an avg of 60k/year for a five year production on a 1000 people team. But how many AAA games are actually that large?
It helps, since there's A LOT of context to it. They also have a "story so far" option in the DS2 menu but I haven't tried it. Or just watch a yt story/playthrough, because playing them both back to back is not really something i'd recommend. DS is a long game.
I have an app ( feedMe I think) that also pulls the text from the web version along with the 1-sentence feed and ocasionally a header image. Very useful on an eink device, but not sure if it works with pcgamer, because it can't pass some ad-walls/pay-walls.
However I feel RSS had a small part to play in the state of web today. If everyone were to use RSS how would writers get paid? Donations are too unreliable, subscriptions are frowned on, sponsorships are incompatible with the job and taxes really only work for state media like the BBC. People gotta eat, no?
I was in your shoes just today lol. I've got about 50h of gametime and bought a platinum pack because I heard 75% off is fairly rare. I don't really feel bad about it - even if I stop playing today, it was well worth it.
The monetization doesn't feel too aggressive, it seems fairly balanced, but it does have some annoyances. Not sure how similar mmos behave, but the amount of weeklies, dailies, battle passes, layers upon layers of complexity and currencies, and other mild fomo does get old. I suppose servers need to be kept up, and they've been successful at the pay-for-convenience model for the past 13 years, so they must be doing something right.
Luckily the gameplay and the overall loop is fun, the pve is pretty good and the community seems to be one of the better ones.
You might feel better if you'd take off the completionist glasses. The amount of grinding and farming to get everything without paying is indeed annoying but again, it's a 13yo game, the backlog adds up.
I friggin loved Everybody's Gone to the Rapture! It was like listening to those dramas on british radio, but set at your own pace. And it had the most excellent 80s UK vibe.
Wait, they did not already do this before AI? Did they just hire solely based on portfolio or what?
Honestly the biggest reason might be the population density and structure in Japan. People live and travel between large metropolises, and those are relatively close, so this makes train travel more cost-effective.
Otherwise, this "only" makes the shinkansen great. Because regional and local trains are pretty much the same as any developed country ( albeit very very punctual ). Great train networks aren't limited to Japan. European trains fare the same except some lack of punctuality, and the lack of central backbone, due to the amount of international borders. Chinese high speed rail is actually better quality-wise and more connected than in Japan, but local trains are meh and extremely crowded. Honestly it feels like the US is the outlier here, because they had decent rail and managed to fuck it up in favour of road traffic.