I’ll never get past the Dangerous Hunts games since some management somewhere at Cabela’s had to approve a hunting game with deep lore about a literal shapeshifting demon and chimpanzee supersoldiers.

In Wasteland 2 there is a museum of pre-war artifacts. One item is an undetonated nuclear bomb. If you monkey around with it you can find a big red button. It is obviously a terrible idea to push the button. If you still decide to push it you get a special game over screen.

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Speaking of disrespectful, the rules for this community specify that posts must be photographs.

Respeccing. It shouldn’t be infinitely free, but I like games that allow you to pay (usually increasing amounts) to respec.

Related to this, in older games without this it was common practice to save up your skillpoints and just sit on them until you’d gotten a little further into the game and hopefully had a better idea how to spend them. What was massively frustrating in older games were when leveling up forced you to immediately spend the points instead of sitting on them.

I thought about my answer, since many mechanics I don’t like can have good implementations, or at the very least are a sort of lesser of two evils kind of thing.

What I can’t stand are tactical or RPG games with realtime or turn based combat option toggles. I play many games with one or the other and enjoy them, but when I play a game with both that can be toggled in options I always feel like neither setting feels perfectly right. The balance is always off no matter what. Understandable with game devs having to double the amount of work for creating combat and tuning items and it ends up feeling a little soggy every time.

It’s very obnoxious. What’s worse is when the secret areas provide armor or weapons that feel mandatory to beat the level with. If the secrets are just for a score I can at least ignore them.

Level scaling. It’s a mechanic designers put in because they think the game needs to stay challenging, which is true but I’ve never agreed with level scaling as the answer.

The least bad implementations (but still not good) at least replace low level enemies with different kinds of enemies entirely. The worst, most lazy implementations just increase existing enemy HP and damage.

I think it is much better to have different locations or zones where different ranges of enemies spawn, with more powerful enemies tuned to the expected level of a player character for the quests in the zone.

And then it goes into a sewer.

I blame the Tylenol.

I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?

The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.

I am now.

The idea of ranking games on a numerical scale is inherently flawed. I suspect many publications still use it as a way to make nice with game publishers. Text that’s lukewarm can slap a 9/10 score on and a lot of people just jump over the review to the “objective” score.

I feel it’s important

Genuinely, why?

Not all YouTubers are quality. This is obvious. What I am saying is that I’ve found a mere handful who are quality and for my tastes they have replaced the entire legacy professional gaming journalistic media. Other people I’m sure can find similar YouTubers who cater to their tastes and opinions.

That might be exactly part of why gaming journalism is irrelevant.

If the “news” about an upcoming game is just repeating developer hype, then it’s just useless noise. At that point the only thing that matters are reviews, and independent YouTubers are beating the professionals in quality and trustworthiness.

So what’s left? Actual dry industry news? I suppose some small amount of people care, but not enough to support the amount of gaming journalists out there.

click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism

Gaming journalism has been overrun with that.

What I, and I think many people, want are trustworthy, knowledgable reviews.

I can’t trust any of the major publications. I trust a small handful of YouTubers who are giving me more of what I want than the entire professional industry.

Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.

Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.

I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.

Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.

The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements, and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need? (Or more importantly: How many of those people can it financially support?)

As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There’s about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven’t felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.

I can’t be certain, but I suspect a lot of gamers are completely burnt out on the professional gaming journalism industry.

A wrinkle to this case is that Federally marijuana is in the most restricted category. It’s above meth or cocaine.

Obviously a lot of people consider those drugs more harmful than marijuana, but if we are playing the legal game then marijuana is legislated as being more dangerous and that’s what the court has to work with.

SCOTUS I think has to decide if controlled substance use as a whole can prohibit legally buying a gun or not. I’m not sure if they can just make a carveout for marijuana. (Also the person taking the case up had cocaine too, so it can’t not be brought up.)

You’d be surprised how many 2A people, who are across the political spectrum, are fine with removing that category of prohibition entirely. However I wonder if it will make SCOTUS more hesitant to make such an “extreme” ruling.