From what I remember hearing people say he's mostly alright, but occasionally gets things wrong or gives the wrong take when something is not in his field of specialization.

I think the Hasbro OGL scandal last year was one instance of him missing the point and not doing his research, for example.

Does anyone remember Checo's last good wet performance? I know he's had some in the past, but over the past few years he's been looking incredibly poor in wet conditions.

Don't know why I'm not hyped about this game. It should appeal to me. I love a cyberpunky dystopia, retro-futurism is perhaps my favourite aesthetic and early 2000s influences should be prime nostalgia bait for me. But I've watched some trailers and it just isn't hitting the spot for me. It looks like it's going for more comedy, so maybe the humour comes through better in the actual game?

Can someone who played it fill me in? Is it actually good? Is the combat actually good? I heard mixed things from people during the betas.

I quit cold turkey too. Took a lot of willpower since I loved smoking. I think the psychological aspect is the stickiest part of my addiction. Even though the physical addiction has to have subsided by now I'll never stop missing the intangibles. The small meditative aspect to smoke breaks, gathering your thoughts. The smoke alongside your black morning coffee. Always having something to keep your hands busy, like a social shield when you're among people or preventing boredom and loneliness when you're waiting for a train. Even the taste of it, that I unironically enjoyed.

Never was a Camel man myself, though. I actually really liked Gitanes when I was in France, otherwise Benson & Hedges was my brand. Smoked a lot of Luckies too, though. We're easier to find around here.

Yeah I can't see mid-meal smokes doing much to enhance the flavour of the turkey. The only well advised part of the whole thing is smoking with the coffee after the meal. That's the stuff right there.

Well, the best advice would be not to smoke, but you know.

God I feel you. When did you stop craving smokes? It's been like 8 years for me and I still crave them occasionally. Hell, I still get the odd dream about smoking some nights.

Though even with that said, I actually enjoy looking at these ads. But maybe I'm just masochistic.

My first exposure was when DDO went from subscription model to free-to-play but with microtransactions in 09.

At the time I thought it was a great idea as it ended up cheaper to sustain for me than paying monthly (since many dungeons were skippable and you could also earn cash shop currency by grinding) which led me to have a confusingly positive association with the concept of microtransactions for quite a while.

Farmville is an excellent major milestone as well. I completely agree with your take. It releasing in 09 again kind of reinforces my thinking that the 06-09 period is sort of a good endpoint for the era I'm thinking of.

I think you're onto something and what I'm landing on as an endpoint is somewhere vaguely between 2006-09. We have several massively influential events in this period that shaped the following decade both in terms of design and monetisation.

I think both the Horse Armor in 06 and TF2 adding hats in 09 are good markers for the direction monetisation would take over the coming decades.

Design wise I think the release of the first Assassin's Creed in 07 - which set the precedent for the now-ubiquitous checklist-filled "UbiSoft style open world game" - is a fairly important marker. It's a bit of a watershed game, actually.

On a larger scale, the seventh gen consoles coming out in 06 also marked a shift I think. More and more PC games were being developed with multi-platform releases in mind. The identity of PC gaming became slightly more diluted.

These consoles also had internet access, which - together with the by then prevalent broadband internet - contributed to the death of the expansion pack.

I think there is too much bad happening at present day to call it a true golden age, but I might be wrong. Depends on your definition. There are certainly plenty of good games coming out. Maybe it's a golden age of indie games? Overall though, predatory monetisation is rampant, pre-order scams and shovelware mobile games are abundant. Gacha games have conquered the world and continued the EA Sports tradition of selling gambling products to children. Shareholders dominate the business more than ever, we have mass layoffs happening everywhere, mods are getting copyright struck, we have normalised rootkit DRM and always-online singleplayer games... I could go on.

Same! I remember thinking the 3D globe was so cool compared to other RTSes, and I loved going around in a hot air balloon spawning volcanos and other hijinks. Good times.

If you haven't played this classic you should. Perfect platformer, and the musical levels alone are worth the price of admission, especially at 85% off.