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Everything Everywhere Once A Week - 10/14/2022
🕑 Added 2022-10-14 16:52:04 +0000 UTCHello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week. This is one of those weeks where I assumed I had way more time than actually exists, so I’ll be integrating some stuff I planned to write over this week into this newsletter. There’s kinda just not a lot in the news this week, so!
We're experimenting a bit by making things public here so let's see if it works!
Street Fighter 6 Could Be A Game of the Year If I Stop Being Bad At It
This past weekend, I participated in a very-closed beta of Street Fighter 6, a game I have played several times since June and think is just aces. The previous times I have played it, however, I did so usually capturing footage or playing against Linkshell’s Michael Higham, who is good at Street Fighter but I’m not going to get infuriated at my friend. I am going to get very infuriated at Timmy426 or whatever that guy’s name is, though, because I know I was better than him and still got my ass kicked.
Like, I lost badly. I am sure I am not that bad, but I was on tilt. And it’s a testament to how absolutely great Street Fighter 6 is that I kept playing despite getting so mad that I turned to my partner and said “I legitimately hate this person.”
Do I actually hate them? Probably not! Was I still having fun losing as Kimberly? It may be hard to tell through my furrowed brow and general scowl, but yeah, I was. Street Fighter 6 still plays smooth as butter and it’s a testament to the modern control scheme that I kept getting my ass handed to me by someone using it. It did not feel unfair, I felt like I was losing for reasons that were largely my fault.
But more importantly, Street Fighter 6 feels like the definition of a lesson learned. Games are as iterative as any other creative endeavor and someone took the time to sit and look at Street Fighter V, and possibly the rumored doomed Ono version of Street Fighter 6, and saw what did not work. They studied it. They sanded the edges without compromising the ethos.
There’s been no release date for Street Fighter 6 so far, but it’s fairly obviously going to release in 2023. Even with some heavy hitters already announced for next year, I do wonder if SF6 can make a genuine run at Game of the Year. Maybe its ability to top that list for me will be inextricably linked to my own ability to beat people I think I should be able to beat. Or maybe the act of getting actually good enough to do that is what’s going to vault it over that line. We’ll have to see.
I Wanted to Review She-Hulk But Instead I’m At Kinda Funny’s Studios
Whoops! The newsletter you’re reading today was actually written yesterday. I’m spending today helping my old friends at Kinda Funny with their new studio launch. And by helping, I mean hanging out backstage and eating their food. Unfortunately, at time of writing, I have not seen the final episode of She-Hulk yet. I expect I will actually review that next week, but I’ve liked everything so far.
I’ll also, while I’m talking about streaming TV here, mention that Andor is really damn good. Like, if you like heists and character writing, go watch that show.
It kind of baffles me that there’s a new Game of Thrones show, a Lord of the Rings show, and a great new Star Wars show but it’s somehow the one getting the least discussion and buzz. I kind of wonder if you can lay that at the feet of the not-great Star Wars things in recent years or even at the actually good things that have nevertheless contributed to overall fatigue.
Either way, if you feel like you can take some more laser sound and ship whooshes, Andor’s definitely a thing you should watch.
There’s Going to Be A $1500 Meta Quest For No One
At this week’s Meta Connect — formerly Oculus Connect for what was formerly the Oculus VR family of headsets — the company that may or may not have permanently ruined western culture talked about VR. In this time, they announced that they are releasing a new Meta Quest, their wireless headset, called Meta Quest Pro.
For $1500 American dollars.
Now, the logical answer here is that Meta is aiming this headset at enterprise users who need a headset for…something. And they’re intendending to sell this headset, whose battery lasts one (American or non-American) hour, to companies en masse so they can have VR headsets for their meetings. The logic, I think, is that ten headsets is cheaper than an office but also that math doesn’t make sense if you think about it for longer than ten seconds or that Zoom is cheaper than either.
Meta is taking it as a given, for some reason, that we’re all just going to move into VR spaces for work and is trying to get ahead of that inevitability by charging a premium for access. Which is a lot like me assuming that we’re all going to start needing cat hair to live and shaving my cats proactively to sell their hair to people for $1000 each. No, really, you’re going to need this, I’m not going to explain why, I’m just saying you need this and have to pay me money for it.
You’d be forgiven for thinking this is Meta ceding the gaming market, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. I think they’re ceding the AAA VR market, with your Resident Evil Villages and what have you, to PlayStation. Their acquisitions of Camouflaj, Twisted Pixel, and Armature indicate they’re still in for a lower-end market of cheaper and cheaper-made games. But they’re rapidly running out of road to explain what this vision looks like for anyone.
Is VR the future, a future, is it for gaming, is it for work, is it neither, is it both, or is it being shoved down people’s throats but not even the people doing the shoving know whose throats they should be aiming for?
Overwatch 2 Stumbles Out of the Gate and then Back in the Gate and then Back Out the Gate Again
It’s been a rough launch for Overwatch 2, the muted sequel to one of the biggest multiplayer shooters of the last decade. Having gone free-to-play, Overwatch 2 wanted to stop accounts from evading bans, so they required phone numbers for new accounts. But to be an effective deterrent, they banned prepaid numbers, which effectively cut off a number of people who don’t have extensive long-term cellphone plans. I used to sling phones at Best Buy and can tell you sometimes people just don’t want the newest phone or a 5G network or to sign on for a two-year contract with Verizon. Sometimes they can’t afford it and that’s a perfectly valid reason, too.
Blizzard ended up kind of partially undoing this unlocking the phone requirement for people who already owned Overwatch 1, and thus would be losing a fair bit of their entitlements if they popped a new account to ban evade, but leaving it in place for everyone else. Which feels a bit like the appearance of doing something without actually doing anything or simply doing it for a small subset of people but not actually fixing it.
This would be an own-goal in a vacuum, but it’s set against the backdrop of just everything going wrong with the game. Overwatch 2 is technically Early Access but only insofar as the main campaign — the reason it is called Overwatch 2 — is not anywhere close to ready or available yet. In theory, it also gives Blizzard space to let things go wrong without much criticism or mockery, but things are going wrong and they’re being both criticized and mocked.
Both Bastion and Torbjorn, characters from the now-dead Overwatch 1, have been disabled due to glitches.Torbjorn is still available in Quick Play, but Bastion has been so thoroughly nuked from the game that even attempting to access its character profile just quickly shifts to Cassidy instead in a sitcom-like act of shifting your attention.
It happens, especially as games become both more complicated to make and more of a service than ever. But it makes Overwatch 2 an easy target because the game itself feels so unnecessary to exist. Why is this called Overwatch 2? Why did Overwatch 1 die, not just with the recent shutdown but the slow strangulation that occurred over the years of petering out, for what essentially amounts to lighting changes? Is it so we could relaunch and remove Bastion because he literally got too powerful?
You Can Put Custom Video Files On Your Steam Deck Opening So This Guy Put The Entirety of Shrek So He Has to Wait For It to Finish Every Time
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/y3htzd/help_ive_set_my_boot_video_to_shrek_and_now_i/
He seemingly regrets it.
Materia Possessions First Episode
Hey! We recorded the first episode of Materia Possessions! I have to, uh, replace the file for some EQ reasons and I have not quite figured out how to both make it public and make Patreon host it, so we’re going through some growing pains here. This episode talks about Overwatch 2, Natalie’s orthodontist telling her not to get sunlight on her wisdom teeth extraction, and absolutely no publicly bad feelings about any former employers any of us might have.
Since I have to replace the file I won’t link it directly, but you can find the first episode (and presumably all other episodes) on the Patreon feed.
Things to Look Forward to This Week
- A bunch of embargoes are expiring in the next week or two, so expect some of that writing here!
