I've been on a pretty bad streak with gaming lately. With every passing day I lose more and more confidence in modern game development. Looking for a fun brain dead action game with contemporary graphics, I installed "Guardians of the Galaxy" via Game Pass, and it was such a stinker that I couldn't even be bothered to review it. The writing was funny, but you barely got to play! It was a game of cut-scenes, and when combat did occur, it was so bolted on that it was almost worthless. It felt like a prototypical example of a game made by Hollywood wannabes or rejects, who said as an afterthought "Oh wait, we need to make this interactive somehow..."

Then I turned to my self-granted monthly allowance, and purchased "Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes." It's also so bad that I don't know if I can even bring myself to play it long enough to review it properly: non-stop cut-scenes and tutorial interruptions. When there is gameplay, it's chugging along in the low twenties or teens on the Switch's pathetic hardware. The writing seems to be targeted for a "Teletubbies" age-range audience: war going on, army incoming, and here the characters are all smiling, "Thanks so much for your help!" in these really exaggerated tones of voice... it's totally incongruent, I can't take it seriously at all. The game also prominently features this totally androgynous character, for the life of me I've no clue if it's male or female.

Yikes.

I have been enjoying a second attempt at playing through "Cyberpunk 2077" at least, so much so that I may re-review it, except this time for the Series X. A lot of the visual goofiness and constant bugs I encountered the first time around are gone, and the game is quite the looker now, even without the ray traced reflections and global illumination I enjoyed in the Windows version. Maybe things will pick up overall for me soon: the Atari 50th anniversary collection comes out on November 11, followed quickly by the new Pokemon titles on November 18. Siralim Ultimate comes out in early December for Switch, finally-- a game which happens to have the best video game song of the past twenty years, incidentally.

On the balance though, I'm not only seeing nothing moving the industry forward, but it's actively regressing on top of it.