They have their own database. If there’s a release or a rumor they don’t know about, you can suggest one, but they ask you to cite your sources. If it’s got a Steam page and you provide that link, they’ll basically add it right away, which is what happened when I got Total Chaos added. Fantasy Critic also gives league commissioners a lot of power to house rule just about anything.
Correct, you don’t know that. You can speculate on releases, like I did with Pony Island 2, and get counter picked as a punishment for the risk. As long as it’s in the site’s database, it’s fair game. I drafted “Unannounced 3D Mario Game” this year, but then I picked up “Unannounced 3D Donkey Kong Game” after the draft for 1 in-game dollar (no one else put in a bid for it), as a hedge, since the rumor was that either a Mario or a Donkey Kong game would be made by the Mario Odyssey team for the Switch 2 launch. No one counter-picked Mario, so I’m allowed to drop it, and the Donkey Kong entry automatically updated to Bananza. The “season” is a calendar year. We do our draft early in January, and typically the first release of the year will be like halfway through the month, and the score that each game earns is whatever score it has at the stroke of midnight on January 1st.
Because we don’t know every release a year in advance, A) this game got a lot harder starting back in 2022, because that’s when game marketing cycles got way shorter, and B) some of the best reviewing games of 2025 probably won’t even be announced until this coming June.
Yes, it is fantasy sports but with video games. You draft games, and your points are determined by their score on Open Critic. Over 70 gains points, under 70 loses points. Every point over 90 is worth double. The way my friends and I structure our league, we have one counter pick during the draft, and the counter picker gets the inverse of the points of that game; so if I have a friend who drafts Kirby Air Riders, and I counter pick it, and it scores 67, my friend loses 3 points and I gain 3 points. If I counter pick a game that scores positive points, I lose those points instead.
The only game on my roster that has released so far is Knights in Tight Spaces, which only got me 6 points (I aim for about 13 points per game), because it scored a 76 on Open Critic, and I was perhaps a bit too risky when I drafted Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, because I got counter picked on it, and it doesn’t have a release date, so I might be stuck with a game that scores 0 points due to not releasing this year.
I don’t know. As far as I can tell, it’s only searchable for the current calendar year, and we can view games we had on our roster in the same league in previous years. No one had any of those games on their roster. The site differentiates between remasters, remakes, and reimaginings, with a reimagining being something like Resident Evil 2 or Final Fantasy VII Remake. We used to not allow remakes, but we changed the rules for our league starting last year (personally, I voted against it, but I was outvoted). The league commissioner can always override a decision that the site makes when categorizing a game.
I hear this rhetoric a lot, which shows me that a ton of people have a much harder time than me finding the good stuff, even though there’s so much of it out there.
We both know tariffs have little to do with this game, but it was very possible to see them coming 2-3 years ago if you listened to that man speak.
The story was the most interesting thing about Starfield, since like me, the writers of Starfield also really loved the movie Interstellar. Unfortunately, nearly every plot line sort of wrapped up in an unfulfilling way for one reason or another.
I think the gist of Bethesda games is that what they did was truly impressive 20 years ago, but each individual piece of them is kind of bad. The combat is bad, the story is bad, the RPG systems are way worse than their pen and paper roots, the NPC schedules tend to do little more than make quest givers just appear in slightly different locations, and what should be dynamic uses of physics and NPC line of sight never manifests in anything more interesting than putting a bucket on a shop keeper’s head to steal things.
There’s nothing quite like a Bethesda game, because I think when another developer sits down to make a new game, they try to make one or more of those pieces way better than a Bethesda game rather than implementing everything that Bethesda implements, because plenty of it is bad and will be bad without being able to focus on it.
I play Fantasy Critic with some friends. We allow remakes in our league but not remasters. This one counts as a remake for purposes of this site, with a flag on it to note that it was contentious. This game definitely blurs some lines on some definitions.
I’m no professional, I just love gaming news
Judging by how these posts are taken here, I think once you’re done vacationing, you could look into doing this professionally.
It’s cool that Breath of Fire IV has that tag saying that the game was picked up due to the dream list, but I’ve got some concerns about what GOG will or won’t touch. Someone here on Lemmy pointed out correctly that these are always the PC versions of games in the Good Old Games program. Several of the games they’ve picked up recently are games that I only ever thought of as console games and didn’t know that they had PC versions. The problem with that is that up until approximately a few years into the life of the Xbox 360, it was quite common to have a PC version that didn’t resemble the console versions of the same title at all. For instance, the Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter games on PC have the same stories and voice lines, but the levels and gameplay mechanics are totally different. Spider-Man 2, based on the movie, is immensely important in video game history, but only the console version; the PC version is widely considered to be garbage. 007: Nightfire is on the dream list, but everyone there is sure to mention that the one people want is the console version. Anyway, I hope they can figure this out and start getting some classic console games saved just as well as the PC versions, and I hope that the PC versions they’re choosing aren’t compromised compared to the ones that are so fondly remembered.
Nor me either, but I’m going to start packing my parachute now. You probably said the same about Reddit a few times before you ended up here, too.
Indies are making now what would have been AAA back then. And as many great games as there were back then, we get more now. Back then, it was possible to keep up with just about every major release as it came out. Now I’ve got a backlog of 9 games that piqued my interest and came out this year that I haven’t had time to get around to yet, and it’s only April.
Including in this interview, but not in my summary.
The first person who attributed issues at BioWare to Jennifer Hepler, without understanding how any of it works, only called for her to be fired too.
Oh, I’ve seen the “criticism”, and you can’t point it all at one person, hence the problem. You make a target out of someone without understanding it.
Nah, don’t try to pass this off as, “I was only joking, bro”. People get real death threats when this kind of shit happens in forums. I remember the Jennifer Hepler stuff, and there was just as much expert analysis that went into her witch hunt back then.
One man is not responsible for all of your criticisms of writing in their games for decades. The writing and development processes of games are too opaque for you to be able to attribute anything to one person on teams as large as Bethesda’s.
I would hope, but it is becoming less and less common.
Often times they’re the same thing. The money comes from the owner of the IP, who contracted out the project; owner of the IP decides they don’t want to do it anymore; no more money coming in to fund the people working on it.
That first part is exactly what I’m saying. Many multiplayer games involve starting from zero every time, so that didn’t seem to be what OP is looking for. I wouldn’t recommend Vagante, for instance. It has a small handful of unlocks, but the lack of other progression is a feature, not a bug. Meanwhile, a loot game like Borderlands will have you continually upgrading your character and gear over many sessions, and that’s likely what OP is asking for.
This isn’t a “do you guys not have phones” moment. This is a “Diablo Immortal made a boatload of money” moment.