The Geek Bravado Ramble

This is an audio reading of a written blog post from Geek Bravado on my retiring from Extra Life and the future of my charity efforts.

You can read and comment on the post here: https://geekbravado.com/2022/08/15/retiring-from-extra-life-and-the-future-of-my-charity-efforts/

Discord: https://discord.pxa.ca

The game industry bombshells keep hitting as on Mar 2nd, prolific game industry vacuum Embracer Group announced they were buying most of Square Enix's western studios and IPs, including Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and much more. I talk about the sudden announcement, the borderline fire sale price tag, Square Enix's mismanagement and how clueless their statement on what they'll do with the proceeds seem.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Elon Musk has made a formal commitment to buy Twitter. While he doesn't own it yet, it's likely he will end up doing so. I have mixed feelings on this to put it mildly, but rather than just give my general take on the matter, I thought I would go through a few key things I'd like to see Twitter improve under Musk's ownership that they have been neglecting for years and that I think could make the service better.

NORCO is a new adventure/visual novel hybrid from a rookie studio that came out of nowhere for me and at time of posting, hasn't gotten a lot of attention. This is a genre I normally have high standards for and while I know this won't be for everyone, I thought it was very interesting.

Buy a NORCO Steam key from Fanatical and help support my content: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/norco?ref=pxabstraction

Background music consists of selection from the NORCO soundtrack: https://thou.bandcamp.com/album/norco-original-soundtrack

Minor errata: I said that Geography of Robots came together in 2020. They've actually been together since 2016, but joined up with Raw Fury in 2020.

People Makes Games Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDPzZkx0cPs

A video exposé into three indie press darling studios was recently release, showing claims of emotional abuse by those at the top. I talk about how the publisher all these companies share did nothing, whether or not the accusations are as severe as they seem and in particular, how the games press has been near totally silent in discussing issues like this, when they come from studios where they are either friends with or worse still, afraid of those who run them.

Martha Is Dead is a controversial new mystery walking simulator from a small Italian team. It started out as a quite compelling experience for me but I ended up having my opinion 180 on this in a way that rarely happens for me.

Buy a Steam key from Fanatical and help support me: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/martha-is-dead?ref=pxabstraction

Valve is a true anomoly in the gaming industry, a company that brings in billions of dollars a year but which has a comparatively very small staff and in recent years, seems to have all but left their creative talent to wither. I talk about what I believe are the reasons behind that and why this is probably going to be the way the company goes for the foreseeable future.

Tyler McVicker video I referenced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AwIcRNQPWk

Unless you've been living under a rock recently, you've heard about the announcement of Microsoft's colossal deal to purchase Activision-Blizzard, the biggest acquisition ever in gaming and one of the largest in history. I give my thoughts on that but also expound on the idea of the heavy consolidation the game industry is going through right now and how it could impact us as gamers.

This is an audio reading of a rare written Geek Bravado blog post about the future of my content plans. You can read the post at https://geekbravado.com/2022/01/16/my-content-plans-for-2022-and-beyond/ if you prefer.

My Odysee channel is now live at https://odysee.com/@PXAbstraction. If you're willing to make an account there, I'd appreciate a follow.

Everyone's talking about the Metaverse and NFTs right now and largely, not in a good way. I agree with most of that but there's a bigger, perhaps even more sinister reason behind all the hype for these new fads, one that's not being discussed that much.