Joshua Rivera's saved articles

Fascinating and surprisingly heavy stuff, Joshua. But way to pull no punches when describing the toxicity of gamers! I know you said you considered the toxic reception you might receive when writing this, but I thought you were very clear and forceful in calling out the terrible behavior of some in our community. Read more

i am embarrassed of how i reacted to the ending of Mass Effect 3, involved in the entitled mob vitriol and rabble rousing on social media. why’d i let myself get so upset? why did i dwell on it? It was sobering when a game I worked on later in the decade became subject to a mob backlash of it’s own, a notable speed… Read more

You raise your voice.
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Man, I need to play Nier. Read more

Good article using various games to highlight how they were around industry movements. It would be interesting to see something like this in a much longer form narrative. Read more

Wow ZERO reporting credit?!?! Read more

Ultimately, everything is political. I forget who actually said it, but the aphorism that we do not have to take an interest in politics for politics to take an interest in us is absolutely true—and it’s of vital importance to the present situation.

More importantly, Acti-Blizz (and the NBA, and South Park) took a… Read more

This isn’t specifically aimed at Borderlands 3, but this is a pretty common problem with loot shooters in general: The entire game is built around getting better drops, better drops usually mean bigger damage, and thus the endgame basically is to use whatever characters and weapons have the biggest DPS. Read more

I initially started out as Zane, and around level 17 wanted to check the other characters out just to make sure I wasn’t missing out.

It really is staggering how much of a a disadvantage Zane is at compared to the competition after just a brief playabout on them (and taking Amara to the end). It’s not that “he’s bad”,… Read more

Please keep me in your thoughts during this difficult time, everybody.

You almost need a friend to learn to play a Paradox game. You could join us anytime, but if the Great Khan crushes you it’s not my fault.  Read more

As much as I love 4X games, I never really recommend them to anybody because of the Steep learning curve. Although recently, I’ve been playing a game called star Traders: Frontier and even though that’s not a 4X game, it really does seem to scratch the itch for me. Read more

I’ve had the game for a few years. Drawn to it for the same reasons you mentioned. Read more

What I’ll do pretty often is watch the first tutorial type video before playing the game (largely to get a sense for whether or not I’d enjoy it), then play the game while the other tutorials are playing on another screen. I often do this with Let’s Play videos as well. I’d say 25% of the 130 or so hours I’ve put into… Read more

Sorry making three comments on this article lol. I’ve been super into these 13 player multiplayer matches on youtube. The guy who runs the channel creates stories for all the players so that the game has a roleplaying aspect to it.

Stellaris is fantastic. Just dive in and start playing. You will end up restarting over and over. Even more so once you figure out whats a good start and what is a bad one. Plus different races play pretty differently. Read more

My cousin is super into Stellaris so I was lucky enough to have that board game experience with him and a couple of his friends. They gladly helped explained things as we went along. I never would have been able to get into it without a group to play with.  Read more

I would say that having a friend explain Stellaris to you is a great way to play. The multiplayer is really fun, and it’s a good way to get introduced to the game because you have an ally to keep you alive when you inevitably irritate a vastly more powerful species of racist genocidal spacefaring treants. At least on… Read more

Yeah, my first three Stellaris campaigns were aborted due to not quite grasping how to properly expand/build without running into shortages. I didn’t even figure out district buiding was a thing until the third try. Read more

I noticed a ton of new players talking about the game on the stellaris reddit because it came to Xbox Game Pass. I know “renting” games has it’s cons but game pass is always introducing a ton of new players to different games and I think thats great. Read more