Picking out parts of reviews that you find relevant is a good idea; your enjoyment of any kind of media is subjective and therefore unique to every person. I guess if you can find a particular reviewer with similar tastes, who also happens to have read a lot of the books you’re interested in, their reviews could be a good indicator of whether you’ll enjoy a book. And yes a 4 tends to be my baseline for book reviews; anything less and I didn’t enjoy it that much. 5 is pretty much perfect.

Over-analysis is definitely an issue. It’s inappropriate a lot of the time like you say. Writing a good review is tricky! You have to take into account the target audience, when it was written, whether it’s part of a larger series and so on. Authors and readers are too often obsessed with their overall rating for a book, but the real indicator is what people have actually written in genuine reviews, and whether you agree with that opinion. Unfortunately websites like Goodreads don’t make those reviews easy to find.

Great points. Does Steam get around this slightly by having different tags intended for meme reviews? I.e. I think I’ve seen ‘10 people said this review made them laugh’ or something along those lines. That at least makes it a bit easier to filter out the ‘actual’ reviews. I wonder if the cumulative total (on both Steam and Goodreads) averages out the joke/genuine reviews, assuming that a) enough people have left a review and b) there hasn’t been any review bombing.

And yeah there are plenty of books, games and shows out there that I’ve absolutely loved but they’ve been reviewed terribly by professional reviewers. I think on the whole people assign too much weight to arbitrary totals - “Oh this book is a 6/10 so I shouldn’t waste my time on it”. But if you think like this, you’ll miss out on so much.

Storygraph is quite a good alternative from my experience

There is definitely an element of that from the article and I agree it’s ridiculous. Some authors and their followers attack those who give poor reviews (because they can’t accept criticism, instead arguing that a ‘professional’ review would give them a much better score) and on the other side you have people reviewing books that aren’t even out. In many cases it’s no longer a place to find genuine reviews, but an unmoderated wild west with crap at both extremes (a bit like Twitter in that respect). It’s a shame because there are plenty of people leaving great reviews, but it’s becoming much harder to find them.

It’s possible I saw it but just forgot, with the number of games currently on my radar. Hearing about it again has reignited my interest though! Will keep an eye on it

First I’ve heard of this game. Looks interesting & the art style is neat!

So it’s an average of the different isotopes that can be found? That’s interesting, I wonder how they work out that average. Do you have to take samples all over the world?

I like the sound of this! The Starfield coffee article was funny. $7 a month miiiight be a little bit much for me - but I’ll keep an eye on this and if the journalism is decent and they put out a fair number of articles I’ll definitely consider it. I guess I used to spend around that amount on gaming magazines…

Yes this is annoying. I like to play games docked, and in order to get them working correctly I have to manually tell Steam to use 1080p resolution for every game. This then gives you more options within the game settings (rather than maxing out at 1200x800) whilst docked. But in most cases I have to then change the in-game setting each time I go from docked to portable.

It does feel like docking is an afterthought with the Steam Deck. I was expecting something more akin to the Switch which has a flawless docking experience. I hope SteamOS improves on this in future.

I finished TOTK yesterday! What a great game. How do you think it compares to BOTW? At some points while playing it I felt like it didn’t have the same magic as BOTW (but that’s nothing wrong with the game itself, it’s just that BOTW was such a unique experience the first time I played it). But having finished TOTK, I can really appreciate how much they changed. The sky islands, depths and all the new ultrahand mechanics are perfect additions to the formula.

There aren’t many games that can release such a stunning trailer, and then live up to that hype.

I felt like a couple of the dungeons were a bit average - the Gerudo one in particular. The Divine Beasts were a lot more memorable in my opinion. Then again, each of TOTKs dungeons felt very distinct which was nice.

Overall though, easily one of the best games on Switch and I’d probably rank it on par with BOTW.

Thanks for explaining this. So were there many Roman citizens in Britannia, or was it a pretty small ratio of Romans to locals? Did the Roman soldiers give commands to the local elites, who would then tell the locals what to do? And would you say that life changed much for the locals under the new rule?

That’s very insightful, thank you! I didn’t realise the Celtic tribes ‘coexisted’ with the Romans in that way

So I think it’s a crab apple tree :)

I want what your dog’s having

I’ll have a look at the tree later and get back to you!

You could be right! I should add that this was found in the UK, Midlands. Looks like it has a purple-y interior where it has been split/eaten in the middle

Love how scuffed and used it looks! Awesome render

That’s the healthiest looking jade I’ve ever seen!

Many thanks for explaining this in detail! I think I understand, but it probably makes more sense as you play it. Sounds a bit like the colour picross puzzles in the S series?

Game looks great (visually, and as a puzzle game). I’ll definitely look into emulating it if it’s possible.

The Steam Deck does have touchpads on both sides so yes that could work. How does the 3D version work?