Laura Bailey's Favorite Critical Role Romance Changed Campaign 3 Forever

The myth of the Bigfoot in GTA San Andreas might have been debunked, but it will live forever as the symbol of an exciting time in gaming.

Willa Rowe is a contributing writer at Polygon, covering games and entertainment. She is a New York-based journalist and critic whose work has been featured in Kotaku, Digital Trends, the A. V. Club, GamesRadar+, and more. She also co-hosts the Girl Mode podcast. GRRM's prequel to the HBO series will continue

Sometimes, the people who make movies don’t always get the credit they deserve. Carrie Fisher served as an uncredited script doctor on the 1998 Adam Sandler movie The Wedding Singer, and Quentin Tarantino did an uncredited rewrite of the Saturday Night Live sketch-turned-movie It’s Pat. This is more common with writers than directors, but it can happen to directors, too. For example, Richard Donner, who helmed the 1979 masterpiece Superman, shot a good deal of the sequel Superman II, but was fired partway through the movie. Richard Lester, who replaced him, received full credit. And while all the details about it still aren’t really known, there’s a certain 1982 horror film that many speculate was directed by someone other than the guy in the credits. Poltergeist, which is currently available to stream on HBO Max, follows an ordinary suburban family who begin to experience strange things in their home. Furniture and toys move on their own, a glass of milk shatters out of nowhere, and the youngest child in the family, five-year-old Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke), begins to communicate with beings through the television.

The developer behind Russian roulette anime game Drunken Goddess Reflux has canceled its plans for a public Steam demo, citing concerns over potential AI copycats. Alliance Arts and Who You's path to launch has seemingly been mostly bump-free since it was announced back in April. Featuring ghostly pinks and purples and a gameplay premise described as "shot glass Russian roulette with a demon who loves you enough to kill you," the recent reveal that it would launch this December only made its future feel clearer. Part of that release date announcement included the promise that a demo would launch October 19, but as explained in an update post on Steam, those plans have changed. What was originally intended to be a public release for the Drunken Goddess Reflux demo has now been canceled in favor of a "closed play session for a limited number of participants. " It's a last-minute move Alliance Arts apologized for, but its concerns related to rapidly advancing AI technology were simply too great to ignore.

They say that happiness equals reality minus expectations, and, unfortunately for these eight Switch games, reality landed nowhere near what was expected. It’s hard to blame the critical and community reception for some of them, but not all of them are bad. Some just aren’t what people were hoping they would be. So we’ve ranked them by the size of the gap between promise and result, from the mild letdowns to the ones that stung most or didn’t justify for the cost. Consider this your reminder to check your expectations at the door. Expected: A showstopper. Got: A chill, easy stage show Here, Peach takes the lead in a theater full of costume-themed stage plays, including a detective, a mermaid, and a swordfighter. If you love Princess Peach and enjoy dressing up dolls — which, same — this may sound like a good conceit. Critics largely enjoyed the charm of the outfits granting Peach various abilities, but found that as a gaming experience it was “pretty, if shallow.” Others found that the game was short, without offering much of a challenge to justify its $60 price tag. Princess Peach: Showtime!

Picture this. You're me, and you boot up the demo for Rain98, an incredibly blue-looking, rainy visual novel set in Tokyo, 1998, about a woman who refers to herself as the Angolmois, a world-ending reference to the predictions of good ole Nostradamus. At one point you have to light this woman's cigarette in a lightly stylish sequence. You get to a bit where you're asked to put your name in, and you put it in because like its predecessors, this is surely a self-insert kind of situation. Only you get a Steam achievement for getting a game over for putting your name in. Rude! But curious, so you, and of course I mean I, pressed on. In Rain98, you play as a nameless Generic Man who is deeply troubled, if not outright suicidal (of which this game has strong themes of) by the state of the world as it is in our present day. It's a fair stance to take! I would not exactly say things are good right now. But they weren't great in 1998 Japan, the year that Generic Man is somehow transported back to, finding this young woman, Reina Amehara, the Angolmois, in what he thinks is his apartment.