The Cartridge Thief Blog

 I've always considered myself a fan of Fallout . It was one of the first RPG series that I ever played and while I've avoided the original isometric games for fear of melting my smooth console-gamer brain, I frequently find myself returning to the rest of the series for another hit of post-apocalyptic chaos. (Image property of Amazon MGM Studios) As a result, I've been keeping an eye on Amazon's streaming adaptation of the series for a while now out of a mixture of genuine interest and morbid curiosity for how they'd screw it up. But, if you've been doing the rounds on the dystopian hellscape of the internet in the last week or so, you'd know they haven't actually done a half bad job. Interestingly, as a result, the whole Fallout series is seeing some of its highest player numbers ever.  In light of this profound success, I want to discuss what exactly this means for the series and what it can tell us about how big-name franchises can maintain their lon...

You know what’s easy? Hating stuff. There are whole cottage industries out there of people that make money by just being angry and hating stuff. Even the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was in-part engineered by Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck because uniting German people in hating the French was easier than uniting them in liking each other. (Image property of Lucas Pope and 3909 LLC) Originally, this was going to be a retrospective of the last week or two in games, in particular, the whole ‘microtransactions in single-player games’ debacle around  Dragon’s Dogma 2 . But, after writing for about an hour, I hit a wall. I was tired, I was bored and I felt as though everything that I was saying had been said before. I was shouting into a void that was too creatively empty to shout back. So, I threw up my hands and said, “Screw it! I’m going to write something positive about a game that I really liked and talk about why its good.” Enter; Return of the Obra Dinn. The Premise Return ...