As far as getting started goes:

Just get 7 on like steam or something, it regularly goes on sale for like 5 bucks.

While the "plot" starts at 4 by release order and 0 (between 5 and 6) chronically, each game is siloed enough that you can just kinda hop in and go.

like the classic dilemma:

Is "Best action game" the game with the best action, or the best game that's mostly action?

Because I'm gonna say a game like Death Stranding 2 deserves to be nominated (and maybe even win) one of those, but not the other.

I do wonder if they're leaning on the fact that it say "best direction" and not "best game direction" so they can like point to the complete holistic package here.

But I think that like a full half of the categories have a problem with being too vague so what can you do eh?

Death Stranding 2 doesn't really change much from 1 and instead builds on it pretty substantially.

There's more types of gear, there's more types of structure, there's more types of enemies, there's more environmental considerations, and there's more interactions between these elements.

Like I got a buddy of mine who only plays Counter-Strike, DOTA, and imsims.

I managed to talk him into buying Ace Combat 7 during one of the many 90% off sales that goes on. He got back to me like 3 weeks later "damn dude this shit kinda rules"

I'm so excited for 8

like I loved E33 but it really just is Guillaume Broche's favourite games stuffed into a blender.

bro is constantly suffering, and seems like he's having a great time doing it.

bro's got that creative momentum going.

like this movie kinda needs to be dogshit to be good.

Leon's gonna be like 70 and still getting himself into ambiguous situations with women.

hell yeah.

Like I don't want to excuse Geoff for being the way he is yeah.

Like he could be better, he SHOULD be better.

But just because it's what should happen doesn't mean it's remotely reasonable to expect.

Shout outs to Skate Story in the exact same vein

Again, this is like purely technically and mostly a joke.

You can't really budget "3 dudes having fun with no restrictions"

But Hollow Knight 1 sold like 15 million copies or something, so Team Cherry had more money to work with than Sandfall did to work with for their game.

If you think about it, that technically means that E33 had a smaller budget than Silksong

It's purely anecdotal, but I think literally every single artist I follow has talked at some point about how Twitter's conversation rate is in a toilet at the bottom of a dumpster.