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AA batteries is an interesting choice. Wish we had a ubiquitous lithium-rechargable-based battery standard for products like this that would be smaller than an 18650 but bigger than a coin cell. Design it with some safe chemistry like LiFePo if you have to, but the old 1.2-1.5V AA standard is starting to feel very anachronistic these days.
As a veteran of gaming on Linux for several years, I have to admit I keep a small collection of various usb bluetooth dongles, because honestly, built-in bluetooth support still remains questionable and unreliable in many cases, at least for me and the systems I use it on. I don’t necessarily blame Linux as much as I blame the manufacturers of the chips and devices, but unfortunately we have to live with the chaos that their reverse-engineered-firmware-reliant devices create. Any cheapass bluetooth dongle is probably fine, the cheaper and more ubiquitous it is, the more likely it uses the same shitty chinese chip that all the others use and that a bunch of someones already hammered out drivers for, but honestly even with multiple different models and brands it still seems like a crapshoot which one feels like working properly at any given time, but usually one or the other will work and get things to connect, and it’s usually perfectly reliable once all the drivers have loaded and it’s all paired up and things start working. The struggle is real, though.
Its wireless is much more compatible, supporting several different connection methods for use with different proprietary systems, and is just generally a better and more capable device. They’re worth every penny, IMHO. 8bitdo’s quality changed my opinion on gaming controllers that had developed after years of being frustrated by cheap, wonky, second-rate, third-party garbage controllers like MadCatz and Logitech that used “features” to cover for the fact that they were cheaply made, overpriced, and deeply inferior. 8bitdo controllers are the only ones I trust anymore. Even Nintendo apparently can’t be trusted to make quality controllers for their own systems anymore. But 8bitdo can.
I’d absolutely buy and play more cyberpunk games with Johnny Silverhand/Keanu in them. I’d also play games where I can be Johnny Silverhand/Keanu. Could certainly see another attempt to make some cyberpunk-style matrix-like story or open world that would go over well with me. I’m pretty open to any sort of Johnny Silverhand/Keanu related themes. I’d also readily accept a John Wick or John Constantine or Johnny Utah game too, basically any of the Johns. Honestly, I’d even play a game where I have to drive a bus that can’t slow down or it explodes (which really isn’t any different from most arcade racers when you think about it). Basically, shut up, take my money, do whatever you want with it as long as there’s eventually more Keanu- or Keanu-adjacent-content in the video gaming space once you’re done, this is a good thing. Or just inject some Keanu right into my veins, whatever, I don’t know.
I’m a relentless idealist too, and I get where you’re coming from, but idealism alone isn’t a winning strategy. The state of the world right now proves that. Sometimes you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. This is important precisely because it is so minor and inconsequential: the stakes and consequences for failure are so low while there is absolutely no legitimate argument against it. Not to put too fine a point on it: People are losing hope in our ability to create any change at all. We need a win. We need to start getting traction, and start making progress somewhere. We need to show people that these battles against corporate interests CAN be won so that they are willing to try to fight more of them in the future, including eventually the bigger ones where there will be real consequences and really serious forces entrenched against any efforts for change.
This is just a first step, a tiny example of giving the finger to “the man” to prove that we still can, taking back a sliver of power and agency. It is not the last step, it is merely a beginning, an almost invisibly tiny crack in the armor of capitalism and corporate rights in favour of society and people’s rights. It’s certainly not going to fix the world on its own, but once we’ve got some cracks in the armor, we can keep working at them to make them bigger and eventually maybe we’ll start making real visible progress.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to solve the problems of the world overnight with a single petition too, but that’s not realistic given the scale of the opposition and resistance we are facing. Late stage capitalism and corpo-fascism are not weak or fragile and they have grown to a scale that is almost inconceivable. We will not beat them in a single blow. We will need to hammer at them for a long, long time before we even start making any serious progress. We have to be prepared for a long, long fight, and relish these small, small victories when we get them. Because every victory is valuable and every one counts. Especially ones where we don’t have to fight to the death to achieve them. Small, cheap victories are the best when our resources are so limited. It’s going to be a marathon not a sprint. Right now they’ve got all the money, all the power, all the media, all the organization. A single large decisive battle would almost certainly mean we lose, and lose big. This is guerilla warfare. We will fight on the fringes and fight them where they’re weakest not where they’re powerful. Eventually the balance of power will shift as long as we keep winning battles, but it isn’t going to change anytime soon.
It solves almost everything?
I guess you don’t understand the benefit of putting all the shady Microsoft shit in its own dirty polluted sandbox (or individual sandboxes) where it can’t spy on anything besides the other stuff in its sandbox that is already tainted and at most it may find a way to spy on the stuff you give it implicit permission to while you do whatever work you need to do with it. Meanwhile your main OS which hopefully does at least 90% of what you actually need to do on a daily basis, and does all the stuff that is actually important to you and happens to be none of Microsoft’s business, is safely running the actual show and remains completely under your control and authority, private and spyware-free. If you can’t completely get rid of Windows from your life (and some people still feel like they can’t for whatever reason), you can at least limit your exposure massively and turn it into practically a non-issue. Compartmentalization is a very effective way of dealing with nasty untrusted software.
When you get that shit locked down tight enough you can run straight-up viruses and rootkits with no concerns at all. You can see what they do, or try to do, and when they’re finished doing it, just casually delete them. Some people do. For research. In fact it’s so common that a lot of viruses or rootkits go out of their way to try to detect that they’re on a VM and refuse to activate if they think they are, there’s a whole arms race of researchers trying to make the VM look more realistic so the virus will still trigger. Even the viruses know your VM is probably just fucking with them. Windows, thankfully, isn’t quite that bad, and programs written for it will run quite happily in a VM or other virtual environment and let you do whatever you want to do with them, quite safely and subject to your complete authority over them that a VM or other simulated environment can provide.
I’m not going to pretend I can judge its potential for commercial success, I’m just saying I think that hypothetical K-pop idol game would’ve been a more interesting game than Inzoi is currently or seems likely to ever be in the future I see for it now. That said, I’m not dying on this particular hill and I don’t have any particularly strong opinions about it so if you think I’m wrong about that you’re totally entitled to that point of view and I’m not going to try to defend my beliefs any further, I think I’ve said all I could possibly have to say about Inzoi at this point. Where the game goes from here is something which reality will eventually tell us, but I’m not optimistic about it.
Ehh, I wasn’t worried about that until the AI stuff happened. Even a K-Pop idol simulator would’ve been an interesting start. Filling in the content to a level that creates compelling stories and gameplay takes time. It takes years of expansions for Sims games to start getting decent levels of content and stop feeling soulless and shiny and bland compared to the previous game (arguably Sims 4 hasn’t even gotten there yet but that’s more of a Sims 4 problem).
Once Inzoi started trying to fill in the content with AI they thought they could rely on that to shortcut their way to success but I knew it wasn’t going to work. It needs the human touch, it’s gotta be quirky and have its own individual character. K-Pop idol might’ve been exactly what it needed to stand out if they had leaned on that instead of trying to fill in the gaps in content with bland and soulless AI, which is exactly what life sim games DON’T ever need more of.
Wild. Sounds like Subnautica 2 dodged a bullet. Hope they sue the literal pants off them and then build the spiritual-Subnautica-2 we all always wanted with the damages awarded and the Early Access money that they know we’re going to give them the moment they announce it.
And RIP Inzoi, we barely knew you before you got infested with AI bullshit and it sounds like that’s only going to accelerate to hyperspeed now.
Yeah it’s gotten shitty. I used to play competitive shooters all the way back to the original Team Fortress mod in classic Quake. It’s not really fun anymore, for me anyway. It’s way too overproduced and overmonetized, it’s become a serious business, there’s too much on the line so anti-cheating becomes a priority and it just sucks all the fun out of everything. I’m reminded of the scene in Ted Lasso where Roy Kent takes Jamie back to the little local pitch he grew up playing at with other guys on his street so he can remember what it’s like to just play the game for fun again where there’s no money on the line and nobody is watching you.
My suggestion would be have you considered getting into speedrunning at all? It’s highly competitive, but is available for basically every game imaginable, can be done solo and can’t really be gatekept by the multiplayer gods. And there are many different categories for all sorts of different playstyles. It’s not just a straight line to the fastest finish either, or grinding out the best run after thousands of attempts, depending on the style you get into there’s strategy and risk and RNG can sink you or save you. Most competitive fun I’ve ever had was speedrunning Legend of Zelda randomizers against people head-to-head. Same seed, same start time, green light go and your skill and choices will decide the outcome. There’s a lot of fun to be had, I think, and it goes in a lot of different directions if you take some time to look around the scene to find if there any parts of it that appeal to you.
Nice choice, but personally I always found Terra a bit hard to relate to, very fey and even sort of creepy in her half-Esper form.
Celes, on the other hand, is a bonafide badass, and her storyline was among the better developed ones and more humanizing than most of the other characters in the game. Although romantically I think she could probably do better than Locke. That boy needs some help.
Free speech issues are not relevant because it’s a private company. Free speech is about limiting the government’s ability to control speech, companies are always free to do so for their own reasons on their own platforms. While that can be problematic when you don’t know whether the government is leaning on the companies behind the scenes, what the first amendment is really written to prevent is the overt fascist gestapo tactics the Trump administration is now using to bully their critics.
It is important to understand the constitution and why it was written, so people can act accordingly. It’s especially important when the government is not acting accordingly.
I am not a fan of platformers and puzzles, in general, and am not too interested in this concept specifically. But I may end up buying it out of spite for hateful people. I also suggest taking a peek at their previous game Semblance which, although also a platformer, looks genuinely sort of novel to me (granted, as I said, I am not a fan of platformers in general so maybe it is in fact not unique at all). Feel free to take my thoughts with a large grain of salt, this is not really my area of expertise.
True, that’s what I was trying to imply when I said it’s necessary to progress. I suppose someone could maybe devise a mod to provide evidence to the contrary, but I’m pretty sure the starter deck pool simply wouldn’t have enough scaling to survive at higher ascension levels.
That said, I would absolutely love some kind of mechanic that allows you to control the contents of the overall pool to some limited degree as well. (Too much freedom would essentially trivialize the game and I’m not sure if there’s any mechanic that would provide effective counterplay to a literally stacked deck)
Absolutely. The reason for this is that as you get to understand the mechanics more you’ll naturally start adopting higher risk play which provides access to higher potential rewards, and that is in some ways necessary to progress, and also really incredibly satisfying when it pays off. But the risks will bite you more often, which then feels like you’re just “being worse at the game”. The progression and scaling mechanics of games like these basically force you to adopt riskier strategies to overcome the challenges that higher levels of play bring.
The really experienced high level players do a very delicate balancing act of min/maxing to do get the absolute most they can out of the minimum level of risk they need to realistically have a sensible chance of success. Finding that sweet spot in the ocean of randomness is the real skill, and people will all have their own different sweet spot of risk vs reward, but in almost all cases there will always be a significant risk of losing because that’s just how the game is balanced especially for higher level play. Luck and trying to make perfect decisions with imperfect information are always a factor.
Yahtzee and his coworkers and team recently escaped from The Escapist (pun intended) to form a new independent group called Second Wind, too. I’m enjoying the direction that gaming media is going. Corporate media can mercilessly suck all value out of the industry until it withers and dies, and the names and legacies of these places will die with it, but they can’t destroy the talent if the community are still behind them.
The only way to do that is to use Linux anyway, ditch Windows, and give them the middle finger until they make their game available. No amount of asking politely or screaming obnoxiously will make them care if people just continue using Windows because they feel like they “have to” play this game and keep paying them money, because all they care about is money. Only when they can clearly see their position is losing them money (3% is probably not clear enough for many of them but time will tell) are they going to change their behavior. There’s nothing else that motivates them more than seeing money slipping through their fingers.
Depending on white knights like Valve and CDPR to ride to our rescue is good but they can’t do this on their own either, and in fact they’ve already done very close to as much as they reasonably can. They need our help, we consumers are the ones who are statistically not doing our part. We need to recognize that we have the bulk of the agency here and we need to start to use it.
We have to choose what matters more to us, the future of playing video games on our own terms or letting the developer dictate how much we need to spend and what rights we need to give up to able to play a popular video game right now. We’re not talking about something we need to live. This is a choice we can make. Will enough people choose the future instead of immediate gratification? I don’t know, available evidence doesn’t paint a particularly reassuring picture, but I never am willing to give up on hope.
Elevator music is a surprisingly profitable commercial niche. For that matter, there are always going to be soulless, insipid, overused imitations of real art that gets turned into staggering commercial success precisely because it’s bland and meaningless. “Live, love, laugh” for example.
Not everything has to have meaning and significance, but we also have the right to judge it when it should.
The problem with AI is that a lot of artists literally rely at least to some extent on the money that flows from that soulless commercial drivel, either with their eyes fully open to the situation, or by convincing themselves that it does have meaning to somebody, or just themselves if nobody else. They need to pay the bills and put food on the table and a huge source of that comes from commercial art work which has a high bar for visual impact and a very low bar for ideas or meaning.
If AI replaces the meaningless filler content of the art world, how do artists survive if that’s their bread and butter? It’s never going to directly replace real human art, but if it removes their meal ticket, the outcome will still be the same. Soon there will be almost no real human artists left, as they’ll start to become prohibitively expensive, which will drive more people to AI in a self-reinforcing feedback loop until only a handful of “masters” and a bunch of literal starving artists trying to become them without ever earning a penny. The economics of the situation are pretty dire and it’s increasingly hard to picture a future for human art that doesn’t look bleak.
I’m planning to do my part to make sure exclusively human-made art is always the choice I’m going to make and pay for, but there are bigger forces at play here than you or me and I don’t think they’re going to push things in a happy direction. The enshittification of art will happen, is already happening, and we’re just along for the ride.
High clock speeds are not the same thing as high wattage, they aren’t even really related, or very closely associated. We have no idea what the power usage of these processors will be. They could even end up being more efficient than previous processors, doing more instructions in a shorter period of time then powering back down to idle sooner on the same workload. Yes people might decide to throw more work at them as a result, but that’s not the CPU’s fault, that’s a people problem not a hardware problem.
It will be hardly any work once a law passes, because they’ll make sure it is. Everyone knows where the proprietary code is. It doesn’t just get merged in “by accident” unless you are a really shit developer (and to be fair some are).
Besides, no one is saying they have to open source it. To be honest, the outcome from this petition that I would most like to see is simply a blanket indemnity to the community attempting to revive, continue and improve the software from that point forward. If the law says that it’s legal once a software is shut down, for the community to figure out a way to make it work again and make it their own, and puts no further responsibilities on the “rights holder” at all, I think that honestly solves the problem in 99% of cases. It would be nice if they gave the community a hand, released what they could, and tried not to be shit about it, (and I know some of them will be shit about it, but we’re pretty resourceful), as long as they’re not trying to sue every attempt into oblivion I think we’ll make a lot of progress on game preservation and make the gaming world a much better place.
AI slop games for everyone! We can use the entire power of a remote datacenter surrounded by natural gas burning turbines to simulate what each button press you make does. It will be frighteningly accurate and will offer new and unique gameplay features like nonsensical hallucinations of constantly changing non-euclidean geometry you must attempt to navigate, and the risk of real wildfire smoke making you struggle to breathe while you play for added challenge!
Most game media/advertising/reviewing is garbage and cannot be trusted. I play games that look fun. I have a particular definition of fun specific to me alone. I’ll watch actual gameplay to decide if it looks fun to me. I might watch technical reviews and benchmarks that tell me if my hardware will be able to play it. IDGAF what culture war moralizing poop that some idiots want to headline it with and babble about to get views on their articles and channels.
I don’t think Stellar Blade looks like the kind of fun I personally enjoy so I’m going to pass, but I’m not going to judge or shame anyone who’s enjoying the fuck out of it because there’s nothing to shame. It’s a game. It’s made to be played and be fun for people to play. Have fun. Don’t worry about the drama storms. They’re pointless and devoid of meaning.
The upside of content creators and influencers like Mr. Beast is that they have built massive audiences based on manipulative brainrot. The downside is that brainrot audiences are already brainrotted in a way that makes them almost immune to further marketing, which is itself manipulative brainrot, the proto-brainrot if you will. All the brainrot value has been squeezed out of them already. There’s nothing left to squeeze, and they cannot be manipulated any further. Imagine trying to market beer or something, to a vegetable of a person who’s already just sitting in their chair drooling at the screen. Like sure, of course they want the beer, but how are you going to convince them to get up out of their chair to get it?