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I mess with SC and S42 every few years, have access from the kickstarter from way back when.
They’re fine. They’re even neat. But Elite Dangerous gives 90% of what their original promises were and has much more demonstrable development progress. Planetary systems without a loading screen is not as impressive as it was in the early 2010s. Kerbal Space Program was created and died since then.
A problem with AAA games is the development time is longer, the time spent working on the final game is not.
Time and time again when a game as been “in development” for 5/7/10+ years, the game that shipped was only really being worked on for the last year or two, once they finally got the design and gameplay nailed down and worked on the final game. Anthem is one of the more egregious examples in that some of the developers working on the game learned at the E3 presentation a year before launch that the game involved flying.
There’s an iceberg of effort and only a fraction of it gets released.
I spent a ton of time on LotR II and it’s expansion. I distinctly remember finding the box for 3 a few years later and just being confused that they didn’t seem to know what was good about their game.
Had a complicated time trying to get 2 running a few years ago, I think I ended up setting up a Win95 VM specifically for it. But now it looks like they’re just on GoG and Steam. Might have to grab it there.
Have also been out of the loop too but went through the know your meme page.
Pirate Software made a video a year ago criticizing the initiative on a very surface level and has continued to do so in streams. Guy who created/sponsored/however-that-works the initiative posted a counter-argument video talking about what the initiative would actually do. Pirate Software did the ol’ Internet Doubledown and in general was kind of an ass and kind of revealed some ignorance. Cue Youtube Drama.
It’s formatted weird on the Steam page but I have this text at the top.
“TotalSpend” is the total amount of external funds applied to your account. This value is used to determine if an account is a “Limited User Account”.
“OldSpend” is the amount of external funds applied before Friday, April 17, 2015 18:00:00 UTC. If your account was linked to Perfect World for CS:GO or Dota 2,
“PWSpend” will be the approximate USD value of funds applied from Perfect World, otherwise that value will be zero. If your account has applied external funds in Steam China,
“ChinaSpend” will report that total, in RMB.
Weirdly I also have a row for “PackageOnlySpend” that doesn’t have a definition.
Are you looking for something like Pocket?
There are self-hosted things a lot like it. Vivaldi and some other browsers have similar functionality. Not sure about downloading the videos, but there are other tools for that.
Sure, if the money is put toward that. And if people can afford to buy what are now more luxury goods. On top of things domestically produced with now being more expensive due to the necessity of importing raw materials. And if a lot of the manufacturing investment doesn’t just vaporize like the PPP loans or broadband investment.
In a few years that manufacturing could get spun and match a portion of the rest of the world’s production capacity.
Of course this time most of the world isn’t flattened by WWII and they’ll actively be looking for alternatives to trading with the US.
Tarrifs in general aren’t good or bad, they’re a standard mechanism every country uses. “Hey steel from over there costs less. If we tax it, it will be at a similar/higher price than our steel and our factories will stay in business producing steel here.”
But what Trump is doing is blanket country based Tarrifs. Instead of using a scalpel he’s using a nuke.
The retaliatory Tarrifs aren’t against everyone. They’re against the US. So American companies have to pay more for electronics, steel, bananas. And when they try to sell their products on the global market, which is what everyone’s been trying to do since the 90s, it costs more in China for American goods. Why buy Ford when you can buy a Chinese vehicle that has local support, is an EV that fits on your road, and costs half the price. (There’s a recent Wendover Productions video about how much Volvo is struggling the last few years, and that’s without a Tarrif war making buying materials and selling product harder.)
The goal of a Tarrif is to get people to buy domestic because the foreign thing is now expensive. When there is no domestic, because it’s all been moved to foreign factories, it just makes everything more expensive for the purchaser.
China isn’t paying for a price increase. You’re paying more tax to the US government for the priviledge of buying goods from China.
China is comfortable being retaliatory to the US because they’re where the US was in the ~90s and selling to the rest of the world. And they have all the (for them) domestic production and market because we outsourced it to them.
I mean that’s everything. There isn’t a “movie of the summer” anymore really, no I Love Lucy / Cheers / Friends / Simpsons that basically everyone is watching or familiar with. It’s been true for longer with books/music because of the lower gateways to entry and being able to be a “local artist”, but not by much, and even for them it’s exploded since the Internet became mainstream.
The democratization of publication has dramatically broadened the type and quality of things being made and no industry titans really have figured out how to promote around that. At least not consistently.
This feels like the second round of this going around as the AI articles / lazy sites pick it up.
It’s a doc ‘sent’ to one guy who had 12 followers on medium before this started blowing up. It was edited after it was sent out to be the real marketing email of the company instead of a gmail address. The doc is still owned by that gmail account, which isn’t typically how companies operate.
I guess they’re getting their viral moment so good for them for generating content?
Would love to get in on this if you’re still going.
Minishoot’ Adventures $11.99 (20% off)
Isometric Zelda / Metroidvania / bullet hell with a lot of accessibility features and neat art where you’re a lil spaceship guy. Has a demo to see if it’s your jam. Already beat it twice, would really love for them to make DLC or a sequel.
It’s a mostly standard view of Tolkien scholarship. They’re much more a medieval view of jewishness then something straight racist like say, JK Rowling’s goblins. As makes sense for an Old English scholar like Tolkein.
Ancient people, separated into familial tribes, outcast from their ancestral home, not really welcomed anywhere but tolerated some places, warrior poet tradition, noble ‘in their way’, beards, gold, noses.
Sprinkle on some Norse/Germanic for flavor and there you go. Though then you can get into the side conversation of Yiddish being a Germanic dialect/language.
It’s also the preferred descriptor for some. I’ve had friends with dwarfism that thought “little people” was condescending as hell and hated it.
None of this is ever black and white. Especially when it’s just interjecting into comments on the Internet talking about the fantasy race that’s either Jews with battle axes or persons from Svartálfheim.
Personally I love Elite Dangerous, but have still only spent ~50 hours in it.
It’s a fantastic flight sim. But IMO it’s just not as captivating as a purposefully created narrative. It’s good for different reasons. I know they’ve added ground/walking stuff since last I played. I know you can discover alien stuff and wander alongside the ‘story’ in the game. But it’s closer to FromSoft style reading text descriptions and forum posts to follow the story than it is playing an RPG.
I believe you’re talking about the Steam Link. Which if you had ethernet running everywhere worked pretty good.
The old Steam Machine branding was more a set of guidelines / branded manufacturer specs for mini-PCs. Not many actually came out and yeah it got shut down pretty quickly. Though it was the origin of Steam OS / Big Picture Mode and what became Proton.