Oh god, please don’t make me talk about myself.
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I actually really like the SNES game, it is objectively not great though. You can’t even save, so emulation is a must unless you can dedicate an 8-10 hour sitting to it.
Particularly that it switches between top-down outdoors and a pseudo-FPS indoors, and the claustrophobic interiors and darker music give it a lot of charm.
I mean, let’s not forget that the early consoles had their own pitfalls, a period of gaming that spawned tropes like ‘Nintendo Hard’ and ‘Guide Dang It’ in order to, among other things, pad out the length of what we would consider an otherwise barebones game, and to sell time on their hints and tips hotline. I do feel like there was less bullshit in the past, but it definitely still existed.
Meta acquiring Oculus
As someone with industry experience working with VR, I can tell you it’s a mixed bag. I think there’s certainly no way Oculus (and consumer VR in general) takes off the way it did without Facebook’s dollars behind it, and it’s certainly paved the way to the outstanding quality of standalone HMDs that are on offer today. However, it killed the initiative for PCVR hardware with the non-consolation that Meta, Pico, and HTC offer “Link mode” on all their headsets and it’s iffy on good days, which makes B2B PCVR very difficult to facilitate without some serious legwork on lowering latency over the air connections. Would that we could revive the Rift S, that headset was perfect for our needs.
Dark Disciples 1 and 2, including the temple of eternity module.
Redfall also flopped last year
Feels like an understatement - this was the game that killed Arkane, because a majority of the team decided they’d rather fuck off than work on whale chasing live-service nonsense. And like, good on them, but it means no more Dishonored, no sequels to Prey, no chance of Arx Fatalis II, and it fucking sucks to see enshittification strangling good talent. I hope they’ll find success outside of MS’ looming shadow.
I don’t know if I could call it good, exactly, but one unique concept that I haven’t really seen captured anywhere else was the Dungeon Maker series on PSP, that allowed you to build dungeons that you would then explore/fight/loot, to give yourself funds to build out further/deeper, ad infinitum. It was clunky, controlled pretty stiffly and basic as ARPGs go, and after a certain point you kind of went on autopilot, but there’s a certain je ne sais quoi to it that I really quite enjoyed, especially if you planned out your builds. I think a similar title was released on the DS but it was turn-based and not particularly well-executed.
I mean, again, you’re claiming if Republicans get rid of minimum wage then they’ll have to come up with some state-sponsored plan to get Bob his shoes when the inevitable wage reduction makes shoes even more unaffordable. Republicans do not care. They will let Bob walk to work barefoot, starving, and destitute, until it eventually kills him, and the whole time claim Bob’s well-being is his own responsibility, and if he can’t manage his life on the wages that the free market provides, maybe he didn’t deserve to live in the first place. This is the party that asks rape victims what they were wearing, and suggests that bulletproof backpacks are the answer to school shootings. They do not give a fuck.
The thing I’m noticing now is a deep stratification between Democrats who are begrudgingly forcing themselves to vote for Biden because a second Trump presidency basically means the end of the United States if it wasn’t already inevitable, and Progressives who are refusing to vote for Biden because of his tacit support of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, who feel it doesn’t really matter who they vote for because the AMIC ensures that bombs will fall and innocent people will die regardless of who’s in the White House.
And the thing is, Biden has achieved a lot that goes quietly unnoticed. $130 billion in student loans debt relief, the $35 cap on insulin, gains in employment and reduction on inflation, to name a few accomplishments. But America’s been circling the drain for a long, long time, and the refusal to admit it, and hold accountable the people responsible for it (because as much a sin it is to engage in bothsidesism, those people bankroll campaigns for team red and blue) is what will end up being the death knell for democracy in America, and even if it’s not, the earth is falling apart faster than we can fix or escape it.
Me, personally? I’m voting for Biden, but I’m not holding my breath for hope in this lifetime. Suicide rates are the highest they’ve ever been and it’s not hard to see why.
I know they make a joke about Tom in office space being the one who brings the specs from the customers to the engineers - as much as it looks like he’s dead weight, there really is a skill in being able to explore the customer’s needs (and frequently manage their expectations of what the proposed software should be and do) and parse them into something more technical for the engineers, because you might not know how to program, but you’ve got a good idea of what the capabilities are because you communicate with the engineering team on a daily basis.
Worth noting this is all a byproduct of capitalism as it exists today. Not nearly enough competition or regulation means every major change these days is really just “How can we put more ads in people’s devices? How can we instill FOMO? How can we charge more money for less service?”
Look at how bad mainstream UX/UI has become, even on the biggest platforms with the most industry experience. Windows 11 is a fucking joke and everyone is certain the next one will be worse. We know Microsoft can design a good UI, but they choose not to because they don’t care about the consumer except as it pertains to getting clicks and ad revenue. They shove Edge back in your taskbar after every update, they make finding your own shit on your computer impossible so you’ll use Cortana. Who asked for icons to be centered by default? Who asked for them to fuck around with the start menu for at least the fifth time in two decades? Nobody. But everything they do is for the benefit of the shareholders.
Admittedly, I’m guilty of buying EA because there have been dry periods in the GameDev pipeline and I was desperate for something new, but I’m okay with it for smaller devs that don’t have the budget for the kind of QA that bigger devs do. That said, the fact that some of these games have been in EA for over a decade (putting aside whether or not they’re effectively a functional product at this point) is a pretty egregious abuse of the community goodwill, and bigger developers shouldn’t be using it at all because it’s encouraging the trend of pushing out buggy messes with 60GB day-1 patches that still don’t make a game playable.
I mean, the problematic part here is that they take the model in the first place, or at least that all signs point to that being the case. Sure, you can coldsteel the hell out of an existing character, but if you’re using an asset you didn’t develop and didn’t license to make a product that you then sell for money, no matter how different the end result looks from the original, that is absolutely infringement. It’s infringement that might have gone unnoticed had the models been more sufficiently edited, but at the end of the day it’s the theft of someone else’s labor.
I don’t know if that’s what happened here, but when the industry professionals say it’s hard to get model proportions that close even moving the same asset into a different engine, and the whole roster is uncannily similar? If it looks like a duck…
There are artists who disagree. They’re saying the proportions are identical to models used in Pokemon Violet/Scarlet.
It makes a lot more sense if you reframe it as freedom for rich white landowners in the 1800s to not have to pay taxes to King George, not so much for the peons, paupers and slaves.