I actually enjoyed the story. Some of the themes and motifs were heavy handed, but that’s par for the course. Honestly, the biggest issue with the story is that players have come to expect a big plot twist. Bioshock 1’s twist hit first-time players hard, so later games have tried to replicate that. But the issue is that it only hit players hard because they never knew it was coming. They only remember it because it was truly shocking the first time you played through it.

So now players have come to expect that from the series, which means the series can’t replicate it; When players are looking for a big plot twist, you can’t really hide it anymore. Because as soon as you start foreshadowing it, players catch on. And if you’re too subtle with your signals, then players who have been looking for it will say that doesn’t make any sense.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t a huge fan of the story at first. It took me a few hours and a few quests to actually get into it. It suffers from Kingdom Hearts 2/The Witcher 3 Syndrome: The two hour long intro/tutorial is absolutely the worst part, which is a shame. The game really begins to shine once you get to Meridian, but that’s several hours in.

That copyright thing was never actually tested in court though, because they settled before the trial began. The “copyrighted keys” argument was what Nintendo originally used to bring the lawsuit, but it was never actually tested because it never went to trial. In fact, many legal experts say it likely would have been thrown out in Yuzu’s favor. But Yuzu didn’t have a legal fund, so they couldn’t afford to actually take it to court and fight it.

FWIW, the PlayStation was meant to have the Nintendo button layout too. In Japan, O is synonymous with “yes/good” sort of like a check mark (✅) and X means “no/bad”. So the X and O buttons were meant to be used in that way. But western game devs didn’t know that, and designed their games with X as confirm and O as decline.

Take it a step farther. Why is cheap grain available on the market? Because European import regulations were relaxed to support Ukrainian grain exports.

In case you weren’t aware, grain is one of Ukraine’s largest exports.

It’s primarily meant for people who have slow connections. If you’re downloading a game over DSL or satellite (which is often the only thing available unless you’re in an urban/suburban area) then the 5GB of extra compression could be a huge time difference. It’s also true for metered connections, where you have to pay by the GB, or where you have a data cap.

I mean, she’s never tried to hide the fact that she’s Russian. And she also hasn’t hidden the fact that she dislikes Putin. But lots of Europe is struggling right now. For instance, the farmers protesting across many parts of Europe, as a result of the war and Ukrainian exports.

I mean, the real end solution is to host your own server. Then you can federate/defederate with whoever the hell you want. As long as you don’t do anything to get banned from a specific instance, you’ll be fine.

But that’s more work than most people are willing to put into a Reddit clone.

Yup. They can’t take out interest-free loans to pay off their almost-interest-free loans. So now they’re scrambling to save money and build value the old fashioned way.

Historically, games would refuse to boot unless you had the game disc inserted. Even if the game was fully installed and didn’t need the disc to run, requiring the disc was a primitive form of DRM.

One of the most common forms of cracks was a NoDisc crack, which did exactly what it says on the label; It removed the requirement for you to insert a disc. This was usually just a quick file replacement. So it was easy to take the game disc to your buddy’s house, use it to install the game on their computer, apply the NoDisc crack, and then your buddy could play the game whenever they wanted without using your disc. This was many people’s first intro to piracy. Obviously game publishers hated this, and constantly played whack-a-mole to shut them down. On the data preservation and user friendliness side of things, NoDisc cracks were popular because they allowed you to play your games without digging through your giant book of CD’s. It also meant you weren’t locked out of a game just because your little sibling scratched your CD.

When transitioning to digital sales, the disc requirement obviously won’t work. You can’t require a disc when the user never actually received a disc. So the game publishers had to remove the disc requirement when they put their game up for sale on Steam. And this is showing that in the official Steam release, a pirate’s signature is found. They simply used a NoDisc crack (from one of the crackers that they had constantly been battling) on their own game, to remove the disc requirement. Instead of finding an “official” way to do it, they just used the most straightforward route.

And yet game publishers still constantly harp about piracy.

IIRC it didn’t end with the wiishop either. Off the top of my head, there was some controversy surrounding the NES/SNES Classic consoles. I think they used emulators that were written by pirates, instead of writing their own?

Sure, but that wasn’t the question. They asked how to opt out of Intel’s telemetry gathering, since that’s the topic of the article. The article just happens to also mention nvidia and AMD, since they’re competing companies with similar products.

The installer has a checkbox for CIP, which is the data collection tool. Don’t install the CIP, and it won’t collect telemetry.

Also, by the time you’ve gotten it to compile, another two versions have come out.

You got to it before I did. Programming languages are like vehicles. You wouldn’t take a sports car off-roading, and you wouldn’t expect a tractor to win a drag race. There is a lot you can do with an all-purpose vehicle, but it’s not going to be as good as something that is purpose-built for a single task.

This is doubly true for games, which tend to be re-released over and over again on different platforms. This is true to a lesser extent for things like movies, but it’s much worse with gaming where each console is a closed ecosystem that’s incompatible with other systems. At least with Blu-Ray, you can expect any Blu-Ray player to play the movie you’ve purchased. It’s not like a Toshiba player will only play Toshiba brand Blu-Ray discs.

Companies love to use the “you don’t own the game, you own a personal license to use the game” line when revoking rights to play games you’ve legally purchased… But that goes both ways; If you own a personal license to use the game, it shouldn’t matter what platform it’s on, because it’s the same game regardless of whether you’re playing on PlayStation or PC.

Yeah, that’d be culturally Jewish. Someone who was born Jewish, but doesn’t actively practice. They’re not religiously Jewish. My point was that he’s actively practicing, so it’s not just cultural.

For what it’s worth, he’s not just culturally Jewish. He’s an actively practicing orthodox Jew. He’s wearing a yarmulka in this photo, and pretty much every photo you’ll see of him.

There’s a big difference between someone who was born Jewish because their mom is Jewish, and someone who is actively practicing. Not that it excuses the Neo-Nazis and antisemites. But he’s not just culturally Jewish.

Yeah, the concept behind the fediverse nests pretty well with leftist ideals, so it’s no surprise that leftism has thrived here. An open-source site that anyone can host, with no centralized power structure, and that openly promotes opening and administrating your own server? The idea behind it is inherently anti-fascist, because fascism relies on consolidating power so only an elite landed gentry are allowed to make decisions.

If you’re worried about the grind, go install the Untitled Project X mod. It has an option to give exp to all party members regardless of battle participation. It eliminates the “swap everyone in to Guard for a single turn” hassle. Because by default the game forces you to either swap everyone in for a turn, or grind like hell to get everyone properly leveled.

UPX fixes a lot of the issues that the remake has, so ironically that option is buried and was only added as an afterthought. But it’s one of the biggest and most impactful changes that you can make, because it completely eliminates the need to grind. Since every member is getting exp with every battle, you aren’t forced to wait for the relevant enemies to spawn before certain characters level up.