Yes.

My point is that saying games that have been going strong for over a decade “always ends up being a rugpull” is… it doesn’t make it look like you understand what a “rugpull” is.

Yup. I REALLY hate those 11 year long scams. Hell, WoW is going at 21 years but it is gonna screw everyone over ANY! SECOND! NOW!

Also jesus fucking christ, WoW can drink.

It is arguable how much it is needed if games/libraries are coded “correctly”.

If a game is not resource intensive it won’t consume a lot of resources. This is why people who don’t understand power supplies might pop a breaker if they boot up the least AAA game but won’t have issues playing Stardew and the like. Or why you can get a few hours out of some games on the Steam Deck and MAYBE an hour with others.

If this is meaningfully effective then it speaks to something with the underlying Sony libraries (I forget the technical term) space filling resources. It sees memory is free so it uses memory and so forth. Which is pretty common with a lot of database/queuing software and why good practices tend to be restricting those with VMs.

Nah. Fuck the remnants of polygon (buncha scabs) but I think they are right that this has to do with setting a threshold/target for a potential handheld SKU. Basically the same thing MS had with the Series X vs S.

Just to provide a bit more. A common way of thinking of it is you have a static and a dynamic energy cost. Running the CPU at all costs a certain amount of power (static). But doing actual work on it costs more power on top (dynamic). So a completely idle chip is just the static and a balls to the walls run is static and 100% of the dynamic.

You can potentially turn off parts of chips to reduce the static cost (e.g. run with 4 cores active instead of 6) but that tends to require significant hardware support. And… most literature on the subject tends to e that it is still better to just run until the proverbial sweat runs down your crack because you’ll consume less power than if you had run lower for longer.

It depends how it was printed.

As a SUPER simplified basic: Any 3d print consists of walls/perimeters and infill. The walls are the exterior surfaces of the print. The infill is what is inside. And the vast majority of prints tend to be sparse infills. So rather than solid plastic beneath those walls, you mostly just have air and a mesh structure of some form.

So if the wall is thick enough (generally referred to as “number of walls”)? Sure. If it isn’t? You’ll just see the void inside the shell itself and make things much worse.

What is generally done to reduce “3d printed texture” is a mixture of smaller print layers (so the ridges are much thinner), printing with more walls, and actually lightly melting the exterior surface (either through chemicals or heat).

VKB are probably the kings of the mid-range sicko HOTAS market and I am like 90% certain they 3d print the shell of their sticks for the Gladiator (?). But they do such a good job that I genuinely can’t be certain. Whereas the vast majority of ploopy builds… aren’t that.

I keep thinking I should give a ploopy a shot but I’ve increasingly grown to like/need vertical mice and, like most ploopy related efforts, it is mostly “you CAN do it” with nobody ever having even tried because it requires pretty hefty redesigns of almost every part to mount things correctly.

Theoretically, you can mold it to fit your hand but the tolerances and mountings make that a hassle.

As for the print itself? Most people just do a quick print and have the telltale ridges from layers. But you can futz with settings to improve the smoothness or just finish the print itself. At which point it is not going to be as smooth as injection molding but it will be more “different” than “bad”.

Unless you are playing purely for nostalgia, I would very much avoid runescape. It isn’t a game for kids to play during typing class. It is very much an obnoxiously sweaty (set of) game(s).

I think you can play the entire original campaign for FF14 for free? And FF14 is probably THE best theme park MMO out there. That said, my experience is “it is the best community on the internet” is very much marketing and you WILL have bad experiences during dungeons… which are mandatory for story progression. You can negate that if you join a clan but then you aren’t really playing with The Community and are already into hardcore-ish play.

I don’t know where the free/paid demarcations are, but I would actually recommend Guild Wars 2 or Elder Scrolls Online for a newbie. The latter does suck if you want to do any crafting as a free player (and inventory management in general will be hell) but you are there for the overworld gameplay. And both GW2 and ESO are very much geared toward playing solo in a crowd. As in you’ll walk around the overworld which is basically a single area with 10-20 other players. You’ll do event quests together, see each other while you go to the store or walk toward an instanced area, and so forth. But you won’t have to worry about someone telling you they are going to <REDACTED> your family because you didn’t skip a cutscene or aren’t holding aggro properly in newbie dungeon.

If you get into those? You can maybe find a guild and play some of the higher level content. Or you can go pick up FF-MMO or WoW or even SWTOR (apparently it is still going).

Good on nu-Waypoint but I do want to make it clear:

This is not the Waypoint that made a name for social justice oriented reporting and leftist gaming content. They all got fired/driven out over the years. Austin Walker has nine million side hustles but is mostly over at Friends at the Table, Natalie Watson has a fucking BAFTA as part of Half Mermaid, and Rob/Chia/Patrick are now Remap. And the rest of the crew have also moved on.

This is the Waypoint that Vice created because they decided they wanted to have a gaming outlet again after firing old Waypoint. And mad props to Valens et al for standing up for THEIR writing but… big ol’ asterisk.

I don’t know enough about the underlying code (I am the guy who still makes jokes about how html is super easy before remembering that it has been 30 years since I made websites with frames…) but yeah. HTLM5+Javascript with a heavy reliance on Impact support libraries.

The end result is that it is a god damned shitshow to get running on modern platforms and controller support is an even bigger mess. Like, I STILL don’t entirely understand how it manages to detect the difference between an xinput device and a device Steam is binding to xinput… on Linux via Proton. And it tends to break for anything but a proper microsoft made xinput device…

Crosscode was a RIDICULOUSLY good game. It genuinely captured the feeling of playing an MMO for the first time and making new friends while having VERY dot hack vibes as you learn more about the world as a whole.

Combat was… fine. When it worked, it worked. When it didn’t, you lowered the difficulty.

Then you get to the dungeons. Which… honestly, I just did not have the patience for puzzles that spanned two or three rooms that I worked on over the course of five overall puzzles and had to have pinpoint accuracy to launch an orb six screens away. I love a good puzzle game (Talos Principle is love. Talos Principle is life) but far too many of these were just more frustrating than fun.

Which is a shame. Because most people nope the fuck out after the second or third dungeon… and that is basically right before the story goes completely off the rails in all the best ways. Shit went REAL hard in ways it had no business even trying but pulled off perfectly.

And… the engine was a technical marvel even if it was also a huge mistake.

So yeah. VERY VERY excited about Alabaster Dawn. And here is hoping Radical Fish didn’t write it in html5 this time.

Its a fundamental mindset that goes into pitch meetings and the like.

Its the same idea behind game design/balance. If you listen to The Gamers, everything will be insanely OP and there will be no curve or balance at all. When the reality is they DO want that balance even if it means their favorite gun is slightly nerfed. But it will basically never be what they actually say when asked “what do you want?”

And same with franchises. People will always say “I want a game where I am Han or Luke” or “I want another KOTOR” and so forth. When the reality is that they don’t actually know what they want.

Like I said immediately after that. Moments of it are brilliant but it is clear there were still a lot of ways the plot could have gone and the showrunners were keeping their options over. And, while I think Aldhani was good, the Citra weirdness and Cassian being a mary sue who could do the entire rebellion better than anyone who was there. Whereas once Vel became more of a main character (and used to contrast Mon’s inability to overtly act) and they focused more on one story rather than having the option to tell ten, it became one of my favorite shows of all time.

As for Season 2? I strongly disliked how zany and fun Cassian’s infiltration of the prototype facility was but also understand that they needed to make something so that the trailers aren’t just bleak and horrifying while speeding Cassian to the point of not just being a Believer but being a Leader. But after that time skip it resumed being one of my favorite shows of all time And a big part of that was not even pretending that Mon isn’t the actual main character with Cassian and Kleya more a means to an end… which also fits with what they actually came to accept over the years.

I actually strongly disagree.

Andor was an example of actually telling a new story. Yes, people were eager to know who Cassian was. But If you had polled the entire Star Wars fanbase, like five of us would have said “Oh, I want a deeply political story with a massive focus on social justice that heavily focuses on a politician and a spymaster’s daughter. Also, hold back zero punches about the kind of people who would spearhead a rebellion. Like, how crazy can Forrest go?”. And we would have fully admitted we were on our bullshit.

Which was basically the problem with Outlaws. Everyone has been asking for a Han Solo game since people realized a Star Wars Pacman could be a thing. And you need to go REAL hard to make that live up to people’s expectations.

Which, getting back to Andor: I would go so far as to say everything up until The Prison is REALLY rough. You have moments of brilliance (basically any time Skarsgard is on screen) but it spends too much time on a plot point it had already dropped and Cassian is kind of a mary sue. But we were enthralled because this was something NEW (well, less so if you have ever read a political thriller but… Star Wars!). And once it found its legs… it was painful beauty in all the best ways.

And, to go back to “It is a Han Solo game” or “It is a Jedi knight but not a Jedi Knight” and so forth? It doesn’t take much to realize “I have seen this story a million times” and wander off. Like, I know I basically did that once I heard there were insta-fail stealth sections (although I generally try to not give Ubi money to begin with). Same with Ginger McBoring Face Survivor. It had an interesting hook (I LOVED Dark Times and Dass Jennir) and the gameplay was fine but when it came time to come back for seconds it was just “Eh, I’m good”.

Nah. We need more Star Wars that people don’t KNOW they want to see. Not just the tired crap that an exec would think was gold.

Eh. I am a huge fan of “one last gunfight” stories but video games rarely ever pull those off and I triply don’t expect Ubi to do it. It is inherently a subversion of the power fantasy and it says a lot that the most famous example (MGS4) turned into a full on macho power fantasy by the end. Off the top of my head, the only one that even tried was LAD: Infinite Wealth and that still screwed it up with the post credits.

So it basically just leaves you with a sad and depressing reminder of aging.

Nah. I already don’t think the Wildlands mission was good, but let’s remember Sam with the VERY underrated Conviction.

Yeah. The I’m A Mac crowd had the same problem… god damn it, two or three decades ago.

As market share increases, platforms become a much bigger target for malware. And a lot of the “I don’t need to run virus scans” crowds learn the hard way.

Its the same with open source. Obviously NOBODY around here would parrot this bullshit, but there is the idea that because something is FOSS it is safe. Code is only as safe as code review and there have been a few high profile cases of social engineering to get malicious code past even fairly rigorous review. Let alone “Well, that script is FOSS so somebody probably reviewed it” that we see so often.

Michael has had a hard decade or so and a lot of indications are that he already can’t be “Sam”.

At which point you basically just have the GR Wildlands (?) mission where he talks to you for like 30 seconds.

I deeply hate articles like this. They are just exploiting the hellish state of the industry to argue for why the games they don’t like shouldn’t exist.

First and foremost: Clearly the author (and anyone agreeing with the thesis) doesn’t read or watch movies. Publishers and schools basically constantly encourage leaving a hook for a sequel because it is a lot easier to get a follow up in the same universe published. And that has always been true. Same with movies where the vast majority of major studio films are remakes or franchises now. Hell… television is a thing.

But second? It fundamentally ignores what is ACTUALLY facing the video games industry. Making a successful live service game is the holy grail because it is job security… until it isn’t. But it isn’t like releasing a critically acclaimed single player game will protect you from layoffs because your parent company wanted to juice the Q2 numbers. And just listen to developers like Xalavier Nelson Jr about how hard it is to even get funding for a game these days.

Shit like this is disgusting. It is “I don’t like X. I am going to say that X shouldn’t exist because I totally care about the industry that I can’t even be bothered to pay attention to”

Fascists care about setting precedent and “purchased vaguely illegal content” is some great precedent.

This just also is a smart attack because the usual crowd is going to come out to insist that it is OWN’s fault for playing Nintendo games and piracy is the greatest problem facing the world and that Nintendo Switch Online™ is a great service.

Its the same as when the christofacists attacked Pornhub via Visa et al in the US. Everyone hates revenge porn and child porn (well, except for certain heads of state…) so nobody is going to complain but it made it very clear the path to destroy content that goes against the fascists’ interests.

I would argue more that anyone grabbing this from the app store is painting a target on their back. It doesn’t matter what permissions it does or does not have: You are now giving a mega company run by a c-suite that have demonstrably bended the knee to a fascist information that you care about this.

Push notifications are incredibly valuable. I still argue that doing it through a dedicated app at all is idiotic and it should instead be through a semi-anonymous chat system like Signal or Matrix and the like and get group blasted.

Seen this going around.

Is anyone familiar with the channel itself? Because based on the article, it sounds like mostly (presumably he) is getting made an example of for reviewing hardware that comes with ROMs on an SD Card? But… a LOT of these “retro consoles” do and outlets just ignore it in favor of their totally legit collection that they don’t talk about.

Did OWN actually show what is on the SD Card and emphasize that these units came with it?