No you aren’t.

There is absolutely nothing here indicating the people who care about this, don’t care about other issues, or only do so second. That is an assumption, and entirely on you.

If anything, this was so successful because it might actually work.

A bunch of EU citizen signatures wishing a war to end wouldn’t do shit.

And your solution is put down the one that did?

The EU citizens initiative objectively improves our chances of having a slightly better society in the future.

And that does not happen at the expense of some other arbitrary more important potential improvement.

So you are literally just complaining about something getting better.

I set up [email protected]. I’ve maxed out my skills, and currently working up the speed classes again, but with double speed turned on.

Also, get that PS4. Omega (or rather 2048 which is included) is IMO the best WipEout ever made. The way the ships in 2048 handle always feels barely controlled, and it adds so much to the sense of speed. The airbrakes on my favorite the Pirhana Speed, are the most violent in the game (save the prototype) and using them you get thrown around sideways, and you just have to learn to deal with it.

Redout 2 was a disappointment for me. I love the first game, it struck a balance between speed a technicality. (Basically a merging of WipEout and F-Zero). Redout 2 went too far into speed, with wider more sweeping tracks, rather than twisty and narrow with the occasional full hairpin. New tracks stopped being interesting very quickly with little to learn. It also has a worse soundtrack IMO.

I legit got a used ps4 for to play WipEout Omega, Gravity Rush 1/2, Horizon ZD (also later FW), God of War (also later Ragnarok).

All four are some of my most beloved games. For the hundred bucks I paid for it, amazing deal.

Still waiting for Omega and Gravity Rush to come to PC…

Because optimism without realism is just a recipe for cynicism later on.

Dude. I’m not on my way to cynicism. I’m past it.

If I didn’t believe change is possible, then I’d be part of the reason it isn’t happening.

Looking for, and pushing in the places it might occur, is how you help it come about.

How is that not realistic? What am I missing?

Does the way you argue, not contribute to maintaining the status quo, even as you agree that it is not desirable?

The problem of systemic gambling won’t just fix itself.

Did I say it would?

Advertising and other propaganda creates a great deal of countervailing pressure.

That is a very verbose concession of a point.

Well yeah. It was being developed by Rocksteady, beloved for the Arkham games.

But interest, despite the marketing, dropped off a cliff the second people smelled live service elements.

The game came out a died a quick death even more quietly than Concord.

while turning a blind eye to the mountains of other people who don’t care

People, fundamentally, care.

That’s like the whole point of having a hobby.

No-one games because they don’t care.

You won’t find anything people are more passionate about, than something they do for fun.

I’m not claiming that there’s some point where people magically come together and stick it to the megacorps.

I’m saying that if you consistently burn your fans in ways that result in them hating you, eventually, you wont have any.

That’s not something that happens overnight. A slow-ass process that leads to a gradual decline, which you can only put off by duping brand new people who haven’t sworn off ever purchasing your product again. But eventually, you run out of those, too.

Doesn’t matter if they’re okay with it or not, as long as they tolerate it and don’t do anything about it.

Not being happy about it is the first step on the road to doing something about it. How does that not matter?

Sure but many many more have accepted it. Otherwise they never would have done it again.

Who is doing it again? I’m not.

I remember Overwatch still being a wild success regardless.

Is it?

We are on like 2905295734th now.

And? It takes as many times as it takes.

Indie game studios could only ever dream of achieving the heights of revenue of games like Fortnite, that survives entirely on microtransactions.

Why? There are absolutely indies who’ve made millions. Why is there zero chance that one day, the next Fortnite or Roblox comes from an indie?

It already happened at least once. Minecraft.

They are doing everything they can to screw their own customers and yet they pile in by the millions every time they have something new.

Yes. But again. It takes as many times as it takes.

Remember when gamers found out Suicide Squad, which at one time did have real hype behind it, would be live service BS?

And people literally just didn’t play it.

People. Even entire demographics, can a do learn.

Why are you trying to convince me my omptimism is futile?

What good does that do?

You’re not wrong.

But all I’m doing here is saying “things can get better” and your replies are just you pointing out how bad things are right now, as if that proves the only way things can go, is to get worse.

The worse things get, the faster the number of people wanting to fix it will grow.

Am I wrong?

They’re desperately trying to find new things for people to bet on.

No shortage of marks you say?

And there’s always new marks.

If your market is small enough.

You bring up gambling. Its de-regulation and consequent proliferation via online casinos has made the problems it causes more likely to be addressed than ever.

The bigger your market grows, the more aware the cultural zeitgeist becomes, the more likely you are be ousted entirely.

A bookie in Vegas, one city, could keep running their casino forever, because there didn’t use to be a casino in every persons pocket, worldwide, that might’ve already taught every new mark to be wary.

It will work. Even if they get 10 new subscribers, it probably took them 20 minutes to whip up this splash screen. They’re wasting much more of your time. And people have proven time and time again that they will get outraged but they’ll never actually do anything about it.

For now. But eventually they do. That’s how entire governments have fallen time and time again.

They won’t stop playing Xbox. They won’t stop buying games. People grow increasingly accepting of advertising and invasive business practices every day.

Indeed. People can get used to a lot. But being used to something isn’t the same as being ok with it. No-one I know is ok with there being ads on their tvs, phones and laptops. Living with something isn’t the same as accepting it. People are tolerating more BS than ever, but that doesn’t mean they wont rally the second there’s a way out of it.

Remember how angry everyone was at horse armor? Most people wouldn’t think twice about it these days. It’s so much worse now.

I still am. So are many others. Remember when people thought NMS would be a good game on day one? Remember when Fallout 76 was going to be bigger and better than 4? Remember Concord? Remember when Overwatch was going to have a story?

Suicide Squad.

There was real hype. The second people found out it was a live service, they simply didn’t play.

Every fuckup, is another portion of the masses getting the memo. And the fuckups aren’t stopping. If anything there’s more of them than ever.

These corporations used to be afraid of looking bad, but mistakes happen. Except when they did, and stocks didn’t suddenly implode, their takeaway was they could be horrible, and still make a profit. Because yeah, most people don’t learn the first time. But what about the second? Or the third? Or the tenth?

If you ask me, given time, the one thing every person on this planet can do, is learn. Eventually.

The only reason Roblox and Fortnite keep growing is that there are markets they haven’t penetrated. Finding new customers faster than the old ones leave doesn’t work forever. There are only so many humans on this planet.

Meanwhile, indie games with actual passion behind them and fair business practices that still feed the mouths of the devs, without private equity firms in the middle sucking up all the value, are absolutely exploding.

XBOX is dying. MS won’t say it, but they are less involved in the game-industry than ever. This price hike is a death-throw. Not the next step in their master plan to dominate the market forever.

IMO, the only gaming mega-corporation with the goodwill to exist 20 years from now is Nintendo, and even they are burning through the nostalgia people have for them faster than ever before in their insanely long history.

Ok?

It’s not sustainable. Tricking people faster than they wise up to your BS is not a business model that leads to a healthy, content, customer base. And if it’s what EVERYONE does, you get an unhappy SOCIETY.

No-one will enjoy where that leads, and is already leading.

It’s a ratcheting mechanism. Unless something about capitalism changes SIGNIFICANTLY the masses will simply grow more and more discontent.

Yes. And that shit is a one-way door.

Every customer you piss off the way you are pissed off, is A LOT less likely to be a return customer.

Oh that is gonna piss people off.

Your ads are not gonna work the way you think they’ll work, when every person who sees them is gonna feel like it’s a middle finger.

That was a fun one! I don’t think fully utilized Aeriths kit until that fight, either.

Intergrade still has some of my favorite fights.

I really wish Rebirth was more difficult right off the bat. When you go into it having played Intergrade, you already know to min-max character usage, and the fights are a little too easy.

A lot of the bosses are spot on tho, and the game absolutely SHINES as you juggle three characters and their full range of abilites. In longer fights you can also go past limit breaks, and use level two and three limit breaks. Lining up three level three limit breaks on a boss is 👌.

And the gameplay does improve massively. The addition of party abilities, powerful mini-limit breaks which you can use if two compatible party members both have the relevant bars filled, are an amazing addition to the combat system.

The combo moves are also a huge qol improvement. In intergrade flying enemies are kind of a pain when playing melee characters like Tifa, but in Rebirth you can have Cloud (if he’s in the party) launch you at flying enemies by jumping off his sword at any time. In Rebirth all the characters get additional combo moves depending on who is in the party.

You absolutely need to be switching characters.

The ATB bars fill very slowly when you aren’t playing as a party member, meaning that if you need to use certain abilites or spells, you should focus on playing as the character’s that can use them.

Same goes for limit breaks. On harder bosses you may need to build up a stagger, and then pull off a triple limit break during the stun. But you won’t have all three limit breaks ready if you didn’t evenly play as all three.

Also pay attention to ability effects. Some cause stagger instead of damage, some are single target vs AOE. The game doesn’t do a super good job of telling you what to use when, but read the descriptions and remember to check for weaknesses with assess.

Crab Warden was where I think I really fell in love with modern FF gameplay.

Switching characters to min-max ability usage while keeping HP up was wonderfully intense and engaging for me.

Rebirth is a bit too easy in that regard, and the highest difficulty isn’t available from the start.

This is barely news. They’re literally doing the same thing they did with the first Hades.

Jack in BL2 was funny and entertaining tho.

I adore both of the FF7 remakes.

They aren’t flawless, and the obfuscated story that requires a lot of theorycrafting to keep up with isn’t for everyone.

But damn. The way these games make me feel like a pre-teen exploring my first game again, is pure magic.

Good

How long before these kernel level rootkits start identifying each other as cheats, making being a fan of more than one game a bannable offense?

It’s not even that vague.

Valve basically said: “we are not doing anything illegal”.

To which mastercard responded: “yeah but you’re making us look bad, so tough”.

Oh wow that is A LOT more similar than I was thinking.

HuniePop is a comedic masterpiece I will actually be upset about if it’s disappeared.

This group is nuts. Wanting to ban Detroit Become Human because it depicts child abuse is completely insane. That’s like solving sex trafficking by making it illegal to mention it.

If it passed in its current form

It doesn’t really have a “current” form.

An EU citizens initiative can really only outline what the goal is, and if passed, force the EU comission to investigate the problem to determine what an actual law could look like.

It would mostly harm always online live service models. This stuff only gets complicated if a game has micro-transactions, and therefore has to have a bunch of systems to handle payment and accounts.

If your game just does server-client/peer-to-peer multiplayer, like older games (and a lot of modern ones), there’s barely any complexity to handle. Even less so if your game isn’t online at all.

Basically every title on GOG would already comply with any law this might lead to. It’s really not that demanding. The big publishers who nickle and dime their players are the only ones who would have a hard time. And that’s a good thing.

Does the US have citizens iniatives?

This isn’t just a change.org petition. In the EU (and a lot of member countries) theres a system for citizens initiatives, which have the same or similar legal weight as laws proposed by legislators.

That doesn’t mean the proposed laws get passed, but it does mean the people can bypass the politicians in order to at least get something onto the starting line.

Like for real.

Were the people who actually do nothing really the ones to get axe for once?

You are being stopped from stopping people playing their games.

That’s a double negative bruh, as in, it reduces overrall limitations in the world for what people are allowed to do.

I like your Heather Mason. You’ve found a perfect level of detail to make these work.

Like they’re just barely “too detailed”, making them just a little unsettling, the way horror game art should be.

[email protected]

Have you done other characters?

You say “your style”, so my first thought is to wonder what else you’ve done since must’ve done enough to land on a style.

Edit: ah, found your other posts! Feel free to cross-post to gameart, we want to see and celebrate all the art that games both contain and inspire.

Unless they were looking, they wont have seen it. And as far as I know, just the cursor being active sends the “typing” indicator in some apps. When I see it for just a second I just assume someone hovered over the chatbox for a bit.

No-one thinks it’s weird for it to pop up for a second and then go away. Or for it to appear for a good while and still not get you a message. Sometimes I’ll write a first draft of a response right away, then leave it there for hours while I think about it some more, before finalizing it.

It would be smart if chat apps implemented a minimum, where “typing” won’t apper until you’re three words into writing a response or something.

That way it wont go off over nothing. It’s still useful, it lets you/them know whether you’re getting/giving an immediate response, so you/they know whether the conversion is continuing right away, or later.

I don’t actually think you can call it that.

I’m pretty sure they’ve spent every cent, considering how much they have in fact produced.

The part that boggles me to this day, is that they spend the money on making a litany of insanely high quality assets and features, with seemingly no plan for how they’ll fit together.

And then they proceed to spend even more money, and time, on trying to fit it all together into something that functions like a complete system.

And that’s before you discuss their obsession with “realism”. What there is to play, is marred with balancing issues. Better ships are just… Better. Because they insist on weapons and ships functioning “logically” within the game universe, rather than in whatever way is the most fun.

Fighters beat bigger ships because equipping the same weapons, a fighter can hit every shot it takes at a slow moving giant. Meanwhile the travel-time of weapons make the fighter completely unkillable for the big ship, becayse the fighter can land shots from a range where its own speed allows it to dodge literally everything the big ship might send its way.

They’ve been buffing the shields and ammo counts on bigger ships, but all that does is make the fight last longer.

The project is real, but it’s a mismanaged catastrophe.

This isn’t even something you should be doing for your devs just because being nice to them is nice.

So many indies on their second and third games are showing that once you get the ball rolling on institutional knowledge (skills and tools developed during the making of a game, contributing to the next) you can SERIOUSLY up your game. And for a lot less cost than it would have been to go that big from the start.

Meanwhile big studios are dumping staff and therefore expertise like it’s no big deal. Switching to a revolving door of subcontractors who can’t possibly get to intimately know the games they work on.

They don’t.

That’s why Hasbro can’t just make another BG game, Larian isn’t willing.

So now they’re looking to make it anyway. Without Larian, or even the people at Hasbro that Larian worked with.

Yup.

Unless they just take the IP, and assets they’ve made, and use that to make something else, Marathon is likely DOA.

If by the time it comes out it even whiffs of a luve service long-term nickle-and-diming, people will dismiss it.

I don’t know.

But it’s not all phones. I’ve had some android devices that take over a minute to start up, but my current Xperia 1V also only takes 20 seconds to ask for the pin, then another 2-4 seconds for the home screen to fully show.

I do want to point out that phones aren’t running blazing-fast ssds. Lots of android devices run fairly sluggish eMMC flash.

For a while now, I’ve been making sure the android devices I buy are running a recent standard of UFS flash, instead. The difference is noticable, just with stuff like opening apps and moving files around.

Yes, since most games are simply unrated.

But the “playable” rating does not require full steamdeck support, it just means the game runs. A “verified” rating means a game is a fully seamless experience on the deck.

Do you know about co-optimus.com? Is that the “third party” you mentioned?

I don’t know of anything better. Setting your filter and sorting by user rating is pretty effective. Aside from that I sort by release date and check back every now and then.