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Surprised I haven’t seen Undertale yet. The online fanbase is hilariously toxic, (seriously, don’t go looking for any extra details about the game after you finish it) but it’s a solid game that should be experienced 100% blind. All I’ll say is that it’s a game that is written to subvert expectations; If you go into it expecting to play it like a traditional RPG, you’ll be in for a big surprise.
That’s because employees are seen as a liability, while holdings are seen as value.
Basically, employees need to be paid, so having a lot of employees hurts your company value. But owning immaterial things helps company value, because you don’t need to pay for ideas beyond the initial investment.
So headlines like these are common any time a company is looking to boost their stock. Lay off a bunch of employees to reduce cash out, use that freshly gained cash to buy intellectual properties (or buy the companies that own that IP) and then sit on the IP because actually using it would require employees like the ones you just laid off. You don’t care about actually leveraging the IP, because simply owning it is what gives you the value bump. You’re not worried about income from those IPs yet, because you’re just trying to make the company larger with the existing cash you have access to.
Alternatively: people have gone out of their way to foster a space where LGBTQIA+ people feel comfortable. In a world full of heteronormativity, this is a bubble where they can truly be themselves. It’s one of the few places where a gay dude can flirt with another dude, without the fear of being punched in the mouth just for being gay.
And then a straight guy walks into the gay bar, and starts a fight when another dude tries to flirt with him. He starts ranting about how it’s not okay to assume he’s gay, and that he feels oppressed for being straight. He wants the heteronormativity to extend even into LGBTQIA+ spaces, despite the fact that he could go to literally any other bar in town and not have this issue. Instead, he has chosen to make a scene at the gay bar, because he’s upset it’s a gay bar.
You got a few downvotes, but you’re not wrong. Another issue is if you have tags for everything except being straight, then it sort of implies that being straight is the default “normal” option, and everyone else has to go out of their way to designate themselves as not normal. It’s something that should be left up to the users to choose, instead of having a default.
Sort of like if you had race tags for everything except “white”, it would imply that being white was the expected norm, and everyone else has to mark themselves as outside the norm. Or for a more forced-binary example, what if a game had a “woman” tag, but no other gender tags? It would heavily imply that the expected default is “man”, and every woman (or really anyone who doesn’t explicitly identify as a man) has to self-select.
That being said, it’s a queer game made by queer devs for queer people. They can do whatever the hell they want with it. Not every space is meant for straight people; Queer people have often been required to go out of their way to form their own communities and spaces to avoid judgement from straight people. Demanding a “straight” tag feels a little like a straight dudebro walking into a gay bar and getting pissed when dudes flirt with him. No dudebro, you’re the one who is wrong here, because you have literally every other bar in town to go to instead. You don’t need to encroach on the gay bar, because it’s likely the only place gay people have that is truly “their” place.
The unfortunate part is that Nintendo is likely going to win it. It’s a Japanese company, in Japanese court, and the courts are hilariously biased in favor of Japanese companies. Nintendo has literally never lost a lawsuit in Japan against a foreign defendant, because the Japanese courts are set up to trust Japanese claimants more than foreigners by default.
Japan has a lot of cute media and a reputation for being polite, but the harsh reality is that the country is one of the most racist in the world. They get away with it because the culture is built upon being polite. But under that polite exterior, there is a lot of overt racism. Japan is one of the most homogenous populations in the world, with 99.8% of the population being native Japanese. That remaining 0.2% includes all of the tourists, visa holders, immigrants, half-Japanese children, etc… Japan has a saying, which roughly translates to “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” In a society that is focused on blending in, immigrants stick out.
Imagine how bad the White Power rhetoric would be if America were 99.8% white, and that other 0.2% (not 2%. Two tenths of 1%) of non-white people included tourists, immigrants, and naturalized citizens. In a packed 20,000 person stadium, that would only be 40 non-white people in the crowd.
Yeah, the intro is honestly awful. The game suffers from some major Kingdom Hearts 2 Syndrome. The goal is to teach you how larger Witcher contracts work, but it just slogs and there’s very little plot development for the first few hours of the game. The plot picks up once you get out of the starting area and to the Bloody Baron, so withhold judgement until you get to that point.
Also, the combat can be rough in the early game, but the difficulty quickly tapers off as you begin leveling up. By the end of the game, you’ll be mowing through enemies even on the Death March difficulty.
The dude’s arguments sound like the kind of stuff that is frequently parroted by SovCits. My bet is that this dude is so nutty that no lawyers were willing to take him on as a client even if he asked. But I doubt he asked, because SovCits often believe they know more than the lawyers do.
The stuff about not owning the company reeks of SovCit “I’m a man acting as an agent on behalf of my name” bullshit. The rest of his arguments also sound like common SovCit “throw legalese at the wall like it’s some sort of cheat code” stuff.
I mean, they landed Gary Bowser in prison for 10 years for something very similar. Dude was just installing mod chips in Switches. He got out after only a few years due to a degenerative disease, (I think he has ALS, but that’s just off the top of my head,) but he still owes Nintendo $10M and they’re basically garnishing 30% of all of his pay for the rest of his life.
Which is a very easily recognized pattern, color, and size. The entire point of a dollar is that every single one looks identical.
Imagine if every single dollar bill was a different color, shape, size, printing pattern, etc… Now imagine trying to block that. Now consider that as soon as you figure out how to block all of the current versions, anyone in the world can just design a new version in 5 minutes.
Skyrim, Factorio, and The Sims 3 or 4 (it really doesn’t matter which one.)
All of them are open-ended and player-led, so there’s not a single set-in-stone story to play through and get bored with. All of them have extensive modding communities and support. And there is a variety of gameplay styles, so there’s something to suit various moods.
And all of them are notorious for hooking players. Nobody ever decides to boot up the Sims because it sounds fun; They boot it up on a whim, then come up for air three months later, wondering what the hell happened to all of their free time. Once you get sucked into Factorio, you’ll start seeing conveyor belts in your sleep. I played ~600 hours of it in just a few months, and that’s considered newbie numbers; There are plenty of Steam users who have tens of thousands of hours played.
Factorio and RimWorld immediately come to mind. Even with the base unmodified game, you’ll likely get several weeks of gameplay out of Factorio. Then if you dive into modding, you’ll never put it down. Multiplayer is really nice too. And their big DLC just got announced, and is planned to drop in a few months. So now would actually be a great time to dive in, because you’ll get access to the DLC about the same time that you’ve burned through the content on the base game.
Which is deceptive, at best. Steam doesn’t have pricing clauses for developers’ games. The devs are free to sell their games anywhere they want, at whatever prices they want. But Steam does have pricing clauses for Steam keys. Basically, what allows you to register a game to your Steam account.
You can sell your game for whatever price you want, as long as it’s not the Steam version of the game. They don’t want you giving away Steam keys for cheaper than you can often buy them on Steam. And this makes sense; Steam has a vested interest in protecting their own game keys, and encouraging players to shop on a storefront that they know is reputable; Lots of steam key resellers are notoriously shady, for instance.
Basically, the dev can go sell it cheaper on GoG, or Epic, or their own storefront if they want. As long as they’re not selling Steam keys, they’re fine. But players like having games registered to their Steam accounts, because it puts everything in one place. So devs may feel shoehorned into selling Steam keys (which would invoke that pricing clause) instead of selling a separate version that isn’t registered to Steam. But that doesn’t mean Steam is preventing publishers from selling elsewhere, or controlling the prices on those third party sites. It just means Steam has market pull, and publishers know the game will sell better if it’s offered as a Steam key.
Yeah, most FromSoft games just feel intentionally clunky to me. Like the difficulty is artificial, purely because your character’s limbs seem to be full of birdshot. It always feels like the character is directly resisting my controls and fighting against me.
But Sekiro did away with all of that. The character feels snappy. He’s not weighed down. I never felt like I lost a fight because of an animation lock, or because my character was simply too sluggish. Every time I lost, I knew it was because I wasn’t fast enough as a player. And honestly, I prefer that. If I’m going to lose against a boss, I don’t want it to be due to some forced windup animation taking too long.
There have been a few famous (or infamous) cases of game devs adding crack checks into their games. Basically, the devs recognize that cracking is inevitable. So instead of trying to make harder and harder DRM methods, they simply started including checks to see if the player was using a cracked copy. If they did, they could change the game in some way. This can actually be fairly effective for the reasons you mentioned: A cracker gets the game to boot, and maybe plays the first five minutes or so. Then they send it out the door without actually verifying anything further. Because they’re rushing to be the first, so they won’t bother doing a full playthrough to ensure everything works. So when the player gets ahold of it, they’re the ones who experience all the issues.
Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage, for instance, made the game increasingly frustrating to play. It would start removing treasure you had already collected, so you had to recollect it. And in a game where your progress is tracked via collections, that means it’s a huge time-sink. And if you somehow managed to get all the way to the final boss, the game would crash and delete your save so you had to completely start over.
Game Dev Tycoon is another example. The devs themselves actually posted a “cracked” version of their game on day 1. So all the various sites grabbed it and started seeding their torrents. It’s a game where you spend time and money developing games. And the cracked version also includes a piracy feature, where as you gain popularity you also see your profits getting eaten by piracy. And the game will slowly ratchet up the amount that you lose to piracy, until it’s eventually impossible to make a profit. Notably, there was no in-game way to combat the piracy or stop it from eating into your profits.
That latter example was used to great effect, because it sent all of the pirates to the steam message boards, to complain about piracy in their games and ask if there was a way to develop DRM to combat it. In essence, they were tricked into ratting on themselves. Because if you were playing a legit copy, you wouldn’t have any issues with piracy.
I mean, Palworld suffered from the exact opposite problem, where the game received basically no post-launch content. So once players burned through the main game, there was very little reason to keep playing.
This just goes to show that support needs to both exist and be something players agree with.
Worth noting that the wiimote just uses Bluetooth, so it doesn’t take any specialized equipment to connect to your computer. And Dolphin has built in support for it. The sensor bar was also just a pair of infrared LEDs; All of the actual “sensing” happened at the wiimote directly. So you can just throw a wireless sensor bar (like $15 on amazon) underneath your computer monitor, and it will work fine.