https://xkcd.com/243/

Does anybody actually want one of these things?

I’ve never seen the Legion Go irl but the old one looked like the touchpad was just the right size too be unobtrusive but still practical. The new one looks like a thumb print reader.

I’ve never heard “I’m sorry Jon” called gorefield before.

I’ve never even heard of this before. Is it mostly a rendering library or is it a full game framework like Godot or Unity?

And thanks to the AI customers you can’t afford it anyways.

The animation and aesthetic is amazing and I like the music but … what’s the gameplay? I confess I got a little disappointed when it shifted to platformer perspective.

And I don’t make my own paints either when doing art. I still agree with the basic original point:

It is disappointing that we’re currently automating creativity far faster than manual labour. I’m angry that my art is getting automated away faster than my folding of laundry.

Okay but I still have to fold my own laundry.

I wish they could come up with a more honest term for it than “vegan leather”. Call it “upholstery vinyl” or something. Frustrating how there’s no good standard quality grades for that stuff too. Like, the seats in my Prius don’t wear the way my belt and my boots do, and they’re all made of pleather vinyl.

Glass backs are the dumbest idea in the history of stupid.

The only way things like that could be defensible if they were easy to replace (bring back Moto-Z style magnetic backs!), but since phones are all held together with glue now, that’s not a thing.

This feels like a workaround for a core problem: Media (particularly games) are no longer transferable goods.

What’s needed is a proper legal standard WRT resale-ability and server support. Clear requirements on what a piece of software must be able to do without its private and impossible-to-acquire cloud server, and clear requirements on allowing transfers of ownership of non-recurring-subscription-based digital goods.

They also don’t have the thumb touchpads that Valve has put so much effort into. That’s a huge form-factor advantage.

God damn how is it that Sega has never released a Sonic Adventure-style game with that kind of online multiplayer? It’s so freaking obvious and yet we’ve never seen it.

Some of the gameplay mechanics look a bit… unnecessary? Like riding on vehicles, at least at speed. And I’ve always thought the Sonic Adventure rail grinding was tedious. But still overall it looks like a fun adaptation of the 3D sonic gameplay albeit with a slightly dated-looking art style.

On the one hand it’s kind of disgusting, but it’s also heartening: this is a studio that had done nothing but asset flips. Their artists didn’t even know what a rig was. They were completely out of their depth.

And while the game is the most cynical thing I’ve ever seen, its creature designs are blatant mash-ups of Pokemon, and its media hype is absolutely bewildering and somewhat suspicious… but by all accounts it’s decently good fun and looks decent visually too.

So, a studio with no idea what they were doing managed to poop out a moderately good game and smash it out of the park in terms of success.

That should be heartening. That should say “maybe I can do it too” to all the hopeful indie devs out there. That should be a massive endorsement of the tooling that the industry has developed, that a completely unqualified group of guys can make a fun and successful online multiplayer action game.

I’ma call him Totoraichu.

Wasn’t there an official branded pokemon dotalike for a while? I mean, they tried the approach of “let’s make a conventional PC genre game but with Pokemon” and it didn’t stick.

Yes, many many many years ago. Beyond Earth is the palest of pale imitation.

Civ Beyond Earth has the neat approach that it replaces the old “build a spaceship to alpha Centauri” with three different technological endings each with different moral implications. The game is about human transcendence so any ending is going to be about changing humanity.

The problem is that the game itself is not one of the better entries in the Civ series otherwise.

Fun bit of context: if I, an individual, found a way to remote into Sony Playstation and hack them in such a way that they disconnected from their controllers?

I would be in prison. For years. Remember what happened to Aaron Schwartz? Kevin Mitnick? They do not fuck around on computer crimes.

But when a corporation does it to their customers and competitors? Pay the fine and get back to business as usual.

I don’t think the controllers are literally “damaged”, it sounds like just muddling legal terminology with technical terminology.

The controllers are still physically functional in the same way they were before the patch, they’re just mo longer consistently connecting to the ps5. If Sony rolls back the patch they will return to normal.

That said, returns and reputational damages would be substantial to these companies and the fine does sound too small for such blatant anti-competitive and anti-consumer action.

Sony’s excuse is bullshit. If they really were convinced these were counterfeit 3rd party controllers, they should’ve popped up an on-screen message “defective counterfeit controller detected, please only use properly supported hardware”. That would’ve made the error clear. But random disconnects are just sabotage.

It’s not really about the strategy – jumping from board to a digital counterpart, it’s the book keeping that is the huge difference. All the stuff that happens automatically between turns - in civ, this is income, maintenance, trade routes, research, culture, production, population growth, happiness, religious pressure, diplomatic decay, auto move, terrain development, experience, etc figuring in all the bonuses and penalties applied by every citizen, every trade deal, every tech, every wonder, every cultural development, every special land, etc.

In theory in a 4X you’re supposed to be aware of all those rules and factors that are in play but in practice the game is too large to account for every instance.

In a boardgame, you’re executing that by hand, so it’s much more direct.

Well yes but actual no. While 4X games are turn based strategies where most rules are implemented through simple math, the obscene scale and complexity means they’d be impossible to implement on a board. And that’s before even considering fog of war.

For a TBS to work as a boardgame, it must have a real-world mechanical solution to its secrets (cards, Stratego units, etc) and it must be simple enough for humans to execute all of the logic within the game.

Give me an F-zero 99 + Mode7 Mario Kart Mario Maker game. Simple 2D maps.

I love the concept but that gameplay looks hella repetitive. Combined with a black and white art style that could get tiring, I’m worried about longevity.

I think I saw some co-op in the Golden Axe. If they lean into the multiplayer I could see it being good fun as a co-op soulslike without the oppressive grimdark atmosphere that tends to define the genre.

Shinobi looks cool, but there are enough amazing pixel-art platformers out there already.

No interest in Streets of Rage.

Crazy Taxi looks like Crazy Taxi. Which is neat but I don’t really have nostalgia for that.

I’m mostly disappointed they missed how awesome Armored Core 6 was and didn’t jump onto that bandwagon with a new Virtual On game.

Powerstone 2 was basically a Super Smash Bros-style 4-player fighting party-game but with the 3D-platformer gameplay of a Wrestlemania game. Instead of Smash Balls, there were a set of “Stones” where you’d get an ultimate if you got 3 of them. Very fun party/fighting game, much like Smash.

That’s Capcom. It was a Dreamcast flagship game but resurrecting it still isn’t up to Sega.

Why would they intentionally screw up so badly idk.

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

They probably started with an overambitious design, took some ill-advised short-cuts, and pivoted the to the “extraction” format after they’d already marketed it as a different concept, and made a bad gamble or two. Normal gamedev stuff. Same as every Molyneux game.

A few years back this could’ve been another No Man’s Sky story where they fix it after launch… but that means going deeper and deeper into debt while you salvage the mess you’ve made. Post-COVID interest rates make that impossible. So now they’re broke and the project they spent the last years on is a stinker and they don’t have enough runway to fix it.

So they’re done.

Uh, have you not seen how many game studios are collapsing? It’s more likely an “oh crap we’re bankrupt interest rates jumped and we can no longer pay our loans’ carrying costs”.

The interest rate jump screwed a lot of businesses that depend heavily on loans to make it to profitability.

They probably took one look at their launch-day take, compared it against their loans, and said “fuck this we’re filing for bankruptcy and I’m and going to go get a regular-ass job”.

Did they miss the memo on Armored Core 6? If they’re bringing back a Dreamcast franchise, it’s Virtual On

Tomb Raider 2013 would only pop up the hud when you did something that involved it, by default the GUI was fully hidden.

The ultimate original “no hud FPS” was Jurassic Park Trespasser, where checking your health involved looking down at a tattoo on your breast.

Lenovo’s ones win for bang-for-your-buck. Not great for gaming or the like but for simple reading comics and watching videos you can’t beat the price for a big device like that.

Opens tab

Anime game with many characters with different gameplay? Sure I’ll take a look.

Zenless Zone Zero is an upcoming free-to-play urban fantas…

Closes tab.

They should run proper goddamned metrics. I go to considerable effort to ensure good quality wifi.

I only played it briefly at my nephew’s house back in the day but it actually seemed really janky. Was it actually good or was this just “omg GTA but with Simpsons I’m 11 and this is cool!”?

This is why the digital good I buy the most of is music. MP3s are just dumb files. There’s no subscription fees, no DRM. Nothing but digital watermarks. The “service” is the ability to redownload and stream the songs that I’ve purchased on other devices, but I also store the raw files on my fileserver.

Now, the challenge for the vendor is that I can also just as easily pirate these same files.

And yet somehow I still buy.

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and Large Corporate Landlords: There’s a perception that these entities buy up substantial amounts of property, making it difficult for individuals to purchase a home due to increased prices and limited supply.

People keep looking for the bogeyman here but this is one where that’s too facile. Rents in Canada have skyrocketed, and REITs rent out their properties. Sure, they rent them out as expensive as they can, they’re jerks. But they’re profiteering off of the shortage of rental properties. And if they’ve got a crapload of property, and they’re profiting from the shortage… well they’re not really the cause of the shortage when they’re offering a lot to rent, are they? They’re profiteering from it, but they’re not causing it. If there was truly endless money buying up everything and then renting it out, prices to buy would climb, but prices to rent would plummet, and that’s obviously not happening.

You want to look at the cause? Look at people who prevent new housing from getting built. Petty bureaucrats. Wealthy NIMBY neighbours.

And yes, as much as it goes against Canadian values: if you’ve got more immigrants than you’ve got new housing, you’re going to run out of homes, and the people who have homes can price them as high as they want because everybody needs a roof.

Yes but the typical gameclip set up where you have the DS-style setup of the controller at the bottom and the screen at the top is surprisingly uncomfortable because of how top-heavy that is.

Too bad phone makers have given up on experimenting with form factor. Just an endless array of oddly-sized rectangles, but not quite consistent-enough to make gameclips feasible.

Also I’ve hit problems with gamepad+Bluetooth audio giving my game controller bad audio latency. Had to switch to wired audio.

I mean I remember grinding for loot and levels in FF1.