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That’s basically the point of a tariff; to discourage people from buying foreign goods and to encourage production and sale of domestic goods instead.
The only times it doesn’t work correctly is when too much of the general populace refuses to do the work necessary to create production, domestic regulations make production locally too prohibitively expensive, and/or when domestic product manufacturers raise their prices to match the new higher tariffed prices, effectively cancelling the intended benefits of a tariff.
The USA right now is kinda seeing the effects of all 3. It has been so reliant on imports for such a long time that trying to cut that off all at once is having a more pronounced effect than if its import reliance was curtailed more slowly and started a while ago. And since there is no regulation (AFAIK) saying that domestic good prices cannot raise to match imported good prices when tariffed, that doesn’t help either. Businesses want the most money, and if all the other options for a product are $150 and their domestic one is only $50, without law saying they can’t match those other prices businesses feel like they are leaving $100 on the table.
I mean, any person that tries to learn history from video games or movies alone is pretty dumb. In order for it to be entertaining, artistic liberties often need to be taken which usuaally means the final product is not historically accurate. The thing with Assassin’s Creed games is that where history was involved, in the past they tried to be as accurate to real life as possible. The layouts of cities, the appearance and roles of real historic characters, etc. In more recent years they have tossed that out the window, but historic accuracy on elements not related to the assassin storyline was something Assassin’s Creed prided itself on.
Even still, most only have a single text screen at the very beginning that just says “this is a work of fiction.” I don’t know that I would call that emphasis, but it is present. I also haven’t tried this mod myself, but I don’t see that it would be portraying itself as real events unless it says “this is based on real events.” I have always assumed that video games are a work of fiction, even if they are based on real events. If I wanted to learn more about the real events, I would do research on my own.
I suppose at the end of the day more context is needed. Did Valve contact the mod author prior to takedown to request a change in the mod description to add a “work of fiction” tag and the author refused? If Valve just straight up removed it without even contacting the author, I think that is not good.
I am concerned that censorship might become greater with this action. What other governments will say to Valve “remove X or Y game/mod because it is offensive or portrays real life characters or events improperly?” Ideally none, but still. I don’t exactly agree with the context of this mod and entirely understand why it would be offensive, but at the same time I think that a mod author or game developer should be free to create whatever they want, without fear of censorship removing their work.
EDIT:
Valve has denied reports its pulled a controversial mod from Steam around the world at the request of the South Korean government, saying the mod was only blocked in South Korea and only because it broke local laws. The mod’s author is said to be behind its global removal.
EDIT: This was important information I was not privy to when I originally made this comment. This makes more sense and is completely understandable.
Original comment below:
I feel like this opens the door to banning any “alternative history” setting for a game or mod on Steam.
For example, if someone wanted to make a mod about WWII but aliens invaded Earth and the Allies and Axis decided to make an agreement to become allies to repel the alien invasion, how would that be different from this? That would effectively make Nazis “good guys” in that alternative historical setting. Obviously, that is something that never happened in real history, but if someone is interested in real historical events, it should be on them to do their research, not a video game developer or a mod author.
Unless there is specific context where a government is pointing to this mod saying that’s “how it really happened,” would not a disclaimer saying that the events in the game are not based on reality and set in an alternative timeline be sufficient?
Sometimes, but most of the time duplicates let you level up a character beyond their basic level (Limit Break, most commonly called), or give you materials to pick a new character (sometimes called Pity System, but that is a little different), or materials to forge new weapons.
I have played many gacha games, and I have only ever spent money on NieR Reincarnation because I wanted Square Enix to see that I like Yoko Taros games and want more of them. I am not a whale, dolphin, or a minnow. I am a “barnacle” F2P player, and I have never had a problem with the games I play. They’re not really designed to be constantly played all the time like a “regular” game would be, instead being level or session style games. I don’t compare my game progress with other players, and I play to have fun and pass time. I get exactly what I want from them for whenever I play them.
I would just like to mention that it is called “gacha” not “gotcha.”
“Gacha” is short for the Japanese term gachapon, which means “capsule toy.” You remember gumball machines? You put a quarter in and twist the handle and a gumball comes out. Gachapon is like that, but with a small plastic ball with a random toy inside. Those are less common than the gumball machines, but there were also some that had sticker/temporary tattoo sheets and those hard candies that looks like fruits(mostly bananas).
Gachapon is a bit different from gambling. Gambling comes with the inherent understanding that you have a chance to lose. With gachapon, you always get exactly what you are paying for: a random capsule toy. You just don’t get to pick which one you get. With gachapon, you always “win,” there is no chance that your money is spent and you get nothing in return. This is why games with gacha mechanics makes duplicates of characters or items useful. Whatever you get is still useful to you, even if you don’t get what you wanted.
I think you already understand the negative aspects of gachapon, but I just wanted to add that little bit of information.
Honestly? Its kinda good Perfect Dark was cancelled.
When MS first showed Perfect Dark, there was nothing of substance really to base any expectations on. Except previous games, which were only ever “okay.” But the second time they showed it, with their idea of gameplay, it looked bad. It didn’t look like what one would expect from Perfect Dark, it looked like some weird hybrid between Battlefield/Call of Duty, Mirror’s Edge, and a high tech cyberpunk game.
Perfect Dark was really only ever “that game Rare made because they weren’t allowed to make GoldenEye 2.” It wasn’t really revolutionary or prolific or anything, unlike GoldenEye.
Its better that it stays the way it was than be ruined by whatever it was going to be cobbled into. I am kinda shocked it took MS this long to cancel it.
because piracy means stealing
No. No it does not. Piracy is legally copyright infringement, not theft. Stealing requires that the thief deprive the original owner access to the stolen thing. Piracy is not stealing because there is no deprivation of access.
If I made a copy of your car, but you still had access to your car and could drive it like normal, I didn’t steal your car.
VOID originally split from the original publisher of the game because they “didn’t want to compromise their vision of the game.”
Well, apparently that has changed now that console money is on the table. They’re completely disregarding what they stood for before and are trudging ahead with compromising their vision of the game.
Look, I am still using a GTX 1080 Ti (GOATED GPU btw, best dollar per performance value probably ever) because GPUs are too expensive. $700 USD for a low-mid tier card, or $1000+ for a card that should (and usually does) give good lasting value. I don’t see where anyone is buying a PC for less than $500 and it has better performance than a PS5, but I suppose it is possible this is a result of Price Discrimination, since I am in California.
NVidia is showing what PlayStation will look like when it feels there is actually zero competition. Xbox, so long as its hardware exists, is a constant threat to PlayStation keeping a lot of things in check. Once Xbox completely disappears, PlayStation will have no competition. Then Sony can set the prices however they want and nobody can do anything about it except pay up, or don’t.
I have Valkie 64, and I say save your money. Last I played it, it was VERY rough, unpolished, and felt unfinished. It didn’t properly replicate N64 graphics, looking more like an emulator from 2005 with the internal resolution cracked way up and only basic bilinear texture filtering. The controls are clunky, and I don’t mean like in an N64 game way, I mean they just feel bad.
Even for $5 USD or whatever, I say its not worth it. I was disappointed because the trailer seemed to make it look like an attempt to recapture the magic of Ocarina of Time, but it doesn’t do that at all. Like, not even close.
Its crazy to me that even after all these years, gaming media is still using Xbox/Microsoft as a punching bag. I guarantee that this opinion piece wouldnt have been written if Nintendo or Sony were doing the same levels of layoffs. Instead just a few softball articles would be made before going back to the regular clickbait slop basically all of the media giants create.
This is certainly a good strategy but this probably assumes the player has been grinding levels. I don’t do that. I play the storyline, and do absolutely no extra grinding because it is boring. I must have been underleveled because those “just humans and robots” were getting a TPK in 2 or 3 turns of combat on I think the 4th group.
Sad to hear the game gets better, but honestly it took me 20+ hours to get to that point and I wasn’t absolutely loving the game. By the time I quit, I just kept thinking that I wished I could play as Jecht instead of Tidus. Jecht had a better design and his voice acting seemed less annoying. I understand the specific voice acting quirks of FFX, but it sure sounded like Tidus’ english actor was some random Square picked up off the street and paid $50 to read the lines. Along with other annoyances, I just decided dropping it was probably for the best. Lulu was my favorite character, with Jecht or Auron being second place. Seymour was good as a character, I just didn’t like him.
Perhaps, but simply reporting content does not prove that they are aware of it. Their report system could be automated, and it might not flag those specific reports for human review, or it could have been lost or dropped. I don’t know, I am just particularly curious as to how lawyers will be able to prove beyond any doubt that whoever at Roblox actually knew about the problem and willingly let it happen. I don’t doubt that Roblox was certainly negligent, but I wouldn’t know for certainty that they could be labelled as “allowing” as opposed to “neglecting to take action.”
“Allowed” implies they knew about it, and let it happen anyway. Is that actually provable? They knew about these specific cases and knowingly let them continue happening? Some may say its just semantics, but semantics is literally the only thing lawyers and judges care about.
Like, if someone buys a car and then drives into a crowd of people killing multiple and injuring many more, you wouldn’t say that the car manufacturer “allowed” a mass murder to happen. I wonder how the lawyers will talk about this case.
I played FFX for like, 20 hours give or take. The combat wasn’t so obnoxious in that games like previous ones. But then I got to the Seymour Wedding part, what I can only describe as “the part where you must defeat all these enemies in order with no save points in between and if you werent prepared with 30 billion healing items and Lulu (the GOAT) gets killed, your game is basically softlocked” part. Beat that (thank you savestate scumming) and was already not having fun but that cutscene at the end of that part was frustrating to me. It felt like every character was acting extremely out of character, except maybe Seymour, and it was at that point that I decided I wasn’t having fun anymore and didn’t really care enough to try to potentially suffer more of that.
I really tried to like Final Fantasy. I want to like it. I just don’t like that kind of gameplay experience.
But I do enjoy FF Tactics.
Ironically, the turn based combat in Final Fantasy is the biggest reason I don’t play it. I find that the combat feels too repetitive, because its always the same animations, same music, same background per area, etc. Also, the random battle encounter mechanic annoys me when I just want to explore and I have to fight an entire army just to move from one side of an area to the other side.
Yeah, that’s kinda what I mean. I think we agree. It’s just that recently there has been more attention on more… questionable… changes that localizers have been making to entertainment media, some I agree with and some I don’t.
In the 80s and 90s, it was common for overseas versions to change names to be more Western sounding. Personally, I don’t mind this kind of change. It usually doesn’t effect the overall story much, but sometimes a character might have an exotic sounding name in the Japanese version, I would hope that they also have a similarly exotic sounding name. However, it was also common for the entire story to be altered pretty drastically, even with the entertainment itself being chopped up into something entirely different. Which I don’t appreciate. I want the foreign media because it is different and from a different culture, changing it to match my own culture defeats the point of me wanting to engage with it.
Sometimes though, entire conversations are completely removed or changed entirely from their original versions. I mean, completely different, the difference between a character saying “I love you” and “You will always be my dearest friend.” I believe the Fire Emblem series (which I haven’t played very much so I have only minimal experience with) has had a few of these kinds of changes. In those cases, I believe that is a malicious change the developers may not have known about or may not have fully understood when they approved or signed off on the localization. Or the localization agency may have either thought they had more creative license than they actually had or deceived the original creators to push their own version instead.
Jokes are a bit different IMO, since humor is pretty different between cultures. Jokes in entertainment often rely on an understanding of the local pop-culture, so naturally jokes or geographical/historical references may need to change. It is understandable in those cases.
I feel like this is entirely a localizer-added thing, and the original Japanese version was very different. I could be wrong of course, but this is just my gut feeling considering the time TYD released (and honestly it isn’t too much better nowadays).
Now, people can argue whether drastic changes like that are good or bad (I would say it is a massive “it depends”), but personally I would really prefer localizers stick to something as accurate to the original as possible while still being understandable in the target culture, and then include an altered or changed version as an option.
Like being able to choose between the ADV or Netflix dub for Evangelion.
I don’t mind if someone wants to add their own spin or whatever, as long as that doesn’t become the singular defined version for an entire region as is all too common. The original creators had a vision, and I want to see that vision, not the one a localizer is adding on that the original creators didn’t have.
For example, in a culture that doesnt have bread cakes, but they do have rice cakes, I would want a localizer to say characters ate “a food similar to rice cakes” or “an exotic food.” As an absolute last resort “a rice cake” is okay, but certainly not “the characters ate a big feast of pork and jelly donoughts.”
Physical copies are almost always cheaper, especially if you buy used. You cannot currently buy used digital games, and the sales they go on are rarely lower than their physical copy counterparts.
I remember about a month after Destiny 1 launched the Rise of Iron expansion, I went to buy my brother the digital edition on Xbox 360 and it was like $100 USD, but there was a disx only used copy on ebay for $7. You can guess which copy I went with lol.
Whatever you are willing to pay, since they are most likely looking for a new job. They have experience in damage stacking and liability research. And stapling.