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No clue if he was joking, but last year, Charlie Brooker said Balatro was super addictive, that everybody was going to fall prey to its charms, and it would tank global productivity.
Balatro showing up in Black Mirror tracks, because he’s apparently a big fan of the game, and either it’s a thank you to a dev he likes, or he genuinely thinks it’s a (fun) digital trap for humans.
Honestly, that’s probably where GOG fits in. They grant you a license to download the full game without DRM. I don’t know if they already do this, but if a game is planned to be delisted, they could warn players and allow them to download a final copy that should work whether the listing exists or not.
In that way, you have a coexisting license and ownership of what you pay for.
It’s a blast! The devs listen to and are involved in the community, you can go back and play earlier season content at your discretion, and all the paid content is optional cosmetics that exist primarily as an additional revenue stream for the devs, so no pay to win or praying to RNGesus to get that one ultra rare drop everyone needs.
Are boycotts really the best solution to stop this epidemic in gaming?
Yes, but not if you don’t convince others to join you.
How can we best prevent these gambling grey markets and the gaming to gambling addiction pipeline?
Educate people on the dangers. Show them why it’s gambling, because there’s a lot of apologetics out there to trick people into thinking it’s not. Point out the same slot-machine-tactics they use to get people hooked.
And then convince them to boycott. The CEOs that put this shit in games know how to read sales numbers, and if sales start dropping (or player counts), they’ll soon figure out that it’s because of their lootbox/gacha systems.
Lastly, give people alternatives. I usually point people to Deep Rock Galactic, but there may be others that are better suited to people’s tastes. “Just leave” isn’t really effective if they don’t know where to go.
Cool, and you think Nintendo is spending the resources to develop their own model from scratch? Because if not, the existing models were built and refined upon other people’s art (written, drawn, etc.)
I don’t think they are, because that would be costly; it’s much easier to just enter a licensing agreement.
You missed the point. I’m not talking about just giving a model their library of artwork, which they are within their rights to do.
That model that can parse their artwork had to be developed and refined upon other work. Unless Nintendo is building their own upon their artwork—which I seriously doubt, because that would be a costly undertaking—they’ll be using existing models licensed from somewhere, all of which were developed by stealing from legitimate artists. If they’re using it for idea generation (like an LLM), that text generator was built upon stolen writing.
I’m merely pointing out that it’s ironic for a company that takes such a harsh stance with its fans for “stealing” its IP to be okay with AI.
Amid the furore around the $449.99 price of the Switch 2 and Mario Kart World’s $79.99 price tag, there is shock at Nintendo’s decision to charge for the console’s tutorial game, Welcome Tour.
You can spend about the same amount for a Steam Deck, and you can play Aperture Desk Job for free. Speaks volumes how Nintendo views their fans.
It was, imo, the founder of the Vania part of Metroidvanias, so they didn’t have the benefit of standing upon many shoulders. Hollow Knight is a great spiritual successor to that endeavor, and I agree that they took much of what made SotN great and improved upon it.
It’s interesting watching people get so excited by HK, I have to wonder if that’s what it was like when SotN and successive games came out.
If you liked Hollow Knight, you should give Symphony of the Night a try sometime. The gameplay loop is similar, and like Hollow Night, there’s no hurry.
I think they’re both good, with the older one being the one that, imo, defined the Vania side of things. But being on the older side myself, I understand having limited time to take on new games!
The art style is great, and the ability to choose your loadout adds a unique twist to how Metroidvanias usually work. I had a good time playing it, and it reminded me a lot of when I played Symphony of the Night many years ago.
Many Metroidvanias are boring because they lack character that would motivate you to do Metroidvania levels of backtracking.
This is a good point, and likely why I’ve not gotten that into many of the more recent ones (with some exceptions). I suppose in that sense, it’s revolutionary next to many of its contemporaries.
Hollow Knight is clearly one of the best to ever do it in my opinion. It also totally transformed the landscape of metroidvanias, with subsequent games imitating it left and right.
Can you expand on this? I feel like there’s some interesting perspective in there.
And I will probably play Silksong eventually, too but I’m just trying to understand why people think it stands above the rest.
I don’t really understand the appeal of Hollow Knight. Like don’t get me wrong, I loved it, but having played lots of other Metroidvanias, including the classic Symphony of the Night, it didn’t rock my world or reshape the paradigm that existed. It is a good Metroidvania alongside others.
Is the appeal a kind of generational thing—people who hadn’t played a lot of those predecessors but experienced this one first?
Edit: I appreciate the responses and everyone’s unique perspective!
Yeah, no. Valve has all but ensured their continuing relevance with the Steam Deck alone. Coupled with their consumer-focused policies (like forcing companies to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat), they’re not going anywhere.
This is just a Mac fanboi who’s salty that Mac support is poor, even though it’s Apple that has made their walled garden hard to work with.
I do worry a little about future antitrust actions, because while I generally like Valve as they are, Gabe won’t be around forever. They have a giant influence in the market, and they don’t even have to try (they were one of the first, so it makes sense they’d have the most market share); it could be that the company I generally like starts actively being anticompetitive or starts donating to Nazis or something.
But that is a problem for a future time, and there’s no denying that Valve has propelled Linux gaming into mainstream relevance. No matter what happens, I’ll always be grateful for that.
Sad, but not unexpected. I happened to pick it back up after a few years right about when the first round of layoffs happened. Somebody decided to fundamentally change the game all at once, removing or replacing people’s weapons and gear, and while I think it’s overall good, it pissed off a lot of people who had spent hundreds of hours farming behemoths.
I’ve been playing my last hurrahs, knowing this was coming. Sad that Forte (who bought Phoenix Labs) just let it die like this, but they were never in it to make a good game—just a quick buck.
Hopefully a game like this comes again, someday. They were the first game I can recall that had good crossplay at a time when what was novel.
Gaming? Pretty sure that’s FL Studio, and all those stimulants and depressants would make gaming performance terrible.
Inspiring amazing music, on the other hand…