Hot take: BotW > TotK

My most played game is probably The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. No idea in terms of how many hours. But I played it, then hundred-percented it (yes I found all the Korok seeds), then the DLC came out and I played that, then I started over in master mode, then I replayed it with mods, then I replayed it with cheats, then I speedran it for like a year.

The ship named “software does shit I don’t like on my own hardware” sailed the day proprietary software became a thing.

Mind you, it’s scary how many people applaud kernel-level anticheat. “This game was just ruined by hackers until they added kernel-level anticheat. Now it’s great again!”

How would a campaign against kernel-level anticheat “succeed” exactly? More awareness? More people boycotting kernel-level anticheat? Laws prohibiting the practice?

Like, obviously I’m never running any software that involves kernel-level anticheat, but I’m a Gentoo neckbeard with an EFF-approved tinfoil hat surgically attached to my scalp.

(Hell, I think it would be great if most of the games out there had cheater and bot servers where it was encouraged to run your cheat tools and/or bots. If they allowed that but just kept it separate from non-tool/non-bot players, that’d be a fantastic way to get kids more interested in STEM.)

(Also, if anyone made and sold a boardgame that made players want to cheat (in a bug-not-feature kind of way), it would get negative reviews and no one would buy it. In a way, kernel-level anticheat can almost be considered a type of “externality”. The game studio, rather than going to the trouble to tune their game to make cheating less appealing, they break their users’ computers and invade their privacy. And the game studio then rakes in more money as a result.)

But how would we get through to normie 12-year-olds who just want to play Valorant and not have their face constantly rubbed in the dirt by “hackers”?

That’s the neat part. I don’t!

I’ve got enough privacy concerns about my car’s privacy policies that I don’t want my phone talking to my car. (Except via the aux audio port, at least.)

And since I first got a smartphone, I haven’t done enough traveling that I’ve ever felt the need for a maps app. But there are options on F-Droid. I just can’t speak to how good they are as I’ve never used any of them.

Though, honestly, I can also just use https://maps.google.com/ through my browser.

Nope! I’m Google-app free.

My only app store is F-Droid. And I have yet to install any proprietary apps on my phone.

I’ve got Shelter set up in case my work ever pressures me to install any proprietary apps, but so far they haven’t pushed anyway.

The DMCA is such bullshit. I mean, U.S. (and other WIPO countries) copyright law is bullshit in general, but it got 100 times worse when they passed the DMCA.

I’ve got my caps lock key remapped to escape.

I use my left pinky for ctrl, shift, a, and my remapped caps lock/escape key.

I use my right pinky for shift, enter, and I’m pretty sure that’s all.

I use my ring fingers for backspace, tilde, tab, q, backslash, quote, and that probably isn’t a comprehensive list.

I use my middle finger for semicolon/colon! I never realized that before. Wild.

Did people think they meant something else? Or was it more that they didn’t really elaborate and folks didn’t know quite what they meant?

if you want to take OpenAI’s own research into account

No thank you.

OlympicArena validation set (text-only)

“Our extensive evaluations reveal that even advanced models like GPT-4o only achieve a 39.97% overall accuracy (28.67% for mathematics and 29.71% for physics)”

• The OlympicArena analysis that you cited.

Source?

Unlike this year when LLMs are more of a huge scam.

Here’s a rather wacky one: Star Tropics. A sequel to Zoda’s Revenge would just blow my mind.

Can you share what specifically you’re referring to?

Never have I acquired a bit of head canon so quickly and permanently.

I’m just going to put in my will “and to my loved ones, please pirate some games I liked.”

I know I’ve seen “cryptographically secure” levels (as in, you can only possibly beat it within a human lifespan if you know the specific “combination” or “cryptographic key”), but maybe only in Super Mario Maker 2.

And I’m not sure if in 1 you can inspect the whole level. The SMM2 cryptographically secure ones I’ve seen rely on mechanisms that must remain off-screen the whole time or else it’s trivial to derive the key.

It’s really disturbing how popular the notion that rootkit-based anti-cheat is a good thing is on the internet at large.

I love it when a thread like this comes up on Lemmy every single comment condemns EAC’s whole anti-cheat model.

Y’all are all right.

Disney trying to send the message that Steamboat Willie Mickey is still theirs.

You’re hallucinating. (Pun intended.)

Neither Capt. Wolf nor I said a single thing about AI or Open Source. And the article didn’t mention anything about Open Source.

Completely unrelated to anything my post said.

Even if it’s just another scheme to further concentrate wealth (and it is at least that), that harms everyone but the 0.1%.

They will conclude that they did not actually save money by replacing human developers with LLMs.

The next CTO might realize that. If there hasn’t been a change in upper-level management, they’ll just double down and blame the few remaining human developers for the mess.

CTO’s are incapable of self-reflection.

Shining Force II for the Sega Genesis! I’m not very far into it yet, but it’s a good old classic JRPG.

What did you think I was saying this project was?

Magarena also comes to mind. It’s a computer game implementation of Magic The Gathering. There’s a button in the settings that downloads all the card art from publicly available sources.

I wish more projects like this would just think smarter.

If you implement an engine and include a tool that takes the assets from the official game, it’s a lot harder for the IP owners to argue it infringes, and thus a lot harder to shut down.

I’m a Luddite for sure, but I’d be uncomfortable with my car having access to data about how I interact with my phone. I use Lineage and not Graphene, but I don’t think I’d use Android Auto if it was available for Lineage. (Or maybe it is. Not sure. But I wouldn’t use it regardless.)

So does that mean you would have preferred that Infestation hadn’t changed its name?

Yeah. The “ok sign” one started just as some random 4chan post.

They could even keep Mickey. Just give him a narrow mustache and a Nazi uniform like you see in Indiana Jones movies and they’re good to go.

Except, I’m guessing Infestation '88 is about being hunted by Mickey, so maybe they should change that too.

It seems like every time the alt-right and neo-Nazis make something a new dog whistle (remember the “ok” sign thing that started on 4chan?) the left is just like “oh fuck, I guess we better stop using that now.”

I’m not sure there’s a better option. It’s not like it’s a good idea to just go on flashing “ok” signs and pretending it hasn’t been coopted by fascists, but it seems shitty and frustrating to just cede ground like that every time the alt right is just like “this is ours now.”

Come to think of it, I named a project at my workplace “IG-88” a while back and didn’t think about the Nazi connection until the name was already in common use. (With that name, the project in question even had a badass theme song.)

Yume Nikki. The RPG Maker version. On my phone with EasyRPG Player. It’s about time I picked it up.

I also want to be told the same, please.

This is (one reason) why anti-cheat should be server-side.

what’s the issue with Epic

Enshittification.

why should I go for Steam

Not sure you should.

or GoG?

I hear GoG tends to be less DRM-y.

Thanks for the answers!

Too bad it was never open sourced. Seems like someone could have stripped out the assets, made a tool to extract assets from the ROM, and the result wouldn’t infringe.

Maybe the author would be willing to open source the engine with no assets now. We can hope, I guess.

Just seems like it wouldn’t have taken that much more work to make it less likely to be taken down by threats from Nintendo.

Edit: I wrote this response before I saw @nanoUFO’s response about it having been open source.

Edit2: I just realized the GitHub repo doesn’t indicate what license that code is under. So, not FOSS and it’s unclear what’s legal to do with that code.

I don’t know much about Link’s Awakening DX HD. But I’m curious about three things:

• Did Link’s Awakening DX HD have a price on itch.io or was it a free or pay-what-you-want thing?
• Did they distribute assets from Link’s Awakening along with the engine, or was it just the engine with a tool to extract the assets from a Link’s Awakening ROM?
• Is Link’s Awakening DX HD open source?

This is news? We knew this decades ago.

I’ve published a good handful of videos on YouTube. Mostly speedruns and glitch/exploit tutorials. (I’m not monetized or anything. Never really was trying either.)

I haven’t made any videos in quite a while, but I’m very much planning to only publish future videos only on PeerTube.

I’m glad I’ve never had an iPhone or Android phone with Google Apps. It’s the “conveniences” that ensnare you.