Weren’t those accessories just wrist straps?

It looked like they were mimicking cars to me, not mice. Not saying that it wouldn’t be a cool concept if it has an optical sensor. But they didn’t show any visual feedback to imply they were controlling any kind of cursor. If that was the implication, it’s obvious it was a rushed marketing piece.

I think that’s still the DS. The Switch got close, but didn’t beat it, and now that attention is on the Switch2, it probably won’t.

Which mouse thing? they seem to be exactly all the same inputs the Switch 1 already had.

If you are open to try a more adventure oriented spin on this, then try Tunic. Where the main game mechanic is translating the game’s manual by learning the language of the world.

Typical infantile C-suite logic “I didn’t do X well, therefore X is impossible and no one can do X! It’s not my fault, I swear!”

Sure, but the support, both technical and reputational that a steam OS compatible machine brings would steer the market for more accessible and purpose made components. Bazzite is awesome and my daily driver, but it doesn’t have the fancy endorsement of Valve, the owner of the largest game store in the world today.

No system management. A set once and forget it system, ala console style, but with the potential of off the shelf high power components for PC games on the living room is a quality proposition.

Digging on Concord was funny for longer than its server were online.

True that, the tri-core PowerPC is quite a unique challenging mess. But underneath it is just the same processor.

I know it is hard to believe. But the gamecube, Wii, and wiiu are the same machine. Same architecture and family of processors (IBM’s PowerPC). That’s why the wiiu is just a Wii with a beefier CPU (three Wii cores slapped together), and then a newer more powerful GPU sticked to the side. Thats why a single emulator can target all three consoles. The switch 2 will just be a newer version of the Tegra chip.

Have you ever sat in front of a casino’s slot machine. They are also trash, awful and disgusting. But they’re also engineered with the worst dark pattern psychology to manipulate any human being that sits on it to keep playing and be so addictive that people will burn their money just to keep playing. The qualities of fun, and additive are independent of each other. A game can be very addictive and really bad at the same time. Unlike slot machines, they have the advantage of constantly sitting in your pocket and going with you everywhere you go.

By the third patent: Elden Ring, WoW, Everquest, Neverwinter, SW: The Old Republic, Final Fantasy, and many many others have infringed Nintendo patents. Fuck Nintendo.

SC is a scam. Of course they’re willing to break the law to keep the money they stole.

Just tried Heliboard, its glide typing support is experimental and requires hacking GApps to extract libraries or download someone’s else glide library from the internet. I guess my threat model remains for the time being.

It’s not connected to the internet and doesn’t send or receive any telemetry at all. It’s API is very minimal as well. I fear Gboard to compromise me far more than this app. Keyboards don’t need internet connection.

Openboard with swipe.

In this comment: Someone who is not familiar with the history of Nintendo selling pirated versions of their own games and ripping off pirate emulators then passing them as their own.

Rom pirates usually trim and sign their releases, specially if they have to break or decode any encryption. These pirate’s signatures have been found in official Nintendo releases. Some of their own emulators have also been found to run piracy emulation software. They are pretty much hypocrites.

Give GUN JAM a try. It’s a rhythm shooting game, the stakes are as high or as low as you want them. There’s only a minimal story and you just focus on the music, aiming and staying on the beat. Can be a lot of flow state fun.

In ten years? If I had to guess the average life span of live services games I’d say about 18 months. Heavily skewed by the survivors. The shortest lived one only worked for 13 days. Only the very popular ones survive past 5 years and there are a handful of 10 plus. I know it’s hard to believe, the average gamer is oblivious to how over saturated the videogames market is. Despite executive’s delusions, time and money are actually finite. Not all games can demand all of it, at the same time.

Undo is a function of the Android API, not the keyboard. All phones can do it. It is usually the app’s responsibility to implement its button because the feature extends beyond the realm of text input.

If you truly break it down, you’ll notice that AAA only actually makes two or three games, open world third person action RPG with parkour, open world shooter with looting and crafting, and live-service coop/competitive shooter with loot boxes. Every iteration of these same ideas are just varnishing the same bored gameplay concepts over and over with different coats of theming and slightly different stories. I only ever find original and stimulating gameplay on indie projects and the occasional small studio. They’re the only ones actually experimenting with innovative game design and varied concepts.

AAA games don’t have a production quality or even a development time problem. They have a far more existential one. A gameplay focus problem. These are games made with profit as first priority, not fun. They have confused engagement and addiction with gameplay quality. Live services poisoned their design language. This is why they want more, faster, at higher budgets. The fallacy is that more, faster, more graphically demanding, will magically make them all the money.

I want less games, with lower budgets, that take longer to make, have less graphic and animation fidelity, that pay better to their devs to do their job well. And I mean it.

The video games market is already overflowed for its size, yet somehow these companies are inflating their budgets like balloons instead and charging ever more and more for shittier games that somehow cost more to make. This isn’t sustainable. AI won’t fix any of these issues.

I will repeat, and I can’t stress enough with this reiteration, fuck Ubisoft.

It’s already being called the lowest price in a decade. Technically true, but honestly disingenuous since the massive price bump to over €100 was an anomaly caused by the pandemic that swept the entire industry, not just this one publisher. Also drivel to generate engagement. Just like this post, here we are discussing it, despite the fact that it is misleading and poor characterization of the entire picture.

Do you know how much money disappeared overnight because of this?

I do know, none. Not a single cent disappeared. Because stocks aren’t liquidity. That money was never there in the first place. Some paid some money to get those stocks, that money was real and it entered the company’s liquidity. Then they spent it on something. Those stocks are but the promise of paying some dividends, some time in the future or giving some power inside the company. Their virtual fluctuations of price over time are nothing but smoke and mirrors, people exchanging virtual titles over those rights like little kids trading collectible cards. Some people cashed out for a low price (that was already grossly overinflated from the pandemic days, so they probably still made bank) and it pushed an already correcting stock to accelerate for today. That money didn’t come from the company, it was exchanged entirely by third parties, public traders. Ubisoft didn’t participate at all in whatever pushed the price drop. No matter how much I want it to, Ubisoft is not in any more danger today than it was in yesterday. They are still filthy rich, if anything the biggest danger for this is that it gives them lee way to layoff another group of underpaid developers or gut another studio to appease the stockholders. Who are already in a frenzy for blood because Outlaws didn’t make all the money.

If you were to compare Ubisoft today to Ubisoft 2 years ago, you would see they dropped nearly 93%. Dear golly, how is this poor boutique family company in business after such a massive loss? /s

Percentages are also misleading. The timeframe will always stretch the percentage. Sure, a 20% drop on the same day is significant, but it still says absolutely nothing about the overall situation, nor why it happened. It is a significantly smaller drop when compared to their year long performance, and a significantly larger loss if only the last month is taken into account. There’s research on this, observing day to day changes on stock prices to describe a company is just as effective as describing people’s personalities through astrology. It’s bullshit.

Look at this thread and realize that it’s just a lie. You can show the exact same information with a starting at zero graph, but won’t be able to push the “stock is tanking!” panic point. Publishers and marketers do this on purpose to manipulate headlines. This is why the stock market is mostly just high stakes gambling. No one involved is making rational decisions, just moving from panic to mania like psychotic patients.

And it’s dumb. It says all you need to know about the ethical integrity of most economists. Lying for profit.

I hate graphs that don’t start the Y axis at zero.

That said, fuck ubisoft.

I mean, sure, it might be a dumb argument to make, but it doesn’t mean that wasn’t what he intended it to be about. The author is free to have an intention and interpretation of the work that is radically different from the audience’s perception. It happens with all art forms.

He made another game which is a direct criticism of capitalism. The dude is talking about the first few Fallout games, he hasn’t worked on Fallout since Bethesda bought the IP.

If someone ask you for a ride and you tell them not to roll down the window and they say “lol, nope” and still get on the car. They can’t be mad if you stop the car and tell them to get out when they roll down the window laughing hysterically at your face. Pressing escape means nothing in this case. The Verge’s writer was acting stupid on purpose. This is like kids who think that crossing their fingers behind their back means they aren’t bound to a promise. It is wishful thinking.

Add: oh, and BTW, there’s a reason almost all terms of service start with “By using this software you agree to…” the legal fact is using the service not clicking on the agree button. That’s just legal ammunition that companies use to prove on court that the user was aware of the legal contract. EULAs uset to be sheets of paper on a cardboard box along side CDs. No one had to click on an agree button. By buying and using the software, those were the terms you agreed to. Almost all contracts include that sort of language because the use is the fact that supports the legal contract. Law is just leaving facts and agreements on paper, facts overrule legalese, that is actually the basis used by courts to dismiss enforcement of EULAs. Like how signers aren’t legally bound to fulfill irrational or unachievable agreements, or language intentionally obtuse or ambiguous.

There was a very direct terms of service “Don’t share info”. But The Verge are notoriously awful journalists. It’s like they have no clue of what basic decent journalism entails and confuse good reporting with being trolling assholes. There’s a reason they were the only idiots who broke it and got rightly burned at the stake for it. I bet the guy wasn’t even looking at the screen when he spammed the ESC key at the game. Just because it wasn’t 100 pages of legalese doesn’t mean they weren’t bound by it, clicking ESC instead of the button OK means nothing in legal terms. And just using the software means you agree to the explicit and implicit terms of service that come with the software as long as it isn’t something blatantly illegal. They were assholes and received the consequences of their actions. And that’s that.

Maybe because that one didn’t come from videogames. Selection sets or groups have been a thing on UI for a long time, ever since vertex editor on CAD software.

Funny enough, Rogue doesn’t have a set of permanent enhancement for a wider meta game. In Rogue you start over from scratch always and every time. That’s the difference between a roguelike and a rogue liTe game. Binding of Isaac and Spelunky are roguelike. You die, you start over from scratch. Hades and Slay the spyre are rogue lite. Every run gives permanent enhancements that change the next runs, so each time you start slightly different or progressively better.

I don’t agree that they don’t care about story and only do it for marketing.

I never said that, but sure, you’re free to disagree with the thing I never said.

halflife’s episodes are all about an attempt at continuing that story.

And, as I said earlier, they got bored, found it to not be a satisfying thing to do and stopped and never did it again. Episode 2 was 17 years ago. There will never be an episode 3 or half-life 3.

I think that the Cave and Glados bits of portal are a large part of what made those games

That part sold those games but funnily enough they aren’t even half of the game. Most of Portal 2’s content is on the multiplayer coop puzzles. They have more levels and a play through runs for more hours than the single player portion.

I think the only way to know would to be an insider

We have them, I’m not making shit up. There are dozens of interviews, documentaries, in-game commentary and books written by Valve staff themselves saying exactly what I have been summarizing in these comments. This idea isn’t mine, I’m just repeating what people at Valve have publicly said about game development.

And the first Defense of the Ancients was originally a mod for a completely different game. The common theme is polishing gameplay. Team fortress existed and was popular, but between the release of TF classic, with the announcement of TF2, and the actual release there were almost 9 years and a complete rewrite between two radically different versions of the game. At one point people compared it with Duke nukem, claiming it was vaporware and would never release. Truth is, it was in development hell for a long while. They didn’t like what the game was at that time. TF classic and TF2 only common thread is class based team death match. Everything else is different. The producers have said that TF2 was resurrected to perfect the netcode, lighting, facial animation rigging, particle system and shading tech for the source engine in anticipation of the visual and gameplay improvements they wanted for HL2ep1 and 2. All three games were produced by the same guy and Gabe noticed what he experimented with on TF2 was worth developing into a finished game. Specially because they dropped all the ideas they didn’t like and stripped down the gameplay.

The other side of the coin being that Valve had learned the importance of visual packaging and marketing with Ricochet. With pure gameplay, although wildly acclaimed for being super fun, it didn’t reach the mass appeal and cultural impact of half-life. It had great repayable value, but no eye candy or lore to hook people long term. So, when TF2 was a success with its character based marketing narrative, it became the test bed for a myriad of things we now take for granted. Matchmaking, micro transactions, cosmetics stores, etc. (All things that were made to develop the Steam store social features, which was produced by the other guy who made the TF mod originally) Valve only goes hard on things they think are innovative or interesting tech, or at least plain fun to do. If the internal sponsor of an idea get bored or loses support from colleagues, the project just halts.

Story is a major parte of the marketing. It’s not like they don’t care about story, just it isn’t the seed they start from.

If you read Raising up the bar, or watch the documentaries they are upfront about it. Half-life was in its inception a loose collection of levels and set pieces of experimentation to push the limits of the game engine they were working with. They didn’t start with a story then made a game to tell it. They had a game then hired writers to help them string together the levels in a way that told a coherent story. Half-life 2 was also made to construct a new physics system for the source engine. TF2 was the result of experimentation with team based death match gameplay. Left4death was created when they were experimenting with game director and mass numbers of enemies and discovered it was fun to mow down huge numbers of enemies. Alyx is the result of developing gameplay for VR. Portal started literally with the portals system. Dota2 was a polish of MOBAs gameplay. Etc.

They work on world building and story writing only once they find a gameplay breakthrough that is fun. When they tried to make the story first (half-life 2 episode 2), they found it boring to develop so they stopped. Hence why there’s no episode 3. Portal 2 was not made to tell cave Johnson story, it was to make fun puzzles with liquid physics.