OMG, a Pokemon All Stars would be amazing. But I do want them to get fancy with it: with every new game that starts, make me start with a starter as usual, but once I get access to trading, let me pull Pokemon that are below the soft level cap out of my boxes.

I think I buy this worldwide, honestly. Case in point: one of the most popular video game series for young people recently has been Five Nights at Freddy’s, and that series dropped its first four games in eleven months, and its next four games in four years. Minecraft remains one of the most popular games in the world, and it’s releasing full free content drops every few months. Pokemon is still insanely popular among kids, and there hasn’t been a year without a new Pokemon game release since 2015.

So, yeah. Hey, kids like novelty. Who knew?

The stripped log and the wood are fine, but the regular birch log is almost impossible to use in builds. It just looks bad in almost any context.

The stripped log and the wood are fine, but the regular birch log is almost impossible to use in builds. It just looks bad in almost any context.

Huh. I just looked it up and apparently birch was added just about a year before I started playing. Crazy how we assume everything that was in there when we started has “been there forever.”

Lol. Birch trees are the most despised tree by most Minecraft players.

In this case, the service is the same thing. Both the Minecraft client and the Hytale client are connecting to a Hytale server. So I guess you could say it’s like if Lemmy had an official app, and you used that and the Boost app to connect to a Lemmy backend: the hypothetical Lemmy app would be the Hytale client, connecting the way it’s meant to to the service it was designed for; and the Boost app would be the Minecraft client, designed to connect to a different type of server but modified to work because the workloads are similar enough that they can be translated pretty simply.

Probably not. This is more akin to using different apps to access the same service, like one person using Ivory and the other using Tusky to access Mastodon. Multiple clients accessing the same API endpoints is kind of how the internet operates, or at least was before big tech decided to shut out third-party apps.

Yep, I’ve done that. Hardware changes are more effective than software changes, though. Every time.

I mean, it’s probably fine. I’ve just had a Pixel for long enough that my standards are too high. I have kids, and we just moved across the world, so I take a lot of photos.

Yeah, that one too.

hmm. That’s true. And dangerous, lol.

I don’t really want that much control removed, though. I just want to have a little bit more friction between my serotonin-starved brain and the cortisol river on Facebook.

I think the main purpose is probably to provide a more-usable “dumbphone” experience. I know a lot of people (myself included) who would love to doomscroll less, but need a more full-fat version of Android for work or family. Using Digital Wellbeing and the like gets part of the way there, but not the whole way. With this, the weird aspect ratio means that pretty much all video is going to be letterboxed to a crazy extent, which could be enough to make bypassing those controls feel pointless. And then they used that extra space for a physical keyboard, which is genius. If this thing had a better camera, I’d be all in.

I think part of what you’re saying is why the Kowloon build can’t deliver that, though.

It’s a very good summary of the article. The things the author reconsidered were pretty nuanced, and trying to describe them in a headline without making the headline even longer than it is.

Would you have liked this better?

“This Minecraft map that recreates Kowloon Walled City, one of history’s most notorious slums, made me realize that 3D level design isn’t just about the complexity or the environmental challenge, but about the internal lives of the people who live there and the way that the game implies a greater reality that exists beyond the confines of the camera’s field of view”

Because that’s too long to fit in a tweet.

I read the article. It appears to deliver on the promise of the headline pretty completely. What is promised is a little bit too nuanced and complex to be neatly encapsulated in the headline any other way. The headline also isn’t sensationalized or misrepresentative of the content. And, honestly, the reason I think most people are clicking is for the Kowloon part, not the level design part. Are you just upset because it sounds a little bit like a LinkedIn status in its construction?

Are you kidding? I might actually stop buying new games and make it through my backlog now! This is great!

Tutorial sections that just suck. Some don’t explain enough, others treat you like you’ve never played a game in your life. Or, when they interrupt you to explain a mechanic in great detail, but it’s too much of an info dump, and you’re just left wondering wtf they just said.

The ones I hate the most are the ones that meticulously teach you “press A to jump!” (Cool thanks, yeah, I’ve been playing video games since Super Mario Bros, I’m pretty good on the basics) but then you get out of the tutorial and play for an hour or two and realize that you’ve never once had to jump, but that complicated combo that they didn’t even allude to in the tutorial is for some reason the core game mechanic.

Oh man, the Ouya. That’s a blast from the past. Play mobile games on your TV using a controller made out of cardboard and balsa wood and sized for a Roswell alien. Good times.

For me, with the Switch 1, I was worried about wanting to play a game but oh no it’s back at home. Happened a bunch of times with my 3DS.

But then I bought a case that had card slots in it, and that concern wasn’t much of a concern anymore. Then the pandemic happened, and I never really left home anyway, which meant it mattered even less. So now I have a few digital games that are super annoying to share.

Maybe they could add a setting to automatically start up the game in the background after an update. Since shader compilation happens right at startup, that could get the job done.

I played BL2 at launch and don’t regret it. But I only just picked BL3 up again over the last couple of months. It wasn’t only the loading screen, but I will say I don’t think the writing shines quite as much as it did in BL2.

Thank you for that info! I do most of my PC gaming on a very underpowered Linux box. Gonna need to check that setting.

Maybe if there were any variation at all in the dance. Or a cycle of two or three different dances he goes through. Maybe give him a hat at random intervals. But no, just the same nonsense, over and over, for five minutes every time you start the game.

I honestly feel like it would be better if Steam would compile the shaders in the background after the download finishes and before it tells me that the game is ready to play. That seems like a thing they could totally do.

They could even precompile shaders for known setups (the Steam Deck, the last three generations of Nvidia and AMD, that sort of thing) and just add that to the download for people with those devices. It would improve the experience for a lot of people.

Woof. I want to play BL4, I’ve always been a huge fan of the series, but like…I distinctly remember BL3 and watching Claptrap do that stupid Vanna White thing across the screen for ages after every update. I kind of want that time back.

I don’t know, Valve is financially motivated to make every game they sell a hit. This isn’t like YouTube, where they want people to keep churning out content without remuneration; Valve only gets paid when video game companies sell their game.

And as a software engineer myself, I can totally see how this bug could’ve happened. There are so many ways, in fact; they released on 2024-12-12, maybe the bug was that they also released at 12:12, and some ancient code in the emailer got set up to treat any repeating string of four 12’s as a signal that this is only a test and shouldn’t actually be sent (probably in an attempt to diagnose and fix another bug), but that if statement was never removed from the codebase before it shipped.

Or maybe there’s a weird overflow error that happens when an email is supposed to go to exactly a certain number of customers. It’s kind of close to a number divisible by 64 (138,688); maybe it’s just sloppy binary unit choce?

Or maybe it was at the end of the email fanout for the day and the server crashed without warning, and lost some games without notifying anyone. That would only have to happen once a year over that decade and it would add up to all 100 games.

The point is, I don’t see any evidence of malice here, so I have to assume stupidity. Or at least a SWE going too quickly and not checking their work.

Probably not if you lived on Pandora.

I think he thinks he’s Jack in The Pre-Sequel, but really he’s Jack in Borderlands 2.

Sounds awesome. Does anyone know where I could find a decomp?

Bedrock Edition is fine. It’s basically at feature parity with Java now. The mod scene is almost non-existent, but for vanilla it’s fine. If that’s where your friends are playing, you’ll have a great time.

My math was assuming that most users do charge every night, and again during the day 2-3 times a month. 365 + (12x3) = 401. So it seems like we have both ends of standard usage. They’ve basically just said that this battery will only last one year of standard usage before they intentionally hobble it.

If that’s for safety reasons, they need to stop putting unsafe hardware into their handsets.

400 cycles? So, a year? One year.

Yeah, I guess that’s pretty subjective overall. In any case, they’re not so great now.

Ok, I’m not familiar enough with any of those to know what that means in this context. But in any case, weren’t his contributions to those games all ages ago? M&M in particular came out almost 30 years ago, right?

WotC was already pretty awful before the Hasbro acquisition, as I recall.

People have been complaining about WotC’s executive meddling in D&D and MTG for as long as I can remember, since before the 1999 Hasbro purchase. D&D 3e, mostly written after WotC acquired TSR but published shortly after Hasbro acquired WotC, was panned so badly that they dropped 3.5 just a couple years later. And 4e (including the first OGL fiasco) happened when Hasbro didn’t care about WotC because they were all-in on the Michael Bay Transformers movie. In fact, up until Stranger Things and Critical Role, Hasbro seems to have considered WotC the “Magic: The Gathering Money Printer” and done most of their meddling on that side of the house.

How much do we actually know about what Crawford is like outside of the WotC machine? He might be perfectly competent but held back by executive mismanagement.

There’s also a complete rehash of the Wikipedia article about the game, its release and reception, and maybe even a slideshow of memes before you get to the “No confirmation” part. And then a list of all the times the developers have said, “yeah, if they want to do another one, we’d take their money.”