MudMan

This is a requirement of modern right-populist politics. They won’t play defense, so they just say crap and you’re always chasing the latest nonsense and never get to make a point.

Of course the counter to this is for Walz to make this a non-stop couch-fucking roast from minute one. I’m talking opening statement is about upholstery, fabric texture, visualize choices for lubricant and material combos. Just go all in on the furniture abuse right away.

“Forced exclusivity is bad” is an angle that has always baffled me a little, because some of its proponents seem to also be going “what exclusives does the Xbox have” like two posts down the road.

Or maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember where the “I will never buy anything on Epic because they pay for exclusives” was instead “Square has betrayed its customers by moving to the PlayStation” (or, you know, Konami for having Xbox ports).

Gaming opinions are weird, and get weirder if you track them over time.

It says (pretty explicitly, if you go back and read interviews), that Gabe Newell really doesn’t like Microsoft in general, that the feeling is mutual and that the fact that his multibillion dollar empire is stuck as a Windows application MS may try to muscle out at any point has motivated him to bring PC gaming out of Windows from very early on.

Granted, MS has been sucking at attempting exactly that for a long time, but that’s the ultimate motivation here. That’s not a particularly disputed fact.

Well, that and the several billion dollars in Gaben’s bank account.

Private companies are still corporations, guys.

I don’t think this tracks. Steam’s model is developing software to automate or crowdsource expensive effort. Now, anyways. It originally was to fix PC piracy, but they achieved that ages ago.

And hell yeah they have a natural self-reinforcing monopoly. Even ignoring the mass of captive users with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars committed to the platform, Valve has been doing feature work on that storefront for decades. When others try to compete people immediately bring up the expansive value added features. They make their own controller drivers. They make their own compatibility layers. They make their own OS, FFS. In what world bringing a PC storefront to that level would “not take much”? It’s an Apple-style ecosystem model, and much as it terrifies me that it’s an ever growing monopoly, it’s still impresive that they managed to build it within Microsoft’s own.

Yeah, if it isn’t it will be. If you extrapolate their current moves to a world where PC gaming is entirely controlled by them, maybe even from the OS level downwards, and there is also a set of console-like standalone platforms on handheld, set-top and VR segments… well, that’s a level of control over a massive media industry that I don’t think anybody has had before. Especially not a private company whose ownership is two cheeseburgers and/or an unfortunate knife sharpening accident away from changing overnight.

Man, I don’t like the Steam monopoly on principle, but I have to admit I do struggle to pay attention to Epic exclusives. It’s simply the launcher I open the least after GOG and Steam. I’ve though “hey, wasn’t that Ubi Star Wars thing out” like two or three times and forgot about it between remembering that’s an Epic thing and deciding whether I wanted to buy it.

But hey, since we’re going multiplat again, I could use some newer Ubi games on GOG, too.

Isn’t this pretty much the same system Google was intending to implement on Chrome before backtracking? That’s my understanding anyway.

Ultimately the issue is that we’ve gone to extremes. The response to the data market that runs the Internet is now that many people are against ANY amount of information being dislodged from users to anybody else. That is obviously way more strict than pre-internet standards, when people’s location data was widely available and TV advertising ran a whole lot of live reporting and segmentation data, but it has become the goal.

Mozilla (and Apple, and for a bit Google), are suggesting to go back to a world where someone quietly aggregates some info without tracking individuals in excruciating detail and now advertisers don’t want to lose the granularity and resell ability of the spy-level data gathering… and users don’t want to give up even aggregated info.

We’ve scorched the earth so badly there is no path forward, so we stay where we are. I have no moral stance on this, but it seems to be what’s happening.

I don’t know, I think maybe it depends on age? Most people exposed to US media will recognize at least the landmarks, but that’s probably true of other cities as well.

But NYC has been in so many videogames I feel younger people with a passing interest in gaming will at least have a weird set of expectations. Of Manhattan, if nothing else. The twenty years of open world Spider-Man games alone are more exposure to an overhead map of a city than most people get of the place where they live in that amount of time.

Oh, cool. My current device uses Logitech Options+, which is not the same as the old G Hub and is not the same as what you’re describing.

Which honestly, before we get into the mandatory login and everything else, begs the question… why does Logitech need three different multi-device software hubs? What the hell?

It’s not (just) that manufacturers are trying to mine all this bloatware for data, it’s that most of them are absolutely terrible at making software in the first place.

Yeah, I’d like to know the specifics, too. My Logi mouse still uses the same application (although they did update terms recently) and while they’ve added some AI shovelware to it the mouse stil remembers its shortcuts with that thing off and I haven’t noticed any changes to how the application is put together.

It’s entirely possible the application is a Chromium-based browser thing, but in any case it still doesn’t require a login (although it does support one) and it will run offline.

Don’t get me wrong, Logi’s approach to this, along with a lot of other hardware manufacturers, sucks really bad. I do appreciate Microsoft, of all people, recently starting to standardize RGB controls, at least. It’s still wonky and interacts weirdly with some third party software, but it’s a start. I don’t need twenty different apps to keep glowy lights and saved shortcuts going.

Hah. Your bar for “super rich” and mine may be in different places.

And you’re preaching to the choir, I’d much rather sail myself. But nerding out about the specifics aside, it’s very weird to leave it out of the renewable-powered sea travel conversation the way these guys are doing.

I mean, I don’t know what to tell you, after Fallout 76 and Starfield I’d say expectations are well and truly tempered.

I don’t want to appear dismissive, the bar for triple A RPGs is insane, but it’s been long enough that I think meeting the scope of the few good Bethesda ones that everyone remembers would very much satisfy people, at least if they looked good and played well, which would be a Bethesda first.

“Normal” is very much not the word I’d use.

I’d say it’s a psychological horror thing with a side of body horror. It doesn’t focus more on combat than Eternal Darkness does, honestly, and it’s certainly a lot more straight-up gory and gross. But it’s definitely not a B-movie riff in the vein of Resident Evil, at least narratively, it just mostly plays like it.

The new remake is coming soon. People are a bit worried about execution on that, but if they don’t botch it may be a good place to start with it.

Admittedly it’s WAY easier to operate a motor boat than a sail boat, so depending on how you like to recreationally bleed your unlimited money I can see reasons for that choice.

But I fully agree that we’ve had renewable energy-based ships with unlimited range for millenia. The claim that “The aim was to demonstrate that zero-emission sea travel [is possible today]” broke my brain a little.

I know this became a bit of a cult classic, but I played it at the time (still have my original copy) and I’m a lot more lukewarm on it.

It does have some neat ideas on paper, but most of the sanity gimmicks are pretty flat and both the story and the visuals at the time weren’t spectacular in a world where people had played Silent Hill 2 the previous year. The anthology setting at least keeps the narrative episodic and self-contained enough to avoid it dragging too much, because the constantly monologuing protagonists would not be able to carry a full game without some variation.

It’s not terrible. As a spiritual successor to Alone in the Dark you could do worse (and we all have since), but it’s a bit of a curio, not a timeless classic. Good to check out, but I wouldn’t feel too guilty if you don’t click with it after getting through the prologue and the first episode, because that’s how it keeps going until the end.

Oh, and it IS covered by Retroachievements.org’s fancy new Dolphin support, so if you want to check it out or revisit it on emulation that’s a fun twist.

Honestly, I can only speak for myself, but 7R felt actively bad to play to me. Them trying to split the difference between a turn based RPG and an action game just made everything feel weird and slow, the way animation priority works on it is super unsatisfying and I really don’t click with how a lot of it is paced. Plus it’s been ages since anyone made a proper spectacle-focused turn-based RPG, and this was a missed opportunity, honestly. Persona looks stylish and great, but it’s not going for the same thing.

That, as a result, made me not want to jump into the sequel, because I never finished the original and people were telling me they play the same.

XVI is a bit of a different beast, I just wasn’t in a hurry to play it because… yay another action RPG form Square that probably doesn’t play great, but I did want to check it out, so I waited for the PC port that just came out and got that. Still haven’t gotten into it. I hope it’s good. It seems to be doing fine on Steam, but it also looks extremely expensive to make, so if they say it didn’t work I believe them, I suppose.

So the gimmick in the 7 remakes is that they aren’t a remake at all, they are a weird alternate reality spin-off thing that revisits the same characters and locations. I mean, mild spoilers for a four year old game you haven’t played at least partially because you didn’t know this.

The way they presented this was very weird and they tried to split the difference between still saying it’s all a remake but then hinting at it not being a remake sometimes slightly.

My biggest problem with these is that combat feels laggy and weird and I would much prefer a proper turn based RPG in the first place, but seeing the comments here is a bit of an eye opener about how it was all perceived.

“If they haven’t” makes me thing you aren’t considering it particularly hard, since 7R has been out for a good while on PC and XVI just came out.

If anything this thread tells me Square maybe isn’t great at marketing, or at least at making games that seem appealing to people not keeping tabs on gaming news proactively.

Right, but now you’re giving me arguments for using original hardware, not for modifying it.

See, that’s the part that loses me. I use original hardware all the time, I have tons of original hardware and software for a whole bunch of platforms, including ones that are trivial to run in cycle-accurate emulators and FPGA reproductions. All good there. I even have some flashcarts and softmods to allow cross-region usage or to consolidate libraries. No problem with that.

But that is based on using the original hardware, unmodified. Once you start gutting it for mods then you’re working against your argument that complexities and sublteties of original hardware are important. I mean, yeah, I do care to at least have a way to go back to sanity check the sublte ways in which original hardware parses the code in a rom. But for that same reason I want to see how the default composite or RF signal subtly interacts with that output and with a period-accurate CRT display. I want to hear the CD spinning when it’s supposed to spin and the original loading times.

To be clear, I think this is just a case mod, but I’m talking about the modding scene more generally. I don’t see why you would think “total accuracy” is important in the interaction between the CPU, VDUs and RAM but not on the I/O. Wouldn’t the CD drive and the video signal be part of “total accuracy”? Wouldn’t the form factor of the shell and the controllers be a part of that accurate experience as well? If you push me I’d even say I consider a MiSTer FPGA solution with a correct analogue out signal and an original controller feeding into a CRT is far more accurate to the original NES than the original Analogue NT that was made from gutted NES parts, or even than an original console pushed through an HDMI scaler or mod.

I guess there is no accounting for taste, but I do struggle to follow the logic where running the original CPU and video chips on completely different I/O is justified by trying to maximize for accuracy.