MudMan

Yep. Definitely falls into this category. The roguelite stuff is a fun quirk, and I do enjoy unraveling the steps metagame more than I enjoy the “find a clue in a piece of paper and remember it for the next run” or the “doesn’t look like a puzzle but it is” bits.

Guys, I’ve been around a while. You’re probably not gonna recommend the game I accidentally missed that changes my mind.

Oooh, Outer Wilds. Did a couple of puzzles, I think I got around the loop once or twice, bounced right off.

I swear, I don’t know what it is. The sense of wonder just isn’t there. Maybe I’m too aware that all the pieces are put in by the designers and that withholding some pieces doesn’t inherently make the puzzle more interesting or even harder. I guess I find myself tapping my foot playing first person Lunar Lander while I wait for the thing to get around to the real game while I do rolling ball puzzles or whatnot.

Hah. Wasn’t into the “multimedia” era as much, either.

But still, I’d say context is important in that distinction. Old point and click was a AAA genre, through and through. Big, cinematic visuals and storytelling were at the core of that.

I’m not saying that’s better or that I like it more. In fact, I’d say I’m less into that kind of thing these days. But it was a different moment in time to get hold of one of those compared to an indie release overcomplicating the self-revealing world concept from Myst.

Why I haven’t been into that idea since all the way back in Myst is harder to parse for me. Maybe I’m just less metatextually enamoured with the idea of self-revealing games as a flourish than I am about having the reveal be a fully functional narrative? As I said above I adore Obra Dinn. There’s a lot of the same connective tissue there, but maybe I’m just more in touch with it when it’s a medium for a good, old-timey gothic horror story than when it’s this abstract world-in-code thing.

No, I don’t think so. I love puzzles. Hard puzzles, even. I really, really like Return of the Obra Dinn, I spent the 90s fawning over point and click adventures. I have zero problems blasting through the Portal games and a bunch of their derivatives.

For some reason it’s specifically this setup of “figure out the rules of the world and peel off the layers of the game” thing that misses me. I don’t know what to tell you there.

I wanted to like it, couldn’t really get into it.

I see what it’s going for, it’s just… not my thing. It never clikced with me moment to moment and the self-congratulatory aren’t-we-smart information discovery stuff just doesn’t work for me in most cases (this applies to Fez and The Witness, too).

I’m not mad that people do like it, though. There’s nothing in there I find… objectionable, or poorly designed. I just didn’t get into it and that’s alright.

I mean, even without FOSS zealotry there are plenty of Android derivatives without Google services in them on weird Chinese emulation handhelds and SBCs and the like. Never mind fricking Huawei, at least until last year, and depending on how much you think their newer one counts as not-Android.

Well, the huge brand helps.

Which is probably why what was even at launch ultimately a somewhat outdated Farmville-like got so much attention.

Downloads have always been a weird metric for mobile games. I’ve downloaded this game on maybe five or six devices during this decade, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t played it al tall in the past nine years and six months.

Incidentally, The Alters is out now and available on GoG.

I don’t know that cloud gaming moves shovelware in either direction, but it really sucks to see the percentage of people that don’t factor ownership into the process at all, at least on paper.

That’s the problem with surveys, isn’t it? What’s “latency being eliminated”? On principle it’d be your streamed game responds as quickly as a local game, which is entirely achievable if your target is running a 30fps client on a handheld device versus streaming 60 fps gameplay from a much more powerful server. We can do that now.

But is that “latency free” if you’re comparing it to running something at 240Hz in your gaming PC? With our without frame generation and upscaling? 120 Hz raw? 60Hz on console?

The question isn’t can you get latency free, the question is at what point in that chain does the average survey-anwering gamer start believing the hype about “latency free streaming”?

Which is irrelevant to me, because the real problem with cloud gaming has zero to do with latency.

I mean, as written the headline statement is always true.

I am horrified by some of the other takeaways, though:

Nearly 3 in 4 gamers (73%) would choose NVIDIA if all GPU brands performed equally.

57% of gamers have been blocked from buying a GPU due to price hikes or scalping, and 43% have delayed or canceled purchases due to other life expenses like rent and bills.

Over 1 in 4 gamers (25%) say $500 is their maximum budget for a GPU today.

Nearly 2 in 3 gamers (62%) would switch to cloud gaming full-time if latency were eliminated, and 42% would skip future GPU upgrades entirely if AI upscaling or cloud services met their performance needs.

This may be a regional concern. Google has very outdated information where I am, too. You definitely don’t want to default to Google Maps to know if something is open here unless you want to show up to a closed business, and for learning where a place is so you can go look it up on their site they are all mostly interchangeable.

I mean… Organic sorta works, although apparently there’s a new fork and some drama around it? If you’re less hardcore DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps instead.

I’m not sure I understand the question.

Heh, what can I say, nerding out about UI design is definitely part of my general dysfunction.

But yeah, if you’re already in a 19:10 display you generally won’t want the sidebar as much because you already have a naturally taller display, so your workspace is shaped the same as mine when you use horizontal and I use vertical. It’s probably more a problem of proportions that sizes.

Which, hey, is why being able to have a vertical and horizontal tabs option is good. We’re in a world where browsers need to fit not just horizontal and vertical displays on PCs and phones, but a whole bunch of screen aspect ratios.

You made me count, because I could have sworn it was thinner than the top bar, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. On a 4K display the single-icon vertical tabs on Firefox are 75 pixels wide. The horizontal tabs bar is a sliver narrower, at 65 pixels tall. Of course that stacks on top of the address bar, which itself is 60 pixels tall, so you end up with 125 pixels of top bar.

I don’t know if I could notice the 10 px difference between the two, given that they’re in different orientations and 10 pixels is 0.5% of the horizontal pixel count and 0.3% of the vertical, but human perception is weird. Like I said, I keep the bar much wider to read the titles and just… hide it when I’m not tabbing, so it’s not an issue at all for me. Although I’ll say that even with the wide sidebar deployed you get a pretty comfy square-ish space to work with that turns a 16:9 display to 16:10 in a satisfying way. And on ultrawide 21:9 it’s a no-brainer, just like having a side-aligned taskbar (hear that, Windows 11?).

I should add that none of that changes that Firefox is… quite ugly in general. Zen is definitely sleeker at a glance, regardless of your setup.

Hah. Well, that and a good fullscreen browser for OLED displays were my main motivations. Both of those are addressed by FF now.

Also, the vertical bar can be set to whatever width you want on both, I think. On FF (which is what I’m typing this in, so I can check) you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.

The idea is to hide it altogether when you’re not using it, in any case, but you can definitely make it as skinny or skinnier than tthe top bar.

I’m guessing people are sharing this intending it to generate a laugh or a scoff and not… you know, an incontrollable welling up of nostalgia and longing where you can smell every part of the picture and you know in your soul you’re never going home again?

Or maybe a light chuckle or something.

Mississippiensis is fairly understandable in not just Latin but romance languages in general as “from Mississippi”. I have terrible news for about 3 million people.

Especially for the 60% of them Wikipedia tells me voted for Trump.

I’m gonna guess from the scratched and replaced line that this was an edit. The original response was about federal systems in general, the guy generalized from the US, I noted this was not the case in general. I guess I wouldn’t have been confused if you had responded to him, but I was specifically not talking about the US. Muddled online chats with strangers are muddled, I suppose.

Which states and which federal government?