For years I was adamant that I didn’t like ambient, I think because I’d only been exposed to very boring drone stuff. Then I discovered Solar Fields / Carbon Based Lifeforms and it changed my musical world.

I’m quite horrible at self-promo so sadly it’s just gathering digital dust, but after 20+ years of writing dance music for myself and others, I decided to get heavily into writing ambient / chill. Made a load of trippy animation videos and setup a youtube… if you love Solar Fields, without meaning to sound bigheaded I think you’d enjoy them.

Ambient / Chill by Ain

I love anything by Solar Fields for tasks requiring concentrating, it’s especially good for reading scifi.

Whenever he releases a new album though I have to listen to it a few times, before I can have it on in the background… It’s very beautiful and intricate.

Yep has to have no lyrics or I get pulled into the song!

Steam doesn’t kick me out of my single player games when my internet connection drops for a split second. I quite like that

“Don’t say things about someone behind their back, if you wouldn’t be prepared to say it to their face”

I learned not to say things about people behind their back, that you’d not be prepared to say to their face, aged 14.

Cost me a black eye & split lip, also some pride. Valuable lesson though that stuck with me to this day over 2 decades later.

Knoble, sorry for calling you Knobless.

My dad is a pensioner now, and got put in a lovely bungalow by local housing association. It came with with a lovely garden, and he was really excited by the prospect of a cherry tree.

Well, the cherries are ready, and the birds ate the lot!

My initial response is prob as sarcastic as the others but a thought just occurred to me.

Skyrim, v1. The og release, before all the mods and bug fixes.

Undoubtedly still a better game than Star field. But was it the Skyrim we revere today? Will Starfield be transformed into something fun over the next decade?

What am I on about. Almost certainly not lol.

Not fucking up the f/c Fallout London mod would’ve also gotten me to play more (or at least, again). I played & enjoyed FO4 on PS, bought it again for Steam specifically for the new mod.

It’ll sit unplayed until the mod is ready!

Have you checked out his podcast? He’s such an interesting person.

It’s called ‘Metaphysical Milkshake’.

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It’s a hard question to answer I know! Racking my brains here, the most novel thing I can think of is Portal.

You make excellent points. Personally, I rarely have a problem paying for proper DLC (and buy proper DLC I mean, additional story content that wasn’t obviously cynically cut from the OG game). Notable past examples for GTA, stuff like ‘The Ballad of Gay Tony’ were amazing expansions.

Also sticking with GTA, they’re a good example of bad practice nowadays (imo). They pivoted to online-only DLC once they realised how lucrative a pay-to-play system can be when leveraged against not being bullied by players with more disposable income. There was amazing single-player content in dev for GTA5 and they cut it to focus on MP. Worse, they left the dregs of that content in the game, allowed a ‘GTA5 mystery’ concept to flourish and left people hunting for the mystery thinking they were going to find something like GTA4’s bigfoot. Knowing all along it didn’t exist. But of course, happy that people were still playing and hoping they would get bored and try online mode.

Yep, it’s a real quandary. I’m not sure what the solution is, or if there is one from our perspective… it’s no point voting with my wallet when there’s millions of others who won’t.

This was what I meant. It’s these smaller devs that seem to be innovating to any extent at the moment!

Maybe I’m just a bit jaded due to being an old fart nowadays… I remember playing the original Doom / Wolfenstein so especially FPS feel so overdone to me. When was the last time you saw a truly novel game concept? I’m sure I’ve seen a few over the last few years but can’t remember (see, old fart).

This is the big problem with modern gaming. Too many companies are now in hock to investors and publishers. To those at the top of the hierarchy, making a game is an investment, a bet. Innovation is stifled in favour 9f ‘safe bets’, no wonder gaming is stagnating.

It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still exceptions to the rule. But it’s certainly not looking good for fantastic single player games.

I’m expecting gta 6 to have a much shorter single player campaign with most of the focus towards online (and more obscene earnings from shark cards 2.0).

Thanks for the info.

I got banned from a… what are we calling them… sublemmy?.. on here for being ‘aggressively negative’. I voiced my disapproval of a character that I didn’t like in a TV show, which included one F-bomb. Some people on here are way too sensitive.

Yeah bit you’ve never played Alan Wake 2 with turbo mode ray tracing in 28000p /s

(proud owner of a 2070s still chugging along here)

Tbh I don’t think humanity was ready for social media. In the past, complete and utter fuckwits would be shamed into silence. Now, they’re all connected to each other, reinforcing their shitty hot takes until they reach a critical mass; attracting other morons like a black hole of idiocy.

Forget technological singularity, we’re rapidly approach a singularity of stupidity. Idiocracy was supposed to be a comedy, not a how-to manual for fucks sake!