If you need more focus to the game play Sky Island, also / and ? are your best friends

Rubber Bandits is a nice alternative to Boomerang Fu too

In terms of twin stick games, Voidigo is currently giving Enter The Gungeon a run for its money.

https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-revival-bundle

i recommend this bundle, donut dodo, round guard, indie guards in that bundle,

Also Hyperparasite in this one https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/platinum-collection-build-your-own-bundle

Spelunky 2

Chronicon

Caveblazers

Heroes Of Hammerwatch

Helldivers 1

Barony

Terraria (of course)

Broforce

Duck Game

Don’t Starve Together

Nuclear Throne (of course!!!)

Streets Of Rogue!! (keep your eye out for Streets Of Rogue 2!!!)

Wobbly Life

PlateUp

Glitchbusters

Ember Knights

Bones Cafe

Shovel Knight

Rainworld Downpour

Petal Crash

Definitely Sneaky But Not Sneaky

Sigma Impact

Cassette Beasts

Spirits Abyss

Cosmos Quickstop

DIG

Farm Together

Death Road To Canada !!! <-----

Knight Squad 2

One Step From Eden

Mutant Football League

Rampage Knights

Maniac (who cares it isn’t co-op it is hilarious as a pass and play)

X Morph Defense

Monaco

Tricky Towers

Himno the silent melody

Dungeon Of The Endless

Adventures Of Shuggy

Renegade Ops

Omega Strikers (online team based)

Cryptark

Ms Splosion Man

Full Metal Furies

Battleblock Theater

Colt Canyon

Cook Serve Delicious series

I’m talking from a perspective of reality. What you “predict” or “feel” or imagine the industry is or going to be, doesn’t really interest me much.

Damn… not sure how you work in an industry that requires good interpersonal skills with an attitude like this but you didn’t really listen to what I was saying at all. I am not defending AI or even claiming it can actually replace human graphic designers in any serious fashion longterm.

Let me lay this out for you really simple, this is a class war, and vapid MBA majors who will always placed by the ruling class in charge of most graphic design jobs don’t give a flying fuck if AI is a scam, the whole point of being a business major is to scam people. At the end of this when the AI hype bubble bursts most of yall aren’t getting your jobs back, and even if you do those jobs will longer be the good quality sustainable jobs they used to be because you will be now seen as an expensive temporary stopgap to AI (independent of the reality of AIs inane bullshit), a temporary “return to using horses while we get cars figured out better” approach that never treats the horses as worthy of a future…

It is hilarious given that you are a storyteller and artist by trade that at this late stage in the game you actually genuinely believe the truth actually matters here compared to the overwhelming roar of economic narratives set by the ruling class…and yeah you mighttt personally get lucky and be fine for the rest of your career but how cruel and naive to use your experience as a device to divorce your empathy from less talented/experienced graphic designers fighting tooth and nail for the privilege to follow in your footsteps.

Stop being a coward and hiding behind the niche little square you have cut out of your industry to support yourself, stand up and actually defend the futures and quality of life of the countless younger versions of you getting ground to dust by the industry before it is too late and the decent future of your career is rationalized away to capitalists and the path you walked in life becomes a mocking foreclosed dream to the next generation.

Like wake the fuck up please, this is catastrophic for graphic designers and it has nothing to do with whether AI works or not

I get sooooo much schadenfreude from programmers smugly acting like their jobs aren’t going to be obliterated by AI… because the AI won’t be able to do the job correctly, as if that matters in this late stage of collapse and end state capitalism.

Y’all (programmers and tech people) cheered this on and facilitated the ruling class destroying countless decent, good careers and now it is everybody else’s turn to laugh at programmers as they go from having one of the few non-dysfunctional careers left to being worthless chatgpt prompt monkeys that can never convince management they are valuable and not just a subpar, expensive alternative to “AI”.

This is going to be awful, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find the silver linings!

Maybe if programming wasn’t full of overconfident naive libertarian adjacent people y’all could have stopped this by unionizing but again… just check hacker news and all the boot licking for the ruling class there to see why that didn’t happen lol.

Not only are you a fool, you spit in the face of people trying to begin careers in your field because you are so naively confident that this massive change in the labor market conditions of your industry won’t affect you or other graphic designers negatively.

Please retire, change careers or at least keep your mouth shut and actually listen to less experienced people in your industry. Stop acting like a boomer, it is just embarrassing yourself and publicly committing your online identity to words that will age so terribly it will make your future self’s head spin.

Almost, the likeliest answer is that CEOs and the ruling class have no fucking clue whether AI can be good enough to replace graphic designers but they also know that this was never the point, AI is a weapon of class warfare, and a nuclear one at that.

Even if the entire industry crashes and decides it does actually have to hire lots of human artists back, those artists will be hired as alternatives to cheap AI and graphic design will have permanently been dissected and destroyed as a decent career for hardworking people who may or may not be the most talented people in the world.

If you (as in anybody reading this not who I am responding too) think this isn’t happening you need to shut your mouth trap and go read a book about the Industrial Revolution not written by an apologist for the ruling class.

Your attitude says more about you than your supposed knowledge does, if you think AI won’t have a catastrophic impact on the value of your work, of the artistry of what you do in relationship to being valued by society, you are an utter fool.

What they are trying to point out is that as self confident as you portray yourself in your skills, at one point you sucked and you got hired anyway.

The new reality is you never would have been able to get into this industry because nobody would have given you a chance.

TL;DR of course sci-fi couldn’t have imagined how cool juggalos are, scifi is mostly written (and MORE importantly gate-kept) by man-babies with incredibly narrow views of reality, fuck sci-fi let’s go hang out with the juggalos…

Honestly other than just extrapolating out what technologies will facilitate the rise of dystopias (while being weirdly obsessed with the aesthetics of dystopias to the point of it being dysfunctional to the objectives of the narrative and fiction) what have sci-fi writers actually meaningfully imagined about the future in the western canon?

For all the mountains and mountains of sci-fi books and tv shows written I am not sure there is actually much to show for it except endless descriptions of how colonization, war and authoritarian power will be facilitated by future technologies (in a way that superficially claims to be subversive but is really just technology porn, politics be damned).

The only western/European sci-fi series of any significant popularity that I think grapples with anything meaningfully human about positive potentials of the future is Star Trek. Other scifis of course accomplish this in parts of their stories, or in peripheral stories and side series, but almost without fail they all circle back to the same 5 things a boomer dude can imagine a society of boring boomer dudes doing who worship technology and talk over women.

Murderbot is dope tho, I don’t say this critique to attack the wave of sci-fi that is written by diverse new authors that subverts the genre, just to say that the old guard of the genre should be trashed and thrown out the window in favor of these new authors who actually treat envisioning the human condition realistically as important…. to writing books about humans in the future…….

….sigh sorry I really think the classic sci-fi genre gets wayyyyyyyy too much of a pass for being a serious genre of art when it is written by a bunch of clowns who mainly used representations of human beings like action figures and G.I. Joe figurines, bending them in brutal and inhuman ways so that they carry out cool action sequences on the living room floor and reference cool technologies that will make their dad notice them and give them a hug for being smart. None of which is wrong unless you are claiming to write literature that illuminates deep things about the human condition with respect to the breadth of future possibilities.

says Pussy riot in the mirror 3 times as the clock strikes midnight

nervously waits (or excitedly? how big exactly is a riot of pussy? Big enough? How many hectares does the average Pussy Riot engulf?)

sigh meanwhile the cop has still probably got a cushy job and probably goes home every night to get drunk and hit their spouse because that is statistically as far as we can tell what 25-45% of cops do based on difficult to predict statistics that rely on cops snitching on their own illegal behavior (so logically it is probably much higher as hard as that is to wrap your head around).

Unfortuantely, I think just about every fan base these days has to deal with its share of racist Trump supporters who steal scrap metal from construction sites for meth money…

If you live in the US (or UK) you live in a collapsing society being suffocated and held in place by neoliberal austerity politics that purposefully shuts down the possibility of any genuine systematic reform that isn’t in the direction of fascism. The US is run by centrists who will spit in your face (while their Republican drinking buddies cheer them on) for daring to suggest populist leftism reforms that would actually improve the quality of life of the working class and poor of the US.

In that environment people are going to resort to taking meth and stealing scrap to survive, as society is literally trying to kill them off and there is no rational hope to be found for things to change. Are these people druggies, are they sketchy? Are some of them maga heads who turn to pathetic and hateful views? Yes, but I think it is important to always recognize the conditions that lead desperate people to act in desperate ways when we discuss the repulsiveness of said desperate acts of non-violent crime.

Maybe the whole point of Monty Python was to sketch out ways that humans could behave that would confuse and hugely throw off machine learning algorithms.

Talk about “poisoning the well” with AI training, all you have to do is 65% of the time make completely normal and rational intelligent choices and the other 35% be completely illogical and inscrutable. Any algorithm trained on you then, no matter how smart you are or how valuable your knowledge is, will inconsistently and abruptly resort to batshit crazy and unreliable choices and information. :)

The thousands and thousands of years we have nurtured sarcasm and absurdism in the garden of human culture has all been for this one true purpose…

I would say maybe John Cleese is an alien trying to save us, but Cleese is a dick no matter how funny the stuff he was involved in was and I would hope Aliens were much more open minded than he is.

Oh thanks! I didn’t even realize factorio wasn’t real!

facepalm silly me

Thank you for the thoughtful response

It’s also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren’t really a life form, they’re more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?

I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.

Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.

I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.

Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…

The Sea Will Claim Everything

https://store.steampowered.com/app/337720/The_Sea_Will_Claim_Everything/

I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.

I don’t know, it is a small thing, I totally get why people get addicted to factorio’s gameplay loop not disputing how amazing that is it is just the basic premise of the game makes me uncomfortable in it’s disinterest in the planet you are on being anything but a resource to conquered and consumed or in thinking about how you are actually the villain in this situation from the planet’s perspective.

I am unfamiliar with the grunt flip, only the warthog flip.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CgDGl-aFD0Q&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2F&feature=emb_title

edit ok I was wrong here, I understand what people disagreeing with me are saying

The top comment on this thread should be an unqualified “Hell yeah!” not speculation over whether she is going to be murdered.

I am not attacking you, I understand the knee jerk reaction, I am just pointing this out because I think it is true. I also don’t question that you are genuine in your concern, that isn’t what I mean.

To everyone else on this thread, especially if you are white/European or from the US and are white please don’t joke about the President of Mexico getting assassinated given the history with Mexico and the US (and by extension Europe). It isn’t funny, even when you are being sarcastic.

Just be happy for Mexico.