Sadly, I’ve seen how much the average non-tech enthusiast LOVES all this AI stuff. Like, people’s parents/grandparents who only occasionally use a computer when they have to. The types of folks who will call tech support and actually need the answer, “Is your computer powered on?” And there are far more people out there like that than many tech folks think. That’s the market that keeps powering this stuff.
Ugh, I remember those days well. I saw personally what MMOs did to two friends of mine (one from high school and one from college), and how the high school friend was able to really pull himself together and make a good life for himself after we helped pull him out of MMO addiction, and how the college friend we couldn’t help just wallowed in a sea of empty energy drink cans and turned EVERYTHING into WoW during that time. I don’t know if he was able to build a solid life/career after college, but I could imagine him looking back at that time and wanting more from it. Either way, I saw both their situations and vowed to never pick up an MMO because I didn’t want the same to happen to me. Just because an addicting game isn’t extractive of one’s money doesn’t mean it’s not harmful if you have a hard time with self-control and moderation. You either lose your money directly or your time, which may cost you money in other ways in addition to other indirect costs. Ultimately you’ll end up losing something of great value you will unlikely get back, if ever.
My only frustration was that you had to essentially master the game completely to unlock all the racers. Sure, rewards for mastery all the way to the highest levels of the single player mode are good, but I felt they should have changed it up so you unlock all the racers earlier and offered some different rewatds for the end. Or maybe I’m just salty that I had to go to the very end on the highest difficulty to play as characters I wanted to play from the start, in a Sega racer, no less, which are generally harder than most. At least in a game like Smash Bros Brawl, you just had to beat the final boss to unlock Sonic, you didn’t have to perfect it on the highest difficulty.
Try Grayjay. There’s an option on their YpuTube plugin to allow age-restricted videos. Just try the mobile app for now, though, their desktop version is still in alpha phase.
TIL super glue is a $50 billion industry
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, a few days ago. Been busy or just didn’t feel like gaming since then.
Nintendo’s lawyers doing something good for once?
Just as there are many reasons not to support Microsoft, Sony, Activision Blizzard, Bethesda, Ubisoft, and so on. None of them is off the hook and they’ve all been under the microscope as well. I wasn’t saying that Nintendo doesn’t do crappy things, but that most game companies do crappy things and they tend to get heat for the crappy things they do almost on a rotation based on what gamers are focusing on.
Yep, it’s a byproduct of the “bit wars” in the gaming culture of the '80s and '90s where each successive console generation had much more of a visual grqphical upgrade without sacrificing too much in other technical aspects like framerate/performance. Nowadays if you want that kind of upgrade you’re better off making a big investment in a beefy gaming rig because consoles have a realistic price point to consider, and even then we’re getting to a point of diminishing returns when it comes to the real noticeable graphical differences. Even back in the '80s/'90s the most powerful consoles of the time (such as the Neo Geo) were prohibitively expensive for most people. Either way, the most lauded games of the past few years have been the ones that put the biggest focus on aspects like engaging gameplay and/or immersive story and setting. One of the strongest candidates for this year’s Game of the Year could probably run on a potato and was basically poker with some interesting twists: essentially the opposite of a big studio AAA game. Baldur’s Gate 3 showed studios that gamers are looking for an actual complete game for their $60, and indie hits such as the aforementioned Balatro are showing then that you can make games look and play great without all the super realistic graphics or immense budget if you have that solid gameplay, story/setting and art style. Call of Duty Black Ops 48393 with the only real “innovation” being more realistic sun glare on your rifle is just asking for failure.
It’s just Nintendo’s turn to be in the spotlight for being crappy. Most game companies, especially if they’re big enough are crappy in different ways from each other.
Personal human contact is still an important thing to have for one’s mental health and wellbeing at any age, and that includes the elderly and the young interacting with each other You’d think that was an important societal lesson the isolated Covid years should have taught us. Do you not think that making robots do all the work of caring for the elderly at least gives off vibes of the young just tossing out the old? A robot can never provide the personal touch of care that a human can. When I get old the last thing I would want would be just to be sent to some “home” with my only contact being with machines and computers.
Odd to say Veilguard was a success when from what I can tell, one of the few things uniting the very fractured and divided gaming community this year was that the writing in Veilguard was horrible. And you know that’s true when the various members of that community can give their own varied reasons why the writing was horrible and they would all be valid.
Bingo. This gives no indication of what they discussed or what said CEOs actually think of him. Basically just routine politics to ensure they don’t get on his bad side regardless.
The only time I was really caught off guard by a game like that was Darksiders II. I went into the final area expecting a gauntlet of challenges, beat the first big boss enemy in there… And final cutscene and credits. That guy was the final boss. Made me literally put down the controller and say “That was it?” I’ve always known long games were going to be long going in to them.
Sounds a lot like Hypnospace Outlaw, which came out a few years ago and had you exploring a fictional Internet from the mid/late-90s era on an OS designed to mimic Windows 95/98 (with an upgrade to an XP-like desktop later in the game). You were basically a mod/censor who went around and busted people for copyright infringement and stuff. Also a real nostalgia trip if you miss that kind of aesthetic.
I’m half a year from 40 myself, and I’m quite concerned. We were fortunate enough that social media never really took off in popularity until we were adults. We’re basically the last ones who can claim that. Sure, our parents wrung their hands and got upset about too much garbage TV and video games, but there is something legitimately different and more alarming here. Even when social media was first coming onto the scene, the technology was different and any algorithms that existed weren’t nearly as fine-tuned as they are now. You basically just got a feed of whatever the people you included as your friends were up to or wanted to share, and efforts to profile you or curate that content in order to keep you glued to their site were not nearly as sophisticated. Smartphones were a brand new tech, so most people still had a “dumb” cell phone that could just present a super stripped-down mobile version of a website, and most apps for them came directly from the manufacturer or service provider. All of that technology has exploded in the last 10-15 years, faster than even the rapid rise of the Internet itself in the '90s. All the goofy Flash games and stuff back then, or skibidi toilet today, aren’t really the problem, I will agree on that (even if I think the stupidity of that stuff has only continued to go downhill). The danger is in that rapidly increasing sophistication of the algorithms and other psychological patterns that social media companies, advertisers and other big tech moguls have been using to ensure we never put our smartphones down, and all the data we give them just makes those algorithms stronger by the day. TV broadcasters and game developers could utilize some techniques to keep you watching or playing, but they could never fine-tune an experience tailor made for the individual user like these tech and social media companies can. The stupid nature of so much of the stuff that’s out there is certainly not helping, but that’s also a matter of “garbage in, garbage out”. But the user would never know exactly how garbage the content they’re consuming is if they never break out of the bubble these companies contain them in.
IIRC both are made by the same dev.
I just clearly remember this making the rounds on Linux YouTube earlier this year with every one of them who looked at it telling people to not let it touch anything resembling your machine.
Checks out. I’m the same as others have mentioned, after work I’d rather just tune out and watch someone play a game (or have it on in the background) than actually build up the mental strength to play one myself, or at least a game that has any challenge to it, most days. If I play a game on an evening after work, I’m usually just cruising the Paldea region in Pokemon hunting for shinies or some other interesting pokemon to catch. I can just shut my brain off, move my character around, and look for a different colored pokemon.
TBF, the Smash Bros community brought their all-but-destruction on themselves. The rest is pretty valid, though.
I notice they tend to have one “killer app” and then the rest of it isn’t much to write home about, at least since the N64 (SNES had a whopping 2: F-Zerp and Mario World). The exception being the Wii U, which had… Nintendo Land? NSMB-U? Nothing really.
N64: Mario 64 (and had almost literally nothing else until StarFox) GameCube: Luigi’s Mansion Wii: Twilight Princess, or Wii Sports, since TP also released for GameCube Switch: BotW