They bought the Perfect Dark IP though. That’s probably just going to languish now.

I think of that with BioShock 1 and Infinite too. Rapture was an atheist society while Colombia was highly religious. Colombia was highly centralized and regulated by an authoritarian dictator, while Rapture is deregulated and allows private businesses to run wild and cause chaos. It’s almost as if BioShock Infinite was written as a counterpoint, to clarify that the first game was not meant to be political.

I suppose you could say both games are criticizing extremism, which combine to form a centrist message. But even that I think was less of a choice to discuss politics and moreso just “We need conflict to create an interesting videogame. What’s a good way to create conflict? Just take some political views and crank them up to the extreme- surely no one will sympathize with them then!”

Oh yeah it’s setting the table for a terrible hellscape.

I moreso meant that Elon won’t be the first. Whoever the first is will of course be a terrible precedent.

For what it’s worth, from quotes from Kimball Musk, Elon himself, and their associates, it seems as though Elon may have been an illegal immigrant himself at one point. Snopes has collected a lot of the potential info, though they don’t go so far as to reach a conclusion one way or the other.

I think Trump is going to revoke citizenships and deport people anyways. Which is terrible, but I don’t think him doing so to Musk will be a precedent. If anything it might be interesting to see if he gets any pressure to deport Melania too.

Lol what a strange stretch. I’m not Christian, I’m an atheist socialist annoyed at how the US government has historically worked to overthrow socialism everywhere in the world.

NYPD has offices all around the globe. Because… 9/11 or something.

Socialism has failed every time it’s been attempted, for one very good reason.

I fully expect the CIA to get involved. Probably before the general election even happens.

I don’t want to accuse Trump or his administration of having rational or intelligent decision-making processes, but it’s hard to really have any productive thought or conversation about theit decisions if I just assume they are irrational or stupid. So bear with me as I try to make sense of something that might be senseless.

There have been a handful of odd discrepancies from the Trump administration piling up. Mueller, for all his flaws, did prove that a good chunk of Trump’s campaign in 2016 had illegal ties to Russia and Putin. Even though Trump avoided direct consequences and pardoned some of them, they were still convicted and the ties to Putin are solid. Heck, there were ties between Trump and Russia going back to the 80’s.

Musk also has ties to Russia and Putin. So it was not all that surprising to see Musk throw his full support behind Trump last summer and then do the whole DOGE thing. It was a bit odd to see someone so thoroughly tied to electric cars support someone so pro-fossil fuels, but I could see Musk deciding that defense contracts for SpaceX, Starlink, and other businesses might outweigh reduced EV subsidies for him.

Allegedly, Trump and Musk had a falling out. The back-and-forth on social media, Musk stepping back from DOGE, and later walking back some of his statements. Speculation as to whether that was real or not. Was it really over the spending bill? Was Musk really leaving DOGE? Was this all a ploy to manipulate the stock market and do some insider trading? Was this just Musk on drug-induced psychosis?

Then the tensions between Israel and Iran flare up again. Trump sides with Israel as the US traditionally has, Putin sides with Iran as Russia traditionally has. There was the recent Tucker Carlson interview of Ted Cruz, and we’ve seen some discord among the far-right over whether to support a US war against Iran or not. The US struck Iran and didn’t appear to do a whole lot of damage, and Iran struck back in the most polite way possible and did pretty much no damage.

Other wonderful folks have dug up old Trump tweets from the Obama years, speculating that Obama was appearing weak and would strike Iran as a show of strength.

So was this all just political theater? Trump doesn’t actually care whether Iran has nukes or not. He wants Trump to appear strong and willing to go to war. He wants to show his support for Israel and reaffirm America as the World Police.

So my guess is that Netanyahu keeps pushing what he can get away with. Allegedly, there was tension between Netenyahu and Biden over the line between counter-terrorist operations and genocide. Biden, the consummate centrist neoliberal, allowed the genocide as long as it didn’t hurt businesses, but seemed to have been pressuring Netenyahu to keep restrictions on it. Trump abandoned those and Palestine seems to be suffering far more since he took office. Then you add the Israeli strikes on Iran on top of that- I don’t think they had anything to do with new intelligence Israel received, just that Netenyahu felt he could get away with it while still maintaining US support from Trump, which he could not have done under Biden.

Where I start to really speculate- I don’t think Trump cares about Iran. He doesn’t care about of they have nukes or not, he doesn’t care about Islam vs Judaism vs Christianity. He care about the media narratives, especially in the US. Same thing with the tarrifs- it was more about appearing powerful to his base than actually being powerful.

I never said EVERYTHING is real. In fact, I would agree that the vast majority of the internet is not. I just think TV news sources don’t have any reality left at all.

Shining Force is a classic. Basically Seva’s answer to Fire Emblem.

Wargroove is pretty good too. Kind of like Advance Wars, but in a more medieval fantasy setting. From an indie dev with pixel art. My only real complaint is one I have with all modern “retro pixel art” style games: the “pixels” can move by much smaller increments than themselves. I wish games that used that style would align everything, including animation, to the fake pixels. It looks kind of busy and messy imo. It doesn’t bother me enough to ruin Wargroove though.

Banner Saga was pretty good. It’s a combination of tactical RPG with mostly text-based choose-your-own-adventure style elements between battles. Still haven’t played the 3rd one, but I enjoyed the first 2.

With how bad TV news has gotten this might be a good thing.

Social media allows for all sorts of disinformation and misinformation, yes. But there’s also real people talking about real experiences. Primary sources spreading their eyes and ears across the world.

TV news is owned by billionaires like Murdoch and Bezos and are basically just propaganda outlets for them. And while I’m sure Zuckerberg and Elon are influencing their social media platforms just as much, at least on the internet there are places like Lemmy where the truth at least has a chance to exist.

I think you need to go back to middle school science to understand the importance of sample size. With a sample size of 1, it is not possible to isolate variables and determine a correlation, let alone causality. Was the driver under the influence of any substances? Was this on a section of road or intersection that was poorly designed or maintained? Were any parts of the bus or bike poorly designed or malfunctioning? And while I hate to blame victims, if the goal is to understand what happened and prevent future incidents, we need to understand the victim’s behavior and how that may have contributed as well. What a case study, particularly an individual death or injury CAN tell us is that we need to further study the situation to learn how it happened and how to prevent or mitigate it in the future.

And of course, I mentioned several other personal vehicles as options. Over 40k people die each year in the US alone from all motor vehicle collisions- we should also be looking at legislation to sedans, vans, busses, motorcycles, roads, and everything else safer. However, compared to busses personal vehicles are WAY more dangerous. To the point where it’s kind of silly to even display this data in a bar chart.

Here is a study looking at a larger sample size. Trucks and SUV’s are more likely to strike pedestrians and more likely to be fatal.

Or are you suggesting we should do nothing? Just accept the fact that manufacturers are allowed to design and market death traps, and individuals are allowed to rampage through the streets as they please? Maybe we should remove seatbelt requirements too while we are at it?

Why do they need to do it “better”, and how are we defining “better”?

Those vehicles are all much better at not running over pedestrians. They get better fuel mileage when not towing things, which is the vast majority of the time. They fit into parking spots better. We could go on and on arguing the pros and cons of these classes of vehicles and how good or bad they are at different things. And then we can dive further into specific models and how electric trucks might get better mileage or how kei trucks are much closer to vans than modern American trucks. Or even how small pickup trucks used to exist in America and we’re mostly fine. Or we could look at things like how all the biggest logistics companies in the world have put billions of dollars into developing their own vehicles and none of them have landed on pickup trucks.

Honestly I don’t really care how good a vehicle is at towing or hauling stuff. If it cannot do so without losing a ridiculous risk to pedestrians and property it shouldn’t exist. There are tons of products that have been banned despite being very effective at what they were designed to do because they also happened to be good at killing people.

Lol that’s silly. Even motorcycles can tow things. Sedans can tow things. RV’s, vans, station wagons.

You and I remember the press for the Wii very, very differently. Just look at the Wikipedia article listing all the awards it won before or around it’s launch. Game Critics, Spike TV, Golden Joystick, Popular Science, IGN, GameSpot, the Guardian, and much more. including awards and praise for the innovative controls.

Was there negativity? Sure, but it was a miniscule minority. The kind of thing only an extremely defensive Nintendo fan would notice. The Wii sold out instantly and was impossible to find for the first year or two, similar the PS5 except without the excuse of a global pandemic disrupting supply chains.

It’s not some anti-Nintendo bias. The press was pretty mixed on the Xbox One for example, with some outlets pointing out it was a bit overpriced, and of course the whole debacle about being always-online and the Kinect being mandatory caused a lot of backlash. The PS3 was seen as overpriced at launch and got a 6/10 from IGN.

And another important factor is that conditions change after launch. (The 360 probably would have had worse reviews if the press knew about the red ring of death before launch. The PS3 saw price reductions and eventually outsold the 360 despite having a worse launch. The 3DS floundered for its first few months until Nintendo dropped the price.

The press is neither monolithic nor perfect. I guarantee you can find some outlet somewhere with the exact take you are looking for, but to just dismiss the entire industry because you don’t agree with most of them on the Switch 2 seems like coping.

The WiiU also got negative press. That doesn’t somehow redeem it.

The Switch 2 being a bad deal and Nintendo having a VERY strong history of anti-consumer behavior has nothing to do with console wars. The person you are replying to is equally allowed to have a nuanced take.

What, are you expecting every comment critical of Nintendo to also include criticism of how terribly Xbox has managed it’s game studios just so we can be “fair and balanced”?

Kinda sad how fascists seem to be so much better at taking down fascists than anti-fascists are.

Why not a Binstance?