This is a requirement of modern right-populist politics. They won’t play defense, so they just say crap and you’re always chasing the latest nonsense and never get to make a point.
Of course the counter to this is for Walz to make this a non-stop couch-fucking roast from minute one. I’m talking opening statement is about upholstery, fabric texture, visualize choices for lubricant and material combos. Just go all in on the furniture abuse right away.
I need to spend more time with it, but there is an unexpected level of nuance to that, isn’t there? You can drag your feet a LOT, and you can promise a choice on the next law to be enacted or to research a technology without comitting to it actually being deployed. Accurately conveying democracy in a game is pretty much impossible, but I do like how well they let you play the policy delay game.
Isn’t this pretty much the same system Google was intending to implement on Chrome before backtracking? That’s my understanding anyway.
Ultimately the issue is that we’ve gone to extremes. The response to the data market that runs the Internet is now that many people are against ANY amount of information being dislodged from users to anybody else. That is obviously way more strict than pre-internet standards, when people’s location data was widely available and TV advertising ran a whole lot of live reporting and segmentation data, but it has become the goal.
Mozilla (and Apple, and for a bit Google), are suggesting to go back to a world where someone quietly aggregates some info without tracking individuals in excruciating detail and now advertisers don’t want to lose the granularity and resell ability of the spy-level data gathering… and users don’t want to give up even aggregated info.
We’ve scorched the earth so badly there is no path forward, so we stay where we are. I have no moral stance on this, but it seems to be what’s happening.
I don’t know, I think maybe it depends on age? Most people exposed to US media will recognize at least the landmarks, but that’s probably true of other cities as well.
But NYC has been in so many videogames I feel younger people with a passing interest in gaming will at least have a weird set of expectations. Of Manhattan, if nothing else. The twenty years of open world Spider-Man games alone are more exposure to an overhead map of a city than most people get of the place where they live in that amount of time.
Oh, cool. My current device uses Logitech Options+, which is not the same as the old G Hub and is not the same as what you’re describing.
Which honestly, before we get into the mandatory login and everything else, begs the question… why does Logitech need three different multi-device software hubs? What the hell?
It’s not (just) that manufacturers are trying to mine all this bloatware for data, it’s that most of them are absolutely terrible at making software in the first place.
Yeah, I’d like to know the specifics, too. My Logi mouse still uses the same application (although they did update terms recently) and while they’ve added some AI shovelware to it the mouse stil remembers its shortcuts with that thing off and I haven’t noticed any changes to how the application is put together.
It’s entirely possible the application is a Chromium-based browser thing, but in any case it still doesn’t require a login (although it does support one) and it will run offline.
Don’t get me wrong, Logi’s approach to this, along with a lot of other hardware manufacturers, sucks really bad. I do appreciate Microsoft, of all people, recently starting to standardize RGB controls, at least. It’s still wonky and interacts weirdly with some third party software, but it’s a start. I don’t need twenty different apps to keep glowy lights and saved shortcuts going.
Right now I’d say on that continuum it’s probably FP2>Against the Storm>FP1, but I need to play more FP2 to know for sure.
I mean, I will give you that Frostpunk does trade off some procedural complexity for the ability to give you narrative scenarios, but that’s not a bad thing. I am waaaay past needing every game to be an evergreen forever thing these days.
That said, if anybody is just hearing about Against the Storm now, they should go play Against the Storm. Against the Storm is also good.
It is the exact opposite of that. Easily the best paced strategy game in years. This thing moves. It flows. If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.
It’s really, really good.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.
From the linked article:
“Ryan deeply believed in that project and bringing players together through the joy in it,” said one former developer, who said he felt Ellis had poured a great deal of himself into the game, leading to a ton of stress. “Regardless of there being things that could have been done differently throughout development…he’s a good human, and full of heart.”
Sources told Kotaku that Ellis was too emotional to speak at points during a post-launch studio-wide meeting after it had become clear that the game was bombing.
You are vastly overestimating how good contracts for creative roles in the industry are, especially for a mid-sized studio of under 200 people. But even if that wasn’t the case, the guy isn’t quitting the company, he’s apparently stepping down as creative director and staying on in some other role, according to the article.
Hah. Your bar for “super rich” and mine may be in different places.
And you’re preaching to the choir, I’d much rather sail myself. But nerding out about the specifics aside, it’s very weird to leave it out of the renewable-powered sea travel conversation the way these guys are doing.
Admittedly it’s WAY easier to operate a motor boat than a sail boat, so depending on how you like to recreationally bleed your unlimited money I can see reasons for that choice.
But I fully agree that we’ve had renewable energy-based ships with unlimited range for millenia. The claim that “The aim was to demonstrate that zero-emission sea travel [is possible today]” broke my brain a little.
Honestly, I can only speak for myself, but 7R felt actively bad to play to me. Them trying to split the difference between a turn based RPG and an action game just made everything feel weird and slow, the way animation priority works on it is super unsatisfying and I really don’t click with how a lot of it is paced. Plus it’s been ages since anyone made a proper spectacle-focused turn-based RPG, and this was a missed opportunity, honestly. Persona looks stylish and great, but it’s not going for the same thing.
That, as a result, made me not want to jump into the sequel, because I never finished the original and people were telling me they play the same.
XVI is a bit of a different beast, I just wasn’t in a hurry to play it because… yay another action RPG form Square that probably doesn’t play great, but I did want to check it out, so I waited for the PC port that just came out and got that. Still haven’t gotten into it. I hope it’s good. It seems to be doing fine on Steam, but it also looks extremely expensive to make, so if they say it didn’t work I believe them, I suppose.
So the gimmick in the 7 remakes is that they aren’t a remake at all, they are a weird alternate reality spin-off thing that revisits the same characters and locations. I mean, mild spoilers for a four year old game you haven’t played at least partially because you didn’t know this.
The way they presented this was very weird and they tried to split the difference between still saying it’s all a remake but then hinting at it not being a remake sometimes slightly.
My biggest problem with these is that combat feels laggy and weird and I would much prefer a proper turn based RPG in the first place, but seeing the comments here is a bit of an eye opener about how it was all perceived.
“If they haven’t” makes me thing you aren’t considering it particularly hard, since 7R has been out for a good while on PC and XVI just came out.
If anything this thread tells me Square maybe isn’t great at marketing, or at least at making games that seem appealing to people not keeping tabs on gaming news proactively.
Let me agree with you explicitly on loving the return to a sane power configuration here. I was watching Hardware Unboxed’s retest of this after the patches and it takes almost fifteen minutes of them reiterating that the 9700X and the 14700K are tied for performance and price before they even mention the bombshell that the 9700X is doing that with about half the wattage.
The fact that we keep pushing reviews and benchmarks focused strictly on pedal-to-the-metal overclocked performance and nothing else is such a disgrace. I made the mistake to buy into a 13700K and I have it under lower than out of box power limits manually both to prevent longevity issues and because this damn computer is more effective as a hair dryer than anything else.
We don’t mention it much because Intel was in the process of catching on actual fire at the same time, but the way this generation has been marketed, presented to reviewers, supported and eventually reviewed has been a massive trainwreck, considering the performance of the actual product.
I don’t know. I mean, he does sound like he catches himself, and he isn’t that good of an actor. But then, who the hell has that just… ready to go to the point where it just blurts out by itself? Like, how often do you have to say that out loud for it to just hijack your train of thought? It’s almost less damning if he did it on purpose, honestly.
See, that I can get behind. Credit where it’s due.
MSAA is pretty solid, but it has its own quirks and it’s super heavy for how well it works. There’s a reason we moved on from it and towards TAA eventually. And DLSS is, honestly, just very good TAA, Nvidia marketing aside.
I am very confused about the concept of “fake perfromance”. If the animation looks smooth to you then it’s smooth. None of it exists in real life. Like every newfangled visual tech, it’s super in-your-face until you get used to it. Frankly, I’ve stopped thinking about it on the games where I do use it, and I use it whenever it’s available. If you want to argue about increased latency we can talk about it, but I personally don’t notice it much in most games as long as it’s relatively consistent.
I do understand the feeling of having to worry about performance and being hyper-aware of it being annoying, but as we’ve litigated up and down this thread, that ship sailed for PC gaming. If you don’t want to have to worry, the real answer is getting a console, I’m afraid.
Man, I know that clamshell Ayaneo is too expensive and that form factor isn’t as good as I think it is… but I still really want one.
Oh, hey, is that you, Barbra?