Isn’t Sony both a publisher and a platform? Nintendo, too.
Also, why is the quote there twice? Read both 2-3 times looking for one to say something different. Guess you got me, but I don’t see the point.
Nintendo is such bullshit.
They have Pokémon but don’t they also make Pikmin? It’s practically the same name, but different. Digimon is the same as Pokémon but they don’t sue each other?
Then there’s Animal Crossing, Pokémon Pokeopia or whatever it’s called, the Hello Kitty one, and Stardew Valley and all its clones/similars.
Breath of the Wild was just a Zelda-themed Dark Souls. Super Mario Bros. has had a ton of spinoffs/ripoffs.
But yeah, go after Palworld.
Oh, let’s not forget that Metroid exists because Ridley Scott said “no” when they wanted to make an Alien video game. That’s why that one boss is named… Ridley.
Nintendo is such bullshit.
I enjoyed the *Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Any%," but I started watching the Mass Effect 3 run and it allows mods (“Mod%”) and half these mods just allow them to skip stuff. So why call it a speed run if you can just use mods to skip stuff? It makes no sense. Why not just use a mod to warp you right to the three choices and then just run toward the… shit, why not just spawn the cutscene of one of the endings? Make it make sense. Love the game and the commentary about it though. But I put way more energy into balancing the personalities of my companions than worrying about their perks. I play on Easy and I just shoot whatever’s not me and mine. Save the krogan, romance the asari. FemShep every damn time. Paragon every damn time.
Yeah, but if you give Valve a pass for jacking up hardware costs, you kinda have to give everyone else a pass. Otherwise it’s just bias.
I’m biased toward Valve over Microsoft and Sony, but I try to argue in good faith. Not saying you’re not, just that I try to hold myself to a standard. RAM, GPU, and storage costs are up so all game consoles are up. I don’t give Valve a pass here.
Sony and StudioCanal isn’t the first time it’s happened, though. It’s just making a lot more waves.
Well, if the Steam Deck hasn’t gone up in price where you’re at, you might wanna buy a couple. Keep them sealed, you can sell them for a profit later. Most places, they’ve gone up quite a bit.
I wouldn’t, simply because most game publishers favour Windows, and Windows is the least secure OS out there. While some legitimately purchased PC games do contain malware (such as rootkits — typically, these are used to ensure you are not cheating in online matches, but some are also used to ensure only people who paid for the game can play it), the fact that hobbyists are volunteering their time to bypass these checks and either injecting their own code in, or having you run a program that does so on your machine (a cracker), you have to wonder if they are entirely altruistic. Sure, there are some the community trusts, like FitGirl. But you never know.
What I like is when people share the GOG installers. For those who don’t know, GOG is a game storefront that used to be part of CD Projekt Red (The Witcher, Cyberpunk 2077) but has since spun off on its own. More importantly, their installers are DRM free and work offline. If a game is available on GOG and there’s also a torrent of the cracked Steam version or whatever, I would be VERY wary of the latter, since the game already exists DRM-free. So you have to ask yourself why you should run third party code. Sure, it may be that the cracked version came first, but if it’s on GOG, the cracked one should just go away. It’s fine that the crack was accomplished, but there’s simply no need to trust the cracker to not infect your system, when the game is already available DRM-free. And, in my experience, the GOG installers are pretty easy to come by. And, IIRC, you can verify their checksum against GOG itself to verify the file has not been altered.
Install Steam OS on a Linux PC. The Steam Machine is overpriced and mid range. It’s okay for beginners. Members of a Linux gaming comm can probably do better.
Note that presently, Steam OS is only for AMD builds. If you have Intel and/or Nvidia, you’ll need to wait. Support for those is coming soon.
Vista was not bad. It gets a lot of hate, but Vista SP1 was rock solid. But 7 came shortly after and Vista never had the Aero Snap/Peek stuff and that was game-changing. 7 should have been a Vista service pack. Vista got shafted.
There were also driver issues, but that’s the fault of lazy vendors. Vista itself was fine, but only just fine.
I like Windows 11 at work well enough (and I have about 30 years of experience with that platform) but at home I’m a happy post-PC Mac user. Honestly there are a couple things Windows does better, and I’m familiar with the platform. But Microsoft needs to learn how to get out of their own way, and the way of power users.
In case anyone’s not clear as to why: Sony has announced that they’ll stop producing discs and that they can take your content at any time for any reason.
Historically, Steam has promised they will never do that and will offer DRM-free (clarification: they’ll remove the Steam DRM) downloads.
Also, all of them have jacked prices up. Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam have raised hardware prices around 35-40%. However, Steam runs on PCs they don’t sell, as well as Macs, and they have a Linux distribution they provide for free called Steam OS.
No.
I’ve been saying for years that because the Switch uses ARM64, any game ported to it should theoretically run on iOS, Android, and macOS (on Macs running Apple Silicon; basically 2021 onward). That’s not the whole story, though. Nor does it much matter that the Switch was originally going to run Android, nor the fact that the Switch is just a modded Nvidia Shield tablet. There’s still a lot of hurdles between any given Switch game (even a simple one like Animal Crossing) and your Android phone, even if it is a full decade newer.
That said, emulation is easier on Mac and Android because you’re only emulating the software. You’re already on the right hardware. Gaming PCs also have to emulate the ARM64 hardware, but that’s fine because they tend to have the power to do so.
I was able to run the PS3 version of Rockband 3 at near native speed (if not native speed) on my M2 Pro Mac mini via RPCS3, but I’m sure a game with complex physics would have been more of a problem. Both my Macs run Switch (and 3DS) games pretty well.
But as for running natively… the Mac version of Cyberpunk 2077 exists because the Switch 2 version exists. So CD Projekt Red had to first modify the game to run on ARM64. They then built it for macOS, and for Switch 2. At this point, nothing really stops them from porting to iOS except maybe hubris (“our game is too powerful for phones, never mind phones that outclass the Switch 2”). Nothing stopped Bethesda from porting Skyrim to macOS, Android, or iOS, except greed (they instead made the microtransaction heavy Elder Scrolls Blades for phones).
But as far as trying to run PS3 games natively on Linux because the design of the PS3 used some Linux code? Nope, not happening. At best, it might make emulation easier. But you would still have to emulate.
The Elder Scrolls VI has the same issue GTA VI has, getting over the hype. GTA VI likely will. I doubt The Elder Scrolls VI will. I mean, sure, it’ll sell, but will it be good? The last good Fallout game was New Vegas, and Todd Howard had nothing to do with it. They bought the IP, made one good one, licensed it out to Obsidian, then half-arsed the next one and still haven’t fixed game-breaking bugs that make the game impossible to complete (at least on Xbox).
They say Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls VI are coming, but with the way Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls Online are printing money, I have little hope for their single-player adventures. Then there’s Skyrim. They ported it to ARM64 for Switch, which is the platform all the phones use. But instead of putting Skyrim on iOS and Android (pro tip: if your phone is made after 2018, it’s most likely more powerful than a Switch; if it’s an iPhone and it came out in 2016 or later, it absolutely is), they made this free-to-play trash riddled with microtransactions. They still haven’t put Skyrim on iOS, Android, or macOS, despite having already ported it to the ARM64 platform they all use. Oh, and when they did put Skyrim on Switch, they didn’t include any of the bug fixes found and published by the community years earlier. They’re porting Fallout 4 to ARM64 for the Switch 2, so yes, your phone can probably run that, too. But they’re not going to do it (or macOS) because it wouldn’t make them enough money. This is Bethesda now. They aren’t focused on experiences, they’re focused on monetisation and microtransactions. And they’ve been this way for 10-15 years, before the Xbox acquisition. Bethesda is trash now, and has been for a long time.
Starfield was kind of their chance to prove that they still had it. The game shipped without a map function and a lot of things were broken. They patched exploits that made the purely single-player game easier, but steadfastly refused to fix bugs, despite running an official Discord community and soliciting bug reports from the community. They then made a ship-building contest with real-world prizes, but they patched out a glitch people were using to make ships look a little cooler, but they let the people they’d already pre-selected to win use those very same glitches. Like the guy in Fallout: New Vegas told you in the beginning, the game was rigged from the start. There were quests most people couldn’t complete and they just didn’t care. They added land vehicles to the game, but they were buggy. People didn’t get out of your way, and if you hit anybody, the whole settlement turned against you. Fair, I suppose, but the NPCs not reacting to the vehicle isn’t. Fine if you deploy on a planet without people, but it was given to you on that main planet where your team is located. And speaking of your team, they would all turn against you if you took out certain enemies. We (the testing community) were able to narrow down the problem, and they still didn’t fix it. That said, despite the game being a rubbish fire, I still beat it 10 times to maximise all the powers, and I enjoyed the hell out of the Vanguard and pirate quest lines (the latter of which gives you the best gun in the game). Some parts of it were really fun. But like anything else Bethesda made, breadth of an ocean, depth of a puddle of lukewarm piss out behind the pub, left by someone who cared more about Starfield than Todd Howard’s team did. (And yet, I still wanna replay a few of those quests.)
I was worried about the future of Bethesda games long before they were acquired by Microsoft. Xbox is just an easy scapegoat here.
You can move the goalposts with your words, but I can’t afford to follow with my wallet, and I don’t want to move backwards anyway.
Furniture can’t spawn in the ground. However, every day, two trees can have furniture shaken out of them. You shake the tree, a green leaf floats down. You pick it up, it’s random furniture. Be warned however. While 10-15 trees also contain one gold coin worth 100 Bells, five trees also carry wasp nests that, when they hit the ground, spawn a wasp that will attack you. It’s one of four creatures that will attack in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The wasp will give you a swollen eye. A villager may give you medicine to cure you. (Also there are mosquitoes that don’t do real damage, they just stop you for a minute and your villager will remark on the bite. And tarantulas and scorpions, which are mutually exclusive to one another by time of year but only appear at night, which will attack you on sight if you have a net out, but will otherwise retreat from you, and those will KO you, which returns you to your house with no loss of any progress.) You can also cure a wasp bite/sting by waiting a day. And you can avoid getting shamed by villagers with lower friendship by wearing any mask or sunglasses (they won’t see the swelling).
Lyman is a cool character, but like any animal villager, it depends on your relationship level with him. You can give already-donated fossils (duplicates) to villagers to vastly increase the friendship. Fossils are worth over 1,000 Bells, so they count as an expensive gift. None of them will be displayed in their home. They are worth a lot to sell, but if you want your villagers to like you, shower them in duplicate fossils. I think once you hit max, it can’t go down (or it can’t go down very far) but I’m not 100% on that. You know you’re at 100% when they gift you a photo of them. They always gift you something when you gift them something, so when they give you their photo for a gift, you’ve hit 100% and you can stop giving them gifts.
As far as regular attendance goes, Animal Crossing is great for older gamers who are weirded out by social networks. If you think about it, it kind of functions the same way as, say, Facebook, just minus all the political BS, and the consequences with people you know IRL for saying the wrong thing. You have friends who say random things and do random things, and you interact with them and show them your appreciation, and they return it to you. I think it’s meant to give that same dopamine hit. Anyway, New Leaf (3DS) is a bit rougher with that. If you don’t talk to a villager in a few days, they’ll whine about having feelings, too. I’m honestly beginning to get a bit tired of it. These games were big during the pandemic when everyone had to stay indoors and isolated. Now that most people aren’t doing that anymore, a game designed to be needy is easier to drop than it is to meet its needs.
Generally I agree with this sentiment, but did either American party campaign for AI data centers and/or technological deregulation in 2024? I suspect Trump may have, but I kind of doubt it. I always thought the Dems were the ones who wanted to push the tech industry. Now I think both of them do (maybe different companies/industries but they both wanna cash those checks).
For post-apocalypse? 君の名は。. Even if it’s in Japanese, with no subtitles. Don’t threaten me with a good time. I used to watch it that way. I still would, but I found some really good subtitles. The film was released outside of Japan as “your name.” (the full-stop is part of the title both ways) but I prefer to call it by its original name in the original glyphs. Both of my computers and my phone (all Apple, so cloud sync) type it if I type the initials of the romanised version of the name (Kimi no Na wa.), period and all. Text replacement, any computer/phone can do it, but it’s nice to have the cloud sync.
White whale? Honestly I don’t have one anymore. I used to have a couple, but I found them. There was a movie I was trying to find for years and years, and a game as well, and I’d Google things and it would never come up. These days, you can just ask ChatGPT and it’ll tell you what it is. Now, if it’s something I know what it is but I haven’t obtained it yet? I’d have to say FLAC copies of every record, tape, or CD I’ve ever owned. That includes my siblings and parents as well, so I could throw it on my Plex server. My mother in particular had to get rid of 250+ records. Would be nice to have all that back, digitally. I think I have the important parts of the collection.
There are RetroPie images “out there” that contain a full Linux distribution, the emulators, the games, and a ten-foot interface. That’s actually what RetroPie is. It’s Linux and EmulationStation, which is like RetroArch but for TVs. RetroPie is just one option. There’s another, but I can’t think of its name. They’re competitors, but they’re not enemies, and neither of them are charging. It’s like different Linux distros, they just have different ways of doing things.
It’s stupidly easy to set up. Once you run it for the first time, it boots directly into EmulationStation, and asks you to configure whatever controller you plug in. That’s best, but you can use Bluetooth controllers, too. Once your controller is set up, you choose the system you want, then you pick from a list of games. ES can be configured to show a screenshot of the game, or a video of it being played, or a TV ad for the game, either on its own, on an old CRT TV, in an arcade cabinet, or other formats, and there might be text telling you about it. It’s very nice. Very “Netflix of gaming” kind of look/feel. Of course you can set favourites and have those in their own menu on the top level.
Shame Raspberry Pis and memory cards are so expensive these days.
If that Android phone has USB-C, it probably has HDMI out. Hook it up to a hub first, then HDMI to HDMI to a TV from the hub, then connect controllers, and a charger. (One of the USB-C’s on the hub should be marked “PD” for power delivery, or have a lightning bolt. FYI you can also connect a keyboard and mouse via a USB-C hub to an Android phone (or iPhone) and they’ll just work. Android because Linux kernel, iOS because macOS base. Android isn’t Linux and iOS isn’t macOS, but the inverse is truer than people think. Just not in the ways you actually want (e.g. my iPhone should become a Mac when plugged into devices, because the MacBook Neo has the same guts that are in my iPhone, literally).
But even with a relatively old, relatively cheap Android phone, all that is possible. I have a Galaxy S10 (2019) and all that works.
Okay, so the name sucks, but if my kid breaks her laptop, I still gotta pay it. I didn’t break it. The kid broke it. But it’s still my responsibility.
I don’t have a kid. If I did, I’d hope I had a kid who wouldn’t break nice things. But, let’s be real. Kids and cats break nice things. I also don’t have a Tesla. But if you own something (or you have a pet or a child) you are still responsible for what they do.
It’s going to be interesting if we ever get those cars that go out on our behalf and do ride sharing gigs while we’re at work, earning back the money they spend keeping themselves charged. I wanna say one of the EV makers floated that idea. It never happened. But if it did, while you’re at work your car does damage. Who are they going to blame? Maybe you have insurance that covers it. But you’d still be responsible.
I don’t necessarily disagree, I just think if you use mods to make it go faster, where’s the line drawn? Though I suppose if certain mods are allowed and others are not, that makes sense.