I got it for travel and it really is a top notch portable gaming hub. Doubly so because emulation is really easy to set up and run through the frontend. I love being able to play Elden Ring on the go.

It makes a lot more sense if you reframe it as freedom for rich white landowners in the 1800s to not have to pay taxes to King George, not so much for the peons, paupers and slaves.

Started playing #BLUD, I’m only about ten minutes in because sleep got the better of me last night but it looks pretty good so far.

Seepage is one of those bands that just sticks in your brain. If you like the tongue-in-cheek of Zane’s angsty edgelord teen vibes, the developers also made a doomlike in the same universe, developed by and starting that character.

After the Helldivers fiasco, I think it’s time to raise the plank and hoist the sails, Yarr.

Good. We’ll see if it sticks.

For me personally, it just got to me that Sony gave negative shits while Arrowhead was fighting an uphill battle getting their game playable in the face of overnight success, and now that everything is great and the hard work is done, Sony’s seeing dollar signs and pushing their fucking corpo bullshit on a studio that sees zero benefit and suffers all the fallout. They’re all too happy to shit where Arrowhead eats and it pisses me off.

I mean, that’s the game, isn’t it? You either grind out the super credits, and the fact that’s an option at all is the Hallmark of a good game, or you pay for instant gratification. Live service doesn’t support itself.

I mean, that’s not really so bad considering you can unlock the battle passes without spending a dime past your initial investment. The timing of the nerfs might be coincidental - I do also seem to remember a Breaker - Railgun - Shield Pack monoculture being a pretty big issue.

Sony dropped an announcement requiring PSN accounts, even for PC players with no cross play enabled, presumably because it makes the numbers look better to their shareholders. Apparently it was supposed to be a requirement at launch but the PSN servers were busted and it was preventing people from getting in so they ‘temporarily’ disabled it.

I mean, hopefully Sony reverses course on this decision and we can go back to playing a good game. What you describe is the most likely outcome.

Imagine having a golden goose and wanting to make pâté out of it. Sure does make me want to buy Ghost of Tsushima when it comes out, totally.

No discredit to R.E.M. but my world’s been ending for over a decade and I feel like dogshit constantly. Nobody told me the apocalypse would be heralded by the dumbest fucking cryptobros and AI prompters the world’s ever seen.

Meta acquiring Oculus

As someone with industry experience working with VR, I can tell you it’s a mixed bag. I think there’s certainly no way Oculus (and consumer VR in general) takes off the way it did without Facebook’s dollars behind it, and it’s certainly paved the way to the outstanding quality of standalone HMDs that are on offer today. However, it killed the initiative for PCVR hardware with the non-consolation that Meta, Pico, and HTC offer “Link mode” on all their headsets and it’s iffy on good days, which makes B2B PCVR very difficult to facilitate without some serious legwork on lowering latency over the air connections. Would that we could revive the Rift S, that headset was perfect for our needs.

The one in the manager’s mind, that also isn’t actually an MVP because sales over-promised and now you have to find a way to deliver.

Dark Disciples 1 and 2, including the temple of eternity module.

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/dark-disciples-43a

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/dark-disciples-2-43b

I’m glad someone else said it.

I know they make a joke about Tom in office space being the one who brings the specs from the customers to the engineers - as much as it looks like he’s dead weight, there really is a skill in being able to explore the customer’s needs (and frequently manage their expectations of what the proposed software should be and do) and parse them into something more technical for the engineers, because you might not know how to program, but you’ve got a good idea of what the capabilities are because you communicate with the engineering team on a daily basis.

Worth noting this is all a byproduct of capitalism as it exists today. Not nearly enough competition or regulation means every major change these days is really just “How can we put more ads in people’s devices? How can we instill FOMO? How can we charge more money for less service?”

Look at how bad mainstream UX/UI has become, even on the biggest platforms with the most industry experience. Windows 11 is a fucking joke and everyone is certain the next one will be worse. We know Microsoft can design a good UI, but they choose not to because they don’t care about the consumer except as it pertains to getting clicks and ad revenue. They shove Edge back in your taskbar after every update, they make finding your own shit on your computer impossible so you’ll use Cortana. Who asked for icons to be centered by default? Who asked for them to fuck around with the start menu for at least the fifth time in two decades? Nobody. But everything they do is for the benefit of the shareholders.

“Now what?”

https://youtu.be/2q35PgSXhKg?si=y50akSSlbmjnSrmG