They legit don’t have any faces or arms. That “Thor” has a weird, flesh coloured, Megaman buster-shaped appendage, no eyes and a gaping hole of a mouth.

It’s not obvious at a glance, but each of those “characters” are amorphous blobs. Seriously, zoom in even a little, it’s really strange to look at.

I appreciate the poster demonstrating always-on to OP, and I’d never criticize them for using this wallpaper, but the only way you can call this “very good AI art” is by glancing at a thumbnail and moving on.

Infinite growth is referred to as cancer. Your friend is obviously right that we cannot sustain infinite growth, but it’s misguided to think that the only way out species can possibly survive to any length is by having more children and increasing our population year over year.

With improving technologies and automations, far less labour is required to achieve the same results. There is no reason we need an infinitely increasing population on our decidedly finite earth just to keep our species afloat. This would take a major restructuring of our social and economic systems to do correctly, otherwise we run the risk of centralized wealth mucking it all up, but the point remains that there’s no necessity to continue reproducing at the rate we have been. This supposed “need” for labour is just capitalist propaganda perpetuating the idea that work is inherently good, all designed to fuel an inherently exploitative economy. Line must go up, otherwise how can the privledged few assure that their net worth continues to grow exponentially?

Support an amazing “single-A” game that suffers none of the issues of modern enshittification by purchasing a physical copy.

OR

Refuse to hand any money to the mega corporation that shut down the studio responsible for the gem that is Hi-Fi Rush.

sweats nervously

The insanity and ignorance necessary to call prison “a sweet life”.

What’s the goal here? There’s no way you’re this willfully ignorant, right?

It’s kind of like Kahoot, but there’s a greater variety of games.

The teacher hosts a game with a question set they either found it made, and each student joins on a device. They’re givegiven the questions and selecting correct answers earns them something relative to the game.

The most traditional one is the one that was described here, where they are given every question in sequence and are awarded points for the accuracy and speed of their answers, but there is some great variety. There’s a tower defense game where correct answers give you the currency to buy and upgrade towers, a “survivors”-like game where a correct answer is required to be given a choice of weapon upgrades and several variants on slot machine-esque games, where correct answers gives them a random bonus ranging across gaining score, multiplying score or stealing score from other players.

I like to use it with the kids whenever I require some rote memorization. Ie, we’re reviewing terms we’ve used or will be using in a unit, or we’re refreshing things they’re supposed to have learned in previous years.

There’s some great single-player options too, if you ever find yourself struggling to deal with rote memorization for any courses you’d take as an adult, too. While it’s definitely targeted towards classrooms and kids, the games are imo substantially more engaging ways to memorize things that are in general hard to care about outside of a requirement for some job, diploma or degree.

Damn, my grade 7 class is cringe af. Kid keeps naming himself “skibidisigma” every time we play Blooket.

The endgame Sephiroth fight was definitely forced. It reeked of “well, he’s been the secret antagonist all game, so we can’t just disclude him from the finale” kind of thinking.

I liked the more persistent villain lurking in Cloud’s broken mind, but they shouldn’t have felt the need to try and put a pseudo capstone on that story thread.

That’s so fascinating, tbh. I mean, different strokes, so I can’t judge, but it’s the impressively deep strategy they’ve baked into Remake’s combat that I am particularly impressed by. That said, it makes sense though that if you dislike Tales combat, you’d dislike Remake’s combat. They’re not the same persay, but they’re cut from the same cloth imo.

I could also go for a “no capitalism” approach, but I’ll take what I can get.

Calling the new game’s combat “mind-numbing” compared to a random encounter turn-based system is both peak irony and peak rose-tinted glasses.

I can’t get over just how much better Remake is compared to the original, so you do you, I guess. I was incredibly pleasantly surprised to see the ways they’re engaging with telling a different story and taking the name “remake” very literally. I was seriously concerned they were just going to sell the original story again in three seperate parts as full-price titles.

I’d think, for someone who loves China so much, you’d understand the value of a social score telling you that you’re doing a bad thing. Guess you only like to listen when that score is managed by a fascist regime.

I didn’t call it nonsense. The truth of the statement isn’t in question just by calling it propaganda. I’m criticizing it because cherry-picking economic successes to celebrate an oppressive regime is a concerning behaviour.

Not as scary as the propaganda you’re spreading with the original post.

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There are a lot of reasons to not bother going to Tim Horton’s, and the lids on their cups is not one of them.

It’s weird because you’re both right and wrong.

It’s not AAA by any stretch. It was sold at a fraction of the usual price point, it’s advertising was non-existant, and it makes no effort to do the usual AAA things: live-service, online multiplayer, “you can play it forever”, etc. are are not present.

But putting it side-by-side with Manor Lords and Balatro, the latter of which was a single-person dev, also doesn’t suit it. It has a real studio, a dev team with experience, and at least enough of a budget to license real music from popular (or at least, once popular) artists. I’d perhaps agree with your statement that it’s closer to AAA than to a “small dev” game, but it is true that it’s a “smaller game that [gives Microsoft] prestiege and awards”.

This is a great article highlighting the pig-headed double speak going on at Microsoft’s gaming divisions. On the one hand, they’re cutting studios and supposidly refocusing on their core offerings, while simultaneously describing the experiences they want to offer as exactly the studios they just cut. The absolute worst part is I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to take the IP, push it on a different dev team that they control and give it the Fable treatment: “this IP was so well received; make a sequel that checks all these boxes that our market research data tells us popular, profitable games have” while conviniently ignoring the passion and vision that the original devs poured into the original title.

“Fuck them, I’ve got mine” pro-capitalist mindset in the wild.

It absolutely has to deal with a Steam account every single time I log in to confirm ownership of the title. And then again every time I make a purchase from my Steam wallet. And again every time I connect to a friend through my Steam friends list.

It’s literally adding another potential point of failure and removes none of the necessities of dealing with the other service. I only suggested the server load bit because I can’t for the life of me understand how you can think it’s “easier” to insist that these two systems interact in a new way when they’re already up and functioning, and the original reason account linking was disabled was to make the game more stable.

Cassette Beasts kicks the ever loving shit out of Pokemon across the board, modern or retro.

Retro games weren’t better than modern games as a “full-stop” statement. They tended to be bug-ridden messes, but there was still a heart and soul behind them that tends to be missing in the AAA industry. Continuing on the Pokemon example Red/Blue were an absolute mess. I mean, moves and items that were supposed to massively increase critical hit rate massively decreased them instead. Stat calculations were all over the place. Hell, the ghost-psychic interaction just straight didn’t function as intended. It was a mess, and yet for some reason, it’s touted as “better” than the modern Pokemon games.

Plus, not all big studio games are soulless cash grabs of releases, either. Hi-Fi Rush is my favorite game of 2023 by a huge margin, and was a Bethesda published game. Sure, the dev studio was “smaller” compared to Ubisoft or Activison, but I wouldn’t call the game indie - it was AAA in polish and scale. I’m currently really enjoying Unicorn Overlord, getting major Ogre Battle 64 vibes from it, and playing a lot of Monster Hunter Rise thanks to a Steam sale. These games slap, and have all the depth and passion of games of old without alI of the horrible jank we dealt with in the pre-internet “no such thing as a post-release patch” world.

It’s easy to see the yearly Call of Duty, Pokemon, generic EA sports, and obligatory Ubisoft open world games release and think “man, AAA gaming sucks”, but they’re honestly a very tiny portion of the conversation.

EDIT: I take everything back, Bethesda just closed the studio that made Hi-Fi Rush. AAA gaming is a cancer that needs to be surgically extracted.