Does not accept free copies/codes for game or early copies of the games. Access journalism is a plague.
Brings in guests to the show/podcast/whatever who are proficient and knowledgeable about the games being discussed. I don’t expect the hosts to be experts, but I’m tired of hearing layman’s takes on games that I’m interested in.
Would you be interested in supporting an outlet financially? If it’s a good product, I’d support a Patreon or whatever.
Do you have any preferred platforms? Would you be interested in an outlet that prioritizes the Fediverse over Twitch, Youtube, etc.? I think it would be best to post content cross-platform otherwise you risk having a dead community or, worse, a circlejerk community.
Do you have a preference between written content, video, audio? I think video and written are a minimum nowadays with audio being a nice bonus.**************
I agree with you on keys/access. Part of why I think being beholden to the release calendar for content is such a problem. It was one thing when previews meant something, now that every publisher/developer promotes directly to their audience and being critical gets you on their bad side, there’s not a huge point to it.
Guests are a good point! That’s been something I’ve wanted to focus on, similar to Giant Bomb at Nite and the Interview Dumptruck. Doing post-mortems with developers could be really interesting.
I hear you on the dead community point as well. Kind of want to encourage discourse happening outside of the big platforms, but using the larger ones to help build an audience.
Sadly no I don’t think monitors support that. Or at least mine doesn’t. The audio menu on the Xbox UI is inaccessible. Unless I have an actual headset plugged in.
Even tried hooking my controller to speaker but that didn’t seem to work.
Depending on what I’m encoding, I am trying as much as possible to do AV1 + Opus.
x264 kind of stands on its own. It is a legendary encoder with excellent encode times, but h264 is an ancient codec and it really shows if you don’t give it a bitrate that’s, frankly, too high. I use it most frequently these days for sharing short, low res clips of videos on Discord or through iMessage or something.
So that leaves us with with our modern choices: hevc, vp9, and AV1.
Off the bat I would say VP9 is irrelevant just because it’s way too slow to encode, and is effectively superseded by AV1. To whatever extent possible I try to use AV1, reencode into AV1, download AV1, and so forth. When done correctly it will shrink files even smaller than hevc can, it can encode relatively quickly with SVT-AV1 and is patent unencumbered so it’s actually supported in web browsers. If the video is an AV1 .webm it will play in Firefox. If I need subtitles, I can put them in a .mkv.
HEVC (with x265) is a pretty strong choice. I will not avoid downloading torrents in this format but I will avoid encoding into it. It maybe has better compatibility in certain cases, like if you have a “smart” TV (ugh) that can natively decode it. In which case that might override any decision you will make: you just want the best compatibility with your existing hardware.
As for audio, that’s Opus. Every time. It absolutely whips. For stereo audio I can do Opus at 96 or 112kbps and it is transparent. Another source with more going on (maybe loud explosions and effects and all that) could possibly benefit from 128. It’s great.
The final thing to mention about encoding is no matter which codec you use you will have to learn a bit about how to use it. You can one and done the encoders with default choices, but at minimum you do need to factor in what happens when you do things like change preset speeds. From there you can consider things like what about changing the keyframe interval (for shorter vids I will do more frequent keyframes to make seeking tolerable. For something like a full movie a keyframe every 10 seconds is probably fine. But what about scene detection? What about bit depth?). Potentially much to consider.
Maybe it’s the fact I downloaded it exactly when I decided to and not when a sale happened or it was in a bundle.
I don’t get this argument. You don’t have to download a game when it’s on sale or in a bundle. Buy it when it makes the most economical sense, download and play whenever you feel like it.
Agree. I changed the way that I purchase games by setting myself a rule:
Buy it only if you are going to play it TODAY
Previously I had a library of games I had never played because I bought them on sale and they just sat there, unplayed, making me feel sad and stressed.
Purchasing only when I want to play now is both less stressful, and less expensive!
Oh well, I should’ve said “acquired” there. I mean I bought it on sale, then forgot about it because I wasn’t jazzed to play it right then and there. With pirated games, the act of acquisition is the download, so they are generally available when I’m thinking about them.
Simple common sense suggests that rented (subscribed) software of any kind is likely a very bad deal for the consumer. Rental where all the control rests with the publisher and not the user or creator (a la Steam) is just as bad.
Before big publishers emerged, we had exactly the try-before-you-buy situation you describe. It was called shareware. It had excellent quality control since any game that didn’t hold the player’s attention didn’t generate income. And the creator got all the revenue rather than the publisher and distributors keeping 80-90% or more.
These days, I just settle for waiting until a game appears on GOG. It’s a decent compromise.
Yeah, I remember the Duke Nukem Episode 1 shareware, one of the first games I remember playing actually. There were others but this was the first one that really gelled as a functioning game. A lot of the others were sort of incomprehensible to my small child brain. It’s wild that I can remember these old games then just search them and they’re immediately playable with no setup needed.
I personally never pirate games. I don’t like dealing with the cracks and the bugs that often come with it. I don’t play more than a few games a year though so the cost isn’t too high. Pirating mostly involves movies and T.V. for me.
I used to avoid it too, but I was less worried about the bugs and more about possible viruses. When I realised there was a crack scene with certain uploaders that are trusted by the community I lost a lot of that worry.
Stanley Parable and Trover Saves the Universe are both pretty funny. I’m sure there are a ton of really funny games, but for some reason, they’re not coming to mind.
Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon - (it is now abandonware, you can play it for free) if you have never heard if it but like sierra/lucasarts style games you really should give it a try. Extremely funny.
But also the Monkey Island Series and Grim Fandango?
There’s a decent write up on how Android ‘dropper’ malware functions here. TLDR - while the APK may be clean, it tries to trick you into installing a malware infected APK later in the install process or during a fake update.
Thanks. That dropper function looks dangerous. However, the first dropper campaign spotted by Threat Fabric at the beginning of October 2022, and this file was uploaded at 2020, so even if it’s indeed malicious, it’s probably a different bad guy I guess.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne