Enjoying KOTOR2 at the moment. A More Civilized Age (AKA my favorite podcast ever) is doing a playalong of the game right now, so that has been motivating me through all the clunky combat scenarios. I’m really loving the juicy dialogue and top-tier voice acting. The Exile is so much more interesting than any other protagonist i’ve ever seen in a BioWare game - I feel like I really have a lot of room to interpret what kind of grey Jedi i want to be. I am shocked that Obsidian (and notorious POS Chris Avellone) pumped out this much amazing writing in 10 months.
I never finished all the time trials in Mario Kart 8, and I don’t have the budget to grab a Switch 2, so i’ve been plugging away at those trials to satiate my hunger for MKWorld.
Only just started Pentiment. And by that I mean I got through the background selection, and I’m now trying to decide if I’m happy with my choices or want to go with something else. The game looks really good so far, I’ve heard good things and I’m excited to see how it plays out.
Outlook 2000 was magic, even if it had more security warnings than a trip to Yemen. The current iteration of Outlook that they’re pushing with Office 365 is an absolute disaster, as if they’ve dragged it down to Teams’ level and let it rot away.
The big problems is outlook like every mail client from the early 2000s collected tons of features during the mail client wars where every client needed to do a billion different things, so now there’s dozens of random little features baked in that very few people use but those who do have built entire business processes around.
For example I observed while working at a bank that the backend finance people would use the voting feature to vote on whether to bundle certain loans together. I’ve never before or since seen anyone in any business actively use that feature. There’s lots of other little features and tunables buried deep in Outlook and it’s a royal pain as an IT person to quickly learn about whatever obscure feature a user is complaining stopped working and of course figure out what the intended workflow for the feature is to begin with before I can even start troubleshooting how to fix it
I can’t blame Microsoft for wanting to greenfield Outlook development to a new standard base that’s shared between webmail and the application, but holy crap the amount of technical debt Outlook accumulated is going to take ages to escape from.
Personally, I don’t mind Outlook (new). It sends and receives emails, it shows my Teams meetings on the calendar, and it lets me easily schedule calendar events and Teams meetings, which is all I really need. Most importantly it bypasses a ton of annoying quirks of Outlook (classic)'s license verification and M365 authentication so I generally encourage my users to use it if they don’t otherwise have a strong preference, because it saves me tickets (especially the dreaded “outlook lost teams integration” complaints where Outlook (classic) misplaced its own extension for communicating with Teams (new) and usually involves uninstalling all versions of Teams then installing Teams (Classic) and upgrading it in-place 3x to resolve)
I prefer the new color.
And hot take: I like the icons of O365 for Wort Word, Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint. And I prefer those over 2007. But I can compromise with the icons from 2013.
Agreed, the current batch of Office icons - and the updated versions rolling out soon - are excellent. I’m a big fan. But I still wish Outlook was gold.
Access let you build visual apps, usually data-entry workflows, around its internal SQL database. You could build small apps with it using Visual Basic and a visual UI editor. Plus, all your work ships as a single file, provided the user also has Access installed. In many ways, it was like Apple’s Hypercard, but also way easier to write than webpages with the same capability. Oh, and you don’t need a server anywhere to make it work; it’s 100% local. It was also the next logical step to take after the most complex things you can do in Excel.
That said, it was crippled from the start - still very useful, but not for heavyweight stuff. It’s limited to a fixed number of UI, pages, database rows, etc, so it wouldn’t compete with more expensive MS solutions (this thing came with Office). I don’t think it got a lot of love because of that, but I personally used it to solve some real problems in the workplace, without need of any (official) developer resources.
In the present day, it would actually compete with a lot of simple business cases that are served in the cloud at some cost.
Honestly Microsoft could’ve had a killer product with Access if they made an easier pipeline from Excel -> Access -> Win32 application/webpage with an SQL backend. Like there is some of that pipeline present, but if Microsoft actually followed that vision, created easy wizards for each step that your average office drone can complete and marketed the shit out of it, they could completely own business processes instead of a cottage industry of spreadsheets turned SAAS apps for every niche usecase that could’ve been handled by a common database frontend.
On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets
Exactly. Access was a dirt-cheap rapid application design (RAD) tool in disguise, and very easily could have been shaped into a smooth on-ramp to ASP, ASPX, IIS, and SqlServer solutions. In short: a hypothetical “Access.NET” would have been really something.
On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets
You just described most of my career, and how a lot of contracting shops get their start. Managers need reports, and someone has to program them. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve replaced Excel with custom software; a faster way to do this is usually welcome. That said, the cloud “Data” space is doing a lot right now to reduce this kind of task to Jupyter notebooks and some other proprietary solutions.
Getting ptsd flashbacks from having to work with access.
Database corruption was so common I’ve had scripts in place to run automatic recoveries.
Terrible security, performance, and SQL feature support.
I’m so glad that thing is buried deep where it belongs
Finished Xenoblade Chronicles, I’m playing the extra story now. I enjoyed it this time around. It’s nowhere close to a masterpiece, but the setting is pretty unique and the gameplay is rather satisfying. Especially since every character plays differently from the others.
Playing a bit of Mario Kart World. The new systems (rails, wall riding) seem fun, but I’m not a fan of the constant straight roads. Grand Prix is not great and Knockout Tour is fun but is starting to get stale. The most fun I’m having is in Time Trial, as it seems like the best way to play with the new mechanics.
Playing a bit of Mario Kart World. The new systems (rails, wall riding) seem fun, but I’m not a fan of the constant straight roads. Grand Prix is not great and Knockout Tour is fun but is starting to get stale. The most fun I’m having is in Time Trial, as it seems like the best way to play with the new mechanics.
God i’m so jealous of all y’all Switch 2 owners. The trick system seems so cool and satisfying. One of my favorite childhood game experiences was Sonic Adventure 2, and I played a few of the earlier stages over and over again as a kid because I needed to farm rings (money) for the Chao Garden. I got really good at blasting through City Escape and similar levels, knowing the various optional routes and shortcuts, memorizing when exactly I had to hit a button to snap to a grind rail or light dash along a ring lane. Speedrunning those stages gave me a very satisfying feeling.
After watching a lot of gameplay of MKW, I really feel like MKW is the first modern game I’ve seen that recreates that experience, in a way that modern Sonic games could never. Especially the Time Trials mode in this one seems like it would recreate my modern experience of trying to do tricks through a stage to make Sonic and Shadow go even faster. Sonic Team should be taking notes from MKW in my opinion, this kind of “arcade racing + tony hawk tricks” gameplay is exactly what I want out of a Sonic game.
That’s true! I hadn’t though about it, but it does feel a lot like when I tried optimising City Escape in Generations. Probably even faster paced since, you rarely need to slow down when driving.
exactly! I’ve felt for a while now that Sonic games should use driving game controls instead of platformer controls, and MKW shows a way they could do that and still have a platforming game in there!
If I were given carte blanche to redesign 3D Sonic gameplay, making it control like a faster-moving Tony Hawk game seems like the way to go. Sort of the middle ground between conventional platforming and vehicle control.
I'd argue their timing was very fortunate since GTA 6 got pushed to next year. That game would've dominated the popularity votes on all the GOTY shows.
It’s definitely not decided yet. A breakout hit could still come out of nowhere, which seems to be happening more and more often lately, including Clair Obscur. There’s also still the likes of Donkey Kong Bananza, Mina the Hollower, and Hollow Knight: Silksong coming later this year, and those are just the ones on my radar that seem likely to review that well.
I have a very hard time seeing any of those competing with either Clair Obscur or Death Stranding 2, apart from maybe Silksong (if it actually ever does come out). But even then I’m not sold.
Mina the Hollower will probably duke it out with Blue Prince for the indie game of the year.
The OpenCritic score is a very reliable predictor for winning the Game Awards, which is itself mostly an aggregate of review outlets. Donkey Kong is the next game from (probably) the Mario Odyssey team, and Odyssey has a 97 on OpenCritic, with Bananza looking to have a lot of the same design ethos. If I were a betting man, I’d be putting my money on Bananza winning GOTY. The previous Hollow Knight and Shovel Knight both hover around 90, so it’s possible but not the most likely thing in the world that Silksong or Mina exceed 90 by a wide margin, but they’ve got a better shot than most.
FromSoft reported sales of Elden Ring increased by over 200% following its GOTY win, if I remember right. It definitely has an impact. I can’t imagine it’s irrelevant in terms of attracting or keeping talent either, and it probably would help maintaining creative integrity and sticking to your vision in talks with investors.
It’s interesting to note that the Game Awards started having a tangible effect on sales in the past handful of years. Games that used to come out in November now come out in October at the latest, because that’s the deadline for Game Awards nominations.
I tried to get one of his head but i couldn’t get the animation to time right outside of the dialog, and i’m kind of tough on myself about not using dialogs or preset camera angles for my screenshots
That’s fair, I have respect for rules like that and also know that camping out for a rare quick animation would kinda ruin the effect when you want to be playing.
I also kept the 4:3 ratio, and the original resolution and framerate, too. The game was designed around this and it felt more right to me. But SoH‘s free camera is awesome of course, really freshened up the game.
Nintendo is just really good at making water i guess.
The first game that really wowed me with its water was Wave Race 64, so this tracks. I first noticed that home consoles were getting better graphics than arcades when I saw WaveRunner’s water compared to Wave Race. It was really a “writing on the wall” moment for seeing the end of the arcade.
Sea of Thieves is a yes, basically any game i play with water goes on it. Subnautica i have played but it was on a cheap laptop with a duo core CPU and 6 GB of RAM so… i didn’t but it on there out of courtesy to give it a fair shot. I want to pick it up again on Steam though to give it a try. I’m not to invested in the lore though so i’m probably going to hold off until the sequel too buy it so i can play with friends
Water Temple is one of my favorites, though i’m used to the 3DS version with the QoL changes so that probably helps. I do get why it can be annoying though
I first played the game on 3DS a long time ago, and god, i spent like 20 minutes going through the dialog trying to figure out why i couldn’t escape. Somethings are just part of the experience i guess
bin.pol.social
Gorące