They’ve been a shit company for over a decade at least.
I got a laptop for my wife back when we were in college. It developed a problem with the monitor where the screen would look all corrupt after using it for a little bit. My wife, while reciting the prayer of percussive maintenance, would whack it and the problem would go away for a while. So I figured the connection had come loose. No biggie, just reseat it or replace it. The warranty had expired, so I cracked it open to see what was wrong. I reseated the cables in it and it worked… for a bit. Then the problem came back. Eventually we got fed up and bought another one, same model, figuring it was a fluke… It developed the same issue. Come to find out, Asus cheaped out in the ribbon cable for the monitor and installed ones that were too short for the laptop. Looking online, there were a bunch of people complaining about the same thing.
Around the same time as I had gotten her the new laptop, I’d also bought an Asus ZenPad for her to read on. We’ll, that suddenly developed a screen issue too! Almost exactly the same as the laptops! My wife, ever eager to apply kinetic reinforcement, found that twisting the tablet a little bit also fixed the issue. I went online and, sure enough, Asus used cheap cables again! They would last just long enough for the warranty to expire before they’d detach.
I swore to myself I’ll never buy another Asus product as long as I live. If I ever have kids, I’ll disown them if they do too… Fuck these scammers.
I highly doubt they used those cables maliciously knowing they’d go out right when the warranty expired. It was probably a cost thing, and they later realized (too late to fix it) during production sometime that the cables were a warranty issue.
Engineers don’t do thing maliciously with their designs. They pick things based on cost, and probably even raised the cable length as a risk/concern during the design and testing phase, and were overruled by the bean counters.
Even in your defense, you point out that someone at the company made the explict choice to sell devices with defective cabling. At no point did he blame the engineers who designed it for that choice.
That’s a shit company that doesnt deserve anyone’s support, regardless if it was “engineers” or “bean counters” that opted to continue to sell what they knew was a defective product.
The fact that it happened over and over with multiple devices means it’s a culture issue with the company, not a one off mistake.
I’m fine not having this conversation anymore. I just gave a perspective from an engineer. No need to continue shitting on me. I’m not even defending the practice.
I haven’t shit on you at all. Re- read my comments and point out one negative thing I’e said about you or engineers.
Ive only talked about buisness ethics, and the pervasive negatives that come from misleading customers. If you feel that’s a dig on you, some self reflection might be warranted.
My own experience with Asus warranty was of utter incompetence.
It was a long time ago, around 10 years or so, and I sent a newly acquired laptop for repairs because of constants BSOD. Waited a month before getting it back… Without sound. Turn out they forgot to reconnect the sound card. I sent it back for repair, waited another month (because even if they are at fault, they won’t even fast track that repair), only to get it back with a nonfunctional touchpad. I don’t use it, so I didn’t send it back a third time, because who know what would have come back damaged that time.
So their repair woes aren’t recent. When their stuff works, it works well, but pray that you won’t need to RMA it.
I had a nightmare situation a few years back with a ZenFone 6.
It bricked itself within a week, and after I sent it in I got months of radio silence, until I started calling them about it. They had no clue what the status of my repair was, there were a ton of orders for part after part, and it just kept going.
Eventually I just started pressuring anyone I could with “I need a new phone, this old one is falling apart, I can’t just keep using it for months on end as you figure your shit out” and they eventually relented, instead just giving me an entire new unit.
Last year I bought an Asus monitor with clearly advertised “on-site-warranty” (which means a courier comes to your house and just drops off a replacement in exchange for picking up the old one), it was DOA.
I thought great, “on-site-swap” should have this sorted by tomorrow. I started the RMA and the first thing they want me to do is ship my monitor to Germany at my expense. I said “fuck no”, and instead returned it to the retailer as I was still within the return window, and then just walked into another retailer with more in stock, to pick up another, which then worked.
Then, months later, some dude calls me and asks when I’ll be home for my on-site warranty swap, straight up dropping my jaw to the floor. I know I cancelled my RMA.
Lo and behold, the RMA case-number wasn’t even the same, so for some reason Asus decided, on their own, to open another RMA, WITHOUT TALKING TO ME for a monitor I TOLD THEM I WOULD BE RETURNING. Maybe someone tried to fix the fuck-up of not honouring the on-site warranty, but holy fuck if that took two months, thank god I took it into my own hands and got it fixed within 24 hours.
I’ve known about GN for years and with everyone talking about Tech Jesus I thought I’d have to look up a new tech reviewer. Never heard him referenced as TJ before but I can see it. Such pretty hair!
First off, it’s a sequel (by the original creators) to a game that clearly helped inspire Mass Effect as well as some of the greatest game designers ever. Second, it’s being made without any of the modern live service, microtransaction, evil tricksy EULA manipulations, and other bullshit plagues of recent gaming. THIRD, the art and music are lovingly hand-crafted and build off of one of the most charming, memorable, and musically brilliant games of all time. AND FOURTH, i want an Xbox port. We’re so close! Only $23k left!!!
The people that matter have gotten paid anyway, unless of course the publisher steal from them too, which happens from time to time, see Bethesda and Mick Gordon.
Thankfully the talent still exists, so they might move on to other places, do their own thing, or leave game dev altogether.
Gamedev is an extremely toxic career, and it has been for a very long time. I’m glad people are finally starting to at least somewhat care, if only for the studios themselves.
Free Stars is being made by the original creators of the series, Paul Reiche and Fred Ford. They had nothing to do with SC3 or Origins.
The reason why it’s not using the Star Control name is because the IP ownership around the whole thing is messy. The short version is that Paul and Fred owned the rights to the universe, but Atari owned the rights to the Star Control name.
When Atari went bankrupt, Stardock bought the name. They thought they’d bough the universe. This resulted in Stardock spending the next couple of years trying trying to use the courts to bully Paul and Fred into turning over the rights to them and generally being dickheads.
This finally ended in a settlement and work on Free Stars has been happening quietly for the last couple of years.
I mean if Star Control 2 wasn’t vastly superior in every way or you could just erase it from history, the game would have had some charm to it. But comparatively, it was a pretty tragic letdown.
The one good part that I still remember though was the quest where you had to retrieve a Daktaklakpak Data Pak. That tickled me since I’m a sucker for fun wordplay.
Star control 3 was garbage that was star control in name only.
Star control: Origins was made by assholes at Paradox Entertainment that tired to steal the IP from the original creators. The game was basically a pretty soulless carbon copy of star control 2 without the witty dialogue or creative story telling of the original.
Neither of these “prequel/sequels” were made by the original creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III.
That’s why this Kickstarter is fire AF. The OG creators have full control here and are making it with the original vision that made sc2 great!
They even released the original Star control 2 for free on steam in preparation:
Man, Star Control 2 was my favorite game to introduce friends to during the BBS days. Two player melee over a shared keyboard! The music in SC2 was top notch MOD/XM music back when trackers were starting to form a genre. Beeps on computers were the norm but you could hear a drum track over the internal PC speaker in this game. IMHO Tunic is the only game that came close to the wonder and awe of exploration and discovery. Absolutely a masterpiece.
Babu’s game room has my favorite YouTube review. I’ll let the bot pipe the link
Why not just expand on the winning formula for the original Arkham games? Do a forty year time skip and have the player as Terry instead of Bruce. Call it Beyond Arkham. It would probably print money if it’s as good as Knight or Origins, to say nothing of how much they would get if it was as good as Asylum or City.
The animation looked nice but it clearly has nothing at all to do with the game and doesn’t tell any story whatsoever. I really dislike these pointless teasers.
I get that a lot of people are saying “oh this has been taking forever”, but from what I’m seeing these guys are producing an AAA-sized title with an engine they don’t own, with an IP they don’t own, all on volunteer time.
youtu.be
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