As far as I can tell, unfair terms in their EULA which are illegal in some places, and silently changing the terms of the EULA after the fact without informing anyone. Removal of content/mods under the new terms that they deemed they “didnt like” it because it had guns while putting guns in their own shop. Probably a number of other things.
I believe there’s also the fact that they flat out ban the selling of mods, but “add-ons” that do the exact same thing can be sold through their store.
This game is just ridiculous. Overhyped advertising, terrible optimalization, 10 years old graphics, so many loadscreens, plain story, no real space exploration, perk wall to do anything, horrible UI and they call it next gen open world space exploration RPG. I stopped playing after 10 hours so I can make a good assumption but it got only worse and worse. I don’t have time to waste it on this. Even if it starts being more enjoyable later it doesn’t excuse all the issues.
I feel you. The first 10-15 hours did feel like kind of a slog. I will say, I hit a point where I’m legitimately enjoying the game and things seem to have coalesced in a way they just don’t in earlier game. I’m 20 hours in though. That’s a slow starter if there ever was one.
You’re a patient man. If you enjoy it, that’s good. But that game is not for me. Last game I enjoyed from Bethesda was Oblivion so I’m not much surprised. I’m quite picky…
Kinda wild they’ve now done this for nearly every game in their portfolio though. We have multiple flavors of World of Warcraft Classic, Hearthstone had a Classic mode for about a year, D2R is basically Diablo Classic, now there’s gonna be Overwatch Classic. I guess we just need a Heroes of the Storm Classic and a remake of Brood War to complete the set.
One gripe I have with this video is that he said the situation at the unity office - namely the supposed death threat by an employee against their employer - was “understandable”. It absolutely isn’t understandable. No matter how shitty your tech CEO is, unless they happily throw puppies into a wood chipper in the office, death threats are definitely not understandable.
My favourite OpenTTD gameplay video is the Valefisk video where he invites his Patreon supporters to play a game with him and his friends and then ruins their day by basically starting the server early so that his corp already has more money than the other players.
If you find yourself enjoying openTTD, I’d highly recommend trying the JGR patch pack. Link It adds loads of improvements that the steam version doesn’t have. I started on the steam version, loved it, and love the JGR version even more.
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.
As someone who doesn’t follow vtubers, I can confirm Holocure is excellent, and obviously made with love. Every character has a unique playstyle, and the aesthetc is a nice departure from the gloom common to the genre.
I played a bit of it and what I got was completely different to what I saw kronii playing. She had what looked like a fishing and farming Sim while I had reverse bullet hell. Runs great on the steam deck though.
Unfortunately multiple sources seem to agree Dong Nguyen has no involvement, which is consistent with the way he originally shut down Flappy Bird due to people spending too much time on it :(
“The Flappy Bird Foundation said it has acquired the official Flappy Bird trademark from Gametech Holdings LLC, a U.S. company that appears to have wrestled the trademark from Nguyen, as well as the rights for the original game and character from Piou Piou vs. Cactus, the mobile game that supposedly originally inspired the Flappy Bird character.”
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!
Honestly, I hate the CRT aesthetic. I grew up with CRTs. Leaving them behind for LCDs was one of the greatest transitions of growing up. By all means, enjoy them if you do, but I don’t.
It’s not just the look of it, but the art and games were designed with the limitations of CRT in mind. Not all games off course. An example is the transparency effect on Genesis / Mega Drive:
There are two variants, one with motion-blur and one without. Besides that, often shaders have additional settings. One can change settings and save it as a new Shader Preset and use that instead. I have described it here: thingsiplay.game.blog/2024/10/19/…/8/#learn-and-e…
Thanks. I shall avoid the motion blur variant as best as I can, because that’s one of several aspects of this device I do not remember fondly.
I borrowed a friend’s Game Boy for an afternoon when I was a kid and I was so disappointed by it (primarily the screen, but also poor ergonomics and the limited nature of its games) that I lost nearly all interest in gaming for a year.
Getting the settings right for video is critically important, too. Scaling needs to be done with the nearest neighbor pixel method, not more modern blend methods.
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.
Some guy played to level 255 and it rolled back to level 0, (that’s the rebirth). Then he played to level 91 after that. To answer an unasked but important question: he did it on a ROM and not a cartridge because it’s pretty damn likely a cartridge would have crashed long before this point. Even on this particular ROM there are a bunch of ways to crash it (there’s loads of them documented).
Did he use an original NES controller with the ROM or a modern controller? I know I have a hard time getting the 40 year old controllers to respond fast enough at higher levels, though I haven’t tried the bump control method.
To add on: After a certain level is reached there are a multitude of tile combinations you have to avoid or they cause a hard crash. I believe oldschool tetris used to be played until the very first hard crash and that’s where everyone thought the record would end. Prior to that was the development of rolling which allowed players to get past the original game over state that sped tiles up too fast to react to.
Now we have players so proficient they’ve memorised crash states, and are rolling over the game.
I wonder how long until Points + Prestige become an antiquated measuring system.
I was a crisp pixel diehard for like 20 years even despite growing up with CRT, because I remember in the 80s-00s trying hard to get the clearest picture (RF->SRGB->S-video->Composite) and it felt like, “what’s clearer than exact pixels?”
And then I tried a good CRT filter that emulates not just scanlines and noise, but subpixel effects, and it really changed my mind. The graphics really were designed to be displayed with those analog “imperfections,” and if you lived in that era, you kind of took for granted the things that worked well with the natural CRT blur while pursuing image clarity. Bringing back the CRT effects was a revelation.
Like, even handheld emulation filters that mimic how those particular LCD screens functioned often give a better experience since game designers took that into account.
I don’t know if someone growing up with only emulated square LCD memories would feel the same, and I’ll always take pixely LCD over bad CRT emulation, but I’d suggest to give it a try with good filters.
Square pixels are a filter just as much as CRT filters are. In fact, they distort the image even more. Even leaving aside all the things that just don’t work right in square pixel land, turning every pixel into a square messes up the aspect ratio of a lot of old consoles. Everything ends up squished and stretched because it wasn’t designed for square pixels. You can call that distorted funhouse mirror version of old video game art “crisp” if you want, but in reality it’s just the cheapest and worst filter.
youtu.be
Ważne