HarkMahlberg

HarkMahlberg, 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

It's probably not the most stacked but I think 2017 was still a monster year for games.

Breath of the Wild
Mario Odyssey
Persona 5
Nier Automata
Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice
Divinity Original Sin II
Doki Doki Literature Club
Cuphead
Prey
Star Wars Battlefront II
Destiny 2
Nintendo Switch itself

These were, for one reason or another, some of the most monumentally influential games in the last 10 years, no matter if you're talking AAA, indie, platformer, shooter, open world, RPG, horror, you name it.

HarkMahlberg, 10 days ago

The price is off-putting because we can see the sticker in order to get sticker shock. But lootboxes and gambling have no upfront sticker, the true cost is obfuscated and extended over years. In that regard, Paradox is much more transparent than Valve.

That being said, my beef with them is their "subscription for DLC" model, at least the version I saw being rolled out for EU4. That and the free updates tend to be fairly unbalanced if you don't also buy the corresponding DLC for that update. That seems skeevy... but still not as skeevy as lootboxes.

HarkMahlberg, 10 days ago

Just gonna drop this here.

HarkMahlberg, 18 days ago

Critikal created a great tribute to his mentor on YouTube, should go watch it. RIP

HarkMahlberg, 25 days ago

I don't know, I think a rag calling itself Windows Central might have a bias towards Microsoft...

Even the tone of the article sounds like their arms are tired from carrying their water.

One thing after another, Microsoft is forced to respond time and time again to ongoing rumors that it's leaving the hardware space.

A new Xbox rumor started this weekend that's now blown out of proportion, as usual.

Can you bitch any harder?

HarkMahlberg, 1 month ago

Push 1v1 caused a lot of shouting matches between me and my brother. 10/10 would play again, that shit was genius.

HarkMahlberg, 1 month ago

I think Jak and Daxter now has a native PC port.

https://overclock3d.net/news/software/jak-and-daxter-and-jak-2-are-now-natively-playable-on-pc-with-opengoal/

HarkMahlberg, 1 month ago

Since you mentioned publishers that haven't been greedy, I'll throw a few more out there that I think are worthy of support. They don't need launchers, that don't need accounts, they don't have predatory subscriptions. They just make great games.

• Supergiant Games: Transistor, Hades, Hades II
• Larian Studios: Divinity Original Sin, DOS II, Baldur's Gate 3
• Playstack: Balatro

Otherwise, I'm totally with you. The account-walling of the Internet as a whole has pissed me off royally and I see no reason to give those bastards what they want.

HarkMahlberg, 1 month ago

I can relate. I played DOS when it had a camera locked to a 90 degree arc. XD

HarkMahlberg, 1 month ago

Give it time

HarkMahlberg, 1 month ago

God I hope so. My DS5 battery died within a year. It literally loses a full charge overnight, and even when it still worked it only reported battery percentage in 12% increments. My still-chargeable DS4 was still accurate to the 1%.

I still use the DS5 wired because screw e-waste, and ergonomically it's adequate. But the battery problem makes it the worst controller Sony's ever made, and I'm including SIXAXIS in that assessment.

HarkMahlberg, 1 month ago

Actually scratch that, the face buttons are mushy as hell and there's nowhere to rest your thumb. I miss jump inputs like I've never played a video game before. None of the every single generation of Dualshocks I've used had such sloppy buttons.

HarkMahlberg, 1 month ago

The article says that Valve is only going to make the game a Daily Deal for a single day. The polygon commenters have it right, why not make it a week?

Why not buy 138,000 copies, one for each user that wishlisted the game, and give those out gratis? At $15 per copy, that's only 2 million dollars. That's a pittance for a company the size of Valve.

HarkMahlberg, 1 month ago

Ah, I did miss that part of the article. My mistake.

HarkMahlberg, 2 months ago

BG3 is the only game I can think of that's worth an $80 price tag and the moniker of "AAAA." There is a frankly ludicrous amount of stuff in this game. The amount of effort it just have taken, let alone to ship 8 fully featured patches, borders on lunacy.

HarkMahlberg, 2 months ago

Beyond the copyright issues and energy issues, AI does some serious damage to your ability to do actual hard research. And I'm not just talking about "AI brain."

Let's say you're looking to solve a programming problem. If you use a search engine and look up the question or a string of keywords, what do you usually do? You look through each link that comes up and judge books by their covers (to an extent). "Do these look like reputable sites? Have I heard of any of them before?" You scroll click a bunch of them and read through them. Now you evaluate their contents. "Have I already tried this info? Oh this answer is from 15 years ago, it might be outdated." Then you pare down your links to a smaller number and try the solution each one provides, one at a time.

Now let's say you use an AI to do the same thing. You pray to the Oracle, and the Oracle responds with a single answer. It's a total soup of its training data. You can't tell where specifically it got any of this info. You just have to trust it on faith. You try it, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. If it doesn't, you have to write a new prayer try again.

Even running a local model means you can't discern the source material from the output. This isn't Garbage In Garbage Out, but Stew In Soup Out. You can feed an AI a corpus of perfectly useful information, but it will churn everthing into a single liquidy mass at the end. You can't be critical about the output, because there's nothing to critique but a homogenous answer. And because the process is destructive, you can't un-soup the output. You've robbed yourself of the ability to learn from the input, and put all your faith into the Oracle.

HarkMahlberg, 2 months ago

Wild to see you call for a "sane take" when you strawman the actual water problem into "draining the oceans."

Local residents with nearby data centers aren't being told to take fewer showers with salt water from the ocean.

HarkMahlberg, 2 months ago

You misunderstood, I wasn't saying you can't Ctrl Z after using the output, but that the process of training an AI on a corpus yields a black box. This process can't be reverse engineered to see how it came up with it's answers.

It can't tell you how much of one source it used over another. It can't tell you what it's priorities are in evaluating data... not without the risk of hallucinating on you when you ask it.

HarkMahlberg, 2 months ago

Almost had me, not gonna lie!

HarkMahlberg, 2 months ago

Warning, this article is graphic but it goes over nearly everything that is fucked up about Roblox.

https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

Unless MC and Visa are run by people who already agree with Collective Shout and are just using them as an excuse to enforce this policy.

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

If they do, that includes them. Decision makers at all levels, nobody gets to say "hey I didn't make Mastercard act this way." Because the status quo would have been to carry on processing video game payments, even in the face of a minority faction like Collective Shout.

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

Eat shit Yves.

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

everything up until The Prison is REALLY rough.

I'm very curious why you think the Aldhani raid was rough. Also, season 2 is already done, and I think it in some ways surpasses season 1. Have you seen it?

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

Did Guillemot not hear about Andor? The costs of a Disney Plus subscription vs a $70 game aside, that show respected the viewer's time and intelligence in all the ways Outlaws didn't. But I'm not surprised the heads of Ubisoft lack basic retrospection. Regurgitating past successes is all they know how to do, and how could they be wrong? Must be the rest of the world. :/

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

I'm a big fan of Special K as it effectively fixed Nier Automata on PC for me. Kaldeian has done excellent, thankless work on making PC games work better and for more people.

And though Valve shouldn't always be given the benefit of the doubt, I don't really agree with his arguments.

Games you purchased on a Windows 98 machine later had their system requirements bumped up to Windows XP, then to Windows 7, then to Windows 10...

Is there any connection between the hardware your initial purchase was made on, and the hardware you would run that game on right now? You can buy games from your phone, or your Steam deck, or at the public library, or on your father's Gateway. Maybe he means the game's original system requirements, as listed "on the back of the box" so to speak. But if I want to play SWBF2 from 2005, must I find an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and an ATI Radeon HD 5570? No, I just need parts with equivalent/better performance that I can find today. Steam updating those system requirements for newer hardware makes those games MORE accessible, not less. It considers new gamers discovering older games and gives them a path to playing it.

The inexorable passage of time, and the eventual security flaws that can no longer be patched, means that every single one of those devices will be retired. But that's why emulation and tools like Special K are important to game preservation. It's why Stop Killing Games is not retroactive and does not ask for infinite software support.

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

The store you bought the game from is squarely responsible for your game not running.

I... Huh? If I wanted to play Dark Forces, a game developed for DOS, it doesn't just run natively on my Windows 10 PC... I need DOS Box. Heck, that's exactly what you get when you buy Dark Forces on Steam. Is Steam supposed to sell a game as-is, when it can't run on modern processors and operating systems? The store is responsible for the move from i386 to x86-64?

Coming from the pre-Steam era of PC gaming, ... [where you] go online to a BBS or FTP site to get patches (irrespective of whether the store you used is even still in business), this is all infuriating!

That era of gaming was the domain of SecuROM and it's ilk, an era where I had to buy a game disc THREE TIMES because my disc drive kept scratching the disc! This waxing nostalgic for a bygone era is not convincing, I know the dark magic, I was there when it was cast.

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

they rather recommend subscription services that are multiple orxers of magnitude worse.

Yeah that was a pisstake, a totally unforced error in judgment. Many commented on his GitHub repo to say as much. I sympathize with getting jaded about Valve and Steam, I understand the frustration with how exploitative gaming has become, but nuking his own 20-year portfolio, a thing he should be proud of, because Valve made him so mad he wanted to stick it to them?

That's a highly self-destructive and ultimately futile decision. What a waste.

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Lol, I'm a software developer that started by writing legacy windows software, I know exactly how much (little) has changed.

It is this perspective that exposes your bias and colors your perception.

We live in a post-Heartbleed world. We live in a post-UAC world. We constantly find new bugs and vulnerabilities, and they cannot always be patched without massive changes to the architecture. We cannot forever maintain old systems that cultivated bad habits in it's users.

Not all change is good, but all change is inevitable.

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

Can I hold you to the decisions you made 20 years ago? I bought that program you built decades ago, that means I'm entitled to your continued support. And don't you even think about getting paid, your support should be free. You shouldn't have built and sold the software if you can't support it...

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

I mean, there is still an industry of Cobol engineers maintaining mainframe code for banks from the 80s.

my gramps, that's not the beacon of good business practice you think it is 🤣

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

All software breaks.

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

Denial.

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

It would not be onerous for them to continue supporting a couple of old versions of Windows

HarkMahlberg, 3 months ago

No. The question at hand is whether you expect any company, or any person, to indefinitely fix and maintain legacy systems. And yes, your argument is indefinite support because you want the purchasing machine to be granted use of the software in perpetuity, you want it to never lose access to the software. You provided no deadline by which anyone is allowed to stop fixing things that broke. And yes, things break naturally as a function of time.

HarkMahlberg, 4 months ago

GOG's move into mod support seems pretty prescient now.

HarkMahlberg, 4 months ago

Generation Zero. Primo aesthetic, sometimes well balanced, good with friends but not so much solo.

HarkMahlberg, 4 months ago

Yeah once you explore the whole map, it becomes a typical looter shooter where you're just grinding for 6 crown weapons. I will say though, having only played for a couple years, the dev team did a remarkable job adding new content over time, and not all of it locked behind DLC. Picking this game up on sale for $5 felt like I won the lottery. It might be "just ok" but I did have dozens of hours of fun in the game with my brother and friends.

HarkMahlberg, 4 months ago

I want GOG to getback to what it was before CDPR.

CD Projekt saw potential to look back at their distribution days to offer DRM-free versions of classic games through digital distribution, ... They founded a new subsidiary, Good Old Games, to serve this purpose in early 2008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com

HarkMahlberg, 4 months ago

My brain is cooked... I didn't understand you meant "they" to be part of the meme. XD

HarkMahlberg, 5 months ago

I thought it would be Swen making the comment, happily surprised to see it's someone else at Larian.

HarkMahlberg, 6 months ago

I mean I enjoy CS2 as well but I can't deny it had pretty major performance problems. It's gotten better over time but launch day was a disaster.

HarkMahlberg, 6 months ago

Good for you.

HarkMahlberg, 6 months ago

I'm extremely surprised that so many comments like FC5. What makes it the favorite over FC3? I know everyone loves to compare the villains of the franchise, and I think Vaas is far more compelling than the FC5 villain.