Shorter answer: games give us what real life refuses to give us anymore.
Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose.
They give us autonomy to complete things how we see fit in the frameworks given. They give us an opportunity to master a set of skills. Finally, the story gives us purpose and drive to continue the “work.”
The game gained controversy when it was discovered that the homosexual designer Jacques Servin inserted an Easter egg that generated shirtless men in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other and appear in great numbers on certain dates, such as Friday the 13th. The egg was caught shortly after release and removed from future copies of the game. He cited his actions as a response to the intolerable working conditions he allegedly suffered at Maxis, particularly working 60-hour weeks and being denied time off. He also reported that he added the “studs”, as he called them, after a heterosexual programmer programmed “bimbo” female characters into the game, and that he wanted to highlight the “implicit heterosexuality” of many games. Although he had initially planned for the characters to appear only occasionally, the random number generator he had created malfunctioned, leading them to appear frequently. Servin was fired as a result, with Maxis reporting that his dismissal was due only to his addition of unauthorized content. This caused a member of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a gay AIDS organization, to call for a boycott of all of Maxis’ products, a measure which Servin rejected. Some months later, a group named RTMark announced its existence and claimed responsibility for the Easter egg being inserted into the game, along with 16 other acts of “creative subversion.” Servin stated that he had received a money order of $5,000 from RTMark for the prank. It was revealed later on that Servin was a cofounder of RTMark.
Servin would go on to be one of the founders of The Yes Men.
Unpopular Opinion: The last few hardware generations have had diminishing returns while increasing the cost of being a PC gamer drematically. While the DOOM games are generally well-optimized, I just upgraded my whole ass system after 8 years just two years ago and I’m hitting minimum specs to play the new DOOM game at all. Same with Indiana Jones, same with STALKER 2, same with Alan Wake 2.
Of course, we also went from 8gb of video RAM being more than enough to needing fucking like 16-24gb as a standard somehow.
Seriously, the rig I bought to play fucking Bioshock Infinite kept up for about 8 years. I know I didn’t go all-out in building my machine but I didn’t 10 years ago either when I put my old box together. Honestly current machine feels way more high-end than the one 10 years ago did.
Anyway, kind of feels like a rip-off by the industry to me, and this is the same industry that is pushing for GTA 6 to cost $80-100 because they’re not making enough money somehow.
Basically, even if you have a 4090, the stutters and poor fps still exist due to the way the game is designed.
In a way, it’s like being back in the NES days all over again. Sometimes the game itself would just push the hardware too much and it would slow down. This shouldn’t be happening at all in this environment, it’s a joke. It goes well beyond just positive reviews for this kind of stuff.
Someone has never read a Rolling Stones best of list before.
They were upsetting people over how they ranked music for decades before ChatGPT was available.
Here’s a thread where people are bitching about them in the same year ChatGPT was released. They’re talking about prior lists, so they’re not talking about AI generated ones. This has been an issue with Rolling Stone for literally decades. Everyone hates their best-of lists.
I’m gonna get tired real quick of this “everything is AI and you shouldn’t engage with it” take. If you can’t handle it, get off the fucking internet and go touch grass.
EDIT: Further, each section of the article, about 2-3 paragraphs per game has a human author listed.
Let’s just keep pretending that nobody gets paid for this kind of thing and make sure that nobody gets paid by lying and saying it’s all AI anyway, leading it to all eventually become AI anyway because everyone stopped fucking reading.
Oh yeah, there’s no doubt about that. It was over two years ago that economists were already crowing about how soon people would be running out of their “pandemic savings” and would have to buckle under pressure again. They never hide this stuff, if you pay attention to the right people, they’re right out there being super honest about what they’re doing and what they want.
They want to starve the citizens out, which is crazy when you consider the old statement “No society is more than three meals away from revolution.” They’d rather risk pushing us to revolution by turning the screws rather than give up any amount of power, control, or wealth.
Dude off the top of my head Balatro (won many Game of the Year awards), Vampire Survivors, Terraria, and Minecraft all have Android ports.
I wonder if Valve plans to release an Arm version of SteamOS
The problem here is you’d be relying on a translation layer similar to Proton, but would probably have to be built off of something like Box64 for it to work. There just may not be enough horsepower on these small devices for that to do well.
I’ma be real: It fucking kills me that Steam on Android has been mostly used for 2FA and the idea of it being an alternate game store for Android somehow just… doesn’t exist?
Especially, out of all companies to take the fight about that kind of stuff to Apple and Google, Valve has the punching power, and they’ve literally already had Epic forge a path for them in this regard.
Why is my Android copy of Balatro unable to use the same cloud save system as Steam? Why am I stuck in Google’s fucking lame gaming ecosystem? It just makes me heave and sigh because I’d way rather be purchasing games for Android via Steam on the Steam Android app. It just feels like such a missed opportunity.
Because AAA games cost more to make than blockbuster movies, thus they need profit to match.
They take more art than a blockbuster movie, they take more script than a blockbuster movie, they take more motion capture than a blockbuster movie (except maybe the Avatar series which are basically all-CGI/motion capture), just everything is so much more than what you need in a film plus the need for compelling gameplay with a satisfying ludonarrative.
The massive amounts of capital needed to make one to begin with literally preclude studios that aim for this style of game from doing anything but submitting to large publishers who will finance them. Because the resources required to make that type of game are just that much.
It’s part of why Larian did Early Access for BG3 so they could make money during the development to help lengthen their runway and lower their burn rate. They still had to cut a huge amount and just release as-is. The Upper City got cut entirely as did the return to Avernus and with it Karlach’s actual happy ending, all of her current canon endings are technically fail-states for her storyline.