dingus

dingus, 8 miesięcy temu

Souls-like, but not as difficult.

dingus, 8 miesięcy temu

Other devs, please follow suit.

This industry needs class consciousness in it yesterday.

Just because you’re paid well doesn’t mean you’re not being mistreated.

It’s valid to be thankful for what you have but to also know you deserve more.

dingus, 8 miesięcy temu

Amog Sus?

dingus, 8 miesięcy temu

I’m gonna take a wild stab in the dark…

“What the current wave of layoffs means for the games industry?”

Crunch, crunch, and more crunch.

dingus, 8 miesięcy temu

Speak for yourself, I’m gonna get smoked 7 out of 7 times.

dingus, 8 miesięcy temu

I’m just a little surprised there’s not more pushback considering that Valve just did with CS:GO and CS2 almost exactly what Blizzard did with Overwatch and Overwatch 2.

CS:GO literally disappeared from my Steam Library and was replaced with CS2. I get that CS:GO’s servers were already down, but it still feels wild to just wholesale remove it from people’s libraries this many years later. I felt similarly about Overwatch 2, but Blizzard caught a lot more heat for that than I’ve seen from the Valve fan community so far.

I know CS:GO has been Free to Play for a long time, but seriously, this is kind of a big fuck you to any archivists who wanted to keep a copy around for history’s sake.

dingus, 8 miesięcy temu

I agree with all your points. I guess, to me, it’s just a little silly that they’re under less scrutiny for doing the exact same thing. If Blizzard received scrutiny because it was a anti-consumer choice, it doesn’t stand to reason that people should ignore Valve doing the same.

I’ve been a big fan of Valve for twenty years or more, but I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to ignore when they do anti-consumer things.

dingus, 8 miesięcy temu (edited 8 miesięcy temu)

CS:GO was a paid game originally as well.

You had half a year to archive CSGO. Don’t act as it came as a surprise or something.

For someone who isn’t huge into CSGO, it actually did come as a surprise for it to disappear from my library today. Sorry not everyone spends their time making sure they know what’s going on with every single game in their library. I’m literally finding this out for the first time today.

In all the reports of CS2 being released, this is the first I’ve heard that the new game would fully replace the old. Once again, I knew about that with Overwatch and I don’t even play Overwatch because people were complaining about this before Overwatch 2 was even released. I was well aware it was getting replaced before release, simply because it was discussed and reported on a lot. There were numerous front page posts on reddit about it, months before release.

The same can’t be said for CS2. It wasn’t talked about a lot by anyone. I only was able to find one specific news article about how it was replacing the old game, after searching today.

dingus, 8 miesięcy temu (edited 8 miesięcy temu)

Reporting the announcement of the game and talking about how it will replace the base game are two different things. Lots of articles about the announcement, very few about how it would replace the base game.

So you live under a rock

I’m an adult with responsibilities and over 300 games in my Steam library. I’ve got way better shit to do than make sure every time there’s a new release that I’m going to lose games I paid for years ago. Jesus Christ man. Reported, you don’t gotta be a dick.

EDIT: Lmao, went and downvoted all my posts after I reported him for being a fucking jackass. Stay classy.

dingus, 8 miesięcy temu

You realize you can be rude and uncivil without directly name-calling, right? The rule is “Be civil” not “no name calling.”

So you live under a rock.

Mischaracterizing what I’m saying and claiming I’m blaming others, etc. Like dude, check yourself. Learn how to speak to others without being an aggressive asshole and maybe you won’t deal with people reporting you.

I was just pointing out that Valve did the same thing as Blizzard, and you jumped down my throat for it because I guess you must be some Valve fanboy. Gimme a break, man.

EDIT: I’m not so much of a pussy that I need to block everyone who has been rude to me.

dingus, 8 miesięcy temu

I kind of want Larian to start making a bunch of promotional videos mimicking Valve’s “Meet the…” series from Team Fortress 2, but for the origin characters.

I kind of never cared for the Overwatch hero videos, they were too serious. The TF2 videos were always absurd and hilarious. (Massively disappointed to this day that Adult Swim never picked up the TF2 show for a full series.)

While the game is very serious, there’s a lot of funny stuff in it (and I don’t just mean Karlach dancing at hilariously inappropriate times). I think Larian has the humorous abilities to pull this kind of thing off, and it will continue to highlight how important the characters and character development are to this game.

EDIT: Yes, this is also so we can get some modern, high-quality video of the absurd shit Minsc got up to before BG3. BG and BG2 callbacks, yeah!

dingus, 8 miesięcy temu

I feel like this was announced years ago.

ign.com/…/devil-may-cry-series-joins-castlevania-…

Turns out I was right. This was announced first in 2018.

I wonder what happened between then and now that would delay this so much?

sportskeeda.com/…/what-happened-netflix-animation…

Oh yeah, it was Netflix shitcanning their entire animation department. No wonder they’re going with Studio Mir, they fucking fired everybody competent internally.

As much as I liked Castlevania, I think Warren Ellis brought more to the series than people think. I’m not sure if I trust Adi Shankar to write a compelling narrative on his own. Especially with Netflix slashing budgets and somehow saving this one from cancellation.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

I mean, this meme is accurate, because that’s about how expressive the faces are in Starfield…

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

AKA “Fun with boxes, dead bodies, and breaking physics.”

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I’m going to just shit out my ultimate unpopular opinion right here, in mild defense of Endorkend, thanks.

If a plot point is enough to ruin a story, it was not a well written story to begin with.

Stories live and die through character development and growth. Weak stories often rely on things like twists and unexpected plot turns. Strong stories can often have these elements, but they don’t lean on them.

Strong stories I return to again and again, because the story is strong even though I already know the story. Knowing the story doesn’t ruin repeat watches/plays/readings of the media if the story is successful at being a good story. Well written stories with deep, interesting characters achieve that.

I’ve been playing Starfield and it has somehow worse writing and voice acting than a lot of previous Bethesda titles, which is saying a lot because it’s not like they’re not well known for weak writing at this point. It has a lot of strengths that have been kind of overlooked because it’s just generally kind of boring, but it does have them. Those strengths are not in the storytelling.

I don’t think this plot point spoils the game at all, instead it reveals how utterly weak the narrative they’ve crafted is.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

That’s legit a bummer, friend. I guess what I should have also said is: art is subjective. My take doesn’t make it true (it’s just like, my opinion, man), but I think that while it’s a bummer for you, if you really think it’s a good game, it won’t stop you from enjoying it for a long time. I hope you do.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

The updated system requirements for Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 are fucking insane.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

I think it would be interesting to compare these reviews to the same publications reviews of Cyberpunk 2077 in it’s pre-release review period.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Pretty sure that’s an April Fools thread.

EDIT: Looks like the original CP2077 review thread got nuked. There’s a follow-up from a few days after it released.

Original megathread: old.reddit.com/r/…/cyberpunk_2077_review_thread/

Post-release megathread: reddit.com/…/cyberpunk_2077_review_thread_2_postl…

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Yacht Rockerman, Shock Jockerman, and Trick Shotterman are pretty high up there, too.

Also, the one he never used because I made it up myself: Snot Flickerman.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

The system requirements have also been kicked through the roof for that update. Pffft, optimization, never heard of it!

Upgrading your system to play the update isn’t “free.”

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

I mean, I’m against pre-orders but why TotK specifically?

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

Valid critique. I felt like it really built on the first game in positive ways in gameplay and story. They basically hid the existence of the Depths until the games release. I spent very little time building stuff, and a lot of time fucking around in the Depths.

For a game existing in the same world as the previous title, I think it worked well for what it was. Also, far fewer people complained about Far Cry 4/Far Cry Primal having the exact same map, slightly tweaked, so the complaints about it seemed a little confusing for me.

However, I would agree that while I think it’s bigger than a DLC, it really shouldn’t have been $70 brand new, especially when they had no plans to make DLC for it.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

It would mean every Unity game was not-so-secretly shipped with code that phones home to the Unity company upon install.

Either they’ve been egregiously spying on gamers for years (and by extension, game developers using Unity have just been fine with that), or they’re lying through their teeth.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

So then this falls under “devs didn’t care” because it was useful information for them and they didn’t see how it could be used negatively.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

Owlboy is a story about failure. Each time you “succeed” it turns out other events that were happening nullified that success.

It’s not really the same thing, but the choice to foist failure on the player even when they “win” was an interesting story device.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

There’s a joke in here somewhere, I know it.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I agree, but at the same time there’s still a bunch of games without that. Nintendo, especially, continues to offer titles that don’t have sex emphasized. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom were both great games, with good story (if a little cutesy, but it’s aimed at being family friendly), not even really any allusion to sex.

Also, with games like Baldurs Gate 3, they’re really just following in the footsteps of the original games. BG/BG2 and Fallout didn’t necessarily have companions you could romance, but they did have at least one or two options to have sex/marry someone. They were less detailed, and less descriptive, but it is part of the evolution of traditional Western RPGs, which traditionally were aimed at adults and didn’t shy away from including sex.

As far as Starfield goes, it’s a similar story, Bethesda games have long had those options, it’s not super new, although it’s a lot more prevalent now.

Still, I think there’s far more games without sex than there are with sex. Still a little weird though, I’m not horny enough to really enjoy it, I guess?

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I thought GameStop was going all in on NFTs and bragging about how it was going to revolutionize the gaming space because you could be more “invested” in the things because you really “own” (hahahaha, fucking as if) your own copy.

Oh, wait, *checks notes

They totally are winding that down and going “whoopsie doodles!”

arstechnica.com/…/gamestop-citing-regulatory-unce…

Ryan Cohen making a quick spin because he’s a fucking idiot, and the only thing he has to sell is an “idea” of a company that respects its consumers. GameStop ain’t it Superstonkers. This guy literally went from “You’ll be buying all your games as NFTs at GameStop” to “Errm, yeah, we need physical drives, you know for the gamers, not so we can continue ripping people off with used games.” What a fucking joke. He didn’t care about physical media six months ago because he was all-in on NFTs.

GameStop gonna get Toys ‘R’ Us’d hard. If this is the best Cohen’s got right now, they’ve got nothing.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

He’s only saying this about disc drives because six months ago he was saying “You’ll be buying all your games as NFTs from GameStop!” (notice he didn’t give one fuck about physical media six months ago?) and then when that went tits up and they closed their cryptocoin and NFT wallets, they need another way to get people to keep buying stocks. They’ve got those Gamestonk idiots still in a frenzy and they haven’t yet woken up to being taken for a ride since the NFT dream turned bust.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Six months ago Cohen didn’t give a flying fuck about disc drives because he was selling the idea that you would soon buy all your games from GameStop on an NFT marketplace that they recently had to shut down because the SEC is cracking down on NFTs as Securities.

He gives a fuck now because his golden goose got shot in the head.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

arstechnica.com/…/gamestop-citing-regulatory-unce…

They were selling the idea to Superstonk investment idiots that the “future” of game sales was in NFTs where you would “really own your copy of the game.” Which… to anyone who knows how NFTs really work is such a sick fucking joke as to pawn that idea off on to consumers.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

NFTs and how they only hold enough data to point to a URL aren’t doing the model any favors. NFTs have been a joke since they were initially released. They don’t show ownership of an item, they show a re-direct to a URL where an item you might be able to claim is yours exists.

The people who bought into the idea of “smart contracts” in NFTs got taken for a fucking ride. There’s simply not enough BITS to be able to store such data within an NFT. The best they can do is a URL.

www.enchant.com/what-is-nft-ownership

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I can own digital files just fine without needing all that unnecessary bullshit. It’s the copyright cabal that says I don’t “own” them.

Funny, because I have the files stored on a physical drive. If that drive is destroyed, so are the items stored on it. Ergot, data is real and physical. You can already own it physically. NFTs are actually just one more way for wall street to justify the bullshit ways copyright doesn’t work.

Because nothing is stopping digital “ownership” from existing as it currently exists, except people who don’t like the idea that data can be copied infinitely at no cost.

This is why I never took off my pirate hat, because it’s just a bunch of tomfoolery to make you think things don’t already work this way. They do, computing always allowed data to be copied infinitely. It’s jerks who try to code locks to hide them behind who are the problem.

It’s also why I buy games at GOG, because they respect this. They sell games with no DRM and understand that this means piracy will happen, but do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do.

Copy that floppy, motherfucker.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

What if that digital file is the title to your car, deed to your home, your college degree, passport, driver’s license, etc?

If you destroy the hard drive they’re stored on, it’s no different than burning a piece of paper they’re written on. Data is always stored in a medium, whether it’s paper or a disk drive. So for digital files like that, you would choose a storage medium that is rated for long-term storage and put it in a fireproof safe. Done.

You’re basically asking “what if you lose the title to your car?” Well, there’s plenty of ways to get a replacement title, even though they’re not easy or free.

The bottom line is data is real and it’s always in a storage medium. The storage medium is what you should be worried about more.

Oh wait, that NFT you “own” is stored on someone else’s server? Oh wait, I guess you don’t own it then, because that data is on a hard drive owned by someone else in the “cloud” and if they destroy that drive, they also destroyed the item you ostensibly “own.”

Oh the server with my Title Deed for my home went down and now I have no proof I own my own home? Probably should have kept a copy of the file locally!

There is nothing interesting about NFTs because they’re a fundamental, nay, purposeful misunderstanding of what data is and how it works.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

A scan of my Title Deed or my Vehicle Title will already be unique digital files. They can be copied infinitely so I can never lose track of them. I can even take a hash of the original file and always keep that around to make sure I’m always dealing with an original copy.

What does storing it on someone else’s property (server) and just linking to it actually achieve for me, as a person? The NFT does not change the data of the original file in any way, it’s just a hash-check itself in many ways.

Would you be okay with storing your car in someone else’s garage that you couldn’t actually see or access, but were told was secure? That’s what you’re doing with an NFT. You’re putting the actual item you own on someone else’s private property, and then claiming that a piece of paper that shows ownership (NFT) is all you need to get it back. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.

An NFT is much more a “certificate of authenticity” than it is a title of ownership.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

“i LiKe ThE sToCk”

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Because there’s a lot of misinformation in this thread.

All media is physical media. All data is stored on a medium. Data is real and physical. Some data is stored on paper in ink writing, some data is stored as ones and zeroes on a disc drive, but the type of disc drive may vary. Hard drives, USB thumbsticks, SSDs, and so on, are all physical media.

If I destroy a BluRay, or destroy a hard drive, or burn a piece of paper, does the data still physically exist? No. In all cases, destroying the medium in which the data exists destroys the data. Whether it is paper, a disc you put in a drive, or a hard drive.

When something is stored “in the cloud” it’s still on a hard drive somewhere, just not on your hard drive somewhere. You have essentially chosen to store your property on someone else’s private property. Much like a physical storage unit. If the storage unit burns down, everything in it will cease to exist. If the data center where your cloud data is stored burns down without any backups, same issue, the data ceases to exist.

People in this thread specifically only dislike one type of physical media, and it’s a type that has one of the shorter shelf-lifes for long-term data storage.

Also, with hard drives, its often trivial to recover deleted data, which is why companies that deal with secure data often completely shred old hard drives to prevent data being exfiltrated from them after wiping.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I literally just asked the same question to the friend who sent me this, it seemed familiar but I couldn’t place it. He said he thinks its Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, which definitely looks like it could be the one.

EDIT: Just checked, it’s definitely Contagion.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I have the recent Chinese version of Three Body downloaded but I haven’t watched it yet. I heard it’s quite good.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

No I managed to find what I assume are English fansubs.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

Ah, then maybe hopefully they’re the official subs!

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

I’m thinking that’s gonna be a bit of projection on your part.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Glad to know you never grew out of your edgy gamer bro stage. Being able to pee on things is peak gaming, amirite? /s

I’m literally saying this as one of the few people who watched the Postal movie more than once simply because it had David Foley in it and I’m okay with bad movies.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

It’s more that there’s actually games that rise to the level of great art that are designed to be fucking stupid, like Katamari Damacy, which leans hard into absurdism, and is often quite funny, but more importantly the gameplay is original, brilliant, and fun. The art direction in KD is also off the charts quality, especially the music, all of which was written for the game.

Look, I loved Postal 2 back in the day (I always sort of rolled my eyes at Postal, but 2 seemed less serious and more tongue-in-cheek). I might even replay it someday, but it’s not great art. Especially now it’s ugly, it’s clunky, more importantly it continues to be a buggy mess. Not even a Gary Coleman cameo could save it. They were fun games for what they were and for the time they existed in, and it’s okay to remember them for that, but it’s a little absurd to just act like the world hasn’t moved on and that they were great art to begin with. Art direction was bad, level design was bad, there was a lot of bad stuff about the game, beyond even getting into the edgelord shit.

Bad art is okay. I love B-movies, but we don’t have to pretend they’re anything other than what they are: B-movies.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu

Yeah, it’s fine to agree to disagree, but just one caveat

OK there was a bit of dodgy stuff

Man this game came out two years after 9/11 and went whole hog on the “all muslims are terrorists” stereotype. It punched down quite a bit.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

but that was an intentionally outrageous caricature of the narrative being served by the US government

I actually agree with you here, but I had a serious experience years later that changed my mind on the whole thing. It’s perfectly fine for folks like us who have any kind of media literacy to understand that it’s maybe not meant to be making fun of Muslims, but rather America, but…

GTA 5 has this torture scene, right? It hit me like a brick wall one day when I met people who read that scene way, way, way differently than I did. I had read it as an indictment of torture. The problem is, there’s way too many people who think that scene is cool as fuck and want to do that kind of shit in real life. It’s like the people who look up to Scarface from the movie Scarface. Like these characters aren’t good people or people to look up to, but because America is full of violent uneducated fucking yokels you had a bunch of absolute fucking idiots taking the exact opposite message from it. ( I mean, just look at Trump voters…)

You can’t control how others interpret your art, and if you’re not clear enough, you might end up in a similar position as the people behind Postal 2 and GTA 5, where you have a lot of folks totally misinterpreting what you’re trying to say, and then deciding it means vile, horrible things are not just okay, but cool.

It’s actually something I worry about a lot in life, because I’ve had so many times where I thought I was teaching a person one thing, but it turned out I was accidentally teaching them something horrible. In a country with basically no media literacy and an average 7th grade reading level, we can’t actually take it for granted that absolute fucking morons might misunderstand us.

The problem in particular with Postal 2’s caricature of the views of Muslims in America is that functionally, most Americans who played the game never understood that intent or cared. So when it came down to it, they further entrenched those ideas in the American consciousness, instead of them being read by most people as a critique. Was that their intent? No. Does it matter that the opposite happened? Yes.

dingus, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I’m not sure they knew the consequences, I think at the time, like me, they actually had more faith that the majority of Americans would read it as what it was. As a young person, I definitely thought there were more thoughtful people.

It’s easier to critique now, 20 years on, because we’re not experiencing the same things the video game industry was at the time. From the insufferable Jack Thompson to Hillary Clinton wanting to ban GTA over the leaked Hot Coffee code that wasn’t in the main game, but locked away in files inaccessible to most, the industry was under attack and being blamed for all Americas ills. Several games, but mostly GTA and Postal, were holding up a mirror to American society and saying things similar to what I said in my last comment: “America has a bunch of ignorant violent gun-toting people living in it, and they were there before video games were, it’s a violent consumer and celebrity obsessed society, so America maybe you need to sort your problems first before blaming us.” At the time, a fair stance to take, but 20 years on, a decision that lead to a lot of negativity and more mixed feelings on the legacy of the game due to it.

It was easy to think back then that acceptance of gaming in the mainstream wasn’t a given, but games now out-profit movies, and some of the biggest “blockbusters” are games. We were honestly probably worried over nothing.