t3rmit3

t3rmit3, 6 dni temu

One thing I recommend for horror games is to play with a friend (i.e. in the same room). You can even figure out a way to do old-school controller-swapping (for a VN, maybe each chapter, or after a fixed time interval e.g. every 10 minutes). My partner is a huge horror buff, but also has a hard time with the longer periods of stress that horror games impart vs movies, so we play games this way.

t3rmit3, 6 dni temu

It’s a game where people are put in animal masks, chained up, and ridden around naked.

what the studio calls “grotesque, subversive imagery” of a ranch where nude human beings in horse masks are treated as animal livestock.

To pretend that said “grotesque, subversive imagery” is not in this case functioning on it’s proximity to sexual degradation, is disingenuous imo. I don’t blame Valve for not wanting to wade into an “art vs shock-sploitation” debate.

t3rmit3, 7 dni temu

Santa Ragione received an automated message from Valve stating Horses would not be approved for distribution on Steam and could not be resubmitted. The ‘why’ came as a shock to the studio. “While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us,” Steam’s automated response read, “we found that this title features themes, imagery, or descriptions that we won’t distribute. Regardless of a developer’s intentions with their product,

we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor.

While every product submitted is unique, if your product features this representation—even in a subtle way that could be defined as a ‘grey area’—it will be rejected by Steam.”

I don’t think is an unfair line to draw by any measure, and while I sympathize with the studio I’m also not going to begrudge Valve taking a hard line on this, because there are absolutely games being submitted that will try to toe that line. I don’t think this studio is doing that, but I also think it’s fair for Valve to weigh art and impact vs peoples’ comfort, if they’re the ones being asked to host something.

t3rmit3, 6 dni temu

Most stores choose not to sell X rated (later NC-17) movies.

t3rmit3, 6 dni temu

I don’t think society is actually more prudish; you couldn’t have had 80% of the shows that are made now, 50 years ago. I think there are just several things that combine to make it appear otherwise (note that these are all 100% my opinion):

1. Corporatism has run rampant, and corporations detest liability. Independent movie stores didn’t have to worry about being noticed by political groups, but big chains did, and big corporations’ shareholders only care about stock prices are much more reactive to ‘threats’. And big corporations killed most independent stores, even before digital took over. Digital is all big corps.
2. The US has sanitized violence in media to such an extent (e.g. superhero movies where logically thousands of people die, or where all violence is ‘bloodless’ but not cartoonish) that I think sex has become the only metric by which to delineate ‘kid’ vs ‘adult’ media for a lot of people. That has a feedback effect on large media creators, who will be less likely to depict sex in anything not squarely targeted for adult consumption, which in turn makes any sexual content in e.g. young-adult media stand out even more, which will get it outsize attention by the wannabe morality police types.
3. Prudish political groups made a lot of strategic inroads into positions of policy influence by using “protect the children” rhetoric, with sex being the #1 thing they actively demonized. It’s much less common to see pro-sex groups making any kind of public messaging or policy impacts, so it can seem like the prudes are the majority.

WRT the current thread: Steam doesn’t ban sexual games at all; at this point it’s one of if not the largest adult games distributor just thanks to its user base. They even implemented a ‘private’ feature for games so people could buy adult games on their Steam account but hide them from others, to encourage people to buy adult games. This particular game is really just an unfortunate case of edgy content accidentally running up against a legitimate guardrail. I won’t be surprised if Valve does walk back the ban soon based on the amount of media coverage.

t3rmit3, 18 dni temu

I never got the PS5 because the PS3 -> PS4 jump was too underwhelming, when PC is pulling away so many games. And it’s not about or solvable with exclusives, because there are literally no games I can think of that would make me buy a whole console just to play. Imho PC gaming, especially in the Golden Age of Indies, is just too strong an argument unless you are a console-only gamer.

t3rmit3, 22 dni temu

Any work that satirizes wealth or corporate greed, made by a public company, is almost definitionally hypocritical.

Outer Worlds has this same issue.

t3rmit3, 21 dni temu

To be fair, the original Deus Ex is more anti-authoritarianism than it is anti-capitalist in the motivations of the villains. Grey Death wasn’t done for economic purposes, it was literally a means to kick off a worldwide eugenics experiment. They used the Ambrosia vaccine to select who lives, not really to make money.

t3rmit3, 29 dni temu

They were always known as being a crunch-heavy studio. The only reason they weren’t pulling their current mtx-riddled, always-online modal before is that the tech wasn’t there.

t3rmit3, miesiąc temu

Arma is pretty cool… despite BI. DayZ has been (for me) a continual disappointment. I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about Dean Hall, but I don’t get the impression he knows what’s wrong with DayZ, or how to fix it.

t3rmit3, miesiąc temu

It’s not copyright, it’s trademark. Sony isn’t claiming they’re the same characters, they’re claiming that the style is so similar that people would mistakenly believe that Light of Motiram is actually a Horizon game, which is why this case is so stupid; it is a blatant ripoff, but ripoffs aren’t illegal, and no one is going to actually mix them up.

t3rmit3, miesiąc temu

It’s not copying it, it’s ripping it off, which isn’t illegal. Copying (i.e. copyright infringement) has a specific legal meaning, and it’s not being asserted by Sony. Sony is trying to claim that it being a ripoff means customers would be confused into believing it’s actually a Horizon game and purchasing it in error, which is stupid.

If Tencent had called this Horizons: Motiram, they’d be 100% in the right. But they are just trying to essentially claim they own the combination of style and theme of “colorful world with tribal humans vs robot animals”. That’s not how trademark works (this is trademark btw, not copyright, just in case anyone is getting them mixed up).

t3rmit3, miesiąc temu

They won’t mistakenly buy the game based on that image.

t3rmit3, miesiąc temu

I will also remind you that you said it would be absurd to take Sony seriously, which is not the same thing as stating “there’s no trademark violations here”. The latter is literally what the court has to make a decision on. The former is about whether there’s any basis to go to court which already means you think you know better than Sony lawyers and, if the court doesn’t instantly throw out the case, also better than the legal system. Maybe you are some godlike lawyer who knows better than everyone else, but if you are I think you can understand why I’m calling bullshit on that.

You should check who you’re responding to.

t3rmit3, miesiąc temu

I was/am responding to something you said in your comment, specifically that they were copying HZD.

I think it’s entirely possible that Sony wins, though they shouldn’t. But it will be about whether this constitutes an infringement on Sony’s Horizon trademark, not copyright. I don’t think it does, and I do think this amounts to Sony wanting to own the concept, like Nintendo wants to own creature catchers, but it is obviously possible another court would make another bad ruling in the IP space, especially if that means siding with the non-Chinese corporation.

t3rmit3, miesiąc temu

I think it’s hard for me to differentiate which games didn’t get the recognition they deserved in their time, and which games I love are just too old for people to think about much anymore.

NOX is one of my all-time favorite ARPGs, but I remember it being pretty popular in its time.

Earth 2150 is probably my answer: it was one of the best RTSes of all time. OF ALL TIME. I don’t get why it never seemed to catch on.

t3rmit3, miesiąc temu

Still can play it, and it’s still insanely fun. I also highly recommend the Star Wars Conquest mod for Mount and Blade/ Warband (mod images).

t3rmit3, miesiąc temu

Why is The Ascent not included? Thats the game that gave me the most Nihei-esque megastructure vibes.

t3rmit3, miesiąc temu

Card games are classed as tabletop games due to the top of the table being the place where they’re played.

t3rmit3, 2 miesiące temu

Nintendo is the worst.

t3rmit3, 2 miesiące temu

Called it!

t3rmit3, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

They were contacted by an unknown person who requested they play their video game demo (downloadable from Steam). In exchange for RastaLand playing their video game demo on stream, they would financially compensate them.

Unfortunately, it’s extraordinarily easy to hide malware in any application that is expected to have online components, because you can add the malicious, “staged” malware after install. Also, depending on what the code is doing, it may not even appear malicious to malware scanners.

Crypto-stealers often don’t even need to elevate privileges or access system components or create backdoors in order to operate, they’re just sending info out, so from a behavioral perspective they often don’t really “act” maliciously.

Sadly, this is less about Valve not preventing something, and more about someone falling for targeted phishing.

Edit: Looking through the tweets, the only references to it being malicious all appeared within the past day, and the claims of the dev being compromised within the last week, so I’d guess the game was updated with malicious components in the last couple days.

t3rmit3, 2 miesiące temu

They already scan all submitted games with malware scanners. Manual approval wouldn’t be any different, they weren’t doing binary analysis or source code review before. Their AV scanners back then would have given them the same result as their AV scanners now.

t3rmit3, 2 miesiące temu

What people overlook is how Valve removing those barriers to listing directly brought about the indie revolution that’s happened.

t3rmit3, 2 miesiące temu

Sniper Elite is my series of choice for de-Nazification fantasizing, mostly because the Wolfenstein games don’t run so well on my GPU. :P

t3rmit3, 2 miesiące temu

Un-sarcastic answer, it’s actually in a really good spot. The backend changes they put in over the past year have boosted the per-server player counts like crazy, they churned through most of their ship backlog, and they’ve been running a bunch of story events. Performance is way up, especially for client fps in high-population areas (15 fps this time last year if you were in a crowd, 35+ now).

PCG has been super negative on SC for years. Sometimes very justifiably, but many times not.

t3rmit3, 2 miesiące temu

I haven’t had any elevator issues in a while, though I know some people have with the freight elevators. Guild chat isn’t something I care about, since every guild/clan/alliance I’ve been a part of has always used mumble/TS/discord.

It’s not really that buggy now, and I don’t know what you mean by “game loops don’t consistently work”?

t3rmit3, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

People who aren’t having issues don’t go online to post about it. Since we know the daily player count hovers around 29,000, those hundreds of complaints can still be a very small portion of players, who are experiencing issues.

Edit: Off my phone, so I can type more easily.

The other side to this is that differences between patches can be huge, so reports of a bug that everyone is having could be irrelevant a week later when the new patch drops, but unless you’re checking every post’s date and patch number, you could falsely conclude the bug is still present, or view those bugs as cumulative with bugs that are in the current patch.

The 4.3.x patches are some of the most stable, bug-free patches I’ve played. If you’re insistent on finding faults with anything, you can, and lord knows there are plenty of things to find fault with in SC, but bringing up issues like the ‘deadly’ elevators and doors from last year or older, is an unserious criticism.

t3rmit3, 2 miesiące temu

Coolio. No one told you you have to play it.

stophavingfun.jpg

t3rmit3, 2 miesiące temu

This describes literally every pet system in any game where the pets can battle.

This is so overly broad, it’s insane.

t3rmit3, 2 miesiące temu

that’s where the hand on the throttle comes in!

t3rmit3, 3 miesiące temu

No, it means the guys who don’t take hygiene seriously. The Cartman Gamers, so to speak.

t3rmit3, 3 miesiące temu

Desert Combat was so much fun. Really great memories from that mod.

t3rmit3, 3 miesiące temu

Interesting. TIL

often used interchangeably with “try-hard” as a newer version of the terminology

iwastheregandalf.jpg

t3rmit3, 3 miesiące temu

I think so. I was mostly a chopper pilot flying blackhawks so I don’t recall most of the fixed wing aircraft, but an A10 would make sense.

t3rmit3, 3 miesiące temu

This is not a good argument for unnecessary exposition though, this is just an argument for shorter, bite-sized narratives, or even what some games already do (like The Witcher 3) where they recap where you are in the loading screen. If anything, unnecessary exposition just wastes what little time you have to play, or forces you to skip the dialogue entirely.

t3rmit3, 3 miesiące temu

Exposition != story.

A good story can be (and usually is) told with minimal exposition. AAA games being exposition-fests is a result of game executives and writers infantilising players in the name of “widest audience appeal”.

t3rmit3, 4 miesiące temu

This group in particular (Collective Shout) is Australian, and they’re anti-gun, it’s just not a key part of their advocacy. They have claimed that GTA is responsible for mass shootings.

t3rmit3, 4 miesiące temu

In the US, that is often true, but Australian Christian conservatism doesn’t have the same pro-gun culture as the US.

t3rmit3, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

co-op, base-building, and mech combat

ah yes, just like Horizon Zero Dawn.

Or is it just the ‘humans fighting giant machines’ part that they’re likening to Shadow of the Colossus Metal Gear Solid Horizon Zero Dawn?

Jokes aside, the standard of “could confuse consumers into mistaking one for another” was meant to prevent things like essentially typo-squatting in product names, e.g. going and making Orao cookies, instead of Oreo (which is why Oreo was able to copy Hydrox).

It wasn’t meant to just be about aping a concept or art style. No one would actually mistake “Light of Motiram” for “Horizon: Zero Dawn”.

t3rmit3, 4 miesiące temu

Sony doesn’t own Konami or MGS at all, as far as I know?

t3rmit3, 4 miesiące temu

Yep, it goes well beyond the principle.

If this sticks, expect every conservative group in the US to start trying this. Pressure Visa/ MC/ PayPal not to accept charges from Planned Parenthood, or from LGBT-friendly businesses, or from book publishers they don’t like, etc. This is just censorship by other means.

t3rmit3, 4 miesiące temu

We’d be in the same place. It’s not any better or worse for a private versus a public entity to do harm.

Also, the government is already part of this. If the DOJ told Visa, “hey, stop fucking around with that, you don’t need to be trying to control legal agreements between parties, that’s our purview” (or if they even thought the DOJ might), they’d drop this behavior in an instant. They are doing this in large part because they believe it is in line with the government’s ideology. Preemptive compliance.

t3rmit3, 4 miesiące temu

Every company is headquartered somewhere, or has some market that it cannot afford to withdraw from, and that makes them all ultimately subject to said governments. No business decision is made free from pressure when it comes to governments.

t3rmit3, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Again, the issue is this is an American company setting American content policy internationally.

That is not the issue. That may be the subset of the issue that you have a problem with, but the actual issue is a payment provider setting purchase restrictions period. That it is happening in the US is not uniquely bad; it would be equally bad happening anywhere else.

Interpreting the international impact to be “the issue” would mean that if this were only affecting Americans, this would be fine, which is absolutely not the case.

Storefronts and brands can set up local branches and sell through those using the local digital payment provider without getting in trouble with their headquarter’d country.

To set up and sell in that country, they then have to comply with the local payment providers. Which shouldn’t be deciding whether people can purchase something, just as Visa shouldn’t be.

t3rmit3, 4 miesiące temu

How so? What exactly about people proposing this actress do you have a problem with?

I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt that your intentions are good, but you’re being awfully evasive about what your actual objection is.

t3rmit3, 4 miesiące temu

Is this a criticism of the quote, or a response to it?

Once again, you’re not actually just stating your issue, and your responses are ambiguous enough that they could be interpreted either as an objection to people treating Hunter Schafer in a way that you perceive as negative, or an objection to Hunter Schafer.

t3rmit3, 4 miesiące temu

My Spidey sense is tingling hard with this one.