teawrecks

teawrecks, rok temu

Which of course precedes being KERBLOOIED!

teawrecks, rok temu

Pretty sure it comes from America Automobile Associations.

teawrecks, rok temu

“The children yearn for the mines!”

teawrecks, rok temu

Just finished Rain World.

What a brave game to make. It is not afraid to scare players away. I admit, I ended up having to look up a map in order to find the ending before I threw my PC out the window entirely, but I acknowledge I was not in the right mindset to be playing. You cannot play the game to finish it, you must enjoy the gameplay for what it is, because it is not going to funnel you through the story at all, and you’re going to have a LOT of deaths that feel like total bullshit.

But the atmosphere, and the sound design, and the art, and the creatures, and their AI, and the world building are all top tier. I don’t know if I can recommend anyone play it, but it is a very well made game.

teawrecks, rok temu

Sounds like an elaborate crackme.

teawrecks, rok temu

I suspect a sufficiently well trained reverse engineer could figure out how the keys are being generated, and crack it. It will surely be interesting one way or another.

teawrecks, rok temu

No, you don’t understand, if they hadn’t cut UT to do Fortnite, Epic would be destitute and wouldn’t have enough money to make the games people actually want them to make…wait…

teawrecks, rok temu

Don’t vanilla skyrim NPCs detect when you’ve taken your clothes off? I remember Morrowind NPCs shunning you if you were diseased.

teawrecks, rok temu

It’s PR. Anti-capitalist sentiments score well in focus groups.

teawrecks, rok temu

As long as the policy changes lead to even more profits, then sure.

teawrecks, rok temu

Time will tell. I mean, he’s not wrong. I think it’s pretty clear that studios have to make profitable games at the cost of interesting games. But it’s not like msft or anyone else is going to change their behavior. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to profit as much as possible.

teawrecks, rok temu

lol the difference of course being that Phil Spencer is not living on the income of a standup comedian.

teawrecks, rok temu

I have to think part of this is just all the ancient representatives we have. They’ve lived long enough to know what gambling looks like, and what good ol’ sports ball looks like, and by golly nobody can tell 'em any different!

teawrecks, rok temu

I stopped buying games from them when I went in the store and there weren’t any games. It’s just a bunch of FunkoPop garbage.

teawrecks, rok temu

Bethesda surely understand how much they have benefited from modding over the years.

I mean yeah, remember when they wanted to start charging people for them?

Looks like they just reintroduced it in Dec.

teawrecks, rok temu

This should be a legal requirement, imo. It’s unreasonable for them to sell a game to people, and then make it impossible to play because they weren’t making enough anymore. That’s like making a movie unwatchable because dvd sales dropped

teawrecks, rok temu

I would use the term “licensing” rather than leasing. A video rental store “leases” the license.

But the point is, they’re selling you a license to play the game, and then at some point after sale, without you knowing when or why, they rescind the license without compensating you. Any reasonable person would think that purchasing a game means a license to play it indefinitely, especially if you received some kind of binary in exchange for money at the point of sale.

It’s the difference between Uber offering a subscription model, but then a year later suddenly saying they don’t offer it anymore, vs Tesla selling you a car, but a year later disabling features on it, saying, “you were merely licensing/leasing those features”.

teawrecks, rok temu

“There are dozens of us!”

teawrecks, rok temu

Ask ZA/UM how it’s going for them.

The expected profit margin when you try to make a genuinely good passion project is razor thin, if it’s there at all. There are two kinds of games that make money: outliers and whale hunters. When we think of good games proving the games industry wrong, we’re thinking of outliers. The rest of the industry is whale hunters.

In theory you could create some kind of game dev collective where a bunch of indie devs all work on their own thing under the same umbrella, and if any of them make it big, they all split the take to fund the group going forward. But you run into all the same logistical difficulties that normal communism runs into: what does leadership look like? how do you hold members accountable? what does contributing look like when development hell can look like not delivering anything for years, or forever? who pays the lawyers who have to figure that all out?

Silicon valley often had “incubators” which are kind of a middle ground between collectivism and capitalism. An investor funds a shoe string budget to several start up ideas to create minimum viable products. If one looks promising they all switch to shipping that and they’re all part owners.

I’m kinda surprised we don’t see more game dev incubators. Maybe indie outliers are just that rare.

teawrecks, rok temu

Apart from preferring Kirby in Smash, the only Kirby game I’ve played is Kirby’s Dreamland on Gameboy. They hadn’t yet figured out how to persist save data in those cartridges, and it didn’t have any codes. So you had to beat it in one sitting, which I could do as a kid, which was no small fear for that era of gaming. Replaying it meant finding where the secrets are, making runs quicker each time.

I kinda like this concept of no save, I think there aren’t many games, even retro-themed ones, that make use of it as an element.

teawrecks, rok temu

Yeah, I generally don’t like most rogue likes though, because they often lean on procedural levels and there’s usually not an “ending”. So I play it enough that I feel like I get it and then I’m done.

Minit is one that comes to mind. It would actually be rad if someone put Minit on an OG Gameboy cartridge. I think it totally would have worked as a Gameboy game with no save data.

Edit: ah I forgot that there is a bit of info retained between runs, like spawn position.

teawrecks, rok temu

I would steer clear of any chairs that

• function as a billboard for themselves (high back with a logo that’s clearly visible on a twitch stream)
• are built like a bucket seat from a race car
• or are otherwise marketed toward “gamers”

I would try looking for a second hand expensive one. I found a guy on CL who restores Herman Millers; sold me a lightly used Aeron for like $300.

The one I used before that was the Ikea Markus (also purchased on CL for $100, barely used).

teawrecks, rok temu

This will be the real challenge. No matter what game is picked, with 15 people someone will feel meh about it. So plan on having a few options, and everyone should agree to at least give them a shot even if it’s not their first pick.

teawrecks, rok temu

I think you can do private games of Stumble Guys with that many people.

teawrecks, rok temu

This game is such a neat idea and impressively well executed given that I believe it’s just one guy working on it. I know Starfield was memed into the Innovative gameplay award, but if the award were real, it really should have gone to this game. Can’t wait to see where it goes, it clearly has so much potential.

teawrecks, rok temu

I’ve also heard it called “evergreen”.

teawrecks, rok temu

I was also going to suggest this. No, she won’t be able to understand what she’s doing in it yet, but the game is a celebration of exploration.

teawrecks, rok temu

I don’t know what the rules of this community are regarding piracy or DRM, but I think backing your content up is generally protected, while sharing the content or encouraging people to copy something illegally is possibly not allowed.

teawrecks, rok temu

No one refers to people who despise X as “fans of X” or “fanatics for X”.

teawrecks, rok temu

Conspiracies are a real thing, you can just say conspiracy.

Conspiracy theories are often bogus.

teawrecks, rok temu

Ahh, that’s a systemic issue; a system where an undesired outcome is inadvertently incentivized. Aka an emergent phenomenon.

teawrecks, rok temu

Buying a CD/DVD was never ownership of the media that’s on it. It’s ownership of a piece of plastic and a license to play to the content on the plastic within certain limitations. If it was ownership, you would be allowed to project the DVD on a wall and charge patrons to view it, but legally you can’t, because you don’t own anything but the plastic. Buying a CD/DVD was always just a more convenient version of buying a ticket to a concert/theater to see the same thing. You’re paying for the experience of viewing their artwork.

So, as long as you also agree that sneaking into a concert/theater to view a show without paying also isn’t theft in any way, then I can’t argue.

teawrecks, rok temu

Just want to highlight how unnecessarily antagonistic your response was. Not sure if that was your intention, but I don’t care to engage with it. Cheers.

teawrecks, rok temu

That’s a fair distinction. Congrats, I’m finding there are very few people willing to engage in productive discussion on here.

teawrecks, rok temu

When you buy a painting, do you only have a license to view it?

That’s a good question. My guess is that the rights to create prints of the painting usually remain with the artist. You own that painting, you probably even own the right to display it for an entry fee, but unless the artist has granted you a license to the artwork, I don’t think you can freely create copies.

teawrecks, rok temu

I think we can all agree that would be bad.

You’d be surprised. There seem to be vanishingly few people here willing to honestly discuss the legal questions around piracy and copyright. The vast majority are just here to circle jerk about how much corporations suck, completely forgetting about the rights of artists they’re defending in the anti-AI circle jerk one thread over. I honestly think they spend more time flaming anything they disagree with than actually putting any thought into the matter. The dogmatism rivals that of conservative forums.

teawrecks, rok temu

I‘m all for sneaking into concerts and everything else

Then as I said, I can’t argue.

But you should keep this in mind when you go to the next thread and join the anti-AI circle jerk, pretending to defend artists for upvotes.

teawrecks, rok temu

If you think I’ve been antagonistic, please let me know how. I’m here to have a productive discussion, but so far I’m here by myself.

teawrecks, rok temu

If I’ve said something false, let me know. As far as I’m aware, what I’ve said is how the law works (at least in the US). I understand if you don’t like those laws, but that doesn’t make them not exist, nor does it make them irrelevant when someone makes a reductive statement like “if buying isn’t ownership, then piracy isn’t stealing”. The fact is, in some cases, it is.

teawrecks, rok temu

If you think I’ve been antagonistic, please let me know how.

teawrecks, rok temu

Yep, this is a valid point. The volatility of access seems to be a convenient side effect of modern streaming technology. I agree that there needs to be regulation around this as it’s currently too easy for a company to suddenly say “we’re pulling access to the thing you paid for right now, sorrynotsorry”.

It’s not reasonable to expect that they have to have servers available serving the content 24/7 indefinitely, but either govts need to force companies to clearly label access to digital media as some sort of “rental agreement” similarly to how renting a video on youtube or amazon works, and making it clear that the user will only be able to access the stream for a minimum of some specified amount of time, and/or they should be required to offer a download of the media for a certain amount of time.

teawrecks, rok temu

“Fraud” would imply a crime. I’m always happy when some european country has a law on the book that enables people to hold a company accountable for their shitty behavior, but in the US, we have some work to do there.

“Enshittification” is a…surface-level description of what is happening. I’m more interested in the “how we got here” and “what needs to happen to prevent it”. Because no company has “make the experience objectively shittier” on their list of new features. Blaming “enshittification” holds as much weight to me as blaming “the deep state”. It’s not a real thing, it’s just how you perceive the emergent result of a system with certain rules and incentives. The real question is, which rules and incentives should we prioritize, and how can those changes most effectively be implemented.

teawrecks, rok temu

although I could picture you wanting to be if that makes sense.

From my perspective, it sounds like you’re reading my posts with an unwarranted intention behind them. I have to assume this stems from you disagreeing with what I am saying, but to my knowledge, nothing I’ve said is incorrect. If you could point to something I’ve said that’s incorrect, I’d be glad to discuss it. Also, if you could refrain from the namecalling, that would also be appreciated.

teawrecks, rok temu

I think we agree and could learn from each other, but I agree, I don’t think that’s in the cards here. Have a good one.

teawrecks, rok temu

I respectfully disagreed with the top level post, and stated facts about why. If that was interpreted as not in good faith, I’m sorry, and I’m open to any counter arguments. So far, two people have pointed out that physical media can’t remotely have their licenses revoked, and I agree, that is relevant to the discussion. If you have anything relevant you’d like to contribute, I’m all ears.

teawrecks, rok temu

Looking at that logo…