Sounds like Eternal might not be my thing, but who knows. One of the reasons I choose Doom over Eternal initially is because Doom lets me take my time and explore when I want to. Eternal seemed like it was go, go, go cortisol, cortisol, cortisol. And that was well above my limit.

I would love a super casual sonic-esque game that you could just mindless meander through without having to worry about falling into environmental hazards or bumping into enemies. Basically just complete and utter freedom to blast through a level without having to think too much about it and not having to fuss with a lot of different controls/buttons. Wonder if anything like that exists.

Build them as connectable hexagons. Learn from the insects, they’ve had a half billion years to figure out what shit works and what shit don’t.

I think it’s possible, but it needs to strike lightning to be at the right place and the right time in a proverbial sense, for it to be successful longer term. Everybody’s trying to meet a metric in this world where clicks and views and conversions are easy to measure but something like quality is difficult to define at its best and impossibly subjective at its worst.

During the few months of the year I consider to be my “gaming season”, I mostly stick to 1 game at a time as my primary focus, but I’ll often have a game or few on the back burner that I’ll work into the schedule now and then.

This year I’m focusing on the Doom remake (Doom 2016) as my main game. To be honest, the game is stressful for me, so even though it’s been an absolute blast for me to play, it’s nice to have some alternative games to switch over to after I’m done with Doom.

I agree, it’s very hard to keep up with the stories when juggling multiple games at the same time. Almost as hard for me, if not harder, is keeping up with the controls. Every game is different. Games in the same genre can and will have vastly different control set-ups. Even games in the same franchise / series can have different controls from game to game. Yuck.

So, the control aspect and the story aspect are part of my inspiration for my secondary games. Right now I’m playing Halls of Torment. I guess there’s a story? But it doesn’t seem super relevant or necessary to keep up with. This game is in the same genre as another secondary game I play (and the main one from last year) called Vampire Survivors. Controls for both of these games is super basic. As I mentioned, if there’s even a story line to them, it’s irrelevant to my enjoyment of them.

I also have the Castlevania Dominus Collection which is includes all the metroidvania-style Castlevania games from the Nintendo DS. I played all of them back in the day on original hardware, so there’s a great deal of “recall” in terms of controls and story. And this is probably one of my favorite genres of game.

Well I think I’m a robot. Couldn’t do the things that it’s asking me to do. So I guess I’m a robot. Beeboo beeboo boop beeboo beeboo bee boop.

I’m still trying to finish 2016 Doom, but life has been literally Deck blocking me for the past few months, so it’s been slow going.

If i finish that game in the next few weeks, I’m going to go back and give Doom Eternal another second chance again once more. I’ve given it a try a number of times, just like I gave 2016 Doom a try numerous times with no luck. However, this year Doom suddenly clicked for me, and I’ve been playing it every chance I get (which is not much or often), so I’m thinking that may translate into finding a bit of love for Doom Eternal, even though I know they are very different games with different approaches to game play.

If that doesn’t work out, then I’ve got a few games that I’ve technically “started”, but I haven’t gotten very far in. So, if and when I decide to pick them up again, I’ll either restart them because I’m not far along enough for it to make much difference OR I’ll continue playing but it’s so early in the game that it’s basically the same as starting from the beginning.

One game I’ve just recently been dabbling with is a slightly older game called “Halls of Torment”. Similarish in game play to one of my other favorites “Vampire Survivors”, it seems like a lot of fun. I’ve also recently purchased the Resident Evil 4 remake and it’s a nice dose of nostalgia even though I much prefer the wiimote controls of the Wii version that I first played it on.

I’m going to be honest, Hades II hasn’t really clicked for me yet and I’ve given it lots of tries. The first game had me hooked almost instantly, so I was hoping to find that same connection with the sequel. So far, it’s not happened. Having said that, I saw that there’s a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game in a similar style as Hades, so I got that to play. So far I like the game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles : Splintered Fate, but I’m not far enough along in it to have a strong opinion.

And my trusty, reliable back-up plan if nothing else works out? Castlevania Dominus Collection. The Castlevania “Metroidvanias” are my favorites. I’ve played all of these DS games on the original hardware, but it’s been so long since I played them, it will be like starting anew. Except in this case, there will be no question as to whether I will enjoy the game or not since I played them all before and loved them.

I’m not saying it’s completely 100% not possible and has never happened in the history of human technology, but the situation is not as ubiquitous as most people seem to think it is.

Don’t get me wrong, collecting and inferring personal information is happening on an epic and ubiquitous scale these days, but for the most part, it’s not the microphones on your devices that are doing the data collection.

Pretty much all my older relatives are completely convinced their phones are listening to their day to day conversations and serving up ads based on those conversations. One of them came to visit me for a week over the summer. One night we had been talking about having asparagus for dinner, and as evidence that their phone was listening to us, the next day they showed me that their news feed was filled with asparagus recipes. Another night, we were talking about one of their medical conditions and the drugs they were taking, and the next day they showed me that they got notifications about a prescription drug for that condition. On another day, we had been talking about a specific actor’s filmography and all their movies that we liked, the next day their streaming video app was suggesting a bunch of content from that actor.

I can understand why this seemed pretty convincing that our phones were listening to us, but consider the simpler explanation.

I live in a rural area where there’s not good cellular reception, so for the most part, our phones are connected via wifi to the same internet connection. Essentially, every device on the property has the same external IP address. So, when I looked up asparagus recipes on my laptop later that night because I wanted to surprise my relative with that specific dish, and when I Googled the prescription medication the relative was taking to see what the side effects where, and when I looked up that actor on IMBD to see what all movies they’d been in, that pretty much gave all the advertisers all the information they needed to start targeting ads and recommendations to folks sharing the same IP address.

Occam’s Razor being what it is, I assume that’s how things went down versus all our conversations being constantly recorded and uploaded to the net to be interpreted and used for the purposes of serving ads.

Even before current LLM-style AI systems became mainstream, a noticeable portion of the most popular submissions on that and similar/related subs seemed to be “fake” to me. So, I’m not so sure AI alone changed that dynamic that much. One thing that seems to have changed, though, is that people are now more willing to believe a fake post is fake. There was a time when someone would question the authenticity of a submission, and there was a greater than 85% chance someone would call them out by saying “nothing ever happens” or linking to a sub of similar name.

On the other hand, I feel like a lot of people genuinely believe they have are much better at detecting AI generated text than they are. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had people reply to me by saying things like “Nice Chat-GPT you got there” or something along those lines. I mean, the typos alone should be a clue.

Yes, but not many games used it or supported it. I think mine came with the game Discworld or perhaps I bought it separately for that game, I don’t recall.

I know I can emulate, but there are times when I wish I still had my old Playstation. I left mine behind when I had to make a sudden break from an ex of mine about 20ish years ago. Somehow I ended up with a controller and the mouse, but I have no idea how they got separated from the system itself and ended up in my possession.