Homie? I want you to know that while I am going to be inflammatory, I am not insulting you. In a slightly sane world, that should be fine.

NEVER work with children. “Hey kids. You can go home or you can stay with me and a few others and learn how to use a computer!”. At best you are setting yourself up for some awkward phone calls when Little Jimmy gets caught looking at something his parents don’t approve of.

If you are a close family friend and the parents understand what you are going to be teaching their kid (and obviously want you to teach it), go for it. If you are just watching them while they eat orange slices? Don’t fucking go anywhere near that. Let the teachers who actually train in how to handle these situations do it.

And the other aspect: Kids (and most adults) are not rational or intelligent. They aren’t going to take “Hey, if Susie sends you nudes don’t put them on this server because it will get me sent to prison as a diddler” as education on why they should not fucking do that.

If you ever want to get scared straight as it were? Take a teacher out for drinks (and you better pay for them!). You’ll hear LOTS of horror stories and get even a glimpse into the kind of hell they have to put up with.

The show Black-ish (like a lot of Kenya Barris’s work) has a LOT of problems. But the number of times teacher friends have shared https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jqmj0ILwfM. And it is not at all exclusive to black people (or even men).

Just a general warning:

It is one thing to provide something for family. It is another thing to be a person in authority providing one for an org. And kids are horrible and basically all have cameras everywhere they go. They WILL do something horrible and, depending on what that something is, you might now be liable for a lot of stuff you don’t want to be.

You don’t want that smoke. They can use google drive. Or you can talk to one of the companies that host next/own clouds for people and ask for a discount since it is the boy scouts.

Somehow I view this as just leading to GabeN never setting foot on US Soil again and living out his days between New Zealand and his yachts.

Like, I like Valve and Steam a lot. GabeN is libertarian as fuck (which is a lot of the problems that make Steam moderation non-existent) and has more money than many small nations. This IS asking Ron Swanston to deal with bureaucrats and idiots.

Yes. If you know ahead of time you’ll prioritize those.

If you are new to the game/genre and are struggling and even wiping occasionally? It isn’t a priority.

But there is also a big difference between having a few different pin types and just having “Well, SOMETHING was there?”. Hell, I still need to get around to figuring out which of my oranges are NPCs because I wasn’t sure if quest NPCs would be auto-tagged (they are, once you have a reason to talk to them again).

Which is another factor to all of these discussions. I fairly regularly push back on Dark Souls (and its successors) being a “difficult game”. It really isn’t. What it is is an incredibly well designed (first half of a…) challenging game. Everything up until Amazing Chest Ahead is designed to teach you how to play the game and how to approach encounters. And once you know that? You are in really good shape for the entire genre even if it is a game that emphasizes parrying (Lies of P), blocking (Sekiro), or beautiful beautiful loot (Nioh! Aka “Best Souls”). You don’t learn character builds (mostly “pick a single stat and work with it”) but that comes later.

And… some of that applies here. I know I made it WAY farther than I should have with no meaningful upgrades because I am a sicko/idiot. But for people who don’t know the idea that “Hey, this crypt full of skeletons is a mofo. Maybe go somewhere else”, they might be slamming their head against a wall trying to fight Last Judge for far longer than they should (although, questionable balancing decisions means that upgrading your health doesn’t matter all that much but that is a different rant).

But it is still the idea of a first game versus a fifth game as it were. And we all start somewhere.

Very good video that lines up with a lot of my own thoughts (yay).

That said? I think I fundamentally disagree with the idea that everyone should be able to beat every game for narrative reasons. My preference is for something similar to what Nine Sols did (AMAZING boss fights. Dogshit metroidvania and traversal), but I don’t fundamentally believe that everyone needs to be able to experience every game. Like, you can make an “easy mode” for DCS but… the point of that game is the fidelity and turning all of that off just feels “wrong”? At the end of the day, it is up to the devs and what they want people to consider “accomplishment” to be.

And we live in the internet age. I remember beating Arkham Knight, having fun, and then deciding there was zero chance I would ever want to get all the riddler keys or fight deathstroke a dozen times and just went to youtube.

But I 100% agree with the back half of the video. The game is very much designed to just take a break and wander off when you get frustrated. Which is where I DO wish there were more QOL features to make it clear what areas might still have a mask (preferably one you can reach) rather than needing to find a guide or try to guess. Especially when you don’t even get map markers for a decent chunk early on.

Hey buddy. I got a 2070 that I’ll give you a real bargain on. Only 900 USD plus s&h. It’ll play Crysis at max settings with absolutely no compromises. Hit me up.

But, in all seriousness: This is why (minimally biased) reviews are a thing. Outlets like Gamers Nexus or Hardware Unboxed do a spectacular job of actually benchmarking against common games of the current era (and a few oldies) and comparing them against a large database of other cards. Don’t just assume that you can give Jensen a grand and get what you want. Make informed decisions.

Also I am not actually sure if 900 is ACTUALLY a steal for a 2070 at this point and didn’t care enough to check for my joke. SImilarly, I want to say a grand is closer to a 4070 than a 4090 at this point? Shit is REAL fucked which is even more why you should actually look at what you are buying rather than “30 years ago if I gave someone a thousand bucks they would suck me off AND let me play every game I could ever want at a full 640*40 and 30 FPS!”

Also I want to say Crysis is actually more CPU bound these days since it was the height of the Pentiums and single core performance is nowhere near the priority it used to be. But too lazy to check.

I mean, Cuphead is one of the more visually impressive games… ever. It has an art style and it works it to the fullest extent. And Silksong is also quite gorgeous.

This comes up every other year or so it seems. People think 2D means “low effort” and get angry that so many fighting games moved on to 3D. But the reality is that actually making sprites is a VERY labor intensive process that often requires a deep understanding of the entire rendering pipeline (including the hardware it is displayed on). At this point, “most” online people are aware that many of the NES/SNES sprites were specifically made with CRT “blurring” in mind but it goes way beyond that. So that is why franchises like Street Fighter just have “generic” 3d models.

And ArcSys more or less made their entire model (wait for it) simple-ish 3d models with cell shading and very specific lighting systems to appear 2D even though they aren’t. Which is why stuff like the super attacks always look so impressive as you do the zoom and spin around.

I can’t speak for blands 4 since 3 (and the pre-sequel…) were so aggressively obnoxious that I just replay 2 every 3 or 4 years. But just look at this thread where you have weirdos saying that UE5 games look like they are from 2016. People are deeply stupid and games need to pop and sizzle to stand out. And while I don’t know (or care) if blands 4 succeeded… just look at ArcSys for how you can use modern engines to make cellshaded 3d models look AMAZING.

It is very specifically for actually 2D games, but check out some of Cobra Code’s videos on youtube. They have put a LOT of work into how to use UE5 to make sprite based 2D games look GOOD and it is actually fascinating. And that is still sidestepping the initial sprite work for the most part.

And as another example of why sprites are actually a ridiculous amount of work to get right. Mina The Hollower (?) is the latest game from the Shovel Knight devs. And… most of us who tried the demo on a high resolution display felt REALLY weird because of the way the sprites and animations looked upscaled (I saw a breakdown of why. I did not understand it). The devs are putting in the work to fix that ahead of launch but it really speaks to the kinds of problems that come up when you go from testing on a Steam Deck or in a debug window to stretched across a 1440p display at 120-ish Hz.

You can expect whatever you want. That isn’t what is being sold. That’s why so much of the nVidia bullshit insists that reviewers and partners report upscaling and framegen as the “normal” results (and why outlets like Gamers Nexus are on their shitlist).

And the “norm for over 20 years” was that games targeted a specific range of hardware “power”. That is why so much work was put into engines to support higher res models in first person view that would only be one per scene and lower res models that other characters have. And scaling detail based on distance and so forth. But it also meant that we didn’t have the ridiculously high res hero models that might only exist for cutscenes because no computer of the era would be able to run that performantly in real time.

Personally? I would LOVE if more effort were put in for scalability (which Unreal is ironically really good at because it targets film). But that gets back into what the target audience is and if it is worth putting the effort in for “Mega Ultra Super Epic” settings when nobody is going to use them. And… considering that one of the biggest issues is people refuse to put more research in than “I set it to High”… yeah.

But also… that isn’t NOT what we have now. We have the games that are designed to look good at 4k asset wise. And, in a couple years (maybe longer, maybe never) we will have the oomph to actually run those natively at 4k/120 and it will be BEAUTIFUL (and have less weird fur textures appearing out of nowhere or weird cape physics when the model barfs). Which isn’t TOO different than building a new PC, playing Dwarf Fortress because it is funny, and then booting up a Total War and losing your mind for a bit.

Obligatory dril tweet about how you never “Gotta hand it to them”

But yeah. It is infuriating how often people just spew nonsense about “it is Unreal so it runs like shit” just like it was when “It is Unity so it runs like shit” and so forth. I very much do not think people need to “code (their) own engine” to understand things but… it would be a good idea to to do some basic research on the topic.

I can’t speak for blands 4 specifiaclly. But with a lot of these games? People don’t realize that the game is very much being optimized with upscaling and even framegen in mind. You can say you hate that if you want to. But these studios aren’t targeting 120 FPS at 4k. They are targeting 120 FPS at 2k or even 60 FPS at 2k. In large part because… there still isn’t a lot of value in actually targeting 4k on any console or even most PCs. So it gives them more or less a “single” target. And some techniques don’t scale anywhere near as well (also 2k to 4k is not linear).

It is just that people grew up in the golden age where everything was targeting a PS4 and kind of has been for almost a decade at this point. So the idea of futzing with your graphics settings and checking the different AA (now upscaling) models is kind of anathema to a lot of users. And consoles STILL try to hide all of that.

…

DID Blands 4 “dominate”? The only mention of it I saw was pitchford (and his magic flash drive) bragging that the servers wouldn’t get hugged over the weekend and… yeah.

Its one of those things you can only really “know” by actually keeping an ear open. I mean, look around. Lemmy generally seems to skew left (how much of that is the tankies on dot ml is a different discussion). But there are basically two or three of us who point out that BDS is specifically calling for a boycott of Microsoft every time a gamepass or Gears of War thread comes up because fuck that shit, No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism™ means Fuck Off Palestine New Forza Dropped.

But if you listen and ask questions when people reference Internet Lore, you too get the brainworm and can make informed decisions going forth.

Which, truth be told, is not that different than anything else. If you only watch the news when something interesting happens, you might think a nazi is a good man and father. Whereas, if you have suffered even a bit of continual psychic damage over the years, you KNOW that is bullshit and can start thinking about why CNN is glazing him and so forth.

The Internet is a spectacular pleasure box and a great way to find out information on demand. But relying solely on The Algorithm and Others to inform you is how you get… 2025.

If you are thinking in terms of building a widget or making an industrial process, it makes perfect sense. Something like a wristwatch is the kind of innovation a LOT of people more or less simultaneously made and it is just impossible to definitively prove what country the first watch was made in. Even figuring out who was the first to file becomes a mess. Same with factory processes where the players who would even have the ability to iterate are often counted on fingers and toes.

But software (and research) in a global society is a real mother fucker. Because now the entire world can more or less see everything and reproducing things is fairly trivial. And… it isn’t like the patents actually matter all that much when so much gets done overseas. China Don’t Care but also the EU doesn’t really either and so forth. Sure there are avenues to try to pursue a studio using the patented Nemesis System but… at best you are going to be tied up in courts for years trying to get a judge to insist that a company in Germany needs to send you a check.

For the exact same reason that “fair use” is still so incredibly nebulous and twitch streaming/let’s plays still exist.

NOBODY is crazy enough to want to take that to the courts. Because maybe you get a judge who has “common sense”. Maybe you get an old white guy who thinks Pong was too complicated and decides that you are wrong. At which point you have now made a bunch of legal precedent for REALLY stupid stuff.

Its also kind of why so much stuff about video games actually never gets patented. It is playing with fire.

I ANAL and am not a lawyer.

The verbiage on this is RIDICULOUSLY specific (as patents generally should be) to the point that I refused to even pass the PDF through an OCR system and instead will trust that site’s transcription

    (1) There must be a PC, console or other computing device and the game is stored on a drive or similar storage medium.

    (2) You can move a character in a virtual space.

    (3) You must be able to summon a character. They call it a “sub character” by which they mean it’s not the player character, but, for example, a little monster such as a Pokémon that the player character has at its disposal.

    Then the logic branches out, with items (4) and (5) being mutually exclusive scenarios, before reuniting again in item (6):

    (4) This is about summoning the “sub character” in a place where there already is another character that it will then (when instructed to do so) fight.

    (5) This alternative scenario is about summoning the “sub character” at a position where there is no other character to fight immediately.

    (6) This final step is about sending the “sub character” in a direction and then letting an automatic battle ensue with another character. It is not clear whether this is even needed if one previously executed step (4) where the “sub character” will basically be thrown at another character.

All of those criteria must be met for this trap card to be triggered (shit… Yugioh lawyers getting revved up now).

Step 4 specifically covers the case where you summon your little guy to fight someone else. As worded, that actually would impact a Summon in every JRPG and Final Fantasy just got sweaty. Step 5 summons a character as an assist or to replace the main character in a fight (so… Pokemon).

What I find most interesting is that step 6 specifically says “automatic battle”. Which… to my Not A Lawyer brain, means this doesn’t even cover Pokemon since you specifically give your mons battle commands. Err, aside from S01E01 Pikachu who did not give a fuck. And then Charizard. And probably a dozen more pokemons after I stopped watching The Son Of Mr Mime’s Adventures. But, from what little I saw of it, it DOES cover Palworld where you just summon your pals to do work for you or fight for you. And it potentially covers Final Fantasy and Ichiban’s Like a Dragons (the Poundmates, not the Sujimon)…

Which is probably the most interesting thing and why I think Pokemon Co is going to be ridiculously selective of who they try to sue. Because any of the big hitters can just say “Dumbfucks, we were doing this before Game Freak even existed”. Whereas indie devs are small enough they don’t want to risk it.

It might be worth keeping an eye on MinnMax as Haley MacLean IS a lawyer who actually specializes in video game IP but I suspect this is too close to her day job for her to publicly speak about it even with the “not legal advice” disclaimers. Which hopefully guarantees she actually talked about it on one of the podcasts this week and I just haven’t looked yet.

As a very early backer of S42 way back in apparently 2012: It never ceases to annoy me that The Wing Commander Guy has once again managed to do everything possible to NOT make a fucking Wing Commander. This is, what, the third big clusterfuck and the first one where there was nobody to take it away from him and just finish it themselves? But, whatever.

As a big fan of elite games: I am really glad star citizen “exists” to contrast Elite Dangerous and has led to some truly amazing games in the genre. Some of which actually ARE more Wing Commander than not (Everspace 2 is basically the Freelancer that was promised). Now we just need some studio to make a proper Freespace game.

All that said: I don’t like it but I weirdly keep coming back to the thought process that Star Citizen actually IS delivering on its “promise” to the backers… of the past decade or so. Not the OGs. Fuck us.

Because they were never sold on actually playing a game. They were sold on a dream. It is the same logic by which you watch Aisha Tyler do VO for a Tom Clancy game and think that you and your friends are also going to be super sweaty tier seven operators. Or how you watch your favorite group of online youtubers read off their pre-written jokes and pretend to be shocked while playing “friendslop” games. Or… you are a non-sicko who read too many AARs of Dwarf Fortress and thought you would boatmurder too.

Its the idea of spending money to Dream. You know you’ll never actually do what you saw the pretty people do. But you THINK you will and, by owning a copy of Garry’s Mod that you will never boot up, you think you will too.

Obviously the star citizen heads are spending WAY more than 20 bucks a pop and some are buying multiple megaships they’ll never use meaningfully. But it is hard to not see parallels to the people who buy a DCS plane because they want to pretend that one day they will learn how to fly that jet.

And… truth be told, I think I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of the annual charity streams where Drew Scanlon (The Blinking White Guy) and Vinny Caravella attempt to play Star Citizen and spend an hour or two crashing to desktop, getting confused, and accomplishing absolutely nothing. Hell, I think there were a few years where they never even found each other in the space station?

Also, as much as Freelancer hurt, I’ll never stop laughing/being annoyed that he managed to take a sci-fi movie starring Freddie Prinze Jr AND Baby Busey AND Matthew Lillard and turn it into a charisma-free void with no redeeming qualities. Like, you gotta put some fricking effort into that. Those guys could make reading the dictionary be entertaining.

TOO MUCH GAMES I REALLY AM EXCITED FOR!!!

But yeah. Hades 1 might actually be the best “full package” roguelite I have ever played. VERY solid gameplay and an unlock system that gets you your full arsenal within the first two hours but then encourages you to learn every single aspect of that as more and more options open up. And it is Supergiant so the story ranges from laughing at the horny to leaving you misty eyed to having a full blown weep-fest during credits as you try to comprehend what you just saw while immediately contextualizing it with your own Life. All done in a way that actually takes advantage of the game mechanics which is what makes Supergiant (and Greg Kasavin) so special.

I TECHNICALLY still have the final final ending to do with Hades 1. Should… probably do that some time. But what little I played of 2 so far is already so fricking good.

Which is, if anything, against white supremacy. You want the best bang for your buck which is, funny enough, often an H1-B slave (or outsourcing).

Which is one of those dark secrets of the world. Rampant Capitalism is HORRIBLE for countless reasons but also tends to be the model that creates the most diverse workforces. For the absolute worst reasons but… yeah. Which is why it is hilarious when you have the chuds who think The White Man is going to win when all that matters is profits.

Again, there are definitely the scumfucks who are true believers. And NOBODY liked “DEI” as a policy since it almost always manifested as all the worst elements of “affirmative action”. It was well intentioned but it was very much a bunch of white liberals behind it. Its why the republicans run on “anti-DEI” platforms so much. Yes, it is a dog whistle but it also is one of those things where it is hard to find anyone who actually wants to defend those poison pill initiatives. What differs is “Why would we want any fucking blacks in our company” versus “Let’s actually focus on making a diverse hiring pool so that our workforce is the best and the brightest and not just hiring the first person we can find so that we can check off a box”. The number of times I had to say the work safe equivalent of “I’m not with that nazi”…

But the thing to understand is that the mega corporations? They don’t give a fuck about white supremacy. Most are global affairs with a fairly diverse upper level management (albeit, with an over-representation of East Asia). They have zero incentive to actually want white supremacy to be a thing. But they DO have a lot of incentives to make token gestures and spend marketing money on placating the white supremacists who are increasingly in power globally.

The “good” news is that the vast majority of that has nothing to do with ideology. It is all about staying in fuckface’s good graces so they can get more government contracts or, best case scenario, have some legislature and grants built up specifically to benefit them musk-style.

As you go more towards the startup size of company (O(10) or even O(100) heads, including admin) things get a lot murkier and you have a lot more True Believers. But the zucks and Jensens of the world are pretty much the definition of apolitical in that they only care about what makes them more money in the short term.

Incels have as much to do with sexual desire as rape does. Because that is inherently what the incel mindset is. It is that others (almost always women, sorry, “females”) don’t deserve any agency and must exist solely to service people with the abrahamic god given right to sex. It isn’t about getting your rocks off. It is about asserting power and dominance over someone by raping them.

Horny people jack off. They go to bars to hook up. Hell, they even go to rub and tug joints. Incels get angry that (again, almost always) women aren’t servicing them and that they are forced to “goon”. And there is one endstate when it comes to deciding that someone needs to have sex with you regardless of their consent.