Unfortunately, you are mistaken. Ross is indeed the founder of the initiative. If you look at the SKG homepage you’ll see Ross is the sole contact listed.

Additionally, here is a PC Gamer article from April 2024 (the month The Crew’s servers shut down) which cites Ross as the founder of the initiative.

I believe he may have reduced his most visible contributions to the movement after it became about gathering signatures in the EU, since he is not a citizen. I could be wrong on that front though.

Are you insane, or have you achieved CHIM?

Not that there’s an appreciable difference…looking at you, Michael Kirkbride.

TIP TEAM!

Try these cool moves, like, playing the game!

…God I miss forum-based let’s plays. I was never a SA member (Something Awful, not Sturmabteilung, though there’s probably some degree of overlap there), but I did browse the lparchive website once upon a time. Some folks put so much effort into their presentation, I want sure where the game ended and the LP narrative began.

There was one in particular that was an LP of the Blade Runner adventure game. That’s a game I had watched my dad play on our family Compaq back in the day, so I thought I knew what I was getting into, but the combination of the game having secret narrative branches (that change based on a random seed when you start a new game, I think) and the posts being written in a first person, hard-boiled noir style, made me think that we had played different games.

For sure! You’ve convinced me to give it another look after unfairly writing it off. It sounds much more interesting than I originally anticipated.

Could be that I’m a product of a country which produced Kevin Costner as Robin Hood, and therefore don’t have the best grip on the culture cross the pond, but I feel like suggesting “Arthurian”=“Irish” might get you in trouble in certain pubs.

Interesting. I remember taking a look at the previous game from a couple of years ago because, in spite of myself, edgelord dark fantasy is still appealing to me if it’s done knowingly (which is different, I’ll hasten to add, from not taking it seriously). However, one glance at the screenshots told me it was a deck-building game and I immediately disregarded it. It’s just not a mechanic or loop that I enjoy.

However, given that this appears to be to Skyrim what, say, The Outer Worlds is to Starfield (narrative tone notwithstanding), my interest is piqued.

Are you enjoying the game?

That’s fair. For me, those first Bond movies are like a travelogue. Not only to a different place, but also a different time. So, I forgive the parts of From Russia with Love (for example) that drag, because I can still luxuriate in seeing Venice at that time. With Thunderball, the big “destination” is the Bahamas if I remember correctly. Coming so soon after Dr. No’s Jamaica set stuff, and the focus on filming the sea floor more than the scenery, just leaves me underwhelmed ultimately.

I’d be curious where you rack and stack it later.

Idk man, Tron is a weird franchise. For one, I dispute your assertion that the consensus is the movie is bad. By and large, the takes I have come across boil down to, “It’s okay…but why is it here?”.

Review aggregators (while not the be-all-end-all of a movie’s reception, hence Bridges’ quote in the article) suggest the critics are about evenly split and audiences are generally higher on it. At worst, the response is mixed.

The reason I bring this up is because, if your comment had a mishap with the Internet Wayback Machine and was sent back in time 15 years, I wouldn’t blink an eye at “Ares”. I’d have just automatically subbed in “Legacy”, cause there’s no way I would have guessed the Disney was going to make the same mistake a third time when it comes to Tron.

Hoo boy, I generally enjoy early Bond, but I feel like you’re being too kind to Thunderball. As I understand it, the underwater photography was pretty astonishing at the time, and it certainly feels like the movie was structured around the idea of SCUBA being the new hotness. Unfortunately, now that those concepts are relatively quotidian, you’re left with a slow, clunky movie whose big action sequences are (by nature of being filmed underwater) slow and clunky.

Whenever I get the urge to go back and watch the early Bonds, Thunderball is always one I skip.

My God, I long to experience a fraction of your appetite for film. Call it poorly managed ADHD (I usually do) or whatever else you like, but I cap out at like 3 movies a week, maybe even less if one is particularly challenging.

I mean, would you say modern Italian culture is the same as Roman culture? Devoid of context, the idea that your civilization evolves over time isn’t a bad one from a fluff standpoint, and, as another user mentioned, it increases the likelihood of niche or late-game specific civs getting play, so I can see mechanical benefit too.

That being said, if anyone said the execution fell flat, I’ve no reason to doubt them.

Love me some Goth Gamer Nation, but the other creator is unknown to me. Always happy to find another creator though, thanks for the recommendation.

I mean, that’s the goal of all of these AI companies. If you peruse any marketing material for Google, Microsoft, ChatGPT, Grok, etc. they almost all mention the “agentic capabilities” of their flavor of spyware.

Personally, an AI model which is capable of doing tasks like this would actually interest me. However, no organization (for profit or otherwise) is trustworthy enough to have access to all of the data on me that it would take to make an agentic AI actually useful, so, for me, it would have to be something I run locally. However, rather than invest all of the time, effort, and money into learning how to make that happen, I think I’ll just call the damn dealership and schedule an appointment. I may suffer from terminally online brain rot, but I’m not so paralyzed by human interaction I can’t make the occasional phone call.

AgenTic, not Agenic. As in, an AI that acts as your agent. Meaning, the goal would be to have an AI model that you could direct to perform certain tasks in the background while you focus on other things.

For example, youre in the middle of doing something or another when you remember that your oil change is due. You pull up KraftonAI and tell it to “book me a service appointment for my vehicle at the dealership this weekend”. The AI proceeds to work on that task in the background, only prompting you for input if it meets a road block it doesn’t understand.

Now, I like Constantine just fine, or at least I remember liking it, though I acknowledge that that could be a case of the last sequence of that movie being so awesome it forgives a lot of the sins of the first hour and change. I’m a sucker for interesting character actors doing interesting work, and the Swinton/Stormare combo at the end is so choice.

With that being said, what do you do with a Constantine movie now, especially if you want to cast Keanu again? Like, the safe thing to do would be a reboot I would think. The 2005 movie isn’t exactly a totem of pop culture, even if it’s rep has improved since release, and it’s not like it was a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material.

I can just see a studio exec sweating in their office trying to decide between the “legasequel to an IP which still has a few dregs of pop culture recognition” or the “franchise reboot which promises to ‘get the adaptation right this time’” buttons.

Ive been growing my hair on t over the past year and half and every time I go back into the salon, I show my gal a series of images from a different Kurt Russell film. It’s been working out pretty well for me this far, next up is getting the beard to match…

JACK: “I’m beginning to feel like a little bit of an outsider here…”

ALL: “You are!”

No, you’re fine, I totally understand the mistake. I AM a pretty big HoMM fan and I was unaware that they had licensed out the IP as well, so I can’t blame you for not knowing.

I agree that there is something bland about the aesthetics of the game. From a distance (or in a thumbnail), it looks very good and faithful to the art style of the original games, just with some extra bells and whistles. However, upon closer examination there is something about the design language which feels like I’m looking at a mobile game ad. It could be that I associate HoMM with a hyper specific micro genre of fantasy art. My views are very HoMM 2 coded, and that game feels its art was ripped from the book jackets of Del Rey and Tor published paperbacks circa 1987. I love the look, especially the hero portraits.

So, this new look doesn’t really do anything for me. I’m not knowledgeable enough to suggest that AI was used to design some of these assets, but that’s the impression the art gives me, which I’m sure was not their intent.