I loathe their lootbox system but I’d say valve is better than their rivals in most places. I’d put them far above Epic, Playstation, and Xbox for their games marketplace, far above meta in the VR space and on par with the game developers I respect in basically every aspect except lootboxes.
I don’t think we should respect, like or trust any large businesses but Valve is certainly the lesser evil of many choices.
I agree that no games are uncrackable in theory, but to my understanding (from about two years to two months ago at least), there were only two people able to crack new denuvo games due to how intensely complex the task is. One of those people only cracks football games and the other is EMPRESS, who from what I’ve seen glancing into the scene, is one crazy lady.
Although modern denuvo may technically be crackable, but while it’s so difficult that only a handful of people have the skill to do it and takes hundreds of hours of work per game, for all intents and purposes, it may as well be uncrackable.
The game I always think of checking out is Assassin’s Creed Mirage, just to find it hasn’t been cracked.
I know assassin’s creed is a bit of a crap franchise but I have a love / hate relationship with the game and think mirage looks made for me. Every few months since release I’ve looked up it’s crack status and not just has it not been cracked but generally the comments around it are that it’s from the new era of uncrackable games.
I don’t play many AAA games but I’m forever gutted that the fight to make them able to be pirated is a losing battle. I want to pay for my indie games but on occasion I look online at the crack status of AAA games from oecen 2-3 years ago and they’re still not playable.
It creates a weird dichotomy where people who pirate or at least don’t buy expensive games don’t take part in the mainstream gaming conversation at all, which is totally different from the rest of pirated media.
Do you mean should add RCS as in they’re expected to, or should add RCS as in “that would be wise”?
I don’t want to throw the word enshitiffication around, especially when I’m not sure if I can spell it, but the platforms that people jump ship to when that happens are probably especially vulnerable to people jumping ship again.
I can’t imagine Mozilla effectively marketing Firefox as anything but the bullshit free browser, and when they lose that, people will just move to the next actual bullshit free option.
I’m a 50/50 toss up between two reasonably different genres.
The first is coming of age films, particularly queer ones. My go to film to call my favourite is Call me By Your Name, I also love Stand By Me, Aftersun and have a huge soft spot for Kiki’s delivery service.
The other ‘genre’ is dramas / thrillers that get pretty fixated on madness, particularly from the protagonist. There will be Blood is my go to second film to say, and I love Apocalypse Now, Perfect Blue, The Witch and The lighthouse.
I’m not as much fan of when the genres overlap however, although that may be because of how small the sample size is. There are quite a few films that have a young protagonist who is finding themselves, who may end up idolising another to the point that the film falls into being a thriller. We had Saltburn last year, which people often compare to The Talented Mr Ripley, and I do enjoy these films but I never get that milestone feeling that I’ve just experienced a piece of media that has profoundly impacted me. The only thing that exists in this shared space is one of my favourite novels; The Picture of Dorian Gray.
I’m born in 98’ so I’m right down the middle but generally classed as the last of the millennials.
I feel a lot closer to zoomers, but where I’m from, I think the people who have fast-tracked adulthood with kids and mortgages are textbook millennials where as layabouts like myself share a lot more spaces with young adult zoomers.
I’m already needing to remind myself that some of the deepest internet brainrot like skibidi toilet is not a new phrase but a meme of the hour started by generation alpha and then carried by confused millennials.
Hey that’s exactly what my rent / wage split was in the UK last year. The only reason anything got better is that minimum wage went up while my rent hasn’t yet.
I honestly don’t think Lemmy will function well without a way for identical communities across different instances could subscribe to eachother, allowing a single feed of information. This would stop the instances splitting the userbase.
Early Reddit had a subreddit for everything, but most were dormant. However as soon as you posted on it, enough people had it on their front page that you’d get a response. I think Lemmy feels very similar to how Reddit did 10 years ago, except many of the dead communities are totally dead.
I definitely doubt the average comic author is pro billionaire. I think having an absurdly rich protagonist is just interesting for plot, not just does it easily justify the funding, but it easily generates a lot of plot hooks.
Growing up, I absolutely loved Peter Parker as just being the average broke kid, but I was never excited by the plot that generated that was largely school drama or conversations in small apartments.
On the other hand, there are plenty of cool things that Bruce Wayne gets to do. Sometimes he blends in with high society functions and you get an almost James Bond style investigation and sometimes you capture that Dracula style recluse skulking in his enormous manor, and both of those are very evocative even before you consider how it funds his heroics.
If I had a button that when pressed would kill the richest person in the world, I’d press it until I physically couldn’t any more. Hopefully the remaining millionaires would have the sense to see what’s happening and spread their wealth more evenly amongst people, and every now and again, I’d press the button a few more times just to keep things from reverting.
Killing a billionaire does nothing but presenting the idea that being among the richest people would result in some regular, omnipotent death would do a lot.
No.
This isn’t my standard instance but I do take a look at it sometimes. I’m definitely very far left leaning, I don’t have a label that clearly fits me but I’m probably close enough to anarcho-communism or syndicalism. I live in the UK so it’s pretty common for my views to fall further left of the USA.
I’m not particularly good at actually adhering to my own views, infact I don’t think I’ve ever done e anything substantial to bringing my ideals into reality. My dream would be for small federated housing / workers co-ops and unions to get a good handle in my area, and then have the stability to grow.
The crucial reason I’m not a tankie is that I actively oppose top down leadership structures, and I’m actually more against authoritarianism than I am against the right, but I feel that in my country, conservatism and authoritarianism are deeply linked, and a bottom up power structure would do more to actively oppose facism and power consolidation than a far left authoritarian regime.
In short, No. My principles may make me a commie, but I’m an anarchist first.
I just always give too much context to my stories, and quickly realise that I’m giving context for context for context and cant remember my point.
My closest friend is very similar here though, and we can have great long conversations that are 20 layers deep of tangents and forgetting our original points. We also sometimes yell ‘pin’ at eachother as a shorthand for ‘lets put a pin in this’ which basically means that at some point we’re trying to remember what we wanted to say at that point because it was fun.
Often when I try to copy other people’s facial expressions, I realise I have no control over my facial muscles if I try to move just the left or right side. It’s absolutely fine if I move both sides at once but I literally can’t even sense the muscle to move it when I try one side, but my friends can. I can wink though, but I used to do it very unnaturally.
I read that as “different because…” implied the author was in the closet.
Also, I live in a UK city that may be in the top three for left wing, LGBT, etc support and my best friend has had basically all of this said to her because of her sexuality and worse, including threats of rape yelled at her and threats of murder at her partner. I literally never hear these kinds of comments but they are absolutely things people in the queer community hear all the time.
Being a lame ally is better than being hostile though, and it’s a shame this comic blends bigotry with well meaning but lame support.
Indie also covers an enormous financial area. People generally group games into AAA, Some nebulous middle ground games that are generally produced by the major studios but aren’t AAA and Indie.
There is a difference between indie games that sell millions of copies vs dozens and this lack of discrepancy makes this complex. I once pirated a game called infernium after seeing a friend play it on switch, then learnt that it’s an absolutely tiny game by a solo developer. I happened to adore the level design and lore of that game so much that I bought it on steam and then bought all of his other games too just to support him.
On the flipside, we refer to a game like Hades as indie. I love supergiant games and have purchased all their titles but I would have felt zero remorse at pirating Hades.
Maybe the only thing that I feel is sad in all of this is that the massive AAA games takes years to be cracked nowadays, which means only indie games are pirateable. I don’t like the unfair dichotomy this creates. There are probably a reasonable amount of people who pirate indie games and buy AAA games for this reason, and that’s bad for industry.
There was an edgy but very fun indie game a few years ago (maybe 5-6?) where one player played as a parent running around and childproofing the house while the other played as the baby trying to kill themselves. The game was surprisingly fun, and weirdly putting the logic you’d heard your entire life to keep children safe to die was always quiet funny, from getting forks to plugs to filling the bath etc.
Taking inspiration to make a game in a psyche ward in a jail break / death is victory multiplayer game would probably make for a popular streaming game, although the topic is as horrible as the baby death game, perhaps worse because instead of being in the role of a silly unfortunate baby, you’d be in the role of somebody fully aware and acting with premeditation.
Oh no, I hate this art and design style:(
Long before ZA/UM closed, I was certain that we’d never see a new game of that quality again from the same studio.
I’m not confident any of these new teams will pull it off, but I’d rather have four attempts than one.