The supply chain problems of covid REALLY broke everyone.

Consoles selling out is actually “bad”. Why? Because they are closed gardens. If people can go down to best buy or browse amazon and pick up a console they are more likely to buy a few games to go with it. Rather than needing to frantically monitor five different discord servers to get into a queue as fast as possible to MAYBE get one. The former encourages browsing and impulse buys. The latter is basically only for people with very targeted shopping lists.

Also… it is not even October. MAYBE come early November you can start to make these assessments for that most holy of holidays, Black Friday. But hell day and xmas are still months out and the holiday rush of shopping hasn’t begun yet.

I personally see nothing compelling about the ps5 pro. But this is the equivalent of buying an xbox and saying microsoft are going to win because they have a stronger supply chain.

We live in a world where everything you do or say on the internet is potentially part of someone else’s training data. Lemmy is already a shitshow for that but you can bet that “ooh, piracy board” is fair game for everyone because nobody would be dumb enough to sue about that.

If someone wants to delete a comment for ANY reason, they are more than welcome to.

If y9ou are close enough to a system of importance that you can spray it, you are close enough to compromise it in countless other ways.

This is just one of many physical access attacks. Just like “you could take a hammer to it”

Like, I know people want to think this is some Ocean’s Eleven heist waiting to happen. It isn’t. This is only viable if you can drench an area with helium (which means you can already gas everyone you care about) or you have such close physical access that there are so many other things you could do. At best it is an episode of Burn Notice where Michael has to rapidly improvise an escape where his CIA handler of the week already refused to give him something much more useful.

If you are close enough to spray a device you are close enough to just steal it. Or spray the owner.

If you are in a position where you can dump random gases into the air supply to the degree it impacts these devices then they are likely compromised in other ways as well.

I would actually very much argue that the N64 is when they “stopped trying” as it were.

Sony (which is a can of worms on its own), Sega, and even frigging Atari realized that CD-ROM was “the future”. Nintendo… let’s skip the Sony aspect and just say they chose not to.

The end result is that everyone else had 700 MB-ish to use for resources and were working on finding ways to hide the load times (RIP Shang Tsung). Nintendo continued to use a cartridge that could hold 4-12 and later 32 and 64 MB. This meant dialogue and cutscenes remained almost non-existent and texture work was similarly VERY limited in favor of solid colors.

Its Nintendo and most of The Internet are still the kids on the playground looking to beat up the Sega kids so we mostly talk about the good parts of those consoles going forward. But it is always fun to watch one of the Influencers have that “So… outside of like four games the N64 REALLY sucked, huh? BUT THOSE FOUR GAMES ARE THE GREATEST GAMES TO EVER EXIST AND I STILL LOVE YOU MIYAMOTO SAN!!!”. Whereas we all almost universally agree “The Playstation had an amazing library… and most of them look like someone sharted on the screen” because… 700 MB is still not a lot for texture and audio work. And “Oh yeah. The Sega Saturn existed… That was the tower of power, right?”

And from then on? It was gimmick city. The Gamecube was “portable” because of the handle. Wii is obvious. Wii U was marketed atrociously but actually was way ahead of its time in terms of second screen (… I actually loved my Wii U) but was marketed like another condom for a wii mote. And the Switch is obviously the gameboy/console hybrid.

Different people like different games.

But SoD is very much built around that sandbox style gameplay. Your guide is how you connect the evidence of whatever crime you are investigating.

That said: I think the tutorial is “a lot” but it is well worth doing at least a good chunk of it. They do a great job of teaching you the basic steps for how to investigate a murder and what to do next.

Its Nintendo. They are always a decade behind on new technology.

Come 2032 or so they are going to be all about how great this technology that lets them create custom VAs for all their characters (so they never have another Marinet situation) is amazing.

I mean… it is removing DRM. It is literally a crack. It is just that people (and outlets) thought they were clever for saying “mod”.

So… the crack is down and now there is even more fuel for the “mods are bad because they are for pirates” stupidity.

I am sure marketing folk have a reason for it but… this really feels like the kind of thing you put alongside the PS5 Pro announcement that the entire planet watched. Rather than leaving everyone wondering “so… why would I buy a ps5 pro?”

It isn’t about being reasonable.

If you are expected to track your time to this degree (and, to make it clear, the majority of employers actively don’t want you to), there is a reason. That reason usually being different funding sources. Generally a mix of grants and clients.

And if a client or grant source finds out you are lying about those? Maybe you only had enough work to do 34 hours instead of 40 hours in one week. Would you be cool paying extra because the guy repairing your muffler had a slow week?

And if people think being proud of a tool that openly talks about what everyone else silently does isn’t a red flag for employers? Hey, its a great job market so I am sure none of that will matter.

Tracking time is fine.

Normalizing your time to the hours you were supposed to work is a massive no no. Especially if you are expected to break down your hours per project.

I mean, you obviously do it. But you never put it in writing.

Pretending the most important use of bit torrent is Linux ISO’s is the kind of cya that people giggle at.

If a candidate I am interviewing has a tool to change their reported hours to me or clients on their public GitHub? That person is radioactive no matter how many times they say “but don’t do anything naughty wink wink”

So … it is a tool to automate time fraud?

Make sure to put this front and center on your CV

Is saving the game from an early leak worth getting rid of physical games? I hope not.

As a PC gamer who has been basically digital only since the late 00s/early 10s? Probably?

But the thing to remember is that, like with DRM, the studios have this data. There are orgs dedicated to analyzing (and selling…) sales data that can detect the impact that Mass Effect PC being “unplayable” for pirates because of securom for the first week or so had on sales (anecdotal but… probably real positive). Because this kind of stuff costs money (well, less so for removing a disc drive…) and they aren’t going to do that if they think it will hurt revenue.

Releasing physical months after the digital release basically guarantees you are only selling to enthusiasts and it no longer is economically viable. That is why companies like LRG exist.

Like almost everything, it isn’t about stopping piracy entirely.

Physical copies get sold early by stores/cashiers that don’t care. Or they get outright pocketed/copied at the factories and warehouses. Which lead to the constant “This nintendo game leaked a week or a month or whatever early”. Which… less so after the lawsuits but it means emulators can be updated to support the games before they even hit shelves.

Digital only doesn’t entirely stop that. But it tends to lead more toward “an unknown fake influencer posted all the cutscenes of this game online a week early”.

And if you are wondering why Sony is killing physical games…

In basically every Yakuza/Like a Dragon game, you play as a former Yakuza who continues to interact with both yakuzas and civillians. Generally speaking, the core story is VERY melodramatic but the sub stories (short side quests) are zany and incredibly horny (one of the most famous ones involved Kiryu teaching a sex worker how to be a dominatrix… at a children’s playground) with generally a really zany side story (longer side quest) where you might own a cabaret club or play pokemon with homeless people or whatever.

That said, Ichiban and Majima (the player character of this installment) tend to have MUCH zanier adventures. Because Kiryu is sort of kind of above it whereas Ichiban is a mentally ill guy who grew up with video games and Majima is half “I act crazy to protect those I love” and half “I am batshit fucking insane”.

So what I expect from this? Incredibly zany opening as an amnesiac Goro Majima comes to terms with waking up in Hawaii (the R in RGG stands for “Reuse excessively”). And he’ll become a pirate to fight all the evil pirates (past games had Kiryu lead an army to fight against NJPW wrestlers who had armies of their own) but also likely rob some fools what need robbing because…

Kiryu semi-officially does not kill (it is ambiguous and unclear how much is a meme based on a mistranslation). Majima leaves huge piles of corpses in his wake.

And then, around chapter 6 or so, we’ll find out why Majima is in Hawaii. Shooting my shot (and obviously spoiler tagging it) but I expect

At its core, the Yakuza games are incredibly heartfelt Japanese Crime Dramas with Soap Opera plots weaved in. Sometimes you are a criminal and sometimes you are someone caught up in it all. You usually have a very personal stake in the overall story whether it is protecting your kids or figuring out what really happened to your baseball career. But always, you are someone who cares about those that society ignores (homeless people, sex workers, trans folk, former yakuza, etc) who is inevitably willing to stand up against the forces of light and darkness to protect them. Because the yakuza/LAD games are not about being a modern day yakuza. They are about the ideal of the yakuza of olde.

For those unaware, most criminal organizations rise to power because of a lack of protection from the government. Many predominantly African American or Latino gangs very much “began” to protect their communities from racism and bigotry. And Warrior was a show that depicted this with Chinese triads in turn of the century San Francisco. They were far from altruistic organizations but they fulfilled a role the cops actively refused to (often fighting against the cops themselves). And, over the decades, efforts are made to villify them which results in nobody “good” joining which, in turn, results in only the worst of the worst joining.

In Japan, this very much happened with the yakuza. Getting into their feudal counterparts is complex but the LAD games touch on this with Hiroshima in 6. Following the war, the Japanese government was in shambles and a lot of people were left to fend for themselves. Crime families stepped in to act as small mini governments and protect and provide for Their people (for a totally modest fee…). But, over the decades, the Japanese government did a spectacular job of villifying the yakuza to the point that only the most evil fuckers join (many of Takashi Miike’s movies touch on this. And he even did a LAD short film back in the day)

Which is where the games come in. Kiryu, Ichiban, and Yagami and their crews are very much what a yakuza SHOULD be. They are people who have forsaken their role in polite society because they want to protect those who can’t protect themselves. They are far from perfect but that is how you get those sharp contrasts of partying it up and fighting off hordes of drunk salarymen for fun to realizing a group of sex workers have been abducted and are being trafficked to who knows where all in the name of “progress”.

And its how you get those cliche anime bullshit moments of the evil crime lord you have been feuding with the first half of the game suddenly becomes one of your strongest allies when it is revealed that a government organization is brutalizing people. Because he also feels the same way and agrees that putting a stop to this Evil is far more important than who has control of a street.

I mean… where do you think the “this has a terrible launch” comes from?

If Influencers like a game, everyone looks past the massive performance and stability issues. If influencers don’t like a game, a single crash is enough to mark it as trash that should be ignored until a couple patches… which is a death sentence for a multiplayer game that requires a critical mass of players to be worth buying.