Oh, yeah, for sure. The marketing they did for Guardians was also very bad, it really made it seem of a kind with Avengers, which it really wasn’t.
There will be a lot to say about why Rocksteady is getting to the looter shooter space so late and why it was the exact wrong move for the studio and the franchise. Unless the game is great and everybody buys it, I suppose.
Oh, big difference there, though. Suicide Squad actually IS a looter shooter driven by a wish to chase a business trend from five years to a decade ago. Guardians is a strictly single player Mass Effect-lite narrative action game (which yeah, given the material that fits).
I’d be with you in the argument that it would have been an even better game without the Marvel license, because then they could have skipped trying to rehash bits from the movies’ look and feel, which are consistently the worst parts of the game. But then, without the license it would never have been made, so… make mine Marvel, I guess. Well worth it.
Nah, I’m mostly kidding. About the being my enemy part. The game is, in fact, awesome, and you should fetch it somewhere before the absolute nightmare of licensed music and Disney IP bundled within it makes it unsellable on any digital platform forever.
Seriously, I bought a physical copy of the console version just for preservation, beause if you want to know what will be in the overprized “hidden gem” lists of game collectors in thirty years, it’s that.
Well, then you’re my enemy, because that game is great, Marvel connection or not. In fact it’s a fantastic companion piece ot the third Guardians movie, because they’re both really good at their respective medium but they are pushing radically oppposite worldviews (one is a Christian parable, the other a humanist rejection of religious alienation).
And yeah, holy crap, they made a Marvel game about grief and loss and managing them without turning to religion and bigotry and it was awesome and beautiful and nobody played it and you all suck.
Well, it depends on when they cancelled it and on how much it cost. That thing didn’t sell THAT poorly, but Square, as usual, was aiming way above what’s realistic. Estimates on Steam alone put it above 1 million copies sold. You can assume PS5 was at least as good.
Based on those same estimates it actually outsold Guardians. Which is an absolute travesty and I blame anyone who hasn’t played it personally.
It’s all usable when you get used to it, but this is a great thread to link for people who develop scripting and programming languages, or just text-based technical interfaces. Because yeah, all that crap is designed with the US layout in mind and screw whoever chooses to use ~ and | as commonplace characters.
FWIW, I don’t even code and I still keep a US layer in the background. I forget which one I’m using constantly, it’s all muscle memory. I just Win-space and try again whenever I type a character and it’s not what I expect.
Hey, at least that game came out. Plus Eidos Montreal also made the actually really, really damn good Guardians of the Galaxy game nobody played. I’d make that trade.
Man, these guys really can’t catch a break. That sucks, they make pretty solid stuff.
I am honestly not super sure about this strategy of buying your way into being a major publisher by vacuuming up IP nobody else was bidding for. What did they think would happen? Did they think the old majors were leaving a ton of money on the table and then realized too late that these really weren’t that profitable? Or was it just a bid that the low interest rates would last forever and the portfolion would just pay for itself if they bundled it large enough?
I don’t know what the business plan was meant to be, and it’s kinda killing me that I don’t fully grasp it.
The only one remotely close to being a hit was the first reboot. I guess it depends on whether you count the “I can’t believe it’s not Deus Ex” franchises they kept spinning up for a while. The first Dishonored probably did very well.
To be clear about what I’m saying, the setup is subtitles in the same language as the audio. So if you’re learning French you set French audio with French subtitles.
That REALLY helps bind the pronuntiation to the writing and it actually makes it far easier to understand the speech. Assuming you’re reading the subtitles at the same time, of course.
You won’t understand a lot of it, and you’ll have to put up with the frustration of losing the plot often for a while, but it does help, in my experience.
Subtitles in your own native language just make you tune out the audio and read the dialogue. That’s not helpful.
This is the answer. The answer is Netflix and Youtube. Anything with media using both audio and subtitles in the language you’re trying to learn.
You still need a teacher to get you past learning enough basics of vocabulary and grammar to get started (and no, language learning apps are probably not an effective way past that) but once you have enough basic words and you understand how a sentence is put together the answer is to watch media even if you don’t fully understand what’s being said, paying attention and stopping sometimes to use dictionaries and translators to get you there on sentences you almost get.
I know people who spent years spinning their wheels on learning apps while refusing to sit through media in the target language because they get frustrated or tired by the effort of trying to keep up. It’s a bit annoying, but it really works.
Yep, that was my point. There’s nothing fundamentally alien to using desktop Linux for most tasks when it’s standardized and preinstalled, you see that with the Raspberry Pi and Steam OS and so on. The problem is that people like to point at that (and less viable examples like ChromeOS or Android) as examples that desktop Linux is already great and intuitive and novice-friendly, and that’s just not realistic. I’ve run Linux on multiple platforms on and off since the 90s, and to this day the notion of getting it up and running on a desktop PC with mainstream hardware feels like a hassle and the idea of getting it going in a bunch of more arcane hardware, like tablet hybrids or laptops with first party drivers just doesn’t feel reasonable unless it’s as a hobbyist project.
Those things aren’t comparable.
No, I’m not talking past it. I just have less an issue with it. The Android thing is disingenuous, though.
But I did explicitly address it above, when I said once you have to pick a distro at all the OP has a point because that’s already past the level of insight casual users have or care about. It’s literally right there in my first response to you.
I’m not splitting hairs, I’m calling out a fallacious argument. If your take is that Desktop Linux is super accessible and mainstream because Android is a thing that’s a bad take.
Here’s how I know it’s a bad take: if I come over to any of the “what Distro should I use first” threads here and I tell you to try Samsung Dex you’re probably not going to be as willing to conflate those two things anymore.
But hey, yeah, no, Android is super accessible. So is ChromeOS. If that’s your bar for what Linux has become for home users, then yeah, for sure. Linux is on par with Windows in terms of accessibility. May as well call it quits on the desktop distros muddying the waters, then. I mean, if all that is Linux what are those? 1% of the Linux userbase? 0.1%? Why bother at that point?
I gotta say, the frequency with which you hear that Android/ChromeOS is actually Linux and it totally counts, or how successful Linux is on other applications is REALLY much less flattering to desktop Linux than people claiming that seem to think.
I’d argue the moment you have to pick a distro in the first place you’ve made the guy’s point. That’s already way past the level of interest, engagement or decision-making capacity most baseline users have. Preinstalled, tightly bound versions like Android or SteamOS are a different question, maybe. Maaaaybe.
You know what? Windows doesn’t get enough credit for its multimonitor window management. Win11 saving window combos and providing easy partitioning and docking on each monitor is actually really cool, and the keyboard shortcuts to handle them are simple and useful. There are lots of things about it I don’t like (I’ll keep whining for a movable taskbar until I get one back, Microsoft), but I’ll admit they do that well.
I don’t know if you’re joking or not here, but yeah, that’s a 200 bucks solution, so hardly support for “cheap HDMI cables are fine”, and for the distances I needed to cover a working HDMI fiber cable was a fraction of the cost (and it doesn’t need to be powered on both ends, either). If you’re trying to wire a whole house (or a studio, which is what those are for), then sure. If you just need the one long cable for home use… well, yeah, that’s the point of good cables. Still finicky and requires trial and error, but if you buy from a place that allows returns it’s more cost effective and it’ll do the job once you find the right mix of parts.
I worked retail enough to say that there’s a skill barrier to both the cheap and expensive stuff, and so to the difference being relevant.
Man, I hated gift wrapping when I worked retail. I sucked at it and as a customer you don’t consider that you’re just sitting there watching somebody do this thing live until you have to do it while being judged by some random stranger that has nothing better to do than stare at you.
OK, this one is true until it isn’t.
HDMI 1.4 and arguably 2.0 specs were straightforward enough that it was rare to encounter a cable, no matter how cheap, that did not support all the features you wanted if it listed the right HDMI spec. That… is no longer a universal truth with HDMI 2.1 if you need something that will do 4K120 with HDR. There are cables that just don’t like some ports, particularly on PCs.
Length is also a way this can be wrong. Go above 2.5-3m and you may start losing the ability to hit some of the spec. I have a HDMI setup that requires a longer cable and there are basic cables that work and some that don’t for the application. To get a better chance on longer cables you end up having to go for powered cables or HDMI over fiber, which are both more expensive than normal cables and it can be luck of the draw even with expensive cables whether they will like your devices and be compatible with what you’re trying to do.
So console plugged directly to your 60Hz TV over 1.5m? Sure, cheap cable will do. Longer distances or higher bandwidth requirements? Be prepared to shop around and try different options, potentially getting very expensive.
I genuinely never engaged with Reddit at all, so I’m not in a position to compare, but I don’t think the numbers suggest that Reddit “is dying” or even that it got significantly impacted.
Which is fine by me. If anything, the vibe here is less Reddit and more “late 90s/early 00s forums” and that’s an improvement on my book.