RickRussell_CA

If I remember correctly, at the time Valve justified the 30% by pointing out that Apple was charging the same for music and video content. And Valve immediately started building value-added services like forums, updaters, multiplayer support, achievements, etc. to justify the price.

If you compare what Valve was doing to the physical media distribution methods of the period, it was a MASSIVE improvement. Back then, you could sell 10000 units to Ingram Micro or PC Mall, or whatever, and you only got paid if they sold. And any unsold inventory would be destroyed and the reseller would never pay for it. And if you actually wanted anything other than a single-line entry in their catalogs, you paid a promotional fee. Those video games featured with a standup display or a poster in the window at the computer store? None of that was free; the developer was nickeled and dimed for every moment their game was featured in any premium store space.

Huh. So, I actually own Lugaru, which I purchased through Humble Bundle in May 2010.

It… was not a good game. Basically anthropomorphic rabbits beating the crap out of each other, which SOUNDS good, but was not executed well.

Eh, I was there. The games were OK.

The biggest change is that we put up with a lot more repetitive gameplay back then, just because that’s how games were and there wasn’t enough horsepower to make complex stuff.

Today, you blow through a level of a modern first person game, or whatever, and see only a tiny fraction of what the game makers created for you. I played Titanfall 2 for the first time recently, and after playing the same level a few times, I noticed that a room that appears only briefly as you take an elevator past it has an extension cord coiled up on the floor. You can only see it if you look down as the elevator goes up, so you can see the floor of the room.

Old games didn’t have the room for those kinds of indulgences.

ChatGPT, program a Metroidvania 2d retro 16 bit graphics video game featuring a naked Emilia Clarke.

Capcom has absolute authority to price its games however they see fit.

If they make choices that put them out of business, that’s on them.

RiffTrax Friends, The Gizmoplex, and Twitch Turbo give me everything I need.

What even is his complaint?

That he doesn’t a fraction of the talent required to make a game this good.

I can feel the saliva-moistened Cheeto crumbs being sprayed into my face.

unlike HZD you actually have a limit to amount of traps you can set

Err. Hmm. One of my complaints about HZD was that it put an arbitrary limit on the number of traps you could set. Somewhere around ~25, the first trap disappears when you lay the next trap.

Reducing the number of traps is a con, not a pro. If I’m willing to gather materials and craft traps, let me use them as I see fit.

I hope it’s decent. One of the things that bugged me about the DLC for the original HZD was that they turned most combat areas into flat, contained arenas where you couldn’t really take advantage of geography and use planning to kill your targets.

Bottlenecking, laying traps, getting advantage of ground, taking advantage of limited mobility of the robots, stealth… all the gameplay videos I’ve seen look SO BORING.

A “stash” that is only accessible outside combat mostly preserves that balance, IMO.

Most games come up with a range of ways to get around the problem, even when they do have a strictly limited inventory with encumbrance:

• Zero weight quest items

• Ability to run or fast travel while encumbered (FO4 selectable perk)

• A pet or NPC capable of carrying your less valuable stuff back to the vendor for sale (Torchlight had this, did Diablo? I haven’t played in decades.)

• Pack animals/robots

• Portable vendors (Skyrim had a demon vendor you could summon once a day)

• Bags of holding (or similar)

• Warp chests (many chests with same contents/inventory around map)

etc. ad infinitum. The fact that most games implement a variety of ways to deal with absence of an infinite inventory is kind of a tipoff that it’s more of a burden than a desirable aspect of gameplay. Most of these games are holding up a carrot (or several) to get you to pursue certain achievements just to reduce the monotony of inventory management.

Season 29… of a video game?

I’m kind of glad I don’t play in whatever ecosystem that is. It sounds exhausting.

“I” is a first person pronoun that refers to the one who is speaking or writing.

And you’ve got KOTOR and Pillars of Eternity and others that are clearly D&D derivatives, but solve the problem handily with a “stash” whose contents are never accessible in combat.

I have never understood the fascination with inventory management. I just want to find stuff, and use that stuff later on. If I wanted something as boring as my actual job, I’d just do my actual job and get paid for it instead of buying a game.

Does the NVIDIA Tegra line support DLSS? I guess it could be based on the “Orin” line of ARM CPUs, but I can’t find anything suggesting they can do DLSS.

ship with an Ethernet port

I have to ask… why? The only device I’ve connected to hardwired Ethernet is a desktop PC in the same room as my router. I’ve not used ethernet for any portable device for eons. Why would you need it?

Classic it may not be, but every few years I fire up a copy of Oni, turn up my playlist of mid 90s mega-hits, and lay some smackdown on some terrorists.

Basically it’s the spatial exploration of a first person shooter with the fighting dynamics of something like Virtua Fighter.

“Neoliberalism and Its Prospects”. 1951

https://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/57816

I’m not drawing some elitist lines between hardcore and casual, I’m saying that the “video gaming revenue” graph is fundamentally defective because it’s lumping together genuinely different enterprises, with different audiences, marketing, and revenue models

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/

This entry explicates neoliberalism by examining the political concepts, principles, and policies shared by F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan, all of whom play leading roles in the new historical research on neoliberalism, and all of whom wrote in political philosophy as well as political economy. Identifying common themes in their work provides an illuminating picture of neoliberalism as a coherent political doctrine.

…

But several recent book-length treatments of neoliberalism (Burgin 2012; Biebricher 2018; Slobodian 2018; Whyte 2019) have helped give form to an arguably inchoate political concept. As Quinn Slobodian argues,

in the last decade, extraordinary efforts have been made to historicize neoliberalism and its prescriptions for global governance, and to transform the “political swearword” or “anti-liberal slogan” into a subject of rigorous archival research. (2018: 3)

Along similar lines, Thomas Biebricher (2018: 8–9) argues that neoliberalism no longer faces greater analytic hurdles than other political positions like conservatism or socialism.

In light of this recent historical work, we are now in a position to understand neoliberalism as a distinctive political theory. Neoliberalism holds that a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state. Neoliberals endorse liberal rights and the free-market economy to protect freedom and promote economic prosperity. Neoliberals are broadly democratic, but stress the limitations of democracy as much as its necessity. And while neoliberals typically think government should provide social insurance and public goods, they are skeptical of the regulatory state, extensive government spending, and government-led countercyclical policy. Thus, neoliberalism is no mere economic doctrine.

… etc …