loobkoob

Is the fully casted radio version not the best version to listen to anyway?

There certainly was some actual “ethics in video game journalism” discussion early on that I felt was legitimate, but that got drowned out pretty quickly by the misogynists (which, from what I gather, was the entire point - it seems the misogynists started the whole thing and used the “ethics in game journalism” thing as a front to try to legitimise their agenda).

I think the discussion about the personal relationships game journalists have with developers in general was a reasonable one to have. It unfortunately ended up just laser focusing on Zoe Quinn supposedly trading sex for good reviews, which was untrue, sexist and resulted in nasty personal attacks. But I think it was worth at least examining the fact that game journalists and game developers often have close relationships and move in the same circles, and that game journalism can often be a stepping stone to game development. Those are absolutely things that could influence someone’s reviews or articles, consciously or subconsciously.

And another conversation worth having was the fact that gaming outlets like IGN were/are funded by adverts from gaming companies. It makes sense, of course - the Venn diagram of IGN’s (or other gaming outlets’) readers and gaming companies’ target audience is almost a perfect circle, which makes the ad space valuable to the gaming companies. And because it’s valuable to gaming companies, it’s better for the outlets to sell the ad space to them for more money than to sell it to generic advertising platforms. But it does mean it seems valid to ask whether the outlets giving bad reviews or writing critical articles might cause their advertisers to pull out, and therefore they might avoid being too critical.

Now I don’t think the games industry is corrupt or running on cronyism, personally. And I certainly don’t believe it’s all run by a shadowy cabal of woke libruls who are trying to force black people, women (and worse, gasp black women shudder) into games. But I do feel it was worth asking about the relationships between journalists, developers, publishers and review outlets - and honestly, those are the kinds of things that both game journalists and people who read game journalism should constantly be re-evaluating. It’s always good to be aware of potential biases and influences.

The fact that the whole thing almost immediately got twisted into misogyny, death threats and a general hate campaign was both disappointing and horrifying. And the fact that it led to the alt-right, and that you can trace a line from it to Brexit and to Donald Trump becoming US president, is even worse.

“poop knife xDD hehe”

There’s so much actually great content posted across reddit over the years, it blows my mind that people decided that was something that needed to be mentioned all the time.

Not that your suggestion is necessarily bad in general, but I don’t really think it’s necessary when it comes to Factorio. I think it should be clear from playing the demo whether 100+ more hours of that seems worth the asking price for someone. It’s probably the most representative demo I’ve ever played; the full game is just the demo but more. There are no surprises down the line. There are no random pivots to other genres, or the game trying to stick its fingers in too many pies. There’s no narrative to screw up. There’s no “oh, they clearly just spent all their time polishing the first hour of the game and the rest of it is a technical mess”. It’s the same gameplay loop from the demo for another 50 hours until you “win”.

… and then another 50 hours after that when you decide to optimise things. And then another 100 hours when you decide to make a train-themed base. And then another 700 hours when you discover some of the mods that exist…

(It has been funny watching some of my coworkers learn a new coding technique and finding it to be so cool that they apply it everywhere regardless of whether it fits or not while I think to myself, “Ah, I remember when I went through that phase as a teenager!”)

I’m not a programmer (although suggestions on a language to start learning with - with no project in mind - would be welcome!), but I’ve found similar things with my old musical projects. I look back some old project files and see that I used various techniques all the time that I don’t necessarily use nowadays. Sometimes, I think I probably should use them more than I do now, but I definitely overused them back then when I first discovered them.

I guess it’s just exciting when you learn something and it opens up a bunch of possibilities for you!

My keyboard (Swiftkey) gets very excited about the possibilities when I start to hyphenate words to create compounds. It accepts that they exist, but it starts trying to throw all sorts of random suggestions in for what the second word could be (and it rarely gets the right word).

Well I’m just glad Harry Mack managed to release his 100th episode of “Omegle Bars” this week. He decided to take a break from doing Omegle-based content at the right time, it seems.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Harry Mack’s a freestyle rapper. He has (had) a series where he’d ask strangers on Omegle to give him a handful of words and then create a full song out of them on the fly. And not just saying those words then immediately moving on like most freestyle rappers do; he actually creates entire verses on the topics he’s given and really raps around them. Plus he’d be calling out things the people were doing as they react to him, responding to things they say, mentioning things he can see in the room, etc, as he raps.

Here’s one of his freestyles that’s really stuck with me ever since I first saw it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehcA4zCeaPI

He takes what are some fairly negative, “cry for help” words from the girls and turns them into a really beautiful, positive rap overall. He’s a very positive guy in general, and I’ve watched him consistently since I discovered him. Binging his videos got me through a breakup, in fact.

My own experiences with Omegle have either been penises or just bland, and it’s not something I’ve used for many years as a result. But videos like Harry Mack’s show what wonderful things could come from it and I do think it’s a huge shame it’s gone. It feels like another part of the old internet’s gone, and that we’re moving even closer to the sanitised, heavily-monetised internet run by megacorporations. I hate that.

They’re not asking for it to be banned from the instance, or from Lemmy entirely; they just want it to be moderated out of this community.

WhatsApp desktop isn’t so bad nowadays, ever since they made it so you can use it without running through your phone. But I agree that Telegram’s desktop client is much better.

The factory must grow!

Like I said, I’ve been actively boycotting Blizzard for years now; I’m not sure why you think I’d want to “slop on their dick”. But yes, if a game is fine on a technical level and mediocre in every other sense, why wouldn’t it be a 5/10? A game that runs properly and is otherwise unnoteworthy is probably already better than the average game out there. There’s a lot of shovelware.

There’s a reason review outlets like IGN rarely give scores below 5/10 - it’s that almost any AA or AAA studio is going to be competent enough to get their game to run and have something to it. Even Redfall is a 5/10 on Metacritic. 5/10 games aren’t generally worth your time, but that’s only because there are so many 7+/10 games competing for your time/attention.

Even though I have no love for Blizzard as a company, and have never played Overwatch 2, I refuse to believe it’s in the bottom half of all games ever. A lot of the grievances I’ve seen about it seem completely justified, but it’s not a game that’s truly awful. It’s good on a technical level. It has good art direction. The characters are unique and identifiable, even to people who’ve never played Overwatch. I get that people don’t like the balance, they don’t like Blizzard’s money-grabbing, they don’t like the change to 5v5(?), and they don’t like whatever else people are complaining about. But that doesn’t make it the worst game on Steam, and it doesn’t make every single aspect of it bad.

This is stupid. I have no love for Overwatch or Blizzard - I’ve been boycotting them for years, in fact. But there are far, far worse games on Steam than OW2. The fact that, to my knowledge, it runs properly, doesn’t have crypto miners built into it, and isn’t just made from stolen assets already puts it at like a 5/10 at minimum.

I’m all for consumers standing up for themselves and being critical or poor products, but I really wish people wouldn’t get caught up in these hate bandwagons.

Or two overlapping lines of cocaine!

Also they’re not tweeting anymore, they’re . . .

Spewing xcrement

It’d make for a good anti-spam measure if there was a limit to the number of DMs users could send to other people who don’t follow them back. It’d mean people can still use Twitter DMs like a normal messaging service (which isn’t something I care for, but I know some people use it like that).

As it is, it just feels similar to the whole “rate limiting the number of tweets people can view per day” thing, where they’re taking the most obvious route to reducing bandwidth usage by restricting users.

I definitely shared that opinion a few years ago. I found Fallout 4 disappointing, Fallout 76 was a disaster (I’ve heard people say it’s better now, but I still feel like a lot of the design decisions are at odds with Fallout as an IP) and they were making a lot of poor decisions.

But I can’t help but be optimistic for Starfield. It’s not just the recent presentation that gives me hope; everything I’ve seen about their approach to it and their design philosophies seems promising to me. I’m sure it’ll still have some of that traditional Bethesda jank to it, but I’m more than happy to accept some jank if I get a proper RPG with some good player agency.