This feels like complaints over asset flips bleeding over into first-party asset reuse, because the people complaining don’t understand why the former is objectionable. It’s not that seeing existing art get repurposed is inherently bad (especially environmental art… nobody needs to be remaking every rock and bush for every game) but asset flips tend to be low effort, lightly-reskinned game templates with no original content. Gamers just started taking the term at face value and assumed the use of asset packs was the problem, rather than just a symptom of a complete lack of effort or care on the developers’ part

There are sophisticated and nuanced critiques to be made of Western power projection, soft and hard. “Nuanced” and “sophisticated” are not words appropriate to the average hexbear or lemmygrad denizen’s take on geopolitics, and for those of us who live in the real world rather than living to argue over how many Maos can dance on the tip of the icepick that killed Trotsky, the loud and unrelenting naysaying of anything less extreme than “armed proletarian revolution now!” got to be incredibly tiresome, not to mention the constant cheerleading of brutally-repressive regimes that don’t have any values in common with actual socialists or communists just because they oppose the US and its allies.

Please be moddable…

I had quite a bit of fun with it for a few weekends with my friends, but ultimately the lack of a system for mechanical progression left it feeling a bit shallow (ha!). As a primarily PvE game with light PvP it’s in a weird place where it doesn’t have quite enough RPG-like elements to hold my interest on the PvE side, or enough player-on-player combat to make it a gripping contest of skill.

It’s still a fun game to hop into from time to time, but it’s never been appointment gaming for me

Quite sure – and given that one game I’ve been playing lately (and the exception to the lack of shooters in my portfolio) is Selaco, so I ought to have noticed by now.

There’s a very slight difference in smoothness when I’m rapidly waving a mouse cursor waving around on one screen versus the other, but it’s hardly the night-and-day difference that going from 30fsp to 60fps was back in Ye Olden Days, and watching a small, fast-moving, high-contrast object doesn’t make up the bulk of gameplay in anything I play these days.

The old one and the new one are literally side by side on my desktop, don’t know what to tell you…

At launch the 360 was on par graphically with contemporary high-end GPUs, you’re right. By even the midpoint of its seven year lifespan, though, it was getting outclassed by midrange PC hardware. You’ve got to factor in the insanely long refresh cycles of consoles starting with the six and seventh generations of consoles when you talk about processing power. Sony and Microsoft have tried to fix this with mid-cycle refresh consoles, but I think this has honestly hurt more than helped since it breaks the basic promise of console gaming – that you buy the hardware and you’re promised a consistent experience with it for the whole lifecycle. Making multiple performance targets for developers to aim for complicates development and takes away from the consumer appeal

Eh… Consoles used to be horribly crippled compared to a dedicated gaming PC of similar era, but people were more lenient about it because TVs were low-res and the hardware was vastly cheaper. Do you remember Perfect Dark multiplayer on N64, for instance? I do, and it was a slideshow – didn’t stop the game from being lauded as the apex of console shooters at the time. I remember Xbox 360 flagship titles upscaling from sub-720p resolutions in order to maintain a consistent 30fps.

The console model has always been cheap hardware masked by lenient output resolutions and a less discerning player base. Only in the era of 4K televisions and ubiquitous crossplay with PC has that become a problem.

Might just be my middle-aged eyes, but I recently went from a 75Hz monitor to a 160Hz one and I’ll be damned if I can see the difference in motion. Granted that don’t play much in the way of twitch-style shooters anymore, but for me the threshold of visual smoothness is closer to 60Hz than whatever bonkers 240Hz+ refresh rates that current OLEDs are pushing.

I’ll agree that 30fps is pretty marginal for any sort of action gameplay, though historically console players have been more forgiving of mediocre performance in service of more eye candy.

Inland is (or was, at least) relabeled eSun filament, and they’re considered a decent brand for basic filaments. I’ve only ever used their PLA(+) but it’s always been bulletproof.

The number of rail bridge collapses covered by Well There’s Your Problem where the episode opens with a retelling of how the railroad company owner designed the bridge himself because the engineers couldn’t grasp the genius of his vision is too damn high.

But it did give us a damn fine concert movie from Muse, and that’s indisputable.

I was a longtime Debian/apt diehard but I’m coming down on the same side of late. My homelab runs Proxmox (Debian based) with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS containers for more up-to-date packages, but my attempt to use KDE Neon (Ubuntu-based) for my desktop PC was a disaster. I’ve switched to Nobara (Fedora-based), and other than having to switch from Wayland back X11 because Wayland on NVidia breaks a bunch of things I need for work it’s been relatively smooth sailing.

For some the optionality of it is less important than the notion that if it’s performative, you can be bad at it and therefore make yourself an acceptable target for abuse, and besides that the idea that some roles can be restricted to only those with a certain set of physical characteristics is deeply ingrained in many, be that in terms gender, career, or what have you.

I loved the in-the-moment gameplay and the narrative arc they had going there for a while. Despite myself I’m still invested in some of the characters… but it’s one of those games where I really recognized how all-consuming the engagement treadmill I had been on once I stepped away. It’s probably a good thing for me that it’s in the shitter at the moment, or I could easily get lured back in.

Oh, and the r/DtG mods deleted my highly-upvoted Lightfall “lore/prediction” shitpost that was a massive wall of text winding up to an Attack on Titan pun, so fuck 'em.

The server I set up for my friends is named “Portable Creatures: Exhalation of the Wilderness” for a reason.

Can’t forget the spineties!

Greed isn’t the problem, per se – it’s that outside of the biggest sites, which could hoover up ad targeting data of hundreds of millions to billions and sell that data through their own internal ad platform – the model was never viable to begin with. Notice that the enshittification really took off all soon as interest rates jumped? Tech startups have all been floating along on easy money, but now that loans aren’t basically free, VC dollars are drying up. Companies that could previously offset their capital burn with yet another round of investment now suddenly need to make money on their own merit, and are finding that they have to cut service to the bone and monetize the bejeezus out of what’s left if they have any chance of survival.

“massively successful” in the context of Larian’s entries in the Divinity series or even Pillars of Eternity, which moved almost three quarters of a million units in its first year on sale, don’t count as successes in the eyes of AAA publishers like EA or Ubisoft. Dragon Age: Inquisition moved more than a million copies in its first week on sale, was Bioware’s biggest launch (probably ever, given the current state of the studio), and still barely made an impression in EA’s bottom line. In the same year FIFA 12 sold 3 million copies in its first week, and with its Ultimate Team gacha system represented a much longer stream of ongoing revenue than anything a self-contained single player RPG could provide.

Not to mention, deep single-player RPGs are massive undertakings, that appeal to a somewhat fickle playerbase. EA and Activision have demonstrated with FIFA, Madden, and CoD that they can cheaply reskin the same game over and over on an annual basis and move multiple millions of copies each time, without making an effort. Why take a risk on a relatively niche genre where your game could flop because of an off story beat or wonky mechanic, when you can just stick your last megahit in the photocopier and have it poop out another nine-figure megahit?

BG3 is of course a massive success and should be celebrated, but big publishers want to maximize their return on investment, and right now that means wedging live service offerings, loot box mechanics, and micro transactions into whatever genre maintains the most engagement over time. Right now that means multiplayer shooters and sports games.

Cats don’t have the metabolic pathways that dogs and humans have that process and neutralize many common insecticides belonging to a class called pyrethroids. For cat flea control meds, these are substituted with fipronil, which is (less) toxic and doesn’t get absorbed through the skin, though when we were dealing with a flea infestation a few years back we still had problems when one of our cats ended up being flexible enough to scrape the gel off its neck and lick it off its paw. Bottom line, though, cats tend to have a lot more trouble with metabolizing medications generally, and tend to encounter problems with “cat safe” meds more often than you’d expect. You have to be careful about monitoring your cat after starting a medication generally.