When I bought my buddy’s used GameCube for like $50 back in 2005, he gave me an extra controller and Smash Bros. Melee with it.
Just on that game alone I logged more than 2,000 hours playing almost literally every day for 4 years alongside my dorm-mates and buddies.
That’s like… $0.02 and a half cents per hour… for a whole ass GameCube and a game.
…Best purchase I ever made.
The problem is the idea of working on games sounds amazing… and it allows them to pull in a constant fresh young pool of eager workers willing to completely destroy themselves to make their mark on the world and release something they’re passionate about…
And all these publicly traded ghoulish-MBA-run companies would rather have more cheap inexperienced “Pikmin” type workers to throw at endless “copycat-chase-whatever-concept-is-popular-and-constantly-pivot-toward-the-popular-right-now” type game projects than experts in their field with dozens of titles under their belt, decades of design, or artistic, or programming experience.
Actually Nintendo is one of the few companies who hasn’t burned out their designers - as easily exemplified by people like Shigeru Miyamoto literally having been there his entire life for more than 40 years at a single company.
This is something unheard of outside of companies like Nintendo, but also Japan in general. Even major industry figureheads like John Carmack, Ken Levine, Jason West and Vince Zampella (the guys who made Call of Duty that Bobby Kotick fucked over and then started Respawn and made Apex Legends - whose features Fortnite stole and added to their own game - just like Fortnite also did with PUBG) - all of whom no longer are at the original companies where they made multi-billion-dollar IPs possible… and then there’s guys like Cliff Blezinski who were on the literal front pages of game magazines and keynote speaking roles at industry events like E3 in the mid-2000s with Gears of War… who just literally quit making games after leaving Epic and then starting a studio that went out of business a few years back.
Nintendo’s biggest problem is that the old master game designers running the place basically don’t seem to “get” the internet… so they have dumb ideas about emulation and ROMs, online fan interactions and e-sports, terrible support for modern ancillary features indirectly related to gaming like voice chat, complex parental controls, advanced technical features like Dolby ATMOS sound, HDR color space, DLSS and modern shader pipelines.
The only thing I do NOT like about Elden Ring (and the From Software games in general) is the truly missable stuff that isn’t clearly shown as permanently missable until after you watch some YouTuber’s video talking about how after you cross this invisible line suddenly a bunch of NPCs die or disappear because of a story bit that action triggers without saying anything to you or warning you… this is real by the way and this is that line on the map.
If you go north of it, the DLC IRREVERSIBLY changes a lot of stuff with pretty much every NPC you have met up to this point
Another example of this though - in the base game, I really wanted to get that “raging wolf” armor set that you see in so many videos and images promoting the game but it turns out I progressed the story and killed the NPC who gives you that quest line before he gave it to me and I can’t go back and get it now unless I want to NG+ it and make the game even HARDER for myself…
…all that does is make me try harder, learn move sets, and watch videos from pros.
Yep. Same. I beat the first 🔥🗑️ this evening. Not a pro, but did make a how-to video.
To be fair, I learned it watching one of VattiVidya’s recent videos. Just summarized that one part and recorded myself on my PS5 doing it.
I hate MS Teams so much.
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Why has Apple not come out with an e-ink display in any of its watches? Or really anything for that matter…? Seems like a no brainer for massively increasing battery life.
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The biggest issue with GIMP is its weird UX choices. They should just make it more like Adobe’s UX. I know there’s tools that bring it closer, but the fact still is that they do some really dumb shit when it comes to experience decisions. Like if I want to change the font of what I’m typing, it works like this…
I have to TYPE in the font I want, no dropdown, and the font selection toolbar off to the side just straight up doesn’t apply to what I’ve typed or selected… and this is AFTER I ran one of those GIMP retrofit tools that tries to make it more in line with Photoshop.
Seriously, I’ve used Photoshop since 5.5 (not CS 5.5… FIVE POINT FIVE in 1999), and I STILL have to watch a tutorial for almost every single action I could intuit in 5 seconds from Adobe’s garbage malware tool.
That being said… the one important thing that GIMP is not… is Adobe garbage malware… GIMP just has a janky UX that no one’s going to bother fixing b/c the tool is free so no complaining!
And in any case, just like with Blender coming on to the scene in earnest like a decade ago to end Autodesk’s defacto monopoly with its $$$$ per year licensing scheme for proprietary 3D modelling tools… with Adobe rapidly getting worse, and just like with Unity’s “pay us per install” debacle made people jump ship to Godot - never to look back… I’d bet that GIMP is going to begin accelerating its improvement… or that Krita will do the same and overtake it in popularity.
…And once that happens, Adobe is cooked. And it can’t happen soon enough.
But without even just the cool space station to just stare at longingly…
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When They Go Low, We Go Die
Chapter 3
Marjorie smiled with great satisfaction as she looked at the crowd and began to check the rifle in her arms to make sure there was a round in the chamber.
2 men with giant beer guts - who each wore different flavors of Punisher-style skull masks and were covered head to toe in pointlessly elaborate tactical surplus gear as if they were cosplaying their favorite Call of Duty characters - began dragging another elderly man up to the makeshift platform.
The white-haired old man was dressed in a finely tailored dark blue suit with a little American flag lapel pin next to his tie. It looked so similar to the one that so many others in his cohort had adorned for probably the last 20 or so years, but he had been blindfolded by the men before being brought before the stage so he couldn’t see how many others still wore it or who had switched to the golden lion that… “the others…” now wore exclusively.
The octogenarian ghost of a man feebly began to speak (not shout) loudly in protest as if trying to reason with whomever might be in charge, but the 2 pig-like men grinned and said nothing. They began tying his hands behind him against a wooden pole covered with small holes, indentations and spatters of red. As the grinning pigs both stepped away from the geriatric man secured to the pole, the mob just below him roared with wild bloodlust over his inaudible words drowning them out over and over again with : “USA! USA! USA! USA!”
Marjorie laughed and took one hand away from the rifle to quiet the crowd so they could hear the old man’s words :
“Point of order, Mr. Chairman! Point of order! I’m reclaiming my time! I’d like the gentle-lady to put down the firearm she just picked up, Mr. Ch-”
…he was cut off with a loud and sudden BANG as he slumped into a dark puddle of red slowly expanding across the stage floor.
The crowd roared and resumed its repeated chant…
…and another blindfolded well-dressed elderly figure was walked up to the pole.