HeyListenWatchOut

Flying on the balloon was used to mask some loading times, but that was waaaaay longer than transitions from space into the world in Astro Bot.

It DID outdo Nintendo’s equivalent - the previous mainline Mario entry - Super Mario Odyssey - in every way except maybe 4 :

1. Quantity - Mario had more moons than Astro had Bots to rescue… so more collectibles.
2. replayability - with the Luigi balloon challenges, they extended the game’s longevity with this feature and it is better than Astro Bot’s simpler “speed run challenges” because of Mario’s unique game mechanic of allowing players to create and compete by crafting one-of-a-kind challenges for each other.
3. Nostalgia - Mario’s New Donk City party was absolute peak love letter to the origins of Super Mario and the sequence with the song sung by Mayor Pauline honestly brought me to tears…

…But everything else - the scale of and pure ingenuity of the boss mechanics, the visuals - from both a stylistic and technical standpoint, the Dual-Sense’s controller gimmicks, the complete lack of load times… it brought into stark contrast how far Nintendo has fallen behind - not so much from a game design perspective necessarily - but certainly at least from a hardware power standpoint.

If we’re just mentioning internet connectivity, the PS2 did end up getting the ethernet + HDD expansion adapter .

I remember playing MGS Online that way with friends back in the day.

Nintendo is competent at exactly 1 thing - designing great video games.

They are run by the equivalent of dwarven master blacksmiths… They’re one of the few gaming companies with employees on staff with more than 40 years experience of game dev (and whom have ONLY ever worked at Nintendo their entire careers) in charge of things.

That’s great if you like Zelda and Mario games… but because they’re run by a bunch of old-school grandpas… they’re not good at much else.

Terrible store, multiplayer, ancillary modern network-driven services like voice chat and partying up, little to no 3rd-party support (whether it’s games, media apps, or even tech integrations with formats like Dolby ATMOS), and - as a benefit - really terrible device security so it’s usually pretty easy for folks to reverse engineer, run custom boot-loaders / jailbreak / scrape their store servers / etc. - stuff that companies like Sony and Microsoft either never had issues with - or have taken seriously long enough that they have locked down.

The only reason they’re still in business is that they still do the one thing that matters most the best - design really great game-play mechanics for IP that is beloved by multiple generations of gamers who will overlook everything else.

I really want to switch my main desktop to Linux, but use it for remote work too, so I have MS Teams… is there a way to reliably virtualize it?

Dave is awesome. Great dude.

Even as a silent GIF I hear something like this masterful rendition of the song play in my mind’s ear.

Still can’t believe that (spoiler for Astro Bot)

… :(

Already lost interest in Assassin’s Creed after they abandoned the Desmond timeline…

Played a tiny bit of the Black Flag one for the fun shanty stuff but that’s been it for me now for probably a decade… so all this has done has lowered my already completely evaporated interest of “apathy” down now to “actively avoid as if it were a virus.”

And Earthbound.

Not good enough. Any OTA updates your TV can get over the web will eventually be trying to circumvent your IP blacklists to shove in any ad-riddled garbage they can.

Literally just blacklist your TV’s MAC address, and use a dedicated set top box of some kind to avoid this shit. My current choice is my NVIDIA Shield Pro 2019, which I installed a 3rd party WOLF launcher (there’s also F-Launcher) and turned off auto-updates so I could avoid NVIDIA and Google doing the same.

At some point, I will probably need to switch to a NUC or other HTPC with some flavor of Linux on it, as eventually the Shield may succumb to this shit as well.

🦆… 🗞️💥

Was gonna say - how long after Elden Ring did Shadow of the Erdtree DLC come out?

I know it’s in vogue to shit on Apple…

Apple does have a lot of vertical integration which allows first party stuff to function well and they work closely with a lot of their premium 3rd party software partners, but you try running an actual RAM hungry process like a local LLM model, for example, and all but the highest end latest edition MacBook Pro WILL shit the bed.

Completely laughable. Literally had 16 GB of DDR3-1600 for my 2600K from 2011 that I handed down to a kid nephew for their first PC to tinker with. Hell, my local NAS has more than that…

How is it that 2 days after this posted no one has said “Craigslist.”

Payday 2 was a really novel idea a long time ago. Highly scripted replayable missions with unique aspects but RNG for procedurally variable elements like guard patrol positions, locations and security aspects… in addition to dynamic changes based off how successful the player was at doing a job without letting security escalate the mission to going “loud.”

It made otherwise boring repetitive loops of missions feel new and different enough each time that it was exciting. Being randomly matched with others fed into the unpredictable heist aspect as well…

But instead of focusing on constantly further improving upon those systems, fixing terrible issues related to both friendly and antagonistic A.I. (I remember how for the longest time your teammates could not literally pick up a duffle bag), they saw dollar signs with in-app-purchases… and with Payday 3, they doubled down on that aspect… so no one got on board… and eventually longtime players like myself stopped playing Payday 2 as well.

…a spellchecker on steroids.

Ask literally any of the LLM chat bots out there still using any headless GPT instances from 2023 how many Rs there are in “strawberry,” and enjoy. 🍓

Oh man, I hate it when that happens…

…I mean… you should probably share the streamer’s Twitch handle so we can all avoid seeing those kinds of videos, since that would be terrible to be forced to see something that terrible.

Yattee on iOS works sometimes depending on whether or not YouTube has blocked an instance, but you could also try setting up your own local invidious instance to hook into it as a more permanent solution, though that was too much for me to figure out how to set up correctly.