Yeah again no arguments there. You’re looking at it from a particular point of view and I think you play a lot more fighting games than me.

But maybe balance isn’t everything to everyone, especially to casuals like me. IMO the classic Tekkens, especially 5, are still more fun than 7 or 8. I’ve played all of them quite a bit and I just can’t vibe with the modern ones. Perhaps at the highest levels people care more about being able to challenge any character with any character but that just doesn’t make a fighting game more fun for me. I prefer it not randomly changing, or having to keep spending money on it. Eh, grouchy old man nostalgic for a “better” time…

Yeah that’s valid. I can see why it’s interesting.

However I personally don’t think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. People are still playing and enjoying 20 or even 30 year old competitive games. Are they perfectly balanced? No. Is that actually a problem in the vast majority of cases? Also no, imo. The meta can evolve for decades, and tournaments can set whatever arbitrary rules they deem make competition more interesting.

Keep this live service nonsense away from me. I stopped playing fighting games, and generally a lot of multiplayer games, because of it.

Edit: Needless clarification: This is purely my grouchy old man personal opinion and if people enjoy games where the gameplay gets constantly tweaked and tinkered with over time that’s fine. I never got used to it. And I’m quite nostalgic for multiplayer games which I only had to buy once to get all the content with my friends.

I wish game developers would stop with this live service bullshit already.

Make a game. Balance it. It’s good. Release it. Gamers buy it and enjoy it. This is how it used to be.

But I guess the appeal of potentially scoring a massive cashcow unicorn title is too hard to resist.

I had forgotten about Misery Index. I think I saw them live many years ago, good show 🤘

Total Annihilation

Some memorable moments in no particular order:

• Outer Wilds when you reach the Sun Station
• Descending into the Lost River biome in Subnautica
• Alan Wake 2: The Musical

The movie and the comics seem well aware that it’s a horrible dystopia. But I agree making it “cool” can be problematic.

Yeah, the incredible footage compelled me to share.

“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.”

A key part of Moore’s law which is often omitted is that Moore was not just talking about transistor density but about cost. When people say we’ve reached the end of Moore’s law this is not because we’re no longer able to increase semiconductor transistor density (just look at TSMC’s roadmap) but that the “complexity for minimum component costs” is no longer increasing. Chips are still getting faster but they’re now also more expensive.

I visited Europe recently and used a rideshare service, the guy was driving a new BYD compact SUV. I was surprised at how nice it was. The interior styling was still a little eccentric, which is something I noticed before with Chinese cars, but the build quality appeared to be very good. It was definitely a vehicle I would consider if they were for sale here in the US. American car manufacturers must be relieved to be protected by arbitrary trade barriers.

The same with Lightroom sadly. The open source alternatives are either too buggy or have UX designed by very “opinionated” people, making them painful and frustrating to use. I currently want to get rid of Lightroom but can’t.

Ah, thanks. That was entirely unclear from this article.

Another game I simply won’t need to buy. Neat. I guess some publishers just don’t like selling games or something.

Perhaps that’s because Steam doesn’t seem to be trying very hard to “lock in” developers to their platform. Devs are free to sell their PC games on Gog or Epic or whatever. Steam is popular because it’s a good platform. This freedom for developers or customers mostly does not exist on mobile or on consoles, except for the EUs efforts here.

Even their “console” the Steam Deck can, relatively easily, run games from other stores. I’m not saying a 30% cut should be considered fair but they do seem to take a different approach to digital sales than the other large players.

Judging from the video description this seems to be a remake of the original Frostpunk in Unreal Engine. Not sure why they’re doing it. The original is still just fine.

All for-profit tech eventually yields to enshittification.