Lurker > adjl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tyr34L56mKk

I remember the incident in question. I'm glad you're managing to move forward. That was a pretty rough time.

Youtube's "Theatre View" option will size up the player to be more or less as large as the window size will allow. It won't letterbox it like real fullscreen would, but size-wise it's pretty much the same. If you want the letterboxing, you can roughly approximate it by switching to dark mode, or really go in on it by opening two command prompt windows and positioning/sizing them to give you a black overlay.

grimhilde00 posted...

they should do a general election but obviously won't since they'd lose all their seats..

Yeah, as much as populism is on the rise and a lot of people are eager to accept somebody that feeds them a steady stream of scapegoats for the problems they have, a party that keeps very obviously screwing up and can't keep a consistent leader isn't exactly going to be most people's #1 choice.

A lot of games have the option to configure which damage numbers show up, if that's an issue.

jiffdiff posted...

There's no point to watching these prequels knowing where all this s*** is going

That's kind of how prequels work. You know where things are going, but getting there is interesting enough to be worth telling.

jiffdiff posted...

the character wasn't the slightest bit interesting in his movie anyway.

Which doesn't mean a series about him can't rectify that.

What you're saying is a good reason to assume the series won't be very good and not bother checking it out unless you've given reason to believe otherwise. It's not, however, a good reason to doubt those that do believe otherwise.

Because you generally dislike action games and are pretty inevitably going to be disinterested by any upcoming one.

Now she'll never get to open those new pork markets. How sad.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Sure, you could argue that "knowing what happens with Vader didn't ruin the prequels!", but you'd kind of be wrong because the prequels sucked.

But the prequels didn't suck because we know what happens with Vader. They sucked because of awful writing and directorial choices that got in the way of telling what was actually a really interesting story that did a lot to flesh out the universe and its history.

Knowing the end of a story doesn't have to make it less enjoyable. Seeing how everything gets to that point can still be very interesting if done competently.

Mensis posted...

Probably the stale urine smell

Probably not. Ammonia isn't a VOC.

I think that something is called "Britain."

You can find the Defrag tool under Windows System-->Windows Administrative Tools, but as others have said, it's not something you need to do particularly often. You can run the tool to tell you how fragmented the drive is, if you're curious, but you're probably fine to ignore it.

Two grandparents', a friend's father, a few people I knew through church (including one or two I was paid to sing at), a great-uncle, and my own dad. That's all I can think of, but there might have been more.

Lokarin posted...

my typical method is to put plastic wrap over a small container of water with a piece of banana in it and poke a hole in top.

This approach works even better, and doesn't need plastic wrap. The dish soap breaks the surface tension of the vinegar such that any fly that touches it ends up drowning.

jiffdiff posted...

Why just entertainment?

I'm all for profit-sharing in other fields as well, but the specific concept of residuals doesn't really fit as well in other employment models. Similar concepts, though, do indeed have a place.

Just put out some ramekins with apple cider vinegar and a little squirt of dish soap in them. Works like a charm and is dirt cheap.

I should really play Neon Abyss. I picked it up in a Humble Choice a while back (along with Atomicrops, which was surprisingly awesome), but haven't touched it yet.

*Shrug* Okay.

EvilMegas posted...

I mean I did make this point in the very next sentence.

You did, but you also neglected to touch on Nintendo's issues that do belong in a discussion of other companies' sins.

Really, everyone involved in creating games (and any other entertainment) should get residuals when their work is particularly successful. That such bonuses only ever go to the executives and shareholders instead of the people that actually created a bonus-worthy product is horribly backwards.

That's what I'm getting at with calling it a format and not a genre (at least with the modern use of the term). That means you can have a roguelike ARPG, or a roguelike FPS, or a roguelike TBSRPG... the defining features are permadeath and randomization between runs, not whether or not the gameplay is turn-based or anything like that (which is a matter of genre).

ZeldaMutant posted...

The most accurate term is "loitering munition". They're somewhere between missiles and drones.

This conjures the mental image of a bunch of teenage bombs standing around smoking on a playground after dark.

I mean, given a choice between free pizza or a cash bonus equivalent to the dollar value of the couple slices I'd eat, I'd probably take the pizza, but that's less a matter of "pizza>money" and more a matter of that being such a pitifully small cash bonus that I don't care about it.

Lokarin posted...

Well, they're Warner Bros. now

I might have seen one or more nimes, then.

Never heard of it.

While that is the distinction, roguelikes without any sort of metaprogression are pretty rare these days, so there isn't a lot of value in bothering to differentiate when describing a game unless you're discussing how much metaprogression there is.

I don't see why you couldn't call Vampire Survivors a roguelike, aside from the focus on surviving until the end of a timer instead of trying to reach a concrete end goal. It's got the basic concept of trying to work with randomized abilities to progress through procedurally generated levels, at least.

Also, I haven't played it yet, but my understanding is that Noita can get pretty stupidly broken at times. Like, falling to your death because you accidentally blew up the entire ground with the right/wrong build kind of broken.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

Edit: then again, it probably emphasizes the problem of naming genre's after games, as not everyone sees a game the same way and might consider certain aspects more intrinsic than others.

And that comes back to the issue that "roguelike" isn't so much a genre as it is a format: It doesn't describe how the game plays, it describes how the gameplay loop works (that is, you play in short, significantly randomized "runs" instead of progressing through a persistent world).

RoR1 is also pretty easy to break, especially if you exploit the Command artifact and the bonus stage that lets you farm indefinitely.

EvilMegas posted...

There's a s*** ton wrong with Nintendo. Online, games being on sale, outdated games and graphics, emulation, etc.

I mean, most of that is just stuff you don't like, not stuff that's genuinely harmful. You can't really bring up "their games aren't pretty enough" in a discussion where "they sexually abused an employee to the point of suicide" is the gold standard. More relevant would be their insistence on cracking down on piracy of old games that they have no plans to rerelease themselves (even though they very easily could), or some of their mobile and other F2P monetization basically being porn for EA executives, or NoA's excessive reliance on contract workers that they treat like crap. Things that actually harm the industry and the people in it, not just things that would make you like them better if they changed.

Revelation34 posted...

How would they prove she went back to a Starbucks if she never asked the question again?

Security footage, but that will probably only be reviewed if somebody recognizes her and complains. If that does happen, though, she could be on the hook for trespassing charges.

Revelation34 posted...

There's nothing wrong with Nintendo.

There's plenty wrong with Nintendo. It's generally pretty minor compared to what's wrong with the rest of the game industry, but they very much are not above criticism and pretty routinely dip their fingers into some of the worst practices (such as Mario Kart Tour pretending you're playing with other people to promote lootbox sales, or Pokemon Unite having five intermediate currencies to obfuscate how much stuff costs).

streamofthesky posted...

They wanted to penny pinch, so they replaced her w/ one of the biggest VA's in the business, who is also unionized?

Kojima tried to replace Hayter with a bigger name in pretty much every MGS game until he finally succeeded in 5. If the budget's there, it's not at all unheard of for studios to try getting bigger VA names over bringing back the original talent, usually because executives believe that having a bigger name will attract more people to the franchise (though in Hayter's case, it may have been less executive pressure from Konami and more Kojima trying to pretend he's a movie director). It's similarly not at all unheard of for studios to effect that replacement by low-balling the lesser-known actor so they don't have to take the blame for firing them.

streamofthesky posted...

She gave an amount, but no context of how many hours the job was to understand how fair or not that offer was.

$4000 for any major role in a game of this size (revenue-wise) is nothing compared to how much the actor could be compensated. It's not a massive, fully-voiced epic of a story-driven game, no, but it's also not just making a dozen different grunt noises and calling it a day. She also provided that context later.

streamofthesky posted...

Instead of speaking about it when the pay dispute happened (when a fan outcry could have gotten her job back), she waits until just before the game releases and calls for a boycott. Seems kinda suspect?

Gamers are notoriously fickle. Get them mad about something two years in advance, and by the time the game actually comes out they'll have forgotten about it. If you want their opinion to actually have an effect on the game's sales, you need to sway them much closer to when they make the purchase decision.

streamofthesky posted...

Kamiya got bullied off of twitter for a while.

He bullied himself off of Twitter by blocking so many people so quickly that Twitter thought a bot had taken over his account. While it has turned out that he wasn't nearly as guilty as the first pass of the story made him seem, and I can recognize that the language barrier makes it difficult to communicate such issues, his behaviour did absolutely nothing to defend the decision or tell Platinum's side of the story and instead mirrored that of so many other corporate mouthpieces that have tried to get away from troublesome accusations by aggressively denying them and shutting down as much discourse as they can.

streamofthesky posted...

People were saying "f*** Platinum Games" and "f*** Nintendo"

And that's not a bad thing. When it seems that a company has done something to make people angry, those people should get angry at the company. Hold companies accountable for doing bad things. If the company then manages to defend themselves by proving they did not do the bad thing, then you can stop being mad at them, but giving corporations the benefit of the doubt in matters of worker mistreatment absolutely should not be the default. That's the sort of attitude that has let Ubisoft and Actiblizz get away with harbouring sexual predators.

Everybody should get mad and stay mad until things are either fixed or shown to not actually be a problem. Otherwise, we're never going to know which problems are real problems, and those real problems aren't going to be fixed.

streamofthesky posted...

Most of them aren't even humble enough to admit they were wrong, they just want to double down on believing Hellena no matter the evidence to the contrary, and/or continuously shift the goal posts, in a pathetic attempt to save face.

Now that's an actual problem, but that's also just plain people. People don't like to be wrong about something they committed themselves to. That's orders of magnitude larger than Twitter.

Blightzkrieg posted...

It's interesting because for a role of such notoriety, in any other industry that would probably be insultingly low. But that's likely standard for video games.

Which kind of highlights the broader problem of undervaluing video games as an artistic/performance medium, but yes, that is pretty standard for a video game.

Blightzkrieg posted...

Regardless, scummy of her to lie about it if so.

Indeed.

streamofthesky posted...

Overreacting and behaving like f***ing s*** lords on the first bread crumb of biased information, showing their asses to the entire world.

I mean, if there hadn't been such an outcry, nobody would have bothered digging for the truth. That this instance turned out to be decidedly less objectionable than it seemed at first glance doesn't mean things that are in fact as bad (or worse) than they seem at first glance aren't happening all over the place. I'm all for keeping corporations on the defensive as a matter of general practice, at least when it comes to matters like treating workers properly. Make them earn our trust.

DiScOrDtHeLuNaTiC posted...

I doubt even Hale could command six figures for a game, unless it was an absolutely huge game and low six figures.

The guy who voiced Niko in GTAIV got $100,000 for his performance, which is still a paltry sum compared to the literal billions the game made Rockstar (again, in any other medium, somebody in a similar role would have been a millionaire many times over), but does establish some precedent for compensation on that scale.

I've had one. Mostly, I make a point of staying up and drinking plenty of water until I no longer feel drunk, then going to bed. Most of the time, that's enough to stave off a hangover.

https://i.imgur.com/NVXIF9w.png

My man, if there were a good chance you were dying, I'd make some soup and give it to you. No need to steal.

funkyfritter posted...

Thinking about all the advances we've seen in AI recently, I wonder how long it's going to take to the technology to replace voice acting. Removing actors that age and ask for money in favor of a mascot.voice file you can quickly implement in any product sounds like a corporate wet dream.

Hard to say. Voice acting in games is still relatively new, to the point where claiming that a game is anywhere close to fully voiced is still something that can be used to market it (to the point where releasing a AAA game without some manner of voice acting is almost unheard of). Generate the voice with an AI, and you lose the ability to claim that, so it may be more trouble than it's worth. We're also very far out from being able to generate a voice that's going to be as good as an actual VA (at least a well-selected one that does a good job), so having a real voice actor will continue to be something that can be marketed (much like having fully orchestrated soundtracks was in the mid-2000's).

streamofthesky posted...

Except it's not, it's within the typical union standard for VA wages.

And the typical union standard is a joke. SAG-AFTRA is notoriously flaccid when it comes to negotiating video game VA wages, in part because they think very little of the medium and in part because the industry pushes back so hard against compensating anyone properly and they just can't be bothered to do their job and push back harder.

streamofthesky posted...

"In any other medium"
This is video games.

And why should that make a difference?

streamofthesky posted...

But for a short action game like Bayonetta? Oh, f*** no. The actual programming of the game, the combat, the QA testing, all sorts of other factors are far more important than the VA.

I'd handily rank the VA work as being just as important as the visuals, soundtrack, sound effects, and other such parts of the game. Sure, they're not the main focus, but when they're done well (and they were done well), they tremendously enhance the experience.

Thematically, so much of the Bayonetta games relies on who she is as a character. You can't tell me that the game would be equally enjoyable if the combos were reduced to mere hit counts and damage numbers between nondescript polygons instead of flashy, over-the-top eviscerations, and Taylor's performance is a major part of establishing a character that's consistent with those visuals. She did an excellent job, and deserves to be compensated accordingly, just like everyone else that contributed to that.

This also is not at all unique to video games. Movies have hundreds of people working on them much harder than the actors do that play roles no less important, yet receive a pittance compared to the actors. Why, then, is it acceptable to pay screen actors orders of magnitude more than their behind-the-scenes colleagues, but so unfathomable to pay the voice actors that provide the bulk of the front-end performance more than those working on the back end?

streamofthesky posted...

That $4000 would be for roughly 16 hours of work over 4 days, as Hellena said regarding prior Bayonetta jobs.

In addition to months of auditions (including travel, in many cases) and other communication leading up to actually getting the part. The nature of gig work is such that distilling it down to an hourly wage fundamentally misunderstands it. Making $250 an hour doesn't amount to much when you only get to work for 16 hours before having to hunt for a new job.

streamofthesky posted...

And yet it's always the f***ing VAs that are whining.

Because they have a union. That's what unions do: Give those represented by them the power to push for better treatment. In a world where not pushing for better treatment means getting treated like garbage, you can bet they'll take advantage of their privilege to whine whenever they can, and they absolutely should.

streamofthesky posted...

You say everyone should be paid more? Then start with those underpaid, overworked developers. They have the worst f***ing deal in all of this right now.

Why pick only one to start with? I can care about multiple instances of corporate exploitation at a time, you know. Possible avenues include boycotting games that excessively crunched their staff, boycotting studios that abuse their staff, boycotting studios that engage in union-busting...

streamofthesky posted...

Rockstar forced their team into months of overtime crunch for Red Dead Redemption 2, for example. Which is way worse than giving one person a lowball offer. On a far bigger game/franchise. And ellicited nowhere near this much outcry.

This has been going on for like two days. There were definitely at least two days of outcry about RDR2's crunch. I also have no intention of ever buying RDR2 because of how Rockstar treated the devs. Same with Cyberpunk. Same with anything Actiblizz or Ubisoft squirt out.

Personally, I'm undecided on what this means for me buying Bayonetta 3. I wasn't planning to get it right away anyway because I still need to finish 1 and play 2, but this has kind of soured my interest a bit and may turn me off of ever getting it. That said, to boycott Bayonetta over this behaviour would, for consistency's sake, require me to boycott most of the games industry. As much as it's terrible, it's also really widespread, to the point where a targeted boycott is pretty much impossible.

AliceShiki posted...
So... 4000$ seems to be the market rate, and it's being offered for a game that is not immensely popular, and made by a company that isn't that well-off... What more do you expect?

Whatever they're paying Hale, at least, since I can guarantee she didn't take $4000.

agesboy posted...

my main problem with chain attacks was that i'd accidentally bring a boss from 70% hp to... 5% hp

muh rewards.....

But then missing the rewards works out to help keep you from being overlevelled, so it's not too bad. Plus you might actually get to hear the boss' low health theme, which is a really awesome idea that routinely gets missed because the chain attack theme overwrites it.

If I was in a position to snapshot a good bleed at the end of a chain attack, the boss generally didn't spend any time alive after it ended.

That is one thing I'm not huge on with chain attacks this time around. In both 1 and 2, you could effectively weave them into various strategies as part of the overall process of killing the enemy, and while they did huge amounts of damage, you still usually had several over the course of a fight and they were only part of it. This time, if you've set up right, you can basically nuke anything from 70 to 0 in one go (including the level 200 version of the superboss), so fights basically amount to surviving until the party meter fills, then blowing the boss up. This maybe means I should have played on hard for the nerfed damage ratio, but I expect they'd still make up the bulk of my damage. I like the system and how it gets back to the more strategic approach of the first game's chain attacks instead of 2's "match the colours once or twice if you have 2+ orbs otherwise just do the most damaging one" (offset by 2 being more strategic in other ways), but the game does end up being a little over-centralized around them.

Of course, I could also just not use them all the time if I don't like it, so it's not exactly a major deal.

streamofthesky posted...

If it is 16 hours, then that's $250/hr, which seems pretty fair.

Look at it in terms of regular jobs? Sure. Look at it in terms of the entertainment industry and how much the lead roles make in other media? It's an absolute joke.

The Bayonetta franchise has grossed $450 million. In any other medium, the actor behind the titular character would be a millionaire several times over, and quite deservedly so given that the acting behind the character is a major component of the overall style that has drawn so many people to the series. That $4000 is seen as acceptable (and more than that, an industry norm) is utterly ludicrous, as is the idea that the flagship character who has defined the series is seen as so replaceable.

The usual response to this is that it's not particularly fair to offer royalties and larger salaries to voice actors when the developers that put more work into the game don't get that, and that's very true. The mistake, however, is using that to justify keeping VA's from being properly compensated instead of using it to demand proper compensation for everyone working on the game.

streamofthesky posted...

And again, there's no way in hell Jennifer Hale did it for less than Taylor.

There's a good chance they just wanted a bigger name and lowballed Taylor for the sake of driving her out. It's what happened with Keifer Sutherland replacing David Hayter, despite how undeniably essential Hayter's performance was for establishing Snake as a character. Studios like the idea of attaching bigger names to their products for promotional reasons, but in practice it rarely does anything to improve the product (and in many cases actually makes it worse, such as everyone's reaction to Pratt's Mario). Screen actors are not necessarily good voice actors, which is something a whole lot of people don't seem to realize despite making the same mistake and seeing the consequences repeatedly.

agesboy posted...

Or go for smashes. A smash near the end of a chain attack will absolutely murder anything in the game you're roughly on par with, even if your multiplier isn't very huge.

Specifically, a Smash paired with a high-ratio art like Hidden Thorn or Demolition, since Smash's damage in a fusion art is based on the damage of the art it's fused to. Critting for 2-3 million outside of chain attacks isn't unheard of with the right setups. In chain attacks, you'll pretty routinely hit damage cap (10 million).

G: Other

LinkPizza posted...

Also, how come sometimes, I reactivate 2 characters?

If your final TP value is between 100 and 149, you'll reactivate one character. If it's between 150 and 199, it'll say "Bravo" and you'll reactivate two characters, as well as increasing your damage ratio by a greater amount. If it's 200+, it'll say "Amazing" and you'll reactivate three characters, with an even greater boost to damage ratio. Unfortunately, there's no benefit to going beyond 200, so as much fun as pushing Valdi to 250+ is, his value kind of drops off once your other characters can consistently get you to 150+ (while doing vastly more damage, no less).

There are some heroes whose special abilities will tweak how that works, but that's the gist of it. It's generally a very good idea to use a healer to stop at 99, then somebody that can generate 50+ (or even 100+) to get up to the next tier. Using a hero like Valdi to do that isn't necessarily the best option because heroes generally do far less damage than main characters and you risk reactivating them instead of somebody more useful on the next round, but they can sometimes be useful for helping you get back as many characters as possible while you build up their TP values to be able to get there on their own.

The point limit thing only applies to main characters in healer classes. Broadly, heroes have no special effects except the ones that are specific to them (which you see when you select them), regardless of their role. In Valdi's case, that's +50 TP when he's targeting a Machine enemy, which is really niche but can lead to some very impressive TP values in the right circumstances.

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/6/6/AAQwHjAADyWa.jpg

Does that include the risk of choking on beef?

LinkPizza posted...

Sure. But at that point, the call center just tells them over and over theres nothing they can do until that person hangs up

Which costs a non-trivial amount of operator wages (especially on the scale of every tech-incompetent person out there who would use a stupid password if they weren't forced not to), results in an unsatisfied customer that will review the service poorly (which no amount of "we encourage customers to use secure passwords" will mitigate), and generally just reflects very poorly on the company.

LinkPizza posted...

But its also bad for business if I stop business with them due to not being able to get into my account

Which is why they offer password recovery services. Perhaps more saliently, the most convenient way of terminating your relationship with the company (cancelling the service and removing your payment information) is locked behind your password. Even if you do decide you want to cut them off, it's generally going to be much more efficient and convenient for you to go through the password recovery process than to cancel the associated credit card or keep paying for the service until the card expires. By the time you get through the password recovery process, your problem is solved and your primary motivation to leave is gone, so the vast majority of customers annoyed by password requirements aren't going to follow through on cancelling.

This isn't to say that password requirements are necessarily handled properly (most of them emphasize entropy over length, when longer passwords are overwhelmingly more secure than more complex ones), but there's absolutely no basis to think that it might be more beneficial for a company to allow users to leave their accounts unsecured than to impose some basic security requirements.

LinkPizza posted...

I think it should be on the person Like make it so they recommend you make a stronger password. But you can opt out

That's not going to stop people from calling the support line if their account gets compromised. The sort of person who thinks using "dog" as an account password is a good idea generally isn't the sort of person that realizes the role they have to play in maintaining their account's security.

Ozmose posted...

He provided all the evidence himself. I'm not sure what better evidence you could find above massacring a bunch of people. This wasn't like he shot someone in the heat of passion and is now filled with regret. If anything screams "not a functional member of society" it's 17 counts of 1st degree intentional homicide.

adjl posted...

I don't think I've seen a single instance where that wasn't just a knee-jerk emotional reaction (read: a uselessly uninformed opinion)

My impression stands unchallenged. "He did bad thing and I don't like it" is not conclusive evidence that rehabilitation is impossible, as much as you and many others have spent your entire lives surrounded by people insisting that it is. Heck, it's not evidence at all. It's just people being upset and clinging to the idea that making the person who did the bad thing suffer is itself the important goal, rather than making sure the person doesn't do bad things again.

Lokarin posted...

well, we know how talented the police are...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/5/4/AADnJsAADyGm.png

To be fair, that's not per capita data, which makes a considerable difference in how the numbers compare. To be less fair, it doesn't change the fact that the US leads by a significant margin if we remove Malta and Luxembourg (whose populations are so low that a single killing makes a significant per capita difference).

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/6/7/AAB4-6AADyLf.png