Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

Blightzkrieg posted...

Having Judg as day 6 is a missed opportunity, we should have every day become an increasingly obscure user til eventually you just start making up users to see if anyone notices

Everyone needs to dig through their old forgotten alt pile and pull out the most old and obscure alts they can find and demand to be rated.

Zareth posted...

So you admit that it's a you problem then, and not a problem with the industry

No, because "a few worthwhile indie game gems" do not justify the failings of an entire massive multi-million dollar industry.

It's like being on a sinking cruise ship but saying you still enjoy the experience because at least the catering is really good.

Zareth posted...

It always was always about squeezing every dollar out of the gamer, they just have more ways to do it now

To be fair, that goes all the way back to the era of arcades where they'd crank difficulty up to artificially hellish levels just to keep you pumping quarters in.

The problem is, there was a long span where gaming evolved into squeezing money out of people by producing actual worthwhile games that people wanted to play. Whereas for the last decade or so there's been more and more emphasis on ignoring quality in favor of doubly down on manipulative gambling mechanics, fee-to-pay mechanics, and psychological tricks that encourage recurrent spending.

So it's very easy to say that the current climate is far worse than it was 10-30 years ago (and maybe even longer). Especially as the value of some exploitative models is encouraging publishers to double down on others.



adjl posted...

Surprise surprise, people didn't actually want to buy 47 different Pac-Man clones, so the industry crashed.

The problem wasn't even "Pac-Man clones". It was that the Pac-Man clones were BAD. Compare the arcade version of Pac-Man (that was always popular) with the Atari 2600 port and it's blatantly clear how exploitative it was. That, combined with abysmally bad games like ET that were shit out and left to die on the assumption that people would buy them due to the brand alone is what helped trigger the crash. Once the initial wave of major failures began, investors panicked and companies tried to pivot to the growing PC market (see also the Coleco ADAM and the Atari ST), and that's what killed them.

Which actually goes back to support the argument. When the games industry sacrifices quality for the quick and easy buck, it tends to backfire on them. It's not just monetization that's the issue.

The main difference between then and now is that the users have grown accustomed to greater and greater complexity and sophistication from games, so the bar for what is considered "quality" is much higher than it used to be. Which makes the threshold for failure much higher as well.



adjl posted...

But the current mass extinction event facing live services is no different from that

Ironically, it may be very different than that.

A number of insiders have suggested that publishers knew full well that the live service model was unsustainable, and that the more games came out using that model, the more it would divide potential income and inevitably kill those games. They were essentially built around the idea that they would only be viable for a short time, so publishers all scrambled to rush their own half-assed live service game out the door early, because the initial games would probably wind up reaping significant profits. It was only the latecomers that were destined to lose money.

In other words, it was more like a pump-and-dump scheme on the stock market than it was ever intended to be a long-term stable investment.

Basically, publishers learned from the MMO bubble, where the first few games out drew HUGE money, but eventually everyone wound up trying to be the next WoW clone and the genre as a whole withered to a fraction of its former value. So now everybody wants to be "THE NEXT BIG THING" first, so they can exploit the market before the bottom drops out.

In that sense it's very different from the Crash of 1983, which the companies really didn't see coming because they were blinded by their own hubris. They couldn't see past their own success, so they didn't know how to cope when that success dwindled.

Publishers now know they may only have a limited time to benefit from any exploitative practice or trend-chasing, so they try to maximize profit as quickly as possible before moving on. They've become predatory beasts that hunt the landscape and kill everything in their path (which used to only be EA's MO!).



adjl posted...

Sounds like you should consider gaming on PC

I really shouldn't.

My issues with PC gaming far outweigh any issue I've ever had with consoles.

My comment that "there are a few worthwhile indie game gems here and there" doesn't really mean there are a ton of games on PC that are appealing to me (because I am only just now noticing that there was a typo in my post - "but most of them are in genres that appeal to me" was supposed to be "but most of them aren't in genres that appeal to me").

It's more acknowledging that there are indie PC games that other people may enjoy/love/etc, and which potentially show the industry as a whole isn't completely devoid of talent or passion, so that some people may say "Oh, gaming isn't dying! I loved Plate Up/Wildermyth/King of the Castle/Starbound/etc". And for them, that's awesome.

But I'm not seeing a ton of games even in the indie scene that appeal to my tastes, and even the ones that do spark a little bit of interest aren't interesting enough to offset my 20-year plus bias against PC gaming. It's also not helped by the fact that after years of mainly gaming on console, my standards for games have gotten unrealistically high, so the jank and weaker graphics of most PC indie games tend to detract from the experience for me.

For me the best case scenario is for a game I do kind of like to get popular enough on PC to eventually get ported to consoles, which is where I usually get around to playing it (which is basically how I played Minecraft and Stardew Valley).



adjl posted...

You might even be best off just buying a Steam Deck over whatever console you're considering for your next purchase, since it's pretty much just a console that plays PC games.

Steam is at least part of my issues with PC gaming though, so that's not really an option.

If I was ever going to switch to PC gaming to a serious degree (which I almost certainly never will), it would almost have to be through a service like GoG or via digital five-finger discount. But even that's not all that appealing to me.

I just have a deep-seated, visceral dislike for PC gaming. I know that's not a hip or trendy attitude to have on this site (where the push towards PC gaming has been strong for the last decade or so), but it is what it is. At this point in my life I honestly don't see me ever really putting in the effort to try and overcome it. Nothing is so fantabulous that I feel like I can't live without it, and there is more media out there than any single human can ever consume, so there's always something else competing for my attention. And it's not like my OLD games are going anywhere - I've been playing Minecraft again lately, and before that I was replaying KotOR.

About the most I'm willing to budge is playing the occasional story-heavy Ren'Py game (which scratches my itch for narrative games), but even those are few and far between when it comes to ones worth playing.

Cacciato posted...

I hate the polls on this site almost as much as Muscles hates people from Poland.

Poll? I hate the word. As I hate Hell, all Montagues, and thee.

"Who the hell is this user?"

I never listened to R Kelly.

As others have said, the only song of his I ever really listened to at all was "I Believe I Can Fly", and that only because it was on the Space Jam soundtrack. And I didn't even think it was the best song on that soundtrack, because Seal's cover of Fly Like an Eagle and the Salt-N-Pepa cover of Upside Down were also on it.

wolfy42 posted...

More to the point waaaaay before the planet even becomes uninhabitable by means other than humanities hubris, we would colonize mars and then the moons of saturn/jupiter etc and be able to even survive the sun expanding.

Except we probably won't.

People love the idea of space colonization, but the complications are waaay more difficult to overcome than most people realize, and anything outside of the solar system likely becomes functionally untenable unless we somehow figure out a workable method for FTL travel. Mars likely isn't viable for long-term independent colonization on a massive scale (smaller settlements, sure. a full transfer of the bulk of the human population, no), and even if we do pull it off it would basically have to be hermetically sealed underground hives (at which point we'd almost be on par with just burrowing into the surface of the Earth anyway).

There isn't much else of any value in the solar system apart from a couple of the moons of the gas giants, but even there you're talking logarithmic issues of scale and other complications that kind of render them poor choices for long-term colonization. And free-floating space station or ship-based colonies would be even more complex and problematic on anything other than the smallest of scales.

The most likely scenario is that if we manage to get off this mudball at all we never really progress beyond establishing mostly-automated mining colonies to acquire resources, but still center human civilization on Earth itself. And when Earth dies, we die.

As much as people love to fantasize about us getting off-world and spreading across the entire galaxy (or beyond) like a virus, the realistic likelihood is that it's never going to happen.

Sure, it's possible that we might discover the multiple borderline-magic level scientific breakthroughs we'd need to change that in the future (cue comments about how modern science would look like magic to people in the 1500s), but no matter how much people have come to assume that all scientific progress is forward and everything is always getting better (and how much American schools have lied to students about the myth of "Progress" in general), there is always the potential for backsliding, setbacks, and ultimately resets that prevent us from ever reaching that point, even if that point is possible at all in the first place.

The real interesting question is whether or not we survive the next 100 years. The entire Industrial Age (and the Technological Age that followed it) is basically built on the back of fossil fuels, and while we can talk all we want about switching to alternative fuels and, that doesn't mean we're going to successfully manage to make that switch without catastrophic consequences. And even if we do there's the added issues of damage already done to the environment, innate and inevitable climate shifts that will happen regardless of what we do or don't do to cause/prevent them, current political conflicts that will shape future geopolitics, and issues most people don't even think about at the moment like water rights crises, overmedication leading to virus resistances and more plagues, and the growing instability of global economies. People assume we'll be easily heading back and forth to Mars by 2150, when we might actually living in caves and hitting each other with sticks again.

Lokarin posted...

ahh, so all we gotta do is push the Earth out of the radius! That should be doable in a billion years

Doesn't really matter, since a bunch of other factors will likely make the entire planet more or less uninhabitable long before the Sun itself becomes an issue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

Oh, and to make this topic more PotD-themed, shouldn't it be this instead?

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

LinkPizza posted...

Mega Ultra Chicken?

He is legend.





On a related note, I heard Cold as Ice and Head Games on the radio today, and all I could think of was "How will you like the belt when you're... Cold as Ice?" and "Who set this to Head Games?!"

4/10

The period from about 2002 to maybe had some of my favorite releases of all time, but since then titles i care about have trickled to a crawl, studios I once respected and loved have turned into absolute shit, and the industry as a whole has begun to drown under mobile game-influenced pay-to-win mechanics, loot box BS, live service models, and other predatory anti-consumer practices that make money for publishers but lead to far worse games.

Arguably there are a few worthwhile indie game gems here and there, but most of them are in genres that appeal to me, and most of them are on PC where I don't actually game, so they might as well not exist.

I wouldn't say gaming is dead, per se - but the current generation is probably the one I've been least excited about since 1982.

Krow_Incarnate posted...

TIL Hulk Hogan didn't do his own entrance music

It wasn't even his entrance music at first. He stole it from Barry Windham and Mike Rotunda. (And if you're still watching WWE wrestling currently, that's Bray Wyatt's dad and uncle.)

This was Hulk's original music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig5phtP3Z_0



Krow_Incarnate posted...

Who the fuck is Rick Derringer

Most people know him for for this instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YdBsF8sagQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n6-kdVrmVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIAp8-cnRxQ

wolfy42 posted...

Everything on the list besides solar flares is pretty much "other humans" so I guess he wants us to pick which way we wipe ourselves out.

"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice."

adjl posted...

Now, saying that, it's just a risk. Nothing's guaranteed to cause harm, and if you're only doing it occasionally and never for really long periods, you probably won't ever encounter problems. It's still not a great idea, though, so maybe don't make a habit of it.

It's like the salmonella/e coli issue. Not every chicken (or raw egg) is going to have salmonella. For the most part, if you get raw chicken on other things or use the same knife/cutting board or otherwise cross-contaminate, you're not going to get sick. It's a risk, not a guaranteed problem. You're really only in trouble if your chicken actually has salmonella.

But since you can't know for sure whether or not your chicken does have salmonella, the easiest way to avoid getting sick is to act like all chicken has it. Because then you're always taking the necessary precautions to prevent contamination or undercooking or the other ways that you can infect yourself with it. Sure, that means you might be overreacting 99 times out of 100, but it also means you'll be doing everything in your power to be safe when you DO get chicken that has salmonella.

Same with raw meat. Not all ground beef at your local store is going to have e coli, and if you just grabbed a handful of raw meat and ate it you'd probably be fine. But some meat will definitely have e coli, and since you won't know whether or not it does, you're better off treating all raw meat as if it does to protect yourself.

Cotton_Eye_Joe posted...

Elden Ring wasn't the best game of 2022

Agree.



Cotton_Eye_Joe posted...

That was Kirby and the Forgotten Land

Disagree.



Cotton_Eye_Joe posted...

Forspoken is a 5/10. Get over it.

Are you directing this as people who think it was better than a 5/10 or people who think it was worse than 5/10?

Sarcasthma posted...

*Adjusted to account for additional votes since yesterdays topic

% approval rating

Out of curiosity, how exactly are you calculating that percentage?

Since it's not a simple yes/no vote but you've got 5 options, are you weighting some of the options heavier than others, or are both good options and both bad options just being counted the same? And how are you factoring in the neutral option? Are you just counting the top three answers combined as "approval"?

I demand to know the science behind this poll!

When I'm stuck in traffic I don't leap out of my car, drag other drivers out of their cars, and then style kill them like I really, really want to. So no, video games haven't influenced me.

Nightwind posted...

Other: "Humans"

Also this.

G) Other

- The Internet -

I pay my full debt each month. Mainly because I go out of my way to never use my card for anything unless I know I have cash in my account to pay for it. I don't use the card for credit as much as I do for ease of transfer and for the greater degree of theft and fraud security.

What poll?

PikachuMaxwell posted...

Although most people involved in science fiction are white, there are also Black people in sci-fi, whether they be authors, directors, screenwriters, actors or the characters they play, etc.

I expected this to be a topic just about fictional characters, not actual real black people. I was just going to say Lando in Empire Strike Back (and not Lando in anything else). Or barring that, the Cat from Red Dwarf. Or maybe Morpheus from The Matrix (but only the first one).

Though for me the problem is that I'm not a huge fan of sci-fi in the first place. So I'm not drawing from a huge pool of possible options. Made worse by the fact that I was mostly thinking of movies and TV, not books or games or anything else.

That being said...



FatalAccident posted...

Keith David in mass effect

SpaceBear_ posted...

Lance Reddick in Fringe.

Absolutely yes to both. Though in both cases the main appeal is that they've both got incredible voices (Lance Reddick is awesome in Horizon, and was great in Destiny in spite of Destiny itself not being that great when it came to characterization).

I've been a Keith David fan since as far back as They Live. I was also a fan in Men at Work (even if it was a mostly cheesy movie) and even the one episode of Highlander he was in back in the 90s. But his run in games (as the Arbiter in Halo and as Julius/himself in Saints Row) was incredible... and he was pretty much perfect in Mass Effect. Quite possibly the only person in this entire list who actually made me feel emotions strong enough to tear up while playing. Surrogate Space Dad was pretty much the perfect foil to Shepard (especially femShep).

I posted this just recently in another topic, but I feel like it belongs here as well:

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

Man, I'm not sure why, but I feel like I suddenly just cut myself somehow.

hockey7318 posted...

I married a single mom, but I too would not date a single dad.

Ironically, I'd steer clear of single moms like they have the motherfucking plague, but I'd probably be fine with a single dad (if I was actually into dudes).

Single moms be batshit crazy.



Blightzkrieg posted...

It's always best to date a partner who is confirmed breedable

Only if they're also submissive.

Sarcasthma posted...

Sorry bub, but everyone gets the same 5 poll options.

Nah, you gotta add a "Who the hell is this user?" option. Otherwise I won't be able to vote.

SilentSeph posted...

Some days he's a pickpocket, some days he's a peeping tom

Some people call hm the space cowboy, some call him the gangster of love.

And some people call him Maurice.

rexcrk posted...

GameCube had it correct

This statement is objectively wrong.



Dat_Cracka_Jax posted...

Maybe this is a tiny hand issue

Could be part of it. I know back when everyone complained about the XBox Duke controller and whined about it being too big, I never had an issue with it because I had adult hands and it fit fine (the only problem I had with the Duke was button placement, which is why I much preferred the S-controller).

I've always found the 360 controller to be one of the best I've ever used (across seven generations and about 15 consoles worth of designs) mainly because it's slightly larger than the PS Dual Shock and fits the most comfortably in my hands (I can use Dual Shock fine, but I definitely notice the difference when I switch from one to the other).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Honestly, I'm fine with either the XBox or PS designs, and it really just depends on which one I'm using more at any given time. ie, if I'm playing a lot of PS games and then switch to the XBox the XBox controller feels weird, but if I've been playing a lot of XBox games and then switch to the PS the PS controller feels weird. It just takes a little bit of adjustment time to get back into the groove.

The only "modern" controllers where I absolutely loathe the stick placement is the N64 and the Gamecube. Those are ones I feel like were crafted in the bowels of Hell solely to annoy.

How you feel about the issue might depend pretty strongly on just what sort of games you're playing.

Basically, this from the other topic. Which stick placement is "better" mainly depends on what sort of games you're playing (and whether or not you're focusing more on the right stick or the right controller buttons), though I don't think it makes enough of a difference either way for me to really care.

WalkingLobsters posted...

Does anyone else find PlayStation controller's stick placement to be unergonomic

I've never found it all that much of an issue. Honestly, I'm fine with either the XBox or PS designs, and it really just depends on which one I'm using more at any given time. ie, if I'm playing a lot of PS games and then switch to the XBox the XBox controller feels weird, but if I've been playing a lot of XBox games and then switch to the PS the PS controller feels weird. It just takes a little bit of adjustment time to get back into the groove.

The only "modern" controllers where I absolutely loathe the stick placement is the N64 and the Gamecube. Those are ones I feel like were crafted in the bowels of Hell solely to annoy.



TheGoldenEel posted...

Well, no, because a very common controller arrangement is to use the left stick for movement and the right buttons for controls

On the other hand, plenty of games these days (especially FPSs and first-person RPGs) put the camera on the right stick, so you'll be spending a lot of time using both sticks simultaneously anyway. And if primary game input is the triggers and you're only using the right buttons for specialized controls, you'll actually be using the right stick way more than the right buttons (and in that sense, it's not that different from games that add separate contextual commands to the D-Pad).

So how you feel about the issue might depend pretty strongly on just what sort of games you're playing.

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

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

If after 20 hours you are still not liking a game, it is fine to admit you do not like it.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/04/14/purgatory

Sarcasthma posted...

Also I'm going to need you to create Stalin and OscarWilde accounts.

I could be wrong, but I could have sworn we already had an Oscar Wilde themed account at one point.

I am watching none of the NCAA tournament.

I actively dislike both basketball and college sports. So it would be difficult to find a sporting event I care about less.

Zareth posted...

Look at all these racists voting St. Patrick's Day

I mean, I'm like 50% Irish and I hate St. Patrick's Day.

SilentSeph posted...

They're just talking shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSZy6lGgOcI

Zareth posted...

Hey PO remember to take the ball out and scratch at the rollers from time to time

That implies I have a mouse.

Which I don't.

Laptop, bitch.

wwinterj25 posted...

I hear they fart rainbows and butterflies.

You hear it from them.

But here's the secret: women lie.

A LOT.

teddy241 posted...

Would you hope to be in the center of the blast so you just vaporize or would you want to try and stick it out from the radiation fall out?

I'd argue surviving a nuclear explosion is worse in nearly every way than dying in one. Vaporize 100%.

The only good way to survive a nuclear blast is to be absolutely nowhere near one in the first place.


If actual nuclear war breaks out I'm pretty much dead no matter what. Being right in the middle between NYC and Philly and a few hours north of both Baltimore and Washington DC means I'm more or less right at the heart of the shit hitting the fan.

https://survival-mastery.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Watch-news.jpg
https://survival-mastery.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Interactive-map.jpg

If I even survive the first strike (NYC being the most likely problem), I'm probably roasted to the born and irradiated to fuck. At which point I'm probably just slitting my wrists and laying down to die because fuck that noise.

And even if I survived all that by some miracle, I'm still fucked because the fallout is going to hit my area worse than pretty much anywhere else.

http://www.radmeters4u.com/states/aacont2.jpg


Ironically, I actually DO have a Cold War-era fallout shelter like 2 minutes away from me, so in theory with enough warning I could potentially try to get into it. But I have no idea if it's been maintained at all over the last 30+ years, and it was probably never all that effective in the first place (most fallout shelters were more for the PR value than actually able to protect against nukes). And even if it worked perfectly I'd still be stuck inside until someone could evacuate me somehow. So I'd probably still be screwed in there even if I could get in.

On the other hand, if it's just North Korea lobbing nukes the best they could possibly do would likely be to hit the West Coast, in which case I'd probably be relatively fine other than the hit to the economy and produce.

Zero Dawn is the only game on that list I consider worth playing at all.

I voted Christmas, because it's the only holiday that has metastasized like a cancer and is creeping through the rest of the calendar like an oversized tumor.

When radio stations start playing Christmas music in the middle of October, we have a fucking problem.

And that's not even getting into "Christmas in July" bullshit.



Conner4REAL posted...

Christmas and Easter.
they are nationally recognized RELIGIOUS holidays.

yes Christmas is basically a Hallmark holiday now but then call it the winter solstice and celebrate on that day instead of its gonna be national.

The EDGE is real.

4real.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmUqKhRqO10

I barely think of him being from The Wire. I think of Fringe, Destiny, and Horizon: Zero Dawn way more.

Sad regardless, though.

captpackrat posted...

Hold down the CTRL key and scroll your mouse wheel.

That implies I have a mouse wheel.

Which I don't.

But you can also hold down CTRL and click + or -.

Metalsonic66 posted...

Okay the payoff was worth the squinting

"Open Image in New Tab"
Zoom 200%
Profit

wpot posted...

This is why it won't be a private entity: there's no profit to be made.

There was no point in going to the moon, either

Private entities are more likely to want to skip directly to the asteroid belt, because mining operations there could generate a lot of useful (and expensive) resources.

The main value for the moon is that it can be used as a launching point to more distant locations. Which would mostly only come into play once we're ready to go to those places. It's the same logic behind building some sort of large space station to act as a transport hub. Getting things out of and into Earth orbit is the largest problem with space flight, so setting things up as a two-stage trip with Earth-to-Moon or Earth-to-Station as the first step and then Moon/Station-to-Space as the second step would be far more effective than trying to do the whole trip in one go.

Getting to the moon originally was supposed to be proof of concept (and political oneupsmanship) more than anything. Which is why we haven't done much with it since.

Lokarin posted...

ya, one of two things are needed to colonize mars.

1. several trillions of gallons of water, if we ship water from earth to mars we're just creating problems on both ends
2. matter synthesis, just turn the rocks into water!

1) Capture a comet. They're mostly water, it's been hypothesized that they're where most of Earth's water came from originally, and it's become a standard sci-fi trope to grab comets to harvest water because the assumption is that it's how we'll have to operate if we ever do become space-faring. Conversely, find a way to redirect multiple comets to bombard the surface of Mars to terraform on a budget.

2) Or you could just find a way to melt the Martian polar ice caps, where tons and tons of water is already stored. Or just mechanically harvest the ice, then defrost it once you get it back to where you want it.

Dreams of completely terraforming Mars are probably little more than fantasy (problems such as insufficient atmosphere, severe weather conditions, lack of a magnetic field, soil composition, lower gravity, etc etc make it unlikely at best), but in theory it wouldn't be impossible to establish interlinked domes (or underground complexes) that are pressurized and then harvest water to keep things running.

That being said, we're likely never going to manage it because the people who are most enthusiastic about space travel tend to fail to comprehend just how hard it is. We're barely able to willing to do things that require waaaaay less effort now (or we do them and then fuck them up because we're bad at futureproofing).

People will say stuff like "Oh, humans colonized the entire world even when they had to persevere through incredibly harsh conditions, so space is just the next step", but that's ignoring the qualitative leap in problems that need to be solved in order to accomplish it at even the most basic level.

Same reason we're likely never going to have massive undersea dome cities like people thought we would in the 50s. The idea is cool, but the reality is so far beyond what we're currently capable of.

Even if we could upgrade our understanding of science and technology to a point where we could make it feasible, it would probably take countless generations to get to that point - and we're far more likely to fuck the planet up and ruin our existing technological civilization long before we could do it.

Well, I mean, it would only make sense. It was clearly made for me after all.