• 26 Posts
  • 730 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • Or much less, if this thing was being decommissioned, which isn’t that unlikely.

    On a related note, I once spent much of a summer internship in a dimly lit basement, prying open hard drives and smashing the platters with a hammer. There’s a surprising amount of variety in regards to how brittle those are: Some are like glass, whereas others are remarkably elastic and resilient.




  • The best light gun shooter I’ve ever played is a small VR game: Space Pirate Trainer. You’re just standing on a landing pad shooting down waves of robots, but it’s incredibly well balanced, has an ingenious dual-wielding system allowing you to prioritize protection or various kinds of firepower. You’ll leap around, duck and throw yourself to the ground trying to evade the merciless onslaught. It’s a ton of fun and a surprisingly good workout at the same time.

    I’m mentioning this game, because I think that VR shooters are the modern-day successors to light gun shooters. Many players are so fully immersed in the latter already that they are instinctively ducking and evading enemy fire with their bodies, even though it has no actual effect on these games. In VR however, it does and the way you are aiming and firing is identical, albeit not limited by a static screen.







  • That’s just the reality of doing business on the Internet. This is by far the best way of doing it right now, not that this information appears to have made it down under so far.

    While Australia’s new legislation is ham-fisted and poorly thought out, the intent isn’t wrong and there’s broad consensus for it (77% approval in Australia). We need to do something about the uncontrolled exploitation, manipulation and endangerment of minors by social media services. Corporations are clearly not interested in protecting them and parents are obviously incapable of it as well (although I could have told you the same thing 20 years ago). That’s precisely the kind of issue where the government is supposed to step in with regulation of some sort.








  • Black Flag came out in 2013, so this tracks.

    Although, having said that, they have released at least a few interesting things since then, good games and ideas that somehow made it through their corporate nonsense (which developers have made fun of themselves, like in the present day sequences in Black Flag) and might motivate someone to hold their nose and play them regardless, like for example their charming “Indie-like” games made by small teams within their oversized studios (Rayman Legends/Origins, Grow Home/Up, Valiant Hearts, various 2D Prince of Persias, etc.), neat VR experiments (e.g. Star Trek Bridge Crew), educational modes/spin-offs based on the Assassin’s Creed games that cut out all of the slop and allow users to explore these game worlds freely - and Ghost Recon Wildlands, which on one hand is a hugely expensive AAA game with all of the typical trappings, from massive production values to godawful writing, but it also has a charming amount of jank and somehow really fun power fantasy squad command gameplay - but only after removing the awful launcher and DRM that makes you feel like the company hates you for buying their games.