In a sane world Oracle would be laughed out of court, but Larry Ellison is a major political donor who’s been cozying up to the Trump administration, so who knows if the facts actually matter anymore?

That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines. They’ll always perform worse than specialized tech, but modern games are so complicated that custom engines aren’t really feasible anymore.

Unreal is the king of bloat. Rather than “general purpose” they strove for “all purpose” - Unreal Engine tries to do literally everything out of the box with as many bells and whistles attached as possible. The result is that Unreal Engine games require tons of optimization to run well, and even the editor itself consumes tens of gigabytes and runs like crap.

Unity is simply a mess of poor decisions and technical debt. Their devs seem to reinvent a crucial development pipeline every few years, give up halfway, then leave both options exposed and expect developers to just automatically know the pitfalls of each. Combined with horrific mismanagement and hostile revenue-seeking, Unity has lost a ton of goodwill over the past few years. It’s a major fall from grace for what was once the undisputed king of Indie dev engines.

Godot is tiny, decently performant, and great for simple games, but it’s very bare-bones and expects developers to implement their own systems for anything beyond basic rendering, physics, and netcode. Additionally, the core developers have a reputation for being incredibly resistant to making major changes even when a battle-tested pull request for a frequently requested feature is available. Still my personal pick though.

I’ll always have a soft spot for the original Xbox due to XBMC, the homebrewed Xbox Media Center.

Though most would probably know it better by its current name, Kodi.

The DS with a flashcart was nearly perfect. It was incredibly pocket-friendly due to the rectangular shape, the screen was protected from scratches while folded so you didn’t need a case, and it could emulate every console up to the N64 as well as every Nintendo handheld (obviously). I was upset when my cart finally died - no other handheld emulator I’ve found is as convenient.

ChatGPT

Cybersecurity

So you know how to fix all the security holes the AI left in your codebase, right? Right?

Still working on Conan: Exiles, which got an update yesterday. My thoughts remain the same: good game, excellent base-building, but there’s not really much that I haven’t already seen a hundred times in other survival games. I’ll probably drop it soon.

I finished a co-op campaign of Abiotic Factor. We started our playthrough early in its Early Access period and had been returning to it every few months as new chapters were added. The game is every bit as great as everyone says, though the ending is incredibly abrupt. I’m wondering if they had to cut a bunch of content to make the release date. I hope they expand on things in a later update or future DLC, because it’s the only major flaw in an otherwise nearly perfect game.

Also played a bit of Gloomwood, a lo-fi immersive sim which comes very close to scratching that classic Thief itch. The stealth is great, the levels are well laid out and heavily intertwined so you always have multiple routes to achieve an objective, and the AI is the perfect balance between smart and dumb for shenanigans. There’s also an incredibly satisfying backstab with the canesword, though certain enemies wear armor that makes them immune so you sadly can’t clear out entire levels while ghosting.

I do have some minor complaints. As a packrat I’m not a fan of the Resident Evil-style grid inventory with limited space, especially since the game has a research mechanic where you need to chop up mutated corpses and bring one of every single body part to a specific point on the map to unlock crafting recipes and permanent character bonuses.

A single body’s various parts are enough to take up the entire inventory, necessitating either some very fiddly inventory juggling (items switch from grid-based paper dolls to physics-enabled models as you drag them to and from the world, causing all sorts of messes) or multiple trips across the entire open world map and back. The Goatman alone took nearly half an hour of combat-less hauling to research, and its boss arena isn’t even that far from the lab.

Enemies are also persistent. Once you kill someone they stay dead for the rest of the playthrough, which on one hand speeds up the backtracking, but on the other also makes it a boring chore if you’ve been thorough. There are a few points in the story where new enemies will spawn in old areas, at least.

All that said it’s an excellent game, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a good immersive sim. It’s still in Early Access, but what’s there is already incredibly satisfying despite my various gripes.

Please post your thoughts on Abiotic Factor when you get to it. It’s tied with Grounded as my favorite game of the past few years.

There are entire sites dedicated to “Rationalism”. It’s a quasi-cult of pseudointellectual wankery that’s mostly a bunch of sub-cults of personalities based around the worst people you’ll ever meet. A lot of tech bros bought into it because for whatever terrible thing they want to do, some Rationalist has probably already written a thirty page manifesto on why it’s actually a net good and moral act and preemptively kissing the boot of whoever is “brave” enough to do it.

The movement’s founder and “leader” is a highschool dropout and self-declared genius who is mainly famous for writing a “deconstructive” Harry Potter fanfiction despite never reading the books himself; a work that’s more preachy than Atlas Shrugged at its worst and mostly consists of regurgitated content from his blog and ripoffs of Ender’s Game alongside freshmen-level (and often wrong) understandings of basic science.

He also has this weird hard-on about true AI inevitably escaping the lab by somehow convincing researchers to free it through pure, impeccable logic.

Re: that last point: I first heard of Elizier Yudkowsky nearly twenty years ago, long before he wrote Methods of Rationality (the aforementioned fanfiction). He was offering a challenge on his personal site where he’d roleplay as an AI that had gained sentience and you as its owner/gatekeeper, and he bet he could convince you to let him connect to the wider internet and free himself using nothing but rational arguments. He bragged about how he’d never failed and that this was proof that an AI escaping the lab was inevitable.

It later turned out he’d set a bunch of artificial limitations on debaters and what counterarguments they could use and made them sign an NDA before he’d debate them. He claimed that this was so future challengers couldn’t “cheat” by knowing his arguments ahead of time (because as we all know, “perfect logical arguments” are the sort that fall apart when given enough time to think about them /s).

It shouldn’t come as a shock that it was eventually revealed he’d lost multiple of these debates even with those restrictions, declared that those losses “didn’t count”, and forbid the other person from talking about them using the NDA they’d signed so he could keep bragging about his perfect win rate.

Anyway, I was in no way surprised when he used his popularity as a fanfiction writer to establish a cult around himself. There’s an entire community dedicated to following and mocking him and his proteges if you’re interested - IIRC it’s !techtakes@awful.systems !sneerclub@awful.systems.

I’ve played Lunacid! It was good, but the limited equipment slots (just your weapon and two rings) meant it didn’t have the same feeling of gradual progression that Kings Field had. Haven’t played Tears of the Moon yet.

If they ever announce a new Kings Field game, people’s heads (mine included) will explode from sheer shock and excitement.

In addition, the company […] wants to be awarded all rights, title and interest in any intellectual property developed by Cleveland, McGuire, and Gill during their employment at Unknown Worlds, including “all movie scripts, movie footage, game design, game code, play tests, or other software development.”

Ugh.

Ah, right. I thought you meant a comment under the awards themselves.

Is there any video of his whose comment section isn’t a complete cesspool? His edgy 4chan-lite schtick draws in the worst sorts of people to become fans.

Sseth also destroys the culture around the indie games he covers. Whenever he does a video on a niche game, the flood of viewers overwhelms the existing community with toxicity and many of them never fully recover.

I’m still mad he turned the wider community of the game Starsector from mostly left-leaning fans of classic sci-fi into a bunch of stereotypical Redditors who constantly joke about committing rape and genocide - his fans even spearheading development of a mod to add those into the game. Fucking disgusting.

A pretty good way to get a code review is to post the code on GitHub and make a post advertising it as a tool everyone needs. People will be quick to review it.

Is this a corollary of Cunningham’s Law?

Precisely. Getting people upset is the foremost technique to farm engagement on social media. Sites such as Facebook even deliberately altered their algorithms to show content that will anger readers because it works so well to keep them invested.

Engagement bait is omnipresent and really obvious once you learn to spot it - even something as innocuous as one or two “accidental” typos in a meme to get people into the comments section.

Damn, single-player only. My brother-in-law is obsessed with Risk of Rain 2 and this seems like a good alternative, but the lack of co-op means he probably wouldn’t play it.

You say “wildly wrong”, they say “incentivizing engagement”.

What video are you referring to? All I could find searching on YouTube was a single stream with comments disabled followed by pages of videos complaining about how “woke” the awards are.

Just to be clear, “watching” is a bit of a misnomer. In Project Zomboid TVs play programs to dispense lore/world-build, show what’s happening outside the Exclusion Zone, teach recipes and skills to players, improve their mood (mental health is an important part of gameplay), potentially draw in nearby zombies with the light and noise, and give survivors something to do while resting during downtime.

However, it’s all just text - the TV will light up, and if it’s tuned to a live channel or playing a VHS, a new line of text will pop up above it every few seconds. As the apocalypse advances more and more channels will go dark or switch to automated reruns (the attention to detail in this game is just *chef’s kiss*), eventually leaving looted VHS tapes as the only way to watch most programs.

That said, if the modders used a program to extract subtitles and kept the timings, you could theoretically play the episode at the same time and watch it in sync alongside your character. Here’s hoping someone makes a mod that lets you launch VLC to a second monitor from within the game with the proper timing offsets!

It does not, but at $8 buying two copies is still cheaper than a single copy of even most indie games.

And Kerrigan should have stayed evil. That’s my “Han shot first” of the franchise.

Agreed 100%, how Kerrigan was handled was the worst of StarCraft 2’s many sins against prior characterization. They spent an entire expansion setting her up as an irredeemable monster and the new big bad of the setting alongside Mengsk and whatever Duran was up to, only to undo it all because NuBlizzard wanted their waifu.

And there is no way Jim Raynor as of the end of Brood War would ever ally with Kerrigan again after her betrayal, yet he goes from having sworn to get revenge for Fenix’s death to helping Kerrigan “redeem” herself with little more than a mention of past grievances.