I write a lot of spreadsheets for games I play, so adapting them into more sophisticated software is always something I chip away at. Good opportunity to learn how to implement concepts in new languages too. Right now I’m writing a Warframe simulator in Racket.
Reading the responses here, why are people so mad about types? Maybe I’m biased coming from a background of statically typed languages and mathematics. I’d rather have a good typing system that makes me think about data than just hoping I’ve thought about a problem right.
Absolutely indeed! I’ll never buy an Nvidia card because of how anti-customer they are. It started with them locking out PCI passthrough when I was building a gaming Linux machine like ten years ago.
I wonder if moving people towards the idea of just following the companies that don’t treat them with contempt is an angle that will work. I know Steph Sterling’s video on “consumer” vs “customer” helped crystallize that attitude in me.
Find an independent critic you respect and listen to the tenor of why they say a game is good. Or ignore critics and develop your own taste and sense of which studios, directors, artists, composers, or otherwise will compel you to buy a game.
Commercial media has always been collaborative with whatever power structures or industries it’s associated with. Only good media is independent, and even then you get some really shitty journalists, and sometimes entire rotten publications.
And it has VR too! I think NMS and having actual Daggerfall doesn’t leave me any room to particularly care about Starfield. I don’t get the hype at all.
Would you tell me what games you have as a point of reference that the combat feels stiff and clunky? I think I generally play games with similar kinds of pacing so I haven’t personally noticed anything. It’s not as fast, fluid and flashy as say PSO2 New Genesis, but I wouldn’t say it feels stiff or clunky to me.
Agreed the UI is awful though. There’s a lot of missing functionality too… like there’s just no way to manage echoes in their own screen.
Cozy Soulslike is a great concept honestly. I loved the first Dark Souls because it mostly facilitated slow and tactical combat. Favourite build was a pyromancer with a high stability shield. Tweak the numbers to add more tolerance to errors (like the boss demonstration showed) and you do get a much more relaxed Soulslike.
I’ll buy any CyberConnect2 original IPs. Fuga 3 for the Switch 2, babeyyyyyy! I see they also have a couple of other games cooking with no release date.
Apparently the main thing that’s been holding Monolith back from remastering X has been trouble updating the engine for Switch. More powerful hardware might enable it… let’s hope.
With their dev cycle and work culture I don’t think we’re getting a launch Xenoblade though, or even anything.
As long as they have co-op!
How does the PSP version compare to the PS2 version? Play! doesn’t emulate it properly.
Fighters Megamix is a classic. I love the weird old games with big rosters and a cheerful vibe. I don’t think any other game lets you pit a Daytona car against a giant mascot sculpture.
As soon as Valve starts distributing it here in Australia I’m all over it! That or until Ayn release their Loki series.
The only big distributors here actually selling it are kind of sketchy about warranties, and it’s also crazy overpriced.
Can’t emulate it properly on any of my portable devices 🥹
Smash Remix is a mod for Super Smash Bros for the Nintendo 64. Very easy to emulate on basically any device you can plug into your TV. It’s all the fun of Smash Bros with all the weirdness, jank, and accessible hype combos of Smash 64.
If your device can handle it, the port of Sonic The Fighters for PS3 is also very cute and fun. It also has an active netplay community.
Some of that is on GNOME. I had to swap back to KDE after a couple years on GNOME due to lack of VR compatibility. GNOME is good for newbies and productivity, but completely unusable for gaming.
Would be nice if there were some kind of open source, cross-platform, low-level graphics API, maybe overseen by some kind of pan-industry group (or “consortium” if you’re feeling fancy). Just spitballing but you could call it “Cape” or “Hephaestos” or something.
Would be great too if there were one or two open-source, MIT- or dual-licensed game engines that target this API. Maybe even some runtimes so you could target PC and the big three console platforms.
I dunno, maybe this is all a pipe dream.
Man just loves the taste of his own feet I guess.
I’m not sure how the tech is progressing, but ChatGPT was completely dysfunctional as an expert system, if the AI field still cares about those. You can adapt the Chinese Room problem to whether a model actually has applicability outside of a particular domain (say, anything requiring guessing words on probabilities, or stabilising a robot).
Another problem is that probabilistic reasoning requires data. Just because a particular problem solving approach is very good at guessing words based on a huge amount of data from a generalist corpus, doesn’t mean it’s good at guessing in areas where data is poor. Could you comment on whether LLMs have good applicability as expert systems in, say, medicine? Especially obscure diseases, or heterogeneous neurological conditions (or both like in bipolar disorders and schizophrenia-related disorders)?