I once tried writing a guide for Paper Mario, and it was then I realized how much effort, consultation, and typing all of these are. It’s in some ways not a surprise that walkthroughs are now just video playthroughs of the game (often involving someone backtracking 3 times as they figure out a puzzle) - that takes a lot less effort than conscious text recorded outside of a game.

Just copying this from a top level comment in case you haven’t seen it.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/zohran-mamdani-new-york-times

Now I feel bad that I unsubscribed from them for something as simple as popup annoyance. I could have slammed them for this.

Another Crab’s Treasure, Stellar Blade, Jedi: FO and Survivor, Hollow Knight, Tunic, and lately Steelrising.

Some of those games are a bit easier but also have harder moments. To me, it’s about having a better-structured difficult curve.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of Soulslikes, but none of the ones made by FromSoft. Their style of providing poor explanations of mechanisms just makes no sense to me, even if you want to give players those moments of self-driven discovery.

I feel like they would still know about it when doing inventory, no?

The game seems awesome, but it is by no means indie or at all a hidden gem. It has a ton of presence.

I’m cautious but a little curious about this one, because QA could actually be a very good target for AIs to work with.

1. It might not kill jobs. Right now, engineers finish a task and the limited number of QA engineers can’t possibly test it enough before release. That game-breaking bug you found in a game? I’m sure some QA had it in their plan to test every level for those bugs, and yet they just didn’t have enough time - and the studio couldn’t justify hiring 20 more QA squads. Even if they do upscale AI testing, they’ll need knowledgable QA workers to guide them.
2. This is often extremely rote, repetitive work. It’s exactly the type of work The Oatmeal said is great for AIs. One person is tuning the balance on the Ether Drive attack, and gives it an extra 40% blarf damage. He tries it, sees it works fine, and eagerly skips past the part of the test plan to verify that all cutscenes are working and unaffected to push it in. An AI will try it out, and find: Actually, since an NPC uses an Ether Drive in a late-game cutscene, this breaks the whole game!
3. Even going past existing plans, QA can likely find MORE work for AIs to do that they normally wouldn’t bother with. Think about the current complexity of game dev that leads to the current trope of releasing games half-finished to eventually get patched. It won’t help patch games, but it’ll at least help give devs an up-to-date list of issues.

That said, those talking about human creativity and player expectations are still correct. An AI can report a problem with feedback that a human can say “No, that looks fine. Override that report.” It will also be good to do occasional manual tests, and lament “How did the AI think this was okay??”

In a way, I guess I agree; it’s not the wittiest analysis of the argument. Everyone SHOULD have topics they get angry about. What matters is which ones. Getting angry about feeding children is a sadly truthful analysis of conservatives right now.

Could lead to a funny comic where they compare reasons each was angry about the last NY mayoral election they lost.

And we say again: Please see the previous election.

These people are doing all they can already to change votes. Those in power are ruthless, but they’re scared of getting caught (they just generally suggest their supporters should “do something”)

Don’t do this - it’s loud! Also do not put a nail inside of a matchbox-like piece of cardboard to keep it upright, and drop it in front of the tire, because that will also be loud when it goes off, and make the agent very embarrassed!

Disney has assembled a very good case against one generative AI company, showing that the stuff “learned” from shared art is essentially infringing on copyright and failing to assemble its own ideas. They asked it for “A man in a metal suit” and it would consistently give them Iron Man, down to the fine details.

We’ve moved away from the simple Copy and Paste tools in image editors, but I would say not nearly far enough for technology to evade the principles of trademark and copyright infringements. The “model” is in many ways just a database of other people’s stolen artwork, ready to be rearranged.

Yeah, filesystem is a slow battle of forfeiture. Everyone wants to say “I’ll just use FAT, or NTFS, because both Windows and Linux support them!” And then it inevitably gives them performance issues among other problems.

I still use either for the drives where both of my dual boot OS’s need to access them, but I recognize it’s not a good place for games (I have some old, light ones that I’m not worried about accessing on NTFS, but big ones like Helldivers are out). It may even be a good excuse to learn more detailed partitioning so you can slowly shrink/eliminate what’s still using the two compatibility formats.

Distro choice is a tricky problem. I say that as someone that kinda settled on one; my own experience has not always matched others. But I will admit, it’s nice to stay on an interface not too far from Windows’ taskbar.

I’ve always felt the tower thing was unfair.

It WAS a good idea when first used. And, when imported across to Far Cry, they also tried to come up with new forms of climbing and even puzzles to get you up. Then, simply because the internet made memes about it through repeat emphasis (repeating an old mechanic alone isn’t necessarily a bad thing) they responded, took the system out, and even lampshaded it in Far Cry 5 - WHILE other devs as far as Nintendo/Zelda were copying it.

Theres a lot to condemn Ubisoft for, but the towers thing always irked me. Call open worlds as a whole boring, but it suggests it’s not the sort of game to keep your interest anyway.

Trails in the Sky

I got sick about dystopian chaotic worlds that don’t work - where the hero’s journey is about saving the world from some impending ruin, or about preventing a starving dystopian city from being blown up.

In Trails, the conversations you have with NPCs remind you that while you’re on the trail of some bandits or suspicious people, other people are not evacuating, sheltering in fear, etc; they’re living their lives, keeping up to date on modern trends, making travel plans to other countries.

So, so many worlds just don’t have space for characters to have those thoughts. It’s always fear around impending disasters, or how to respond to a fight, or grim poetry about how much the world has fallen into darkness.

It especially hurts that some people live so much of their lives in these fictional worlds that they start to believe people would be like that when they go outside. Worlds like the one in Trails, even if they spend a lot of time being boringly polite, are a nice call back to reality.

Part of the problem is, this is not the first time this assault on minorities has happened; and many of the people who voted for Trump were previously thought of as allies who were reformed.

We can even scare our own allies by “making nice” with villains. I remember hearing out a very betrayed voter whose core issue of dismay was hearing Gavin Newsom get cowed by Joe Rogan into saying supporting Trans people was a mistake.

People like Joe Rogan have HURT them. I want you to picture having someone that ruined your life, and picture what it’s like to have them sleeping in your home, based on nothing more than “Hey, bud. We’re good now, right?”

Yup, I had this exact experience. Installed Bazzite because it was a “gaming OS”. Had trouble just installing any non-gaming apps, or looking up guides to do so. Even gaming wasn’t perfect.

Installed CachyOS, and yes, there are annoyances, but also a nice path to fix them. It’s both a good gaming OS, and a daily driver for casual use.

My daily drivers: Outlast Trials, Dead by Daylight, Wild Assault, Helldivers 2, Warhammer Space Marine 2.

All of those work fine on Linux. It just seems to be the most toxic, gamerfuel-heavy games that go full kernel anticheat.

Certainly interesting to look at the fastest-growing distros: Ubuntu (the well-known, popular option), Bazzite (the gaming-marketed one), Freedesktop (someone else can answer this for me), and CachyOS (the side-gaming one? Not quite a gaming OS but very good at it)

I’m not so sure Valve is the right maintainer for the core desktop. The Deck works well, but mainly what Valve is maintaining is the Game Mode feature and Proton. Everything else is largely better handed off to a bigger group.

I’ve definitely run into some snobbish “Accept my incorrect solutions and be grateful, or go back to Windows, newb” types of people. I don’t have much love for them. I recognize it takes patience to acclimate new users, but it’s part of the job.

By and large I’m preferential to just stay with something that works; part of what pushed me off it has just been Microsoft themselves enshittifying the experience. I feel like I remember a day when Windows start search actually took you to what you wanted, and now “notepad” immediately queries the shopping network before your own program list, and when you get Notepad open it has a Copilot button.

You’re doing the right thing as long as you stay on an OS that keeps you going day in and day out. I tried Linux earlier in the year on two distros that did NOT work as well as the internet said they would, and went back to Windows. More recently, tried another one and there were stupid difficulties - but I got past them, at a time when Windows issues were just giving me “This is the way it is now, just put up with it”.