Raison d'être

Watched a couple made-for-TV movies with the gimmick being they're made to look like breaking news broadcasts (so for the original TV viewers it would look indistinguishable from actual newscasts). They're neat for that reason alone, especially if you're old enough to remember watching actual broadcast television.

I really like the climax on this one, at about 1:25:00,

1 hour ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

much like a lot of these kinds of RPGs the main story is like a tiny amount of the game

That's why I was worried, I didn't want to lock myself out of a lot of content by doing it. I still get Fallout 3 (vanilla) flashbacks when I see that kind of stuff.

18 hours ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

It's absolutely bizarre that cyberpunk 2077 had an overhaul to the game that so drastically altered core systems. I never thought you'd be able to say "I started up my singleplayer game and realized an update made my character non-functional" but here we are.

 

The weirdest part is that the biggest part of the overhaul, the perks, aren't even a clearly better system, it's just a completely different one. Like they thought up a new set of perks for their expansion pack, and were like "let's just make it the base game and throw out the old system!" I guess it's "content" for the people who played it through at launch and then dropped it? 

 

I can't talk too much shit because the wacky dash mechanic in one of the new trees reminds me a lot of the Advanced Warfare exo boosts which I happen to love

I'll have to come back to it, I bought it at launch and played it up until the !!!POINT OF NO RETURN!!! Then I was like "oh, better finish up some other stuff" but got distracted.

I think DailyFX's disclaimer is even less of a barrier than those "Are you 18/21+?" screeners. At least those have an option to say no.

(If you're wondering why it's there, it's because they weren't registered with the SEC but implied they were, and the SEC put them on the naughty list. And yes, the US was/is its largest source of traffic.)

This whole talk is worth watching. Even though the rot infests all gaming these days, it really makes you realize how godawful the mobile market is.

Software as a service sucks ass for many, many reasons, but it at least has the benefit of usually working, if only because you need the program to work if you're going to make people pay for it in perpetuity. In the past, unscrupulous publishers wouldn't really care if their crackhead DRM didn't work on every machine because if they made the return process enough of a hassle a lot of affected people wouldn't bother.

Probably spends only a small amount of time online these days, like a lot of folks from 10+ years ago. He's won... he's escaped.

5 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

The only thing I've found recently that hits close to this is Zniw Adventure.  It's a point and click adventure game, but it includes a pretty detailed glossary.  Some of that is just game exclusive information, but the dinosaur characters have information about their species instead, complete with evolutionary timeline, diet, etc.  When you're browsing through that part it does get close to something like The Way Things Work.

 

I guess I should also note that having historical information in games was not uncommon in the 95-05 period.  For example, Civilization 2-4 include a lot of historical information for techs, civilizations, etc. as part of their "civpedias", much of it having nothing to do with the gameplay.  I've never played 5 and 6 so I don't know if they continue this tradition.  Though thinking back on that, it does make me miss having extensive descriptions of game mechanics in game, or even in a separate manual, rather than having game companies say "I'm sure that our fans put that stuff up on a wiki or something lol."

5 and 6 continue it for sure, there's a shitload written in their civpedias. Total War used to have something similar for units/buildings, but I don't think they do it anymore beyond a short sentence or two.

Software back then was interesting because it had enough hardware power to do pretty cool things, but the internet wasn't big enough to the point you could rely on a site to do everything for you, if you even assumed the user had internet access at all.

27 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

I'll not have you besmirching the reputations of the gas stations that provide a fifth of my meals and employee a quarter of my relatives!

Yeah well they take a third of my income so I got you beat!

On 7/30/2023 at 12:39 AM, Gyokuyoutama said:

So I think here is what happened:

 

-They realized that the 99 cent model wasn't sustainable, but it's so core to the image that they needed some tricky way out.

-In 2022 they make their own meme about the price going up to $1.29.

-They immediately say that this is false, and put forward a promise to never increase the price from $.99.  To make sure that their statements become "authoritative" and anything going against it is "misinformation" they actually keep the price constant at $.99 throughout 2022.

-As 2023 rolls in, they start distributing cans with no price on them and with a suggested retail value of $1.29.

-Since the price exactly corresponds with the false meme price, someone confused about this will only find "fact checked" articles saying that the price is still $.99

-These usually end with saying "but retailers can increase the price from the suggestion."  Since there is no price listed on the can, the consumer has no proof that the suggested price isn't $.99, and hence assumes that the store that sold the can is doing price gouging.

My best bet is that since the price the retailers pay for the tea probably went up, they collectively told Arizona to knock it off because they're not gonna stock Arizona if it means they get 5 cents margin per can, while putting 99 cents on the bottle makes them look like douchebags for marking up the price, since the average consumer doesn't know or care about economics (and to be fair usually gas station owners are douchebags). And even if the price they pay for the tea didn't go up, that 99 cents effectively caps their margin, and that's a bad thing when expenses are also increasing.

Obviously printing the increased price on the bottle is horrible optics so they just removed it entirely. I don't think there's a bad guy in any of this - cost leadership is not a suicide pact.

As for social media, I would not be surprised at all if whoever's doing marketing just didn't get the memo until they had already pronounced eternal 99 cent tea.

5 hours ago, Moby said:

I saw a guy that I used to watch devolve into a baittuber in just a few months. It was both sad and extremely pathetic.

 

Face cam, clickbait ALL CAPS titles, open mouth reaction thumbnails, copying whatever the big streamers are doing, jumping immediately into the current trend, bending down to the algorithm, torturing himself with bad stuff because it "generates more clicks", demanding people to leave their PCs on to fake audience for advertisement streams, stopping doing stuff because it was "not getting views".

 

The first red flag was set during one stream I joined and noticed the views had dropped by almost half of what it was a few hours before, so I asked what happened and he immediately snapped thinking I was insinuating he lost views because he was ranting (again).

The second flag was set when he stopped a stream for one hour to review his blocked word list and it was entirely made of single words that made him mad, including common verbs and even a few colors.

Then what made me stop watching was when I joined a stream and , like always, every ""joke"" was "haha cock", "haha gay" or "haha doing your mom". I made a side comment saying "recently all his jokes are either "penis" or "haha gay"" and he once again snapped saying "fuck you, you are not even subscribed".

I'm sorry for your loss. It's always rough when a good youtuber goes bad.

2 hours ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

I've always wondered how they're able to sell them for so cheap. There's no way that whatever they put in there is actually tea.

Why not? Tea, provided you don't really care about its provenance, is incredibly cheap. All you need to make iced tea is tea and water (and in Arizona's case, a shitload of sugar).

Any substitutions would likely cost more than tea. Now those incredibly cheap meat products, on the other hand...

18 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

Tested things with a new update.  Even putting the updates on "pause" will still cause the update to be installed on boot.  I'm not sure if "pausing" actually does anything at all.  There's certainly plenty of other switches you can hit in Windows that claim to do something but actually do nothing.

I remember hearing about someone going into the registry and changing it so that Windows won't auto-update, but I have no idea if that still works or if that would disable updates entirely (I think it did, as you wouldn't be able to run Windows Update without also running the auto-update "feature" of Update).

I had to hard shutdown my computer a couple nights ago and Windows dutifully installed my pending updates before I even got to the login screen. I don't think there's any way around it (short of disabling Windows Update entirely).

1 hour ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

after lunch someone came in and complained to another person in the office that someone moved a cone. how did you know?

 

(It wasn't the cones I moved though, it was the other side of the lot they were talking about)

You're marked. The Cone Stasi is alerted. It's over for you.

2 hours ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

Honestly I'm pretty much with you, a lot of shooters could stand to have something fun going on there or at least add some spice. For all the strides FPS games have made to add immersion like crazy tracer FX, near-miss sounds, supersonic cracks, it's honestly a little weird that there hasn't been much in the way of tweaks for reloading. Honestly the only thing I can think of as concrete evidence of neat stuff with reloads isn't even gameplay related at all, it's just the extremely rare reload animations that some games throw in as an easter egg. Even that really gets me, I remember for the longest time whenever I had a Scout in Apex I'd think about "what if I get the super rare Garand reload?!" Even though it was very rare AND you needed to fully empty the gun (which was pretty rare since it was very ammo efficient). There's definitely been development in reload animations in general, but not necessarily much in mechanics.

 

As a kid I always thought about how it'd be cool if there was a game that let you reload in different ways, like a trick reload that was faster but fucked up if you got hit or something, dumb stuff like that. I figured it was only a matter of time before that happened, but it didn't really ever show up (Advanced Warfare's speed for ammo is the closest I ever encountered). Kinda wish people played around with it more, it would especially fit in a FEAR or Doom type "one man army" shooter since that stuff primarily runs on rule of cool and that's where you can throw in some badass (if impractical) reload animations

 

As an aside that one of the things that Valve talked about in Half Life: Alyx's commentary tracks they talked about reloading in VR and how playtesters reacted to it. They thought that people would be overwhelmed and hate reloads that were more realistic/intricate but instead people really responded well to them even if they technically just made things harder. Reloading in VR is damn fun, I'd be lying if I didn't say I spent a lot of time in H3VR doing my own cringy reload drills just to see what stupid tricks I could pull off consistently.

 

Oh yeah! Speaking of Valve stuff, CS:GO has the CZ Auto which has a unique reload for the first time in a round because it has the weird "mag attached to the front" thing going on. But after that I'm pretty sure it uses another pistol's standard reloads. That's a fun detail tbqh

I can see reloading being fun in VR. I still wouldn't want to play VR, but it's a nice touch.

The CZ Auto thing reminds me of the taped mags that Black Ops 1 had. It was neat how every other reload was lighting speed.

32 minutes ago, hugthebed2 said:

Huh, I was actually just thinking about this earlier and how a game like Payday would be really good for it.

Payday would be great for it, but there's probably going to be too many weapons in 3 to make it viable. Unless...

On 7/9/2023 at 7:17 AM, Rynjin said:

Most military shooters are some level of simulationist, but want to make some nods to game balance as well. They have a locked in balance point for how long they want a weapon to take to reload and it's one of the relatively common pivots for nerfing/buffing some kinds of weapons. I imagine it's a combination of too much work to keep up in a game that will be patched and an idea of like "why put in two reload speeds when we could just get it right the first time?"

I don't think that applies to a lot of FPS games, though, especially games like Black which are, at their core, what I'd call "unstoppable badass" shooters. Stuff like Duke Nukem, Far Cry, F.E.A.R, and Postal (with Just Cause being an example of a TPS game in this vein). These games share some traits, which is that they're almost exclusively single-player games where the player character acts alone for a majority of the game and cuts a swath through his enemies. Balance... doesn't really matter here, as long as the player character's weapons feel fun to use, that's enough. And even if balance mattered, dynamic reloading in combat still wouldn't really matter, considering you'd always get the faster reload when you need it. Games like this don't tend to get significant updates, especially not balance updates, because nobody playing these games will give a shit if the SMG kills a grunt in 5 shots or 6 - as long as mowing that fucker down is a fun experience, that's all that matters.

To be clear I'm not asking "Why hasn't every FPS adopted this feature?" - I'm asking why no other game has. Sure, it wouldn't work for anything with competitive multiplayer, but plenty of FPS games don't have that, nor should they.

On 7/9/2023 at 11:35 AM, A 1970 Corvette said:

The closest thing to some actually interesting reload technology from a "recent" game was titanfall's (and by extension Apex Legends) gated reloads where if you swapped while reloading it would remember and force you to finish parts of it. So if you switch off from empty after your character inserted a new mag but didn't charge the gun, you'd still have to do that and stuff like that. Plenty of games have something similar but titanfall had it more developed than I'd seen anywhere else and it's a nice little detail. Actually, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare had a reloading mechanic where if you double-tapped reload you'd reload faster but drop all remaining ammo, and THAT had unique animations (sometimes). It was actually a fairly interesting thing because it meant ammo perks like Scavenger had a hidden benefit of increasing your reload speed since you didn't have to worry about wasting ammo. Very few people engaged with that mechanic though, I feel like at times I was the only one who knew. (It also had wildly different efficiency based on the weapons, some of them barely benefited at all from it) I wouldn't mind seeing it elsewhere, maybe it is and I just didn't play the games that have it

 

This discussion kind of makes me remember basically the only thing I actually can recall from the Gears of War games, where reloading had that little minigame where you could get it in the sweet spot to reload faster. Is there just a weird era of late-xbox-early-360 games trying to innovate on random things like reloads?

 

PlanetSide 2 actually had an implant that increased your reload speed when your shield was broke and it became part of an infamous exploit primarily used to ruin fights by killing spawn points. Oops. But I could write a lot about planetside's reloading quirks and absolutely none of it would be interesting at all

 

Ultimately I think it's probably as rynjin says. It's both less work to do and more consistent which is what people want. 

I feel like I played another game with gated reloads, but I can't remember which game it was - or even if I'm just hallucinating. It's honestly surprising more shooters don't do more things with reloads considering that's probably the most common action you take in a shooter (aside from, of course, shooting).

Yes, it's more work - but it's not that much more work! Especially considering the games I mentioned tend to have a limited selection of weapons as opposed to 73 different assault rifles. I mean look at all the games that allow you to pet animals or change your outfit. They're not needed, and you'd never complain if a game didn't have them, but they're still neat concepts, and despite taking dev time they're added. And Black was a game made by a AA studio (Criterion) that had never made an FPS before. If they can do it, I don't see why anybody else can't.

Black was a great game in a lot of ways, and I'm still wondering why I've never seen another FPS toy with the concept of dynamic reloads/weapon swapping (faster in combat, slower out of combat). It's such a small feature but it really improves the "flow" of the game, especially since they're new animations, not just sped up ones.

Example of a fast reload:

Slow reload:

After I first played it about 15 years ago I was thinking that there's got to be other games with this feature, but I've not seen them yet. Which is strange, since it's a really neat TECHNOLOGY feature to have. The closest I've seen was Killing Floor 2 changing some reload animations with perks, but that's not really the same thing (though it is also cool).

I didn't mind the soundtrack, it's not something I would ever listen to normally but it mixes well with the earrape gunshots and enemy screaming, which would drown out any soundtrack.

Trepang 2 is fun. It's basically a faster-paced F.E.A.R., complete with great enemy death screams.

People say the story isn't much but I think it's honestly pretty good for what it is (an excuse to shoot things), and the atmosphere felt nice. My only complaint is that it's a bit short, but I can excuse that since what's there is good and the dev team is new and small.

I'm using this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-twitter-layout-2022/

Apparently it blocks the rate limiter but I don't use twitter much so I haven't checked myself. Either way it looks a lot better.

This was in an EU4 music mod a while back.