Lurker > adjl

Lolblocked. What an odd person.

josh posted...

When someone says they wanted to pick a car that is "more unique" you know they actually just wanted to say they wanted to pick a car that "stands out" or "makes a statement". The quantifiable amount of "unique" features doesn't even factor into the decision.

The quantifiable amount of unique features absolutely does factor into the decision. In fact, the only other factor is considering the scope within which those features qualify as "unique." Sure, it would be more accurate to talk about the incidence or frequency of those features than their uniqueness if the actual question is "how likely am I to see another car like this in my city?", but at the end of the day, "standing out" is a matter of it being likely that anyone that sees the car hasn't recently seen one like it. That is a matter of having a greater number of unique features, and characterizing that as "more unique" is both readily understandable and logically sound.

Fundamentally, that's what "more unique" means: More likely to qualify as unique for any given set of parameters, usually with the implication that the evaluation is going to be limited to parameters the speaker feels would be typical of their everyday experience.

Note to self: The next time you think "I wonder what happens if I let the Smoky Progg egg hatch instead of listening to the loading screen tip," punch yourself.

The course designs are generally great, the new techniques are great and allow you to pull off some really satisfying tricks/shortcuts, and the skill ceiling emerging from those techniques is extremely high (WR time trials are pretty impressive to watch).

The whole "drive between tracks" thing was a nifty novelty, but with that novelty worn off it's not particularly fun. The intermission tracks themselves are fairly boring, and the fact that you generally only get one lap on the destination track when you get there means that you only get to enjoy those good course designs and fun technical challenges for 1/3 of any given race, which also makes it much harder to learn those tricks without dedicated practice because you only get one shot at them per race (as opposed to being able to try again next lap with what you learned from missing it the first time). That part kind of sucks, and they've updated the game so that if you choose random course selection, 75% of the time it'll pick one of the courses connected to the previous one and you'll drive between them instead of getting three laps of the new course.

It's that last bit that has people bemoaning that the game is "dead," since most people pick Random online (before the update, because it had a high chance of picking a non-connected course and avoiding the intermissions, but the update broke that) and driving on intermissions for 2/3 of any given match just isn't that fun. It would be easy to solve this problem by adding an option to not play intermissions between tracks (and matching you up with people that chose the same option), but whether or not they'll do that remains to be seen. I'm also not sure just how much of a problem it actually is, since a bunch of vocal nerds complaining about something doesn't actually mean it's a huge issue.

Still, I enjoy playing it and will likely play about as much of online as I did with previous entries (not much), while breaking it out to play with family/friends whenever the opportunity arises. It's frustrating that they've made a conscious decision to make the game less enjoyable for many by forcing those intermission tracks to make up the bulk of a match, but it is what it is and it's not terribly difficult to work around it offline.

The unfortunate reality is that companies like the idea of selling multiple copies of a game more than they like the idea of letting multiple people play the same copy. Unless they expect the idea of local multiplayer to drive sales in a way that pushing online multiplayer can't, it's a bit of a hard sell.

Unless there's an actual formal advisory that your tap water isn't safe to use for cleaning, everything you washed will be fine and will continue to be fine to wash using tap water moving forward. At this point, you haven't even been formally advised that it's unsafe to drink, and there's a major difference between "don't drink this" and "this isn't food safe." There's absolutely no reason to jump from "there's some stuff in your water that you might want to filter out before drinking it but you'll probably be fine even if you don't" to "I should throw out everything that has ever been touched by tap water."

I really do like the idea of Pikmin 3's time pressure, if not the execution. I understand why people don't like 1's, just because you can pretty easily find yourself in a no-win scenario if you overestimate how many parts you can get during a day or otherwise miss that you need to be hurrying, and the idea of being able to invest 6-8 hours in a game and end up losing and having to start all over again just feels bad. In practice, it's not that hard to average 1 part per day, and you don't even need that if you skip some of the optional ones instead of aiming for the perfect ending (and beating Emperor Bulblax at all is harder than keeping up a pace like that), but the idea of even being able to spend that much time and still end up irrecoverably losing is stressful in a way that some people just don't enjoy, so I sympathize with that a bit.

In 3, there is still that same pressure of "you'll lose if you can't keep up this pace," but it's a lot more immediate. If you're going to run out of fruit tomorrow, you spend tomorrow hunting for fruit. If you can't find any, you restart the day and try again, having lost only that attempt and not your entire playthrough. The stakes are lower and you're never going to get into a position where you don't realize that you have a problem before it's too late to correct it.

In practice, of course, you aren't going to run out of fruit unless you're playing really badly (god dammit, Louie), but as a concept having a time limit that the player can increase by adjusting their daily goals/priorities is a good balance between "I don't like having a time limit stressing me out the whole game" and "I don't like having zero pressure to be efficient with my time."

I like 4's Dandori Challenges for this as well (I didn't play much of Mission Mode in 3), since operating with a short time limit means you get that significant pressure, but also lower stakes because you can just try again if you fail, plus the smaller scope makes it easier to figure out where you went wrong (like I knew I'd screwed up when I had a minute left and hadn't even started working on the watermelon that I'd need to make up the 40 points I was missing for a Bronze, so on the next attempt I made that watermelon a priority). Getting a platinum also just feels really satisfying because you've spent ~7 minutes watching your little plant buddies work together like clockwork.

It can be hard to accept that Dear Leader is in fact a fragile mortal.

VioletZer0 posted...

Supposedly better for you than HFCS.

I am not a dietary expert so I can't comment.

The big issue with HFCS is the fructose content. When glucose is present in the blood, insulin (which is released according to blood glucose levels) triggers a reaction that modifies that glucose to allow cells to take it in and metabolize it into fructose to continue its breakdown through the rest of the citric acid cycle. When fructose is present in the blood, though, it can just enter cells as needed and jump right into being metabolized, without needing insulin to trigger that or to wait for an extra regulatory step.

Normally, this is meant to allow fructose to give us a quick burst of energy, while the slower, insulin-mediated metabolism of glucose follows behind in a way that ensures our blood sugar stays at appropriate levels and we get the energy we need after the fructose wears off. This is helped further by the fact that most natural sources of fructose (fruit) also have quite a bit of fibre, which helps to slow absorption and prevent spikes of blood sugar. When the fructose content is too high, though, you end up getting quite a lot of energy without letting insulin regulate the uptake, which messes with your body's ability to tell how much glucose it should be pulling from the blood and therefore its ability to regulate spikes.

That said, HFCS typically has either 42% or 55% fructose (usually the latter for pop), with the rest being glucose. Refined/white/table sugar (pure sucrose) is a 50/50 split (the metabolism of sucrose itself happens in the small intestine, so it has no impact on what happens in the blood). Cane sugar is also just sucrose, just with a few extra impurities that don't really affect anything, metabolically speaking (calling it "cane sugar" just specifies that it comes from sugar cane and not from sugar beets, which isn't a particularly meaningful difference). Compared to HFCS 55, cane sugar is slightly better for fructose content, but not by the same margin that many of the concerns around it would suggest. Neither are good to consume in significant quantities, and swapping from HFCS to cane sugar in pop is more about optics than actual health.

Revelation34 posted...

Trans fats are probably as bad as MSG is

Depends on the trans fat in question. Naturally-occurring trans fats like you find in butter are fine (in appropriate moderation) because the body can digest them without issue. Many hydrogenated ones, though, don't play nicely with our digestive systems and can cause problems. There are like 20 potential trans double bonds on any given fatty acid chain, and they are not all equal in terms of health impact.

Revelation34 posted...

American Express is still around.

I'm sure my perception is skewed because I only notice "AmEx not accepted" signs and not their absence, but there are quite a few places around here where AmEx isn't accepted. Even if it were, though, a triopoly isn't much better than a duopoly in terms of vulnerability to arbitrary moral crusades, and I expect AmEx would follow suit if they felt they had a similar share of the market at stake.

keyblader1985 posted...

It's a touch screen device; I expect that to come into play at some point, more likely than not.

That kind of thinking ("it's a touch screen device, so it should use touch controls at some point") is exactly the problem. A system having unique control options available shouldn't be treated as an obligation to make use of them regardless of whether or not it will benefit the game. That leads to shoehorning them in as gimmicks that add nothing for the sake of ticking a box, and that's just not a good way to design anything. Unique control options are an opportunity to make a game with unique controls, not an obligation to use them when it's not appropriate to do so.

In DoS' case, I made it work just fine (I usually held the stylus in my mouth until I needed it), but in hindsight it really was not a good addition to the game.

Revelation34 posted...

I would rather see Halloween decorations early than Christmas lights that just remind me of shitty music being played 24/7.

Then put up halloween decorations early. Other people's efforts to spread cheer are not obligated to adhere to your tastes. Be the change you want to see in the world.

rexcrk posted...

Isnt Christmas In July like a thing?

Yep. Not a super-common one, but also not unheard of.

agesboy posted...

dragonite's always looked goofy as hell

Indeed. I wouldn't say "Dragonite, but High Entia" is a great look, but it's not really any less silly than the base form.

SinisterSlay posted...

It makes the verification server a nice juicy target for hackers. The server would have access to your birth records. Jackpot.

Which is why the response from sites has been to just ban the affected regions. They know they can't guarantee the security of such sensitive information, so they dip out entirely.

NephalimTechno posted...

im allowed to defend myself

You are, but if you're needing to defend yourself on a regular basis, it's not wrong to consider you a liability and want you to go be someone else's problem.

NephalimTechno posted...

Im allowed to f*** these broads

That's less true. Most public indecency laws pretty explicitly prohibit having sex in public spaces. You and your broads will need to find more privacy than a bush to claim that you're not doing anything illegal.

Lokarin posted...

sometimes a cop deserves to have their time wasted... such as with sovereign citizen spiels and whatever

I like pointing out that "sovereign citizens" are illegal immigrants.

papercup posted...

Its weird to me that night missions take an entire day. I get why, but it still feels not right.

I agree, but fortunately it doesn't really matter because there isn't a limit on the number of days you can take.

papercup posted...

Pikmin 2 is a dandori game that doesnt have any dandori. There I said it.

It has little to no time dandori, but it does have Pikmin dandori. Being efficient with your time doesn't matter, but making sure that any Pikmin you lose (in a cave, at least) don't die in vain is pretty critical.

Broadly, though, you're not wrong. Aside from trying not to die, there's no incentive to manage your tasks efficiently because there's no time pressure. The strategy/management angle only comes into play if you're trying to speedrun it (and I might argue that every game is a dandori game if you're speedrunning), otherwise it's just a matter of how long you take to amass the resources you need for whatever fights you have coming up, which end up being the actual focus of the game.

I like the balance that 4 has struck: there's no broad time pressure and therefore no actual need for dandori overall, but the dandori challenges/battles and night expeditions force you to at least keep your dandori hat within easy reach, even if you don't actually have to wear it at all times. That keeps me thinking in dandori terms and trying to be efficient about how I use each day despite not strictly needing to, which in turn means I'm having fun finding those little optimizations that I've been nudged toward but haven't actually been required to find (without time pressure, there isn't much direct motivation to seek them out, but it still feels good to feel like you're being efficient). Making cave time slower instead of stopped enables the same benefit that they offered in Pikmin 2 (offering challenges that can be longer and more complex without worrying about them being interrupted by the end of the day) but also means they have to be managed as part of the day's activities (which usually just means not going into a big cave until shortly before sundown and not any deeper strategy, but it's still nice to have something to think of), which I think is definitely an improvement over "you just spent an hour in that cave and now you can pick up this day where you left off."

4's not without its flaws (Oatchi kind of trivializes a lot of things, and across the board the game's a bit on the easy side such that I'm not actually feeling like it's a struggle to survive while rescuing everybody), but I am having a really good time with it. My opinion on the difficulty may change as I progress into the endgame (yesterday I rolled credits and got about halfway through Giant's Hearth), but either way, it's fun.

Yeah, buttons wouldn't make it much better, even if it did map cleanly. In any context, post-boss QTEs should be limited to making the cutscene cooler or maybe getting some extra rewards, not resurrecting the boss if you fail. I'm fine with drawing those symbols to open doors and such (it's been a long time since I played the game, so I don't perfectly recall the implementation), but they should have just played out as an automatic animation after boss fights and not a QTE that invokes a whole separate control scheme.

SinisterSlay posted...

It's good to have both, legal limits are usually wrong.
The legal limit is based on the governments projected cost of cleaning the water vs handling your declining health and early death. It's one of the reasons lawsuits exist, to fuck that math formula to make it way more expensive to not act.

Yep. Legal limits established by the same government that's responsible for meeting those legal limits should always be taken with a grain of salt because there's an obvious conflict of interest there. Other guidelines should be examined in more detail to see what their basis is and make sure they aren't something like "this is 10% of the smallest value that's ever been observed to possibly be correlated with health issues, just to be safe" but if you're seeing something like 700x the other guidelines being only 10% of the legal limit, odds are the actual threshold for concern lies somewhere between those two points.

NephalimTechno posted...

i go to the local PD regularly now and tell them. Theyre very understanding and they back off. Its the ones on the street that get things mixed up

That's because it's the job of the cops in the office to resolve problems as quickly as they can so they can move on to the next person waiting, while it's the job of the cops on the street to look for potential/ongoing problems and stop them. Broadly, homeless people are seen as potential problems (which isn't necessarily right, but you regularly affirm that they're not wrong about you by bragging about getting into fights and having sex behind bushes), so cops on the street hassle them.

papercup posted...

I dont care about adult games in the slightest, but the credit card companies declaring themselves the morality police is fucked. They claimed that allowing people to use their cards to purchase adult games damages the brand whatever the fuck that means. Nobody cares about the brand image of a fucking credit card, because we all recognize it as a necessity. If anything declaring themselves the morality police is what makes me wish for alternatives.

Indeed. If there were alternatives to Visa/MC, this would be motivating me to switch. That I can't also means people motivated to switch by knowing that they facilitate "adult" transactions aren't able to.

So... "more unique" is a perfectly valid phrase because it reflects an interpretation of the concept of uniqueness that is fundamentally required for the term to have any practical applicability.

Glob posted...

This is complete and utter idiocy. To be the only one of its kind does not mean that it needs to be unique in every way. If one thing sets it apart from all others, it is unique. Its such a simple concept.

Then everything is unique, because you can inevitably find something about everything that sets it apart from everything else. Every one of those hundred vases is unique, since even though the aim was to make the first 98 identical, there are going to be variations in pigment density, clay density, water content, clay composition, crystal structure, shape at the microscopic level... scenarios where being perfectly identical is even possible are vanishingly rare, especially at the macroscopic scale

The conclusion is the same: to describe something as "unique" or "not unique" carries a laundry list of qualifiers that specify which traits are included and excluded. Sometimes those qualifiers are explicitly specified, more commonly they're implicit, but either way they're there. That list of qualifiers is not binary, therefore identifying something as "not unique" also cannot be.

This ultimately boils down to the distinction between "unique" as a logical concept and "unique" as a practical concept. Logically, uniqueness is indeed binary. The distinction is made and applied entirely in a vacuum where nothing else needs to be considered. In practice, however, nothing happens in a vacuum where nothing else needs to be considered, and that means there are a whole bunch of extra qualifiers implied and specified to define the scope of assessing whether or not something is unique. That turns it into a matter of "it's unique if we define the scope like this, but it's not unique if we define the scope this other way," which is decidedly not binary when viewing the assessment as a whole.

When you say "this vase is not unique," you are saying "I don't care about the ways in which this vase is unique." When you say "this vase is unique," you are saying "the ways in which this vase is unique matter to me enough to make it stand out." When you say "this vase is more unique than that vase," you are saying "this vase is unique in more ways that matter to me and therefore stands out compared to that vase." This is what it means to translate the logical concept of uniqueness into practical (to say nothing of colloquial) speech.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

And then you are going to laugh and point because I fell for it.

Well darn, you caught us. The photo, the topic, the handful of people telling you that the picture is legit and pointing you toward the trailer to allow you to verify your suspicions, the entire Nintendolife site, it's all been a grand conspiracy to make you waste four and a half minutes watching said trailer so we can all laugh at you.

Heck, all you really need to do is expand the video Helly embedded to see Mega Dragonite in the thumbnail, then click the title to open it in Youtube and confirm it was uploaded on the official channel. You don't even need to spend 4.5 minutes to confirm it's legit. You're getting pointed and laughed at a whole lot more for your paranoia than for "falling for it."

papercup posted...

Holy moly, Tera Raids are such s***.

They really are. Even when they don't decide to arbitrarily screw you out of a win for no apparent reason, half the time spent on the raid is taken up by the long beginning and ending animations. They're just so miserable to do in large numbers.

Shadowbird_RH posted...

Is a dodecahedron more flat than a cube?

Depends on the height.

StelioKontos posted...

TC posted this exact topic almost a year ago. Pretty weird.

I wasn't sure of the timeline, but I had the same thought. Not sure if they're a fan, if they just don't want people to stop blaming roof personally, or if it's some other form of obsession, but definitely weird.

keyblader1985 posted...

For some people, but I'm not convinced that that's the prevailing opinion. People also hated Phantom Hourglass anf other games for its touch controls (among other, more legitimate issues).

That's the other side of things, which is that even if you properly commit to building a game around non-standard controls, that doesn't mean those controls are good. PH and ST did use touch controls in interesting, effective ways, but there were more than a few points where the games would have been improved by using buttons for more things (like if movement was still touch-based, but the L button swung the sword). I also generally liked Skyward Sword's motion controls, but the harp was just straight up garbage.

In games like DoS, tacked-on gimmick controls suck because they add nothing past the initial novelty. In games like PH, the unusual controls just weren't very good and had a lot of issues that could have been prevented by not committing so hard to the idea of "everything should be touch-controlled" at the expense of using traditional controls when they would have unambiguously been better. The games where the unusual controls work well, though, are awesome. I'm not about to pull a PO and say "the mere existence of touch screens offends me to my core and I shall never forgive Nintendo for being born," but I can also recognize that non-standard controls aren't always a good idea.

But yes, there are indeed people (like the aforementioned PO) who just rage at the idea of any non-standard controls existing. Sometimes, that's legit (like having no alternative to motion controls is a serious problem for people with wrist/arm mobility issues), sometimes, less so.

EclairReturns posted...

https://imgur.com/a/U7Sdv6S

It doesn't look like any of those have come close to exceeding the legal limits, even if they're well over EWG guidelines, so it's unlikely that you'll be facing any serious medical issues. None of that is likely to be bad enough to cause issues using it for cooking, cleaning, bathing, or other uses that don't involve ingesting it. For drinking, it might not be a bad idea to get a filter moving forward (choose one that covers the contaminants that most greatly exceed the guidelines), but there's no need to stress out over occasionally having drunk some in the past.

hockey7318 posted...

For Flint's sake I feel like they should have included Lead levels on that list of details.

That list is just the ones that exceed the guidelines. It looks like there's another tab for other detected contaminants.

josh posted...

Now if you said, "cooking food makes humans more unique" then I'd be mad.

And rightly so, because that statement would make no sense.

Saying that humans are more unique than other species, however, and including cooking food as one of the unique features of the species that contributed to that assessment, could be fair game (though that would be a ludicrously complicated assessment that could never hope to be comprehensive enough to draw any definite conclusions and I'd dismiss it on those grounds).

josh posted...

Mate, "unique" literally means "being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else."

In that case, none of the vases are unique because they're all vases. Or if one was more of a jar instead of a vase, none of them are unique because they're all made of clay. Or if one of them was made of glass instead of clay, none of them are unique because they're all silica-based. Or if one of them was made of metal instead of some manner of silicate, none of them are unique because they're all man-made. Or if one of them was a naturally-occurring rock formation that just happened to be the right shape to be used as a jar, none of them are unique because they can all be used to hold things.

Nothing is truly unique. If you dig hard enough and interpret "kind" loosely enough, you can find commonalities between any two objects that mean they are not "one of a kind." That means that, for the word "unique" to have any application at all, it has to be framed as "unique, except for all these other aspects in which it isn't." That qualifier is not binary, and given that that qualifier is the logical complement of the usage of the term "unique," that means the usage of the term "unique" must also not be binary.

Shadowbird_RH posted...

It makes it more unusual, but there is no 'more unique'. There's unique in more ways, but that isn't the same thing.

Is it not? Why would somebody who achieves uniqueness more frequently not be considered better at uniquing?

josh posted...

Honestly, this is why unique bugs me so much and why I brought it up. Because at least with literally most people understand that they're using hyperbole to communicate their point whereas with unique people just straight up don't understand what it means or why they say it.

They say it to communicate the point of "this thing more noticeably stands out as being unique," which in turn means the traits that they have assessed have qualified as "unique" within their colloquial scope with remarkable frequency. It's not wrong to say that "more unusual" is perhaps technically the better way to phrase it, but to use "more unique" to mean "I've identified your traits as being unique more often than for those to whom I'm comparing you" is well within the bounds of reasonable colloquial logic and easily understood by everyone involved.

rmsgrey posted...

But do they only consider pirate downloads to be lost sales? Or do they consider cancelled pre-orders to be lost sales too?

Presumably both, but they likely wouldn't consider cancelled pre-orders in the context of evaluating piracy's impact unless it's a case of the game leaking early and a bunch of pre-orders being cancelled shortly thereafter. That suggests either "I've got the game for free now I'm not going to pay for it" (a sale lost to piracy) or "I tried the game and realized I don't want it after all" (a sale lost to a poor product, which might have ended up being a return anyway if possible).

Because it cooks up the food more evenly. That's less relevant with smaller pieces that heat through relatively quickly, but for something like poaching a chicken breast you're better off starting from cold water and heating it up with the chicken in there, since otherwise you risk overcooking the outside before the inside is done.

Snoregasm posted...

I think it's difficult to sell single player games as a live service or constant revenue stream so execs want to kill it

They want to, but at this point there are too many wildly successful single-player games (in terms of player interest, that is) for anyone to try claiming they aren't popular. That's never not been at least somewhat true, but at least when the market was more dominated by AAA publishers they had a bit more control over what was available for sale and therefore could restrict the number of exclusively single-player games coming out such that anyone not paying close attention might actually say "yeah, I guess there aren't many big SP games these days."

Now, though? A AAA exec says "nobody wants single-player games anymore" and everyone can look at the dozens of single-player games they've just played and enjoyed from the indie and AA markets (to say nothing of the AAA stuff coming out from publishers that aren't trying to push that narrative) and just laugh at them. The narrative is much harder to manipulate when there are so many more players in the market.

Revelation34 posted...

Yeah I don't know how they could possibly have thought that. I saw that before I even really started cooking and knew it was wrong.

You'll often see people recommend starting with cold water, but that's because it picks up fewer contaminants from sitting in your hot water tank and/or because heating the water up gradually cooks the food more evenly. I would guess people saw recommendations to start cold and assumed from there that it's because it heats up faster.

ReturnOfFa posted...

People will point to 'hot water freezes faster' as authentic because it was a name - the Mpemba effect. Reading about it clearly demonstrates that it isn't consistent nor universal.

Intuitively, I would expect it to depend on just how warm the water is. The molecules being more mobile may help it freeze faster once they start chilling out, but it's also going to take more time to remove the excess heat, and making it too hot means the latter could very easily exceed the savings of the former.

josh posted...

No, but I get angry when someone says "more" unique.

Bro, unique is a binary it either is or it isn't. You can't be more or less.

If we treat "unique" as an absolute binary identifier, nothing is truly unique. To exist as a useful concept, you have to narrow the scope (like saying that humans are a unique species because we cook our food, while ignoring that humans aren't a unique species because there are plenty of other carbon-based life forms to lump us in with), and deciding on the appropriate scope to use creates a continuum of uniqueness. Within that continuum, it is accurate to say that something that is unique within a broader scope is more unique than something that is unique within a narrower one.

One could argue that that continuum is a series of discrete binary decisions (albeit a functionally infinite one) and therefore not strictly continuous, but it still creates the basis for comparisons between entities based on the number of criteria for which those entities qualify as "unique." In the car example, a car that is unique in all three of those aspects is more unique than a car that is unique in only one of them, because 3 is more than 1.

Put differently, you cannot say that those two cars are equally unique (A=/=B). You also cannot say, however, that neither car is unique (A=/=0 and B=/=0). In a binary system, if neither A nor B can equal 0, both must equal 1, but if A cannot equal B, only one of them is allowed to equal 1. This means a binary system is logically impossible. Other values beyond 0 and 1 must be used to accurately describe the situation.

I would imagine all that wavedashing wears out the soles of his boots pretty quickly.

rmsgrey posted...

Or Person A would buy Super RPG Game, but doesn't know it exists. They pirate a thousand games they've otherwise never heard of by going down a pirate site's index, and play half an hour of each.

Maybe I'm weird, but I can't imagine ever doing this. Maybe 10-20 years ago when there weren't nearly as many games out there as there are now, but these days there's so much to choose from that I'd never dream of spending 500 hours curating a list myself, knowing that by the time I finished the index in question would have amassed another 2000 options. I'm sure the pirate site would do some curation of its own and it wouldn't actually be uploading every game that ends up on Steam or whatever (over 18,000 games were added to Steam last year, for context), but I can barely be bothered to try 30 minutes of each of the 800-odd games I already own that comprise my backlog, let alone 30 minutes of each of the thousands of games I could potentially pirate for demo purposes.

keyblader1985 posted...

But some people have such disdain for it that there are things like patches for the DS Castlevania games, because they require touch input at just a few points in the game.

It's because Dawn of Sorrow (I don't remember the implementation in the other two) only requires touch input at a couple points in the game that the touch controls are disliked. "You have to draw a funny-looking star after every boss fight otherwise they resurrect" is an idea that sounds cool on paper, but the novelty wears off pretty quickly and it instead just turns into "keep your stylus handy whenever you fight a boss because there's an extra drawing step beyond just playing the game normally." It's very much a case of tacking on novel controls as a gimmick instead of something meaningful, and it tends to get in the way of playing the game more so than it improves it.

By contrast, games like LostMagic, Trauma Centre, or Elite Beat Agents built entire games around touch controls that couldn't otherwise have existed. That's the stuff I like, and the DS was fantastic for it. Sometimes it can be a little hit or miss (like I just finished playing through Elebits on the Wii after abandoning it to the backlog 15+ years ago, and that was a case where an interesting game was built around the motion controls that wouldn't have worked nearly as well otherwise, but the actual execution got a bit janky at times), but if you're going to mess around with non-standard controls, you should commit to doing so, not just find a half-assed way to slip them in for the sake of saying you have them.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's not even that. It's being aware that it's easier to monetize multiplayer with microtransactions, and thus attempting to funnel players into that mode so you can milk them. And then trying to recontextualize the motivation to "Oh, single-player just isn't popular anymore" in an attempt to gaslight people into doing what you want without realizing why you want them to do it.

In that sense, it's not a case of "Oh well, not all games can be for everyone" as much as it is a case of "A significant percentage of the audience want them (possibly even the majority), but we don't want to make them, so f*** you."

I don't think that's what he was talking about at all. He's talking about games that are exclusively designed to be multiplayer (like competitive shooters) not including a campaign or bot match option for people that don't want to/can't play with other people.

The whole "single-player is dead" thing also isn't really a thing anymore. I'm sure you'll find the occasional AAA executive still trying to insist on it, but there's a metric ton of quality single-player games out there that people are loving, such that it takes a level of cluelessness even if average gaming executive can't muster to think that anyone would actually buy "you don't really want single-player games anymore."

I'm playing through 4 for the first time right now, after I wasn't able to get DK last week. It's a pretty good time. I just finished off the fourth zone and need to do a bunch of night missions to catch up on the backlog I've accumulated.

Salrite posted...

Oh, that reminds me of another hot take. Every game should have a single player mode, full stop. It's presumptuous to assume everyone has friends to play with. There needs to be a way to play with AI.

It's not so much assuming that everyone has friends to play with and more not caring that some people don't. "Not all games have to be for everyone" is an argument often abused to argue against accessibility features that would obviously do more good than harm by people who want to gatekeep games for no reason, but when it comes to questions of tacking on a single-player/multiplayer component just to appeal to people that don't care for the other, it's pretty appropriate. Bots can be a viable compromise, but it's not the end of the world if they aren't there. That just means it's not a game I'll play if I don't want to play with/against other people, and that's fine.

I literally don't.

I just clocked it at a little under 20 seconds, though that was imagining a group singing and therefore stumbling over the timing a bit to slow it down.

Salrite posted...

I was taught in elementary school, "Sing Happy Birthday to yourself". And I'm thinking, "what if you're a fast singer?"

When I hear it framed that way, it's usually with the specification that you should be singing it at a "normal" tempo. Technically, Happy Birthday could last less than a second if you sing it at 5000 BPM, but that's not the expectation.

It's the same vein as first aid instructors telling people to imagine Stayin' Alive or Another One Bites the Dust (depending on how morbid you're feeling) to pace chest compressions during CPR. Obviously, either song could be sung at any speed, but the target is 100 BPM, which is the "normal" tempo.

willythemailboy posted...

That would be silly. Everyone knows the government uses cash to gather DNA data from everyone who touches it, and the government can't possibly be efficient enough to use cash for two purposes when they can build an entirely separate second system at twice the cost.

And that's why we're safe: The secret branch of the government installing GPS tracking in cash and the secret branch of the government installing DNA collection in cash are unaware of each other because they're both so secret, and that means they each keep dismantling the money-modification equipment the other installs in mints in their efforts to push their own secret scheme. This eternal conflict raging in the shadows means neither agency is able to actually get anything done.

Salrite posted...

I would argue that a fail state isn't even necessary. I would absolutely consider Minecraft Creative Mode still a game. Just like Lego would be.

The idea of a "game" is inherently structured: There are goals, rules, and fail states, and playing the game consists of interacting with it within that structure and those limitations.

Lego and Minecraft Creative Mode would be better described as "toys" because they're open-ended. There are some limitations inherent in them (like you can only stick bricks to surfaces that have studs on them), but ultimately it comes down to the individual to decide how to have fun with them. That fun may include using them to play a game (which, in turn, involves establishing goals, rules, and fail states), but the medium of play is not itself a game any more than a basketball or hockey stick is.

Salrite posted...

With Visual Novels, as a genre in its base form, I wouldn't consider it a game because the primary focus is the narrative to such a high degree. I feel like a "game", video or otherwise, is an activity where the interactivity is the primary focus.

While the narrative is the focus, framing that narrative as a game (that is, choosing to make a visual novel and not just write a regular book or graphic novel) does put more emphasis on the interactivity and allowing the player to assume the role of the protagonist, experiencing the story with greater immersion and agency than a non-interactive medium would allow. The genre aims to let players experience stories, rather than simply telling them, and the interactivity - however limited compared to games whose designation would never be questioned - is a crucial part of that.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

...but ironically, it's not the violence that was the problem. In my case, it was absolutely the fact that I find platformers frustrating and annoying as hell. So it was the jumping puzzles that made me want to smash my controller into the wall or strangle someone with the cord to vent that pent-up rage.

And in cases where you're playing a game that's intense enough to get the adrenaline flowing, that frustration can push you toward the "fight" side of "fight-or-flight," which can also contribute to violent behaviour. That's not so much a matter of imitating video game violence, though, as it is the video game (which is likely relying on depictions of violence to generate that intensity) creating a set of circumstances that psychologically predisposes people to violence.

That's got nothing to do, however, with the belief that somebody playing a violent game one night and shooting up their school the next day are connected. That's more a matter of immediate frustration creating a risk of lashing out violently in the moment/immediate aftermath. When it does create actual problems, it's more under the umbrella of impulse control/emotional regulation issues, not antisocial mass murdery issues.

captpackrat posted...

When I worked at a computer store I had a customer who always paid cash because credit cards have a GPS chip in them that allows the government to track you.

That's especially silly given that the transaction records already essentially track where cardholders go, or at least where they spend money. GPS chips would be redundant.

I do have to question the logic, though, of believing that credit cards - which are manufactured and distributed by private companies - have government GPS chips in them, but cash - which is manufactured by the government - doesn't.

captpackrat posted...

Capsaicin is not water soluble, in fact, it's hydrophobic. It's soluble in alcohol, so if you've got any rubbing alcohol, that may help. Or try washing your hands with dish soap or laundry soap. These usually contain more powerful surfactants than ordinary hand soap.

And, specifically, scrub with soap for 20-30 seconds without rinsing (which is always best practice for hand-washing, but many people usually aren't so thorough). You want to make sure you've emulsified it with the soap as much as possible before carrying that soap away with water.

Questionmarktarius posted...

...then you've already been hacked

Or they just used cookies.

Revelation34 posted...

How would somebody pirate something without having known it existed before?

"Knowing it exists" was perhaps not the best wording there, but there's quite a bit of middle ground between how much you know about a game having just seen its name and maybe some cover art and how much you know after actually playing it. For a game that doesn't have much by way of preview/marketing material and hasn't seen a lot of word-of-mouth advertising, it can be hard to decide whether or not it's worth buying to try it out. Trying it out for free, though, makes it a lot easier to understand what you're considering.

Questionmarktarius posted...

or, in common parlance, a "hot take".

A take of any temperature, really. At the end of the day, the opinions we have on media and the ways we discuss them are pretty inconsequential, regardless of how controversial they are.

SunWuKung420 posted...

Subscription games are designed to be addictive to keep you paying.

That's neither hot nor a take. That's a factual statement of extremely common knowledge.

Questionmarktarius posted...

Visual Novels aren't games.

I don't really see why most wouldn't be. If they're fully linear and the total extent of the interactivity is just clicking to advance the text, not so much (that's essentially just a book with extra pictures... perhaps you might even call it a "visual novel" >.>), but most branch to some extent or another. That gives them interactivity/control over how they play out, and most also include some form of failure state attached to the choices you make (even if it's only failing to get the ending you wanted and not formally "you didn't get a girlfriend in three days so we murdered you sorry"). Interactivity and a failure state are the two main criteria for calling something a "game."

Mostly, though, the distinction is entirely academic. I don't think anyone is suggesting anything like removing all visual novels from Steam because they "aren't games," so it's not like there's a meaningful consequence to deciding for/against the label.

VioletZer0 posted...

A visual novel with minigames inside of it doesn't mean it has gameplay.

There's room to argue that every story-driven game is just a linear visual novel with minigames interspersed between cutscenes.

rmsgrey posted...

While legitimate sources can't compete on price, pirate sources can't compete on legitimacy. There is value in having a legitimate copy, with the rights and benefits that go along with that (though games publishers seem intent on getting rid of those as much as possible). And the more benefits and services the legitimate source provides, the more pirate sources would have to spend in order to provide an equivalent offering.

While there's some truth to this, there is an upper limit on the level of service that anyone can reasonably provide. If a pirate streaming site remembers which episode you were on, offers recommendations, subtitles, and watch parties, and has good-quality video, there isn't much more that a legit streaming service can do to compete with that, especially considering that a library can be much larger when they don't have to pay licensing fees than when they do.

For streaming, then, the only real options for providing a better legit service are higher video quality (and there isn't that much room for improvement there these days) and relying on anti-piracy efforts to ensure that pirated content is less consistently available. They can't just commit to providing a better service (although I did recently switch from watching a series legitimately on Pluto TV to pirating it because Pluto was just straight up missing an episode, and the pirated version ended up being a better experience overall such that I stuck with it for the rest of the series, so Pluto could have retained me as a viewer by stepping up their game). There is also a need to handicap the level of service piracy can offer so the legit one ends up better by comparison, and that means anti-piracy efforts that interfere with any one service's ability to grow large enough to be a stable competitor.

That said, there are limits to that. If the level of legitimate service provided isn't at least decent, there's little to be gained by paying for it instead of subjecting myself to the jank of piracy. Streaming services in particular are kind of in a race to the bottom at this point, cutting as many corners as they can to get/keep their revenue growing without actually doing anything to become more appealing and justify their ever-increasing costs. That, however, is a market I expect to collapse under its own weight regardless of what happens on the piracy side of things. Trying to take a slice of Netflix's pie and then charge three times as much for that slice as Netflix was charging for a whole pie just isn't sustainable.

Godshammer666 posted...

Smart organization if you ask me. I wish I was that organized

It helps that my girlfriend has raging OCD, but that's one aspect I'm definitely on board with. I'm a big fan of functional organization.

we_dey posted...

Who spends $500 a day? Is this including hotel? I get youre on vacation but food and museums and stuff isnt that expensive

The graphic included lists accommodation, so I guess it does include the hotel (specifically, half of the cost because it assumes double occupancy).