audaxdreik

What allegations? I know there's been some things in the past, but is there something new/more recent?

I think a lot of it is timing, too. Remember, the first Torchlight was 2009, we're talking pre-indie craze. There's been no Super Meat Boy or Fez yet, I think. ARPGs hadn't absolutely flooded the market yet and seeing a very competent and stylized, if simplistic Diablo-like back then could generate some interest. That carried on to the 2nd, which had a lot of improvements.

There's a bunch wrong with 3 and Infinite, but they were also competing in a saturated market and, you're right, the Torchlight "brand" didn't really have enough luster on its own to carry a series.

EDIT: Diablo II was 2000 and Diablo III would be 2012. We were fucking starving back then.

I hate absolutely everything about this.

I've never been a fan of calling Trump nicknames or going low, not because I'm trying to uphold any sort of highroad Liberal ideology but because I personally find it crass and he's an abominable human being with thousands of legitimate offenses to point to. If you do it on your own time to blow off steam, whatever, I'm not gonna get on your case. But I need more from our politicians.

What's the message here? I get that it's generally to agitate him, but are you trying to goad him into not chickening out? Just fucking do it, bro. There are thousands of Americans with food insecurity right now and you're gonna give Republicans tacos?! Again, I get that it's not really comparable and those issues are on different levels, but it still maintains that glossy respectability where you can't really levy any criticism against it because they're just giving away tacos. There's no real message here at all.

And lastly, nobody is even standing up to put their name on this. The DNC is doing this? Who? Whose idea? We have so many Republicans at every level chomping at the bit to get themselves in front of any camera they can to spread their repugnant message and we can't even get one Democrat to stand up and put their name on this meager messaging. Fucking cowards, the lot of them.

I expected nothing and I'm still disappointed.

We must act as one.

I get that the point you're trying to make is something about unity, but it's weird to say that. That's a weird thing to say.

Pretending like one person can go off and do whatever they want and it won’t effect the whole is how we get people like Trump.

This is my exact argument against billionaires. They are acting alone, making these sweeping decisions by themselves.

The money is gone. It isn’t coming back.

Disagree. It's never too late to get the money back, you just need politicians that are willing to take the initiative to go after it. Currently I don't see any, so I continue to say things that I hope will help focus people and bring attention to continue advocating for these policies.

I will concede that there are very few (read: nearly none)

K. Why we arguing? No good billionaires.

we should praise efforts like that so that they might continue. What’s the next billionaire gonna do when they try to give their money away and see that “All Gates got was vitriol and death wishes.”

Charity is not something you do for praise. I'm sorry the billionaires are so thin-skinned my insults would hurt them.

but I think we should agree that the money finally leaving the 1% to help the remaining 99% is a good step.

If I meet you on the street and beat you up and steal your wallet, then donate it to a local homeless shelter, are you gonna be mad at me? It was a good cause, bro, why you mad? It's in the hands of people who need it more now. I admit the analogy is a bit strained, but that's only because the means by which the billionaire class have gotten and maintained their wealth is more obtuse. Obscuring those means is how they continue to operate as they do.

I don't want to argue with you, I feel like your heart is in the right place and you are coming from a place of unity. But billionaires stand so far outside any sort of class consciousness with the likes of us. There is no point, no good that comes from defending billionaires for anything they do, they should not exist and the longer they continue to the more of a blight on the rest of humanity and the literal ecosystem of the world is at risk.

See so many other responses in this topic about how this is just PR, the money is being used to push AI solutions, the amount of wealth spent not really leaving Gates' control because it's being shuffled through different orgs, etc.

Windows 8 was actually pretty decent and had some good improvements under the hood. It handled dual monitor setups waaay better than 7 ever did, I don't know if people remember how rough the support was for a lot of these modern amenities we now take for granted.

In typical Microsoft fashion, 8's biggest sin was simply not letting people customize the GUI to their workflows and forcing that damned full screen Start menu. Once they shrunk the tiles to create 10's Start menu it became my favorite, so of course they trashed it for 11's generic look. Been using KDE now and it's near perfect.

I absolutely recommend it! Slope's Game Room has an excellent, 2 hour retrospective you can put on while you work if you want a pretty good deep dive. Other than that, I recommend getting yourself set with some emulators so you can kind of dig through the series. A lot of the early games are difficult and I think it's perfectly fine to kind of just pick through them a bit, get a taste, move on, return to the ones you like, etc.

You can absolutely feel the arc of design elements through the early series up to the pinnacle, Rondo of Blood. That's because it was all being done by Konami teams, often who knew eachother or were handing the projects off. Rondo hits this sweet spot where you can feel the inspiration of old vampire novels combined with dramatic stage plays (the stages have dynamic names like Feast of Flames instead of just area descriptors), told with 80's anime cutscenes, wrapped into a videogame package. It's truly a work of art that both wears its influences on its sleeve and also that couldn't really exist the way that it does in any other medium. So where do you even go from there? Symphony of the Night! It takes everything that works about Rondo and kicks it to 11 while flipping the franchise on its head with an absolutely rocking soundtrack and sprawling castle. You can enjoy these games in a vacuum, sure. But playing the series up to that point gives you a real appreciation for what they were going for and how they accomplished it. I don't even think you really need to play them in order because going back and returning to previous entries almost feels like fitting in missing pieces of a puzzle.

The series flounders a bit when it hits 3D, but it will always have a special place in my heart. Koji Igarashi takes the Symphony of the Night formula and basically owns the handheld world, especially from Aria of Sorrow into the DS trilogy, A++. Ultimately I think he developed that formula enough on his own that breaking it off into the Bloodstained series feels right and good, I think he's better off this way not weighed down by Konami and the Castlevania franchise, but in this way, we still feel that arc of development. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night actually took a bit to grow on me, but once it did, I saw it as the most Igavania game that ever existed, he has refined the formula.

All this to say that we just don't get experiences like this anymore, where series have the proper time to cook and develop. Instead we get Concord where they pour millions into something and try and ram it down your throat, "You WILL enjoy this new franchise. You WILL pick one of these characters as your favorite to get invested in, even though we've given you no reason. You WILL make this your ONE game you play because ........ reasons?" Ditto Marathon. Ditto MindsEye (likely). Ditto all the other rubbish they keep pushing out.

EDIT: OH MY GOD! And the Castlevania DLC for Vampire Survivors, how could I even forget. It's been a Castlevania wasteland for years and that DLC is some of the best I ever played. Completely the Richter scenario and getting to the end of it legit made me cry, it was such a love letter to fans and felt like a huge emotional, respectful sendoff for the series that Konami will never give us 😭 It's so good, if you're a Castlevania fan you should absolutely play it and if not, save it til the end because it's incredible and bittersweet.

1. What could it possibly matter to you, personally, if people praise a billionaire?
2. No. Absolutely not, every time, no. You don't get to be a billionaire by any legitimate means (note I did not say legal, this is a separate matter). That's money that should've been collected into taxes, paid into systems to help the American people, and if properly supported, donated to Africa through the appropriate institutions.

You don't just get to be a billionaire and then donate BILLIONS at the end of your life to wash away your indiscretions. Fuck him and every other billionaire.

As to boycotts, your individual purchases always matter; not just with what you don’t buy but also what you do buy.

Agreed. I'm having a bit of a hard time articulating my ideas properly.

I think my overall point is just that it's really hard to organize purposeful and effective boycotts these days, especially since no matter what the issue, there's usually a counter movement dampening it. Whatever market forces are causing these companies to register the lack of interest and disdain the consumer market has, I'd like to identify it and capitalize on it because when the market adapts, it most likely won't be to the consumer's benefit.

You could live quite happily off indies these days, but it's hard to ignore the thrashing leviathans. I'm not sure how much I really care about them anymore, but they do take up a lot of the oxygen in the room. And they seem to control a lot of platforms/storefronts as well ...

One of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately is media literacy as it relates to gaming - specifically about the design conversations developers are often having amongst each other that players only vaguely feel. Let me elaborate:

A good example is the Castlevania series. From early on, Castlevania was always both refining and reinventing itself. Vampire Killer and Castlevania feel to me like a kind of A/B testing to see what hits. When Castlevania prevailed, they immediately began iterating on the formula with both Simon's Quest and Dracula's Curse figuring out different modes of gameplay through nonlinear level design and changing characters. Super Castlevania IV was already a remaster of sorts starring Simon Belmont. Of course followed by the all time greats Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. It had trouble jumping to 3D with the N64 entry which was just called Castlevania again and eschewed the burgeoning Metroidvania/RPG elements of its predecessors.

This eventually leads us to Lords of Shadow which I can certainly respect as a good game with a dedicated following, but it never appealed to me and I had a hard time putting my finger on why. It's because it's not just a reboot, but one that kind of wholesale grabs the QTE/cinematic/rage mode game mechanics of the 2010's and stuffs them into a Castlevania package. It's difficult to say anything isn't a "true" Castlevania game in a series that was already very loosely defined as "gothic action probably with Dracula somewhere?" but it had very firmly stepped away from the conversation of its own series.

Even if you're new to the Castlevania series today, I think you can find great satisfaction in trawling through the depths of the franchise, playing them in chronological release order, and appreciating the various thematic and gameplay elements that each entry contributed to the series. I think gamedevs could learn a lot by looking at this evolution, too. Take look at the Release timeline and note the space in between early entries.

Nowadays, a big game will spend multiple years in development. Inspirations it may have taken from the gaming landscape are years in the past, assuming it even picked up on them when they were peak. When that theoretical game exists, someone may then take inspiration from it and push it into their years long development. The needle moves sooooo ... slowly ...

And because of that, as we all know, they're willing to take less of a risk on creating innovative games. There's this prevailing notion that there are only "good" and "bad" game design concepts and if you mash enough of the good concepts together in a package, you'll have a good game. They're all homogenizing because they're no long trying to deliver on a product to entice you to play it, they're trying to force a platform/market on you. Take a look at Concord or Marathon or MindsEye or any of the other monumental flops. Kind of like the DCU in my mind; you know the proper thing to do is take the time to build out the world and characters by giving satisfying entries that serve people the things they're craving. But they keep jumping the gun. If you really wanted Marathon to succeed as a GaaS, why not create a single player game first and allow players to get accustomed to the world and give them something to value to pull them away? The eagerness with which they keep sacrificing projects to snap the trap shut early and make their money back should be a big clue.

Anyways, speaking of MindsEye, I was watching this video earlier which speculates the game was supposed to be another metaverse platform called Everywhere, akin to Epic's Fortnite. Nobody wants an everything game. Nobody wants an everything app. I don't want ONE game that I play for the rest of forever, that's not a thing I ever wanted. They're trying to forcefully dictate the market at us and everyone is just gagging. As consumers I don't think we can put effective boycotts together anymore but the market is so utterly saturated and overwhelmed that you literally cannot get people to care. It stands at the complete opposite end of what the article discusses and I think that's worth meditating on.

Agreed.

And what's particularly galling about this is that it's never made any sense to me. Are you telling me an Android app, on compromised hardware or otherwise, could send malformed data that would for instance deposit $1M into my bank account? That doesn't sound like an issue of local security. An app is just a frontend, all validation would still be through the banking infrastructure.

Hey man, yeah, I get it. I worry a lot about sounding like a conspiracy theorist; a real Chicken Little.

But when I look internally and ask myself why I make these posts, why I conspire so much about unknown futures, I come to two most likely outcomes:

1. I'm trying to trick you into installing Linux for some reason. Selfishly I guess if there's a larger userbase demanding support for things then I can expect better support for myself. Or I'm just trying to sound like a pompous smartass in front of internet strangers. But those are a little obtuse.
2. I see a bunch of people standing in what I perceive (possibly incorrectly, but nonetheless) a trap and I'm shouting, "Hey, get outta there now before it springs!" because I have general empathy towards other people.

Worst case I'm wrong and I look a fool. I really don't have a problem with that. I know who I'd trust if the positions were switched 💯

Ya boy Richard Stallman agrees and has been saying this for years (although this article is more recentish), https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html

“Treacherous computing” is a more appropriate name, because the plan is designed to make sure your computer will systematically disobey you. In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission.

As of 2022, the TPM2, a new “Trusted Platform Module”, really does support remote attestation and can support DRM. The threat I warned about in 2002 has become terrifyingly real.

Actual, honest to god reasons to upgrade to Windows 11 are already vague and questionable. Your average user probably doesn't even see any particular reason and only perceives the nuisance of it. But it's hard to fully close your iron fist around a platform when TPM enablement is so sparse in the consumer space. So what better way to do it than a mandatory OS upgrade with it as a system requirement and assure all (or a vast majority of) systems align at once?

Of course there are ways for stubborn users to skirt those requirements, but that misses the primary point of Trusted Computing. While the OS may baseline function to some degree, there's no telling what functionality may be crippled by not being in a trusted state. EDIT: For example, this could easily tie into games with anti-cheat such that they will refuse to run on Windows 11 unless TPM is enabled.

I don't know the future any better than anyone else, I'm just trying to read the winds at the moment. I suspect they may not try to pull the entire trap closed all at once and that Windows 11 may continue to more or less function as we've seen past iterations. But the pieces will be in place by then and it's only a matter of time before some greedy exec gives the word .....