Yeee. I try my best to avoid both Nestle and Coca-Cola (drink of the death squads is too good a song to not at least try to) but it’s tough with how sneaky those bastards can get with all the brands they own.

Idk if I feel right exactly, I just feel more powerful, I can simply say “No” to being a victim of - or a participant in - what to me is an abuse of people, of lives on a scale beyond comprehension by the corporations. I can deny them the power they want so desperately to hold.

My only wish is more people were motivated to do this, whatever their expertise and possibilities and abilities, we could share so much if we shared the same goals.

I have a personal petty war against the corposlop extortions in my life, I know it won’t stop them or bring about a revolution or smth, but at least I can be an example to others that they need us more than we need them and it makes me at least feel that I have some control, some things that I can take back from being corrupted.

So far I have:

• Stopped buying all fast fashion and buy far fewer clothes in general mostly off Etsy back in the day or indie online retailers
• Cancelled my subscription to Netflix for me and my gf, replaced with Jellyfin
• Cancelled Amazon Prime and stopped shopping at Amazon altogether alongside getting my friends off Wish, Temu etc.
• Stopped using all food delivery and ride-sharing apps
• Stopped eating fast food and at big chains
• Moved most my grocery shopping to Co-Op
• Eliminated all corporate and/or algorithm driven social media from my life (Insta, FB, Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, YT (only via self-hosted proxies/ublock/sponsorblock/dearrow).
• Stopped using corpo LLMs, using only my homebrew refine of Mistral 7B sometimes
• Stopped using Chrome, cancelled Google one and my sub to GDrive
• Almost stopped using Windows
• Replaced almost all daily use software with FOSS alternatives
• Almost entirely stopped buying any tech that isn’t used and/or refurbished and/or old/junkyard material

Next steps are:

• Replace ISP router with junkyard rescue gear with FOSS software, mite b getting some from work soon
• Cancel Spotify as my last remaining subscription service (I have personal playlists I need to backup)
• Get rid of Google accs and host my own email
• Ascend past smartphones (already use only old flagships for less than a hundred bucks)

I feel like it’s still all just in the consumption framework and highly individualistic, but it helps me cope, it’s an outlet for anger that has bettered me as a person in every way imaginable.

Chechen culture sure is something. Iykyk.

Already back

Wuuuut?

The original post had nothing to do with mobile games and service at all.

My comment said that it was not true that all games are interactive movies, and you said it was - because of the games you listed, which you then said are not interactive movies.

Are you like, lost? Downvoting me with your alts ain’t gonna reverse that brain damage my guy, blocked.

But the original reply stated:

It feels like every other AAA game is an interactive movie these days.

I stated that it’s not really true

And you went off to list games that supposedly support the original point.

And I said that’s not true.

And now you agree. So why even include those games or respond at all? This comes across like when you correct chatgippity or smth 🤔

Guilty as charged!

Fwiw I love gaming nowadays, things like itch and steam self-publishing just didn’t exist nearly to the same extent back in the day, and this has allowed for niche titles I could only dream of back in the day and weird artsy games like Buckshot Roulette, Disco Elysium and Warframe finding success is awesome and was definitely not a thing in the past where gatekeeping was inherent to gaming.

Even hardware stuff like FBT trackers and steam deck and the crazy modding scene of today are things I love about modern gaming.

That doesn’t mean it’s not without things to critique, as every generation of games has, nor that nothing of value has been lost.

Every yakuza game, baldurs gate, every fromsoft game, the insomniac games like spiderman, Sony stuff in general like horizon, god of war, last of us, etc, black myth wukong, the endless remake games (some of which are very solid) like ff7, silent hill 2, persona 3 reload, etc, rockstar games even (rdr2 was 2018 and gta6 is supposed to come out this year, maybe). The sea of jrpgs like shin megami tensei v vengeance, trails through daybreak, granblue fantasy, unicorn overlord, etc. And that’s literally off the top of my head

Question 1: And those are all “interactive movies” in your view?

If the answer is yes:

Question 2: have you played literally any of them? I don’t think all of these barring the JRPGs could be more different from each other if they tried. RDR2, Insomniac and the Yakuza games for instance are pretty good, fromsoft not so much, and none of them are alike whatsoever, one is a GTA clone with a shockingly good story that’s as always, too long, fromsoft games are definitely not GTA clones sadly nor are they linear bamham combat superhero action games like the insomniac ones or story focused ones like GoW or Horizon or the insomniac Spideys (latter are particularly awesome).

I would be extremely interested what you’d consider not interactive movies? Factorio? Dwarf Fortress? Ghosts’n’Goblins? Super R-Type for the SNES? Umihara Kawase? Ultrakill?

Meh, if people didn’t pay or play those it wouldn’t make business sense to make em. Gaming is weird these days.

Everybody seems to have “the game” they play like OW or Valorant(?) or Fortnite, certain genres like racing and fighting games seem to have split up from mainstream gaming altogether where if you just check out what’s the new Tekken like people assume you’re like a “fighting game person” that goes to tournaments and builds your whole life around it and have since forever, back in my day it was just a game you played cuz the dudes on the cover looked cool and the game was fun.

‘Core’ games are all rip offs of souls or some other crap that I personally hate deeply, or straight up remakes of games where the original is just kinda better, consoles and GPUs cost way too much this gen and there are no real exclusives.

The trends in graphics are concerning too, everything is a TAA or AI upscale smearfest, PS5 can’t run that new Star wars game at more than DVD resolution without the same bullshit 8th gen checkerboarding or some other dynamic resolution technique alongside god damned AI trash. MSAA and SSAA seem dead and with them clarity and good visuals, all that artwork gone to waste, the only pretty games are MSFS and CP2077 with Path Tracing on max, UE5 is built from the ground up around smear and unity is enshittified, devs are cutting costs and custom engines are out, so future looks bleak

The only thing that I love about gaming nowadays is indie and AA games, from Stray (barring the awful graphics) to Sea Power, Descenders to Teardown to Airport Sim, these are games I had the most fun with this year that aren’t 5th-7th gen classics. That football game at TGA from Sifu devs seems fun tho. Tower networking looks cool too, reminds me of cozy weed shop 2 vibes with a WTTG2 style tech element and a game dev tycoon art style

Says Russia lol. Buh-bye backwards transphobic shithole, see ya never again.

Fun fact: Russians are often very francophilic, you couldn’t do anything more impressive to an average muscovite wannabe intelligentsia than to speak rudimentary French or say you’ve been to Paris. They fancy themselves kindred spirits and fellow Europeans.

Very much like their weird obsession with London and showing cheap plugin effects of it blowing up on the propaganda outlets, many people on VK back in early 2010s would put their city as London, even though they were actually from outskirts of Chelyabinsk, they repress that which they want the most.

Average Russians would also genuinely freak out when I told them I’ve seen black people in the UK, as if I had a bear encounter or something, they are extremely racist in the most juvenile pathetic way.

Russians live in shit and are remarkably poor because their country is run by an oil mafia and the state’s best use for the populace is boosting western arms production and my Lockheed Martin stock, and Russians largely do not want others to have it not shit, they will culturally browbeat the smart ones in line and support the war to stop Ukrainians escaping the crab bucket, and the remaining few are either scared and hopeless, trying to leave, or just too uneducated to really comprehend any of this and just want to get by, which is just sad.

👑 10/10 👑

It’s not ridiculous, it’s true, but it is sad. As always the public chooses the worst things.

This was barely true like 10 years ago. Now everything is mobile games and live services.

Thank you for the chuckle

Bruh can you try reading my comment before you write some dumbass surface-level already-addressed shit next time?

It’s not about having to read a guide because souls games aren’t really that hard, it’s about the fact that everything around the boss fight is such a painful slog that it’s not worth the time investment required by slow, boring traversal across generic fantasy environments to get to the boss every time to actually freely experiment and find a strategy that works well naturally, y’know, something that is fun to do in action games, because it’s far more satisfying than copying what some guy on gamefaqs did, and fun is what games are meant to be about, right?

Look at the hardcore classic God Hand, does it make you navigate some eternal hellfuck boring maze over and over so you can get to being absolutely destroyed by demons, circus clowns and vampire women? No?

Yeah that’s because it’s a good game that lets you get to the fun part fast.

I’ll grant that Sekiro is probably the least carbon copy souls instalment, but that is just because the bar for the souls games is so low it’s right down with dinosaur bones, most games change up the gameplay more between sequels than souls games do between it’s series.

All that endless traversal you do in souls games is really just like a long loading screen for the good stuff and I have better things to do with my time and so should you.

Yeah but just because IGN gave it 10/10 doesn’t make your opinion valid, all those souls series are very very slow, you die, you go way back to some location from an hour ago and slog through the same generic fantasy level again just to get another shot at the guy who killed you, and it just gets more boring each time, especially when the locations don’t stand out from any other generic fantasy place.

It’s extremely punishing and discourages free player experimentation and creativity and fun with the mechanics and encourages reading the wiki to cheese a boss so you don’t have to do it again or going somewhere else to level a stat or get the right gear like some lame ass MMO or ass creed, which makes it all tedious and boring.

The reason people focus in on how these games are hard is because they assume they’re not meant to die much at all, if ever, because who tf wants to sink in all that time repeating the same boring bullshit journey over and over, so they rightfully bounce off the design.

The real difficulty of souls games is having the stamina to make it through the repetitive slog, but if you really think about it why should you bother when you’re meant to play games to have fun.

“If it’s not fun, why bother” as satoshi iwata famously said ;)

Compare that to a fast game like Doom (original, not the shitty reboots), you die, there’s that wipe effect and you’re going a mile a minute, less than a minute and you’re right back in the action to give it another shot with a new tactic or strategy. It’s not that death isn’t punishing or doesn’t matter because you lose all your weapons, it punishes you with difficulty, not boredom.

And more fundamentally those games just are very slow which doesn’t help the boredom, there’s no significantly faster way of traversing a thing the second time compared to when you just walked the first time, sure you can roll and whatnot like the speedrunners and time it perfectly but compare it to something like Ultrakill with it’s fast stylish action and expressive movement mechanics and a difficulty a good bit higher than any of the souls games by a good mile.

The only game that doesn’t have this problem in the series is the OG demon’ souls, idk about the remake since I hadn’t played it yet but the levels themselves being physically smaller obscures the issue at the core of the design.

And all this is coming from someone who loves “boring” games like the paradox strategy games or sims like Arma or MSFS, the difference is these games don’t force you to repeat the same bullshit over and over, sure you might have to go back to a pretty early save in a HoI4 campaign to fix your mistake by the time it comes up but that’s on you, the game doesn’t force an arbitrary retread of the same ground over and over.

DMC4 didn’t have the best level design either, precisely because there was too much of it, and DMC5 went in the right direction and made everything a corridor of monsters so you can get right to the combat and quickly, because that’s the fun part of the game.

Souls combat can be fun too when you’re really in there rolling about the place with some huge dragon or some shit but to actually fucking get to it isn’t worth the time investment of navigating some bullshit maze over and over.

All the aforementioned games can be pretty dang hard, Doom on UV or DMC5 on DMD are both tougher than most Souls encounters, but they are fun and encourage you to try harder and souls doesn’t, and that’s the point of course, with it’s story and atmosphere lining up perfectly with that vibe that the world is indifferent to your journey, but all of this doesn’t make it good game design and certainly doesn’t make it a template other games can copy-paste willy nilly when it doesn’t fit the tone, i.e. Jedi Fallen Order.

Sekiro and Elden ring are literally just a demon souls reskin, I already played that game for free with ps plus on the PS3 and it was an ok time waster in school

Ok slop hoover

Jedi academy and DMC4 has hand-holding? Delusional. They’re just good games. Souls games are shit games, slow and boring asf. Idgaf about forntire demographic they need to learn what games are good before they’re allowed opinions fr fr