This was the Xbox One release. In the initial announcement it was all online, all the time with fully Digital licening. As you can imagine, uproar followed. This was their reasoning for everyone who couldn’t download a few TB of games and updates on the regular. They relented on almost all of their points, but the damage was done.
Have you read the news lately? We’re just training for the next few years.
ALVR isn’t awful. I needed new hardware and bit the bullet knowing I was likely going to lose VR, but with the hardware upgrade, it’s nicer in the new machine (Bazzite, 7900XT) than the old (Win 10, 2080 Super Max Q). Definitely not a drop in replacement yet though.
It’s a “how the mighty have fallen” kind of thing. They are well into the click-bait farm mentality now - have been for a while.
It’s present on the news sites, but far worse on things where they know they steer opinion and discourse. They used to ensure political parties has coverage inline with their support, but for like 10 years prior to Brexit, they gave Farage and his Jackasses hugely disproportionate coverage - like 20X more than their base. This was at a time when SNP were doing very well and were frequently seen less than the UK independence party. And I don’t recall a single instance of it being pointed out that 10 years of poor interactions with Europe may have been at least partially fuelled by Nidge being our MEP and never turning up. Hell we had veto rights and he was on the fisheries commission. All that shit about fisherman was a problem he made.
Current reporting is heavily spun and they definitely aren’t the worst in the world, but the are also definitely not the bastion of unbiased news I grew up with.
Until relatively recently you could see the deterioration by flipping to the world service, but that’s fallen into line now.
If you have the time to follow independent journalists the problem becomes clearer, if not, look at output from parody news sites - it’s telling that Private Eye and Newsthump manage the criticism that the BBC can’t seem to get too
Go look at the bylinetimes.com front page, grab a random story and compare coverage with the BBC. One of these is crowd funded reporters and the other a national news site with great funding and legal obligations to report in the public interest.
I don’t hate them, they just need to be better.
But the BBC is increasingly unable to accurately report the news, so this finding is no real surprise.
It’s very “lipstick on a pig”, but you can run the PWA side by side with the native desktop. I have many screens so I keep non-call activity in the PWA version to avoid this nonsense.
I’m sure they will add tabs eventually as an afterthought and make it even more obtuse though.
I also reflexively delete the personal OneNotes and start a new one where I want it to be, but the war between me and Microsoft about how I want my personal documents stored has now raged for many many years.
Depends if they are in charge I guess.
If it didn’t AIMP has a folders section under my music.
There’s a couple of curators that “review” DRM in games. It’s not perfect but it helps.
There’s a few companies selling a very plasticky mini-pc that also has 2x 3.5" slots. Trialling it now for a homebuilt Nas, so far impressed. Worst problem is that the bigger drives can be noisy.
Aoostar in the US I think.
What mystifies me is usually when they do this sort of thing they throw it on Plus and get a mountain of players. Fall guys, and Destruction All Stars spring to mind as examples. I guess the effect isn’t so strong with the new tiered system, but it may have saved them some face.
So. Years back. When they did that ad where parents sent a kid emails to their own Gmail and then gave them the account details when they were grown up… Everyone who ever did that are gonna lose all their work if they don’t think to log in periodically. Nice.
Was an actual question - it wasn’t exactly universally hailed as a success, so I wasn’t sure if we were pretending it didn’t exist. I found it to be fine though. And last I poked around mod support seemed likely, but I got distracted by other releases so it’s not as ‘grabby’ as MoM was. I think the increased fidelity came at the cost of speed. But maybe that’s just because I can’t rely on muscle memory to bang through turns now.
Uh. Are you kidding? The remaster released like 6 months back.
There was a game for Amiga and ST called Eco. It was a great concept and a terrible game really, too slow, too random, and eventually too easy when you knew the pattern. But it was a great concept, and something like it but with smaller genetic steps/algorithm generated body forms. Think an entire game based around the creature phase of Spore. Or, spore as it was originally marketed I guess! There’s a couple of indies working on similar concepts at the moment, but nothing has quite ‘clicked’ for me yet.
It would not be a good use for Blockchain technology. Besides the problem that your dollars are a fungible asset that don’t have a physical object associated with it, as soon as you dollars get converted to another state, account, entity, whatever along with another thousands people’s dollars you would lose the tracking. And ultimately even if you could achieve this it would then either all fall to one or two accounts so you would have the disheartening effect of seeing your entire annual contribution spent on something tedious like fuelling an aircraft carrier, or they would attempt to distribute it evenly in which case why not save all the effort and just track the average spend budgets? It’s a solution looking for a problem here.
And yet almost every single one had a “Buy” button on the purchase page, not a “licence” and I sure as shit didn’t sign a damn thing. I act like I own them, and will continue to do so. Half the EULAs contains some illegal bullshit anyway and the “also is any of this invalidates local laws, just ignore that bit” clause is relatively a lot newer than a lot of classic games which I probably do own because of this. With the greatest respect, laws are - effectively - requests when the entire population willfully ignores them.
Absolutely true. And this is where I have difficulty with this initiative. I am a heavy collector and patient gamer, I get to stuff years after release. As such I have always avoided heavily on-line stuff so I can use my own schedule, and that’s the sticking point here for me. In the current environment where it’s easy to see network requirements, and even refund games after testing it seems like this could be handled by vote with your wallet for the most part. However, I take a very different view of the current bait-and-switch of taking games without a hard online requirement and changing the terms in some way after release, and this alone is enough to make me support the movement. Adding launchers, additional account requirements, micro transactions post release should be heavily controlled. If you don’t state at release you will be adding MTX - or even DLC honestly - you shouldn’t be able too in my mind. It’s a different product.
I think the other thing that so many are either too young to remember, or perhaps not technical enough now, but in the 90s, you ran your own game servers, and it was awesome. It was hard back then, someone seemed an ISDN or leased line to handle the traffic and access to a decent PC or server - requirements that are now in reach of everyone with a joke connection, a multi core machine and a docker install. There’s no reason this couldn’t be handled that way again with the companies monetising “content packs” for the servers and letting communities flourish. But they like the control.
It’s going to be interesting seeing the outcome here!