I just install DoNotSpy after a fresh install of Windows and have never had an issue with Windows Update ignoring me and doing whatever it wanted.

Obviously the system has to be offline until it is installed and probably restarted, but after that you can plug in a cable and be fine, to my experience. Mind you I am still using an old, old, copy of 10 Pro as the installer, so I am uncertain how newer, fresh installs or home edition will handle it.

Watching the wheels turn when a straight person, upset by being forgotten, is told that this is what LGBTQ+ people are used to and have had to deal with for most of history.

chef’s kiss

Hi-Fi Rush might genuinely be one of my favorite games of all time.

These guys did great, and I’ll be thinking twice about any Xbox product I consider purchasing in the future.

As a “space games guy” is there anything out there that is as satisfying to simply fly around in as Elite Dangerous is without the absolute shit fuck of ass-backwards, tedious and boring mechanics?

I fucking love flying ships in that game with my HOTAS and VR headset, but I will be damned if I am going to roll around on a moon praying I trip over some precious metals just so I can play logistics hot potatoes trying to figure out how I am going to get my module to the relevant station, upgraded, and then placed into the ship I designed it for. Elite is such an incredible space cockpit sim, and they’ve gone to great lengths to prevent me from wanting to actually play it. I just want a good cockpit sim with HOTAS support that doesn’t make me want to scoop out my own eyeballs whenever I think about loading it up again.

Listen, it’s a very easy premise: these anti-gay workers and activists believe homosexual thoughts are something everyone struggles with, because they experience similiar thoughts and urges all the time, and homosexuals are just people made the wrong choice. The logic is easy to follow. People bias their own experiences and wrongly assume that most people have similiar thoughts and feelings. So when you have feelings that you have been told your whole life are “wrong”, “unclean” or “evil”, you don’t assume that they’re unique to you; you see them as demons that everyone faces and attribute your ability to turn them away as a virtue. These people believe homosexuality is a choice because they believe themselves to have made the other choice.

The hate you see isn’t loathing for things they don’t understand. It’s resentment. It’s a deep-seated bitterness born of resentment and envy for people who chose not to fight against their own nature and instead celebrate it. And they believe they’re doing good by helping people like them make the “correct” choice, and eliminating any attitudes, conversations or, in extreme cases, persons, that would normalize the “incorrect” choice.

The article is great, but I hate this title.

“We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions.

The “post-constitutional” world in the title is the way Russ Vought describes the current political landscape. It is not, as the title insinuates, something he used to describe the future he aims to create.

This guy is a fascist nut job with a ton of insane ideologies. We don’t need dishonest titles to make him look bad.

They legit don’t have any faces or arms. That “Thor” has a weird, flesh coloured, Megaman buster-shaped appendage, no eyes and a gaping hole of a mouth.

It’s not obvious at a glance, but each of those “characters” are amorphous blobs. Seriously, zoom in even a little, it’s really strange to look at.

I appreciate the poster demonstrating always-on to OP, and I’d never criticize them for using this wallpaper, but the only way you can call this “very good AI art” is by glancing at a thumbnail and moving on.

Support an amazing “single-A” game that suffers none of the issues of modern enshittification by purchasing a physical copy.

OR

Refuse to hand any money to the mega corporation that shut down the studio responsible for the gem that is Hi-Fi Rush.

sweats nervously

It’s kind of like Kahoot, but there’s a greater variety of games.

The teacher hosts a game with a question set they either found it made, and each student joins on a device. They’re givegiven the questions and selecting correct answers earns them something relative to the game.

The most traditional one is the one that was described here, where they are given every question in sequence and are awarded points for the accuracy and speed of their answers, but there is some great variety. There’s a tower defense game where correct answers give you the currency to buy and upgrade towers, a “survivors”-like game where a correct answer is required to be given a choice of weapon upgrades and several variants on slot machine-esque games, where correct answers gives them a random bonus ranging across gaining score, multiplying score or stealing score from other players.

I like to use it with the kids whenever I require some rote memorization. Ie, we’re reviewing terms we’ve used or will be using in a unit, or we’re refreshing things they’re supposed to have learned in previous years.

There’s some great single-player options too, if you ever find yourself struggling to deal with rote memorization for any courses you’d take as an adult, too. While it’s definitely targeted towards classrooms and kids, the games are imo substantially more engaging ways to memorize things that are in general hard to care about outside of a requirement for some job, diploma or degree.

Damn, my grade 7 class is cringe af. Kid keeps naming himself “skibidisigma” every time we play Blooket.

The endgame Sephiroth fight was definitely forced. It reeked of “well, he’s been the secret antagonist all game, so we can’t just disclude him from the finale” kind of thinking.

I liked the more persistent villain lurking in Cloud’s broken mind, but they shouldn’t have felt the need to try and put a pseudo capstone on that story thread.

That’s so fascinating, tbh. I mean, different strokes, so I can’t judge, but it’s the impressively deep strategy they’ve baked into Remake’s combat that I am particularly impressed by. That said, it makes sense though that if you dislike Tales combat, you’d dislike Remake’s combat. They’re not the same persay, but they’re cut from the same cloth imo.

I could also go for a “no capitalism” approach, but I’ll take what I can get.

Calling the new game’s combat “mind-numbing” compared to a random encounter turn-based system is both peak irony and peak rose-tinted glasses.

I can’t get over just how much better Remake is compared to the original, so you do you, I guess. I was incredibly pleasantly surprised to see the ways they’re engaging with telling a different story and taking the name “remake” very literally. I was seriously concerned they were just going to sell the original story again in three seperate parts as full-price titles.

There are a lot of reasons to not bother going to Tim Horton’s, and the lids on their cups is not one of them.

It’s weird because you’re both right and wrong.

It’s not AAA by any stretch. It was sold at a fraction of the usual price point, it’s advertising was non-existant, and it makes no effort to do the usual AAA things: live-service, online multiplayer, “you can play it forever”, etc. are are not present.

But putting it side-by-side with Manor Lords and Balatro, the latter of which was a single-person dev, also doesn’t suit it. It has a real studio, a dev team with experience, and at least enough of a budget to license real music from popular (or at least, once popular) artists. I’d perhaps agree with your statement that it’s closer to AAA than to a “small dev” game, but it is true that it’s a “smaller game that [gives Microsoft] prestiege and awards”.

This is a great article highlighting the pig-headed double speak going on at Microsoft’s gaming divisions. On the one hand, they’re cutting studios and supposidly refocusing on their core offerings, while simultaneously describing the experiences they want to offer as exactly the studios they just cut. The absolute worst part is I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to take the IP, push it on a different dev team that they control and give it the Fable treatment: “this IP was so well received; make a sequel that checks all these boxes that our market research data tells us popular, profitable games have” while conviniently ignoring the passion and vision that the original devs poured into the original title.

It absolutely has to deal with a Steam account every single time I log in to confirm ownership of the title. And then again every time I make a purchase from my Steam wallet. And again every time I connect to a friend through my Steam friends list.

It’s literally adding another potential point of failure and removes none of the necessities of dealing with the other service. I only suggested the server load bit because I can’t for the life of me understand how you can think it’s “easier” to insist that these two systems interact in a new way when they’re already up and functioning, and the original reason account linking was disabled was to make the game more stable.

Cassette Beasts kicks the ever loving shit out of Pokemon across the board, modern or retro.

Retro games weren’t better than modern games as a “full-stop” statement. They tended to be bug-ridden messes, but there was still a heart and soul behind them that tends to be missing in the AAA industry. Continuing on the Pokemon example Red/Blue were an absolute mess. I mean, moves and items that were supposed to massively increase critical hit rate massively decreased them instead. Stat calculations were all over the place. Hell, the ghost-psychic interaction just straight didn’t function as intended. It was a mess, and yet for some reason, it’s touted as “better” than the modern Pokemon games.

Plus, not all big studio games are soulless cash grabs of releases, either. Hi-Fi Rush is my favorite game of 2023 by a huge margin, and was a Bethesda published game. Sure, the dev studio was “smaller” compared to Ubisoft or Activison, but I wouldn’t call the game indie - it was AAA in polish and scale. I’m currently really enjoying Unicorn Overlord, getting major Ogre Battle 64 vibes from it, and playing a lot of Monster Hunter Rise thanks to a Steam sale. These games slap, and have all the depth and passion of games of old without alI of the horrible jank we dealt with in the pre-internet “no such thing as a post-release patch” world.

It’s easy to see the yearly Call of Duty, Pokemon, generic EA sports, and obligatory Ubisoft open world games release and think “man, AAA gaming sucks”, but they’re honestly a very tiny portion of the conversation.

EDIT: I take everything back, Bethesda just closed the studio that made Hi-Fi Rush. AAA gaming is a cancer that needs to be surgically extracted.

Insane take imo. How does purchase authentication or cross play suddenly become “easier” with this change? Either it works or it doesn’t; having PC players connected to a PSN account doesn’t alleviate server load.