Nipah

I mentioned it in my reply to this comment, but Simple Tab Groups is a pretty solid alternative in Firefox.

Its not quite as elegant as the built-in Chrome ones, but it does make it easy to have a bunch of groups sorted out that you can flip between.

Generally, its not that I have too many tabs as much as I have some tabs I leave open all the time and want to condense down a bit.

For example, at work I use Chrome for my main web work, and FF for my… uh… shit like this. So I have a bunch of Chrome tabs open that I know I’ll have to make changes to again in the future, so they stay open. I also have ‘projects’ which contain a bunch of pages that are all related to each other. Being able to group those together and collapse makes it easy to quickly get back into them when someone wants a small, insignificant (sorry, extremely important!) change to them that needs to be done yesterday, and I can eventually just throw the group away once the project is mostly complete and not going to be touched by human hands ever again (until a year later, when it suddenly becomes a critical problem for someone, and thus a problem for me… I’m not complaining, you’re complaining).

At home, I mainly use Firefox. I have an extension that allows me to have tab groups, but its not as nice looking as the built-in Chrome version (Simple Tab Groups, which is actually quite nice, but not as pretty as the Chrome ones). I have a group for my usual fucking around stuff (Discord, YT, Kbin, DIM (Destiny app), wiki for whatever other game I’m playing), a tab for my streaming stuff (which I don’t use often, but as I have a few container tabs for logging in to my brother’s account for a handful. I like to just leave those open so I don’t have to worry about it), and a group for my “working from home” stuff like email/OneDrive and a smaller amount of pages I always keep open because I’m always editing them for work.

So all in all, I don’t have like a hundred tabs open at any given time, and I could make due with just having them all bookmarked and open them as need be… but honestly, that’s a bit of a hassle and would also either leave me with a ton of useless bookmarks after a month or two, or require me to curate my bookmarks every month or two. Versus just having a tab group I can just kill off once I know I’m done with their work.

Looking for a pure CSS implementation of a concept?

Best I can do is an overly elaborate jquery solution to your question, sorry.

Assassin’s Creed Origins the gameplay started getting repetitive very quickly. Even though I liked the ancient Egyptian settings and the beautiful graphics, I couldn’t follow the nonsensical plot.

Man, that was the only one of the newer style that I liked… Bayek was pretty cool, and it felt ‘fresh’… it doesn’t hurt that it ticked off two of my preferences: exploration and combat (say what you will about hiding in knee high grass, I love me some stealth). Some of the bits did rub me the wrong way, like no 1-hit kills, but I liked the weapon choices and combat options enough that I had a good time overall.

That being said, I can’t for the life of me remember anything about the story of the game so… I guess I just turned that part of my brain off after a while.

The more recent ones went too far in terms of world size, so it went from “I wonder what’s over that hill?” to “I’ll never complete filling in this map so why even bother?”… which sucks, because Kassandra was pretty cool too (not sure how the viking character was done because I didn’t even bother with that game after bouncing off Odyssey).

Shit, I forgot about GTA games in my reply…

I’m with you on this one. I can see the appeal, but for me it ends up being a cycle of: do a mission or two, get bored of the larger than life characters, do some open world stuff, get my wanted level up too high, die, repeat until I quickly get bored and shut it off.

Which is odd because I do that exact same thing in other games I love (BotW, WoW (long since quit) or Destiny) and its all golden… but in a game like GTA? Yawn.

For games that are in genres that I’d actually play:

Final Fantasy 6 (3): I grew up with the NES, and when we got a SNES I got whatever games I could from the $20 bin at Toys R Us. I had some friends who were a bit better off that loaned me some games, and I eventually managed to get my hands on a copy of Chrono Trigger (as well as other RPGs like Breath of Fire), but when I borrowed FFIII from one of them I was just… underwhelmed. I didn’t really care for the characters, it felt pretty slow initially, and I remember getting to a bit with a bunch of moogles in the party and I just put it down and never went back.

I’ve since tried to play it a few times here and there, but it never really manages to hook me… but people sing the praises of it high and low and I just don’t really get it because I can’t get over the hump.

The Witcher 1/2/3: I just really don’t like the combat, honestly. I’ve tried playing all three, and managed to get enough time into them to appreciate the good bits (voice acting, story, quest lines) but the main meat and potatoes for me in a game are exploration and combat, and only one of those really works for me in those games. I had a better time in the first game, all things considered, because I guess I was willing to allow a bit of jankiness from an older game, but I bounced off Witcher 2 pretty quickly combat-wise, and didn’t manage to get more than many 1/3 to 1/2 way through Witcher 3 before I just admitted that I wasn’t having fun.

Persona 3: I got into the games with P4G on my Vita, so part of this is ‘going backwards is hard’ in terms of QoL improvements and what not. But I also played the PSP port of Persona 2 (whichever one was actually ported in English) and had a good time (not so much with the PS1 version of the one that didn’t get the English PSP port… that one was rough) so I guess its just the game didn’t resonate with me as much as the other ones did… Maybe it was the characters or maybe it was the cuts that were made for the P3P version of the game, but it just didn’t hit the same.

Otherwise, a lot of military-style FPS games (stuff like Halo or Destiny or Timesplitters or even Goldeneye 64 are/were fun), the more recent sports titles (up to the Dreamcast/PS2 I was fine with them, but more realism doesn’t do anything for me), and stuff like MOBA or visual novels or ‘walking sims’ or battle royale or whatever those asynchronous horror games just don’t tick the boxes for me in terms of what I want from a video game.

When I used to work at a video game store, I used to try and dissuade parents from buying their 10 year old GTA 3/VC.

“So you can just walk down the street and shoot a random person, then when the cops show up, you can just shoot all of them as well.”

Oh, well they probably see worse things on TV!

“Uh huh… you can also pick up a hooker, drive to a secluded area, have sex with them, pay them, and then run them over when they leave to get your money back.”

Wait, it also has sex?!

But the thing is, you generally don’t just magically have the ability to seamlessly plop an ad into a part of the game. That kind of thing needs to be purpose built, to either have the option to plop an ad on the main menu + map, or to (more heinously) plop an ad ANYWHERE in the game.

So worst case scenario (well, not WORST because the game doesn’t, like, go back in time to kill your grandfather or something) is that someone higher up said “Hey, what if we could put an ad anywhere in the game? Get the team working on that” and it was done… best case scenario is that I guess their games are coded so well that they can just seamlessly plop in a chunk of code that doesn’t break anything else and just works?

But going off of past experience with Ubisoft games, that best case scenario is kind of laughable (insert a screenshot of the guy’s face texture not loading for AC Unity here).

Even taken at face value, it means that they purposely built the ability to have an ad pop up not just on the main menu screen, but anywhere… or at least (giving them a strong benefit of the doubt) on the map screen.

The “error” was that someone popped it into the “show up on map” area of their code and not the “show up on the main menu” area of their code… but the bigger, more glaring problem is that it is even allowed to be a thing that exists as an option.

So even with all that allowance, the fact that it can be a thing is absolutely terrible and it doesn’t matter that it happened as an accident, but it shouldn’t be an option regardless… is the point of my rambling.

I suppose it depends on how much I can bend the rules…

If I’m allowed to use the console only ‘as-is’, then probably the Nintendo DS. This gives me DS games (which are great), but also GBA games as well (though you’ll miss out on GBC/GB games, which is a bit sad); this also nets you a smattering of NES/SNES ports to boot, so that’s nice. But most importantly, it gets me Chrono Trigger and a bunch of my favorite Castlevania games all in one place (sad that SotN doesn’t get here, but…)

If I’m allowed to use the console with no hold’s barred, then Playstation Vita. Mod that little sucker and you’ve got access to a ton of stuff… PSV games obviously, but emulated PS1, PSP, GBA, GBC, GB, NES, SNES, and Genesis also (and maybe more, I don’t think I’ve tried any others though).

My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?

My initial/gut reaction was “obviously relevant ads based on the content I’m watching”, but I don’t care how relevant the ad is when I’ve seen the same Raid Shadow Legend ad across multiple videos I’m gonna try to skip it (or as I did long, long ago: adblock it).

I don’t even know what actual YT ads are now, only the integrated creator ones that they’re personally sponsored by… the hello fresh and world of tanks and manscape and debrand etc., which I’ve started auto-skipping on a channel by channel basis based on very few criteria: the entertainment value/effort they’ve put into the ad (so Drew Gooden is usually always funny and gets a pass, same for channels like Wulff Den or Th3Jez or Critical Role) but certain ones just get manually skipped regardless (no matter how funny you are, I don’t want to sit here and listen to you talk about Manscape for 3 minutes) and how often I end up seeing them (which in these instances, isn’t often because they’re channel specific usually)

So I guess it mainly boils down to relevant ads that aren’t soulless and that I don’t see 3x every other video?

As someone who played/plays a lot of MMOs and stuff like Destiny/The Division: You’d be amazed at the number of people who don’t get to step two of that simple statement.

People who are just downright angry at a game but still actively playing… “Man, I can’t believe they’re forcing me to go into PvP to get [some arbitrary weapon or cosmetic item]!” they grumble, not realizing that they don’t need to tick that little check box in their collection.

People who say things like “I grinded out this holiday season and bought the event pass and I didn’t even like the stuff it offered!” is perhaps not technically ‘common’, but that kind of situation happens often enough that I’m a bit worried for gamers as a whole.

Its some kind of weird combination of a hoarder’s mentality, a sunk cost fallacy, and probably some FOMO sprinkled on top… all mixed together by some psychologist on a company’s payroll to maximize profits.

I replay the “Metroid-vania” Castlevanias every few years (SotN, GBA/DS games), and one of my goals is always maximum map completion… obviously not required for actually beating the games, but I only consider the game completed if I get all the rooms on my map.

More specifically for SotN, I also gotta get the Crissaegrim + Medusa Shield otherwise am I even playing the game properly?

Some of the others I try to get all the doodads: cards, souls, glyphs, whatever. Some are a bit more annoying than others, so sometimes I’ll skip out on the really annoying ones if I don’t get it done before filling in the map.