blindsight
@blindsight@beehaw.org
- Comment on Maven Is a New Social Network That Eliminates Followers—and Hopefully Stress 2 hours ago:
This was my main concern. What’s the monetization strategy?
- Comment on The History of Tetris World Records [by Summoning Salt] ~ a 1 hour documentary 2 days ago:
I already knew the broad strokes of most of what I’ve watched so far (about halfway), but it’s very entertaining. I’m watching at 2× speed, fwiw (which is typical for me).
- Comment on Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together? 1 week ago:
To add to this:
Ain’t no way a brand new game studio is getting a loan at 6%. If they can even get a business loan at all (good luck!), it would be at a much higher interest rate due to the risk, and/or require assets to be held in collateral (only an option if you’re already wealthy to begin with…)
- Comment on Let's discuss: Earthbound / Mother 1 week ago:
I was curious, so I looked it up: Earthbound has a fairly gentle XP curve. Double XP takes you from level 33 to 40, assuming you play the same.
I haven’t played Earthbound enough to remember if there’s grinding, so idk if it’s necessary. In general, I tend to find the existence of double XP romhacks is usually enough to indicate that I’d rather use them, based on my playstyle preferences. Someone thought it was beneficial enough to put hours of work into!
- Comment on Let's discuss: Earthbound / Mother 1 week ago:
There’s a double XP romhack.
“Skip the grind” romhacks are the only way I play a lot of JRPGs. I don’t want to mindlessly battle to advance in the game. I have better things to do with my time, like playing a wider selection of games. I don’t need games’ length padded!
Not sure if it’s needed for Earthbound, but I’d probably just use it anyway. Most games set up a good leveling curve, so double XP shouldn’t break the game even if it’s unnecessary.
- Comment on Let's discuss: Earthbound / Mother 1 week ago:
Earthbound and Super Mario RPG are the two best entry points to SNES-era JRPGs. I haven’t played many JRPGs since the OG PlayStation generation, though, so I’m out of the loop on newer games. But they’re both better entry points than any of the PS2 JRPGs that I know of/played.
I’m more partial to Super Mario RPG, personally. Timing attacks in battle made the grind more engaging, and the Mario world is well known by pretty much any gamer already, too.
- Comment on Voyager 1 1 week ago:
They specifically sent it a command to send a full memory dump after it went haywire. It wasn’t a fluke.
- Comment on Academic Rizzlers 2 weeks ago:
Based.
- Comment on Why do mobile games suck nowadays? 2 weeks ago:
I’m feeling the same way about Minion Masters. I just play it on my Steam Deck, but it got an Android release recently. They gave away a few of their “DLC” packs (which is how I found it about it), so maybe my experience is a bit atypical, but I’ve just been playing for a week or so and I already have more than half the available cards and enough currency that I can craft any cards I really want to finish a deck.
I haven’t paid a cent. It’s so generous with its freemium model that I’m probably going to buy an in-game currency pack if I’m still playing once my Google Rewards wallet ticks high enough to buy one.
- Comment on What is your favourite game console? 2 weeks ago:
Same for me. Lots of consoles have lots of great games, and I really like the idea of the PS2 library’s depth and quality. I bought a 1TB MicroSD card for my Steam Deck OLED and loaded it with a 1TB image of curated roms from a private tracker thinking I’d play a lot of the ones I missed…
…But the only non-Steam game I’ve played is FF5 for the SNES. I’ve wanted to play it since I found out Final Fantasy “III” was a lie. The Steam Deck is the ultimate SNES RPG machine.
That and my SD2SNES in my childhood SNES gets a lot of play time with my 6 y.o. son. He’s almost able to beat world 1 of SMW solo, but he prefers Kirby Super Star, where he can beat world 1 and most of world 2.
- Comment on How FIFA lost their video game franchise - YouTube 2 weeks ago:
I’m privvy to some of the details from this on the EA side of things, and everything in this video is accurate, from what I know.
It was quite a bit of work for EA to strip FIFA out of everything, though. All the UX elements, of course, but they also wanted to be sure to strip FIFA from database names and entries, servers, and a whole host of other places. EA wanted to be 100% confident that there was no mention of FIFA anywhere, just to be completely in the clear from any trademark disputes.
Hearing my connection in EA talk about it reminded me of Y2K patching, lol. Going through the codebase and databases meticulously to check and double check everything.
- Comment on ONS staff refuse to work two days a week in office 2 weeks ago:
Team building is very important.
That’s why my employer strongly requests us to meet in person 2 times/year.
- Comment on What do you personally use AI for? 3 weeks ago:
LLMs can be great for explaining things that have concrete solutions, like physics and math problems, when they have a separate “computations” AI bolted onto it, like ChatGPT does. Usually, you can check the answer in the back of the book anyway, so it’s very easy to catch fact hallucinations.
I wouldn’t worry about source hallucinations with this either. I don’t think it would even come up?
- Comment on Windows 10 will start nagging you to switch from local account to MS Account 4 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t recommend it, tbh, but I’m liking Windows 10 Ameliorated. It’s a hassle to set up drivers for every single device, and sometimes you need to do some tinkering to fix things. It also doesn’t get Windows updates (but has a much smaller attack surface due to so many things being disabled).
So, for your typical “I just want it to work and I don’t disable malware ads” user, I wouldn’t recommend it. But, for power users, it’s nice having a Windows machine that’s essentially de-Microsofted. It also made my shitty old laptop a lot more responsive.
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 4 weeks ago:
Universal holidays between the years was good enough for the Mayans and it’s good enough for me!
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 4 weeks ago:
So what I’m getting from this is that we need to pull the Moon a bit closer to the Earth, and the Earth a bit closer to the Sun.
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 4 weeks ago:
What the flying fuck. I literally did that exact thing in university to manage my at-the-time undiagnosed sleep disorder.
I slept through like 30% of my classes, but it was the most rested I’d ever been in my life.
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 4 weeks ago:
You can thank Julius Augustus for that. He wanted the best months named after himself. Egomaniac.
- Comment on It's finally up! Please sign it if you're in the UK :) Petition: Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state. 4 weeks ago:
Or a patch to strip out the online portion. If developers know they’ll need to create that patch eventually, then they can design the game around it. Offline/LAN play/local servers were the norm until ubiquitous high-speed internet.
There’s no technical reason why Diablo 4 needs to be online only. It was a design decision made for DRM and microtransactions. D2 still works great and has thousands of active players.
- Comment on It's finally up! Please sign it if you're in the UK :) Petition: Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state. 4 weeks ago:
Cool, that’s great, but that’s also kinda the point.
Live service games suck because you can’t depend on being able to play them. This is trying to fix that. So you (or anyone else) can play these games offline—eventually. Once they shut down the servers, customers should still be able to access their purchases. This campaign is trying to force companies to design around releasing a patch to strip out the online portion/online DRM or face significant financial consequences.
- Comment on Steam is a ticking time bomb 1 month ago:
Not parent poster, but I’m going to see if I can find up with some.
\0. If you get banned from Steam, you lose hundreds or thousands of games.
\0.1. You can’t use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.
\0.5. If you’re blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you’re locked out of all your games that use VAC.
1. Steam requiring other storefronts to sell at the same gross price instead of the same price net fees. This means nobody can compete with their 30% cut… On the other hand, they take 0% for activating games sold elsewhere, which kinda balances it. Still, this is probably the biggest barrier that’s maintaining their monopoly.
\2. Discoverability since they stopped curating the games list. (Maybe? Not sure if this is a problem, tbh.)
3. Normalizing the concept of games requiring a launcher to run/DRM.
\4. Offline play functionality is inconsistent, so sometimes it breaks when people are traveling with no Internet access.
5. Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.
\6. Region-locked censorship, like gore in Germany.
7. Some people would say region-adjusted pricing, but I disagree. Still, might be a valid reason for some.
(Numbering is wonky because I thought of actual real problems later.)
I think I did pretty well! It’s hard to find things to fault. It’s a pretty great platform.
- Comment on The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games | Accursed Farms 1 month ago:
Watched the whole thing. I hope this gains traction!
Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about this yet; I’ll set a reminder to check in a month if the petition in my country is active.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to submit a complaint to the French consumer protection agency since I don’t own the game.
- Comment on Dragon's Dogma 2 MTX 1 month ago:
idk, I think there’s more to it than that.
This is another layer of “horse armor MTX”, now with selling pay-to-win features in AAA single-player games. In this case, the first (early?) time it’s been done, it’s “mild”, but it’s a step in the wrong direction.
I don’t like “slippery slope” arguments, in general, but it doesn’t cost me anything to boycott this game for having P2W MTX in a full-priced single-player game. If enough people agree, that might send the message to the industry that nickel and diming their customers isn’t a good business model.
- Comment on What are some games you find yourself frequently coming back to? 1 month ago:
You’re the first person I’ve seen say Mario, which I find surprising.
For me, it’s Super Mario World, including romhacks. It’s platforming perfection. I particularly like the SMW Central level competition compilation romhacks since you can skip the levels you don’t enjoy.
Spyro is another one I come back to, especially now with the remastered version.
Diablo 2, with mods now, is another. “Stay awhile, and listen.” I sure will, old man.
For a long time, it was Counter Strike and Team Fortress, but I don’t really play FPS games any more so it’s been almost a decade for me at this point.
- Comment on The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming: ‘One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs’ 1 month ago:
You can also download remux quality rips. Be warned: they take a lot of disc space! Hard drives cost 1.4¢/GB right now, so say 2¢/GB for a raid NAS, all in. That means each remux costs about $1 USD to store with backup… But you need to put down the cash for like 1000 movies at a time to get the best marginal price.
- Comment on Need android game recommendations 1 month ago:
Simon Tatham’s Puzzles is a fantastic set of FOSS puzzle games. They look ugly, but they have easy intuitive controls with good instructions for many different puzzle games. (40, I guess?)
- Comment on degree in bamf 1 month ago:
Did you drop a /s? This is a funny meme, so I’m assuming I just missed a joke.
Right?
(Speaking as a white male, white male entitlement, and privilege for that matter, are incredibly relevant to white men being sexist/racist.)
(You can trust me on this because I’m a white male. Also, I’m used to my opinion being listened to, so I expect you to as well. Just FYI.)
- Comment on Perhaps 1 month ago:
I think they have a normal sleep schedule?
- Comment on positivity 1 month ago:
√(x²)
- Comment on I see your Outlook (new) and I raise you Microsoft Teams classic (work or school) 2 months ago:
Not sure if it’s host my device, but I can’t drag & drop files into the new Trans for organizations, so I’m still using classic for organizations.
It’s ridiculous, and now I need to click through saying “no” to the new version every time I start it.