NuXCOM_90Percent

@NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Alternatives to Twitch and YouTube for livestreaming gaming?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Also it is fronted by hate groups that scam children and backed by a crypto casino.

  Kick is evil, through and through.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Alternatives to Twitch and YouTube for livestreaming gaming?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  What is your intent?

  Do you just want to saturate your upload bandwidth for poops and giggles? Then consider just being That Guy who is constantly in one of the live channels on a community discord streaming everything to like 0.1 people per day.

  Do you want to make a hustle out of this? Then your only real options are youtube or twitch and… discoverability is near zero for both of those. Even if you are one of the biggest streamers on the planet, convincing people to try a new platform is nigh impossible. Let alone for someone just starting out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  LLMs are actually spectacular for indexing large amounts of text data and pulling out the answer to a query. Combine that with natural language processing and it is literally what we all thought Ask Jeeves was back in the day. If you ever spent time sifting through stack overflow pages or parsing discussion threads, that is what it is good at. And many models actually provide ways to get a readout of the “thought process” and links to pages that support the answer which drastically reduces the impact of hallucinations.

  And many of those don’t necessarily require significant power usage… relative to what is already running in data centers.

  The problem is that people use it and decide it is “like magic” and then insist on using it for EVERYTHING. And you go from “Write me a simple function to interface with this specific API” to “Write me an application to do my taxes”

  Of course, there is also the issue of where training data comes from. Which is why so much of the “generative AI” stuff is so disgusting because it is just stealing copyrighted data left and right. Rather than the search engine style LLMs that mostly just ignore the proverbial README_FBI.txt file.

  And the “this is magic” is on both sides. The evangelists are demonstrably morons. But the rabid anti-AI/“AI” crowd are just as bad with “it gave you a wrong answer, it is worthless”. Think of it less like a magic box and more like asking a question on a message board. You are gonna get a LOT of FUD and it is on you to do additional searches to corroborate when it actually matters.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games have mastered "Both emotional extremes"?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  … I would genuinely love to know what the Barry of video games is. Maybe Spec Ops The Line but that never actually is anything BUT melodramatic and dark which wasn’t the prompt. The Expanse might be a better fit but that was generally a book/show about plot progression over character studies outside of (minimizing spoilers) Everything Around Rescuing Peaches. Which, again, was almost entirely melodrama.

  That said, I do think Barry is a spectacular example of the kind of story that can make you laugh… maybe not cry but something approximating that. But if we are going into the kinds of stories that games will never touch then… I give you “literature”.

  I’ll disagree with those CRPGs because there are so many gameplay mechanics tied to alignment that it largely undermines things. I would MAYBE suggest Tyranny as a better fit although that has many of the same problems. But I will fully agree that CRPGs are much more willing to explore nuance but, similarly, tend to focus much more on a single emotion. You tend to have an Eder style character who will crack a joke to ease the tension before giving a haunting line like “It’s a good thing you weren’t braver”, but there is a pretty hard shoeing out the clowns moment when it is time to get real.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games have mastered "Both emotional extremes"?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I felt it went without saying that this was referring to mainstream media because… video games. With an emphasis on action because… video games.

  Which, to use one of your examples, let’s look at (ugh) Rambo. The first one IS a pretty interesting character study into a man with extreme PTSD who can’t stop fighting his war (which is plenty of tropes). Which is why it is so telling that once they shifted fully into the action side, almost all of that went away outside of cheap drama over the naive pseudo-daughter… getting sold into slavery and raped to death.

  But you’ll also note that the example I brought to the table was Dust: An Elysian Tale. Which is an American (I thought Canadian but wikipedia suggests no) studio. And OP mentions The Walking Dead and Borderlands which are similarly Western. Nobody was implying exclusivity outside of you.

  But let’s look at two of the more interesting examples you brought up.

  The Last Of Us 2… kind of is emblematic of video games’ (West and East) problem with masculinity. TLOU1 has two particularly strong emotional beats and both involve a Man losing his daughter. TLOU2 is MUCH better in that it actually allowed people to be characters other than “Sad Dad” but it is incredibly telling how much of the game revolves around the second of the strong emotional beats from 1. Ellie is driven by her conflicted feelings over Joel taking away her agency to protect her and Abby is driven by… Joel taking away her entire family. And… I think it speaks a lot to Druckmann and Naughty Dog that the character who has the strongest parental narrative is the very masculine woman who angered the internet for obvious reasons. And that is kind of supported by the mess that is the Uncharted series as well.

  As for your critique of (generally shonen) anime? Let’s look at the ur example of Dragon Ball Z (also DB but it is less fun). Vegeta. Homie destroyed at least one entire planet (its cool, it was filler and he obviously never did that when he was rolling with Nappa), allowed Nappa to destroy an entire city, murdered Nappa, probably murdered a bunch of Namekians (too lazy to check), definitely murdered a lot more people when he went Majin, and is Goku’s best friend because Krillin is too busy tapping dat ass. Except… not really. Because if you actually go back to DB, the vast majority of The Z Fighters are kind of just rivals that Goku respected and occasionally teamed up with. Outside of Krillin and MAYBE Yamcha, they weren’t his friends. And that is where Vegeta was too up until he went Majin. It was only after that when he acknowledged that he cared about something more than power (Bulma and Trunks) and that, even after his eyes were opened by Frieza, he was a monster. And while Super brushes over a lot of that because it is meant to be a direct sequel to DB, that characterization is still there.

  Which is similarly something that a lot of people clown on Yakuza/LAD for. Yeah, Kiryu and Ichiban and even Yagami end up teaming up with a lot of people they beat on a few dozen times. But, by and large, it is not a 'you are my best friend" and more “I respect you and now understand why you did those evil things… but things aren’t over between us”. And then you have the inverse with Ryuji who is pretty unrepentantly “evil” to the end… but it is also impossible to view him and Kiryu as anything other than friends as they fight to the death because that is the only way they know how to communicate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games have mastered "Both emotional extremes"?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Japanese developers tend to excel at this because Eastern culture/media is much more willing to acknowledge emotion and moral ambiguity. The West likes misty eyed men whereas East Asians are all about that former boyband member sobbing. And The West only allows a Bruce Willies level character to beat on an abuser.

  A couple days back Aftermath posted an excellent blog on Kamen Rider that kind of exemplifies it aftermath.site/kamen-rider-kuuga-tokusatsu. But the quick summary: There is a meme clip going around of a sentai character beating the ever loving hell out of a monster. And the context is that the hero of that series is a super happy man who loves children who was faced with a villain who murders children in a way that maximizes suffering for everyone around them. So he just completely snaps and crosses every imaginable line while unleashing all of his powers with no wind up or ceremony. And, most importantly, there is no moral hand wringing about how “Yes, he deserved it but what is this doing to you?”. Mother fucker was unquestionably evil and got what was coming to him. And while it does tie into the overall themes of Yusuke being worn down and broken by the weight of the suit, it also acknowledges that… somebody needs to be. Which is a theme common in the Gundams and so forth.

  Contrast that with The West where The Hero is contractually required (formerly legally required…) to stop short and insist that killing the man who slaughtered dozens of children would make him no better… before being given an out when said monster grabs a gun out of nowhere.

  As for games that pull this off? I’ll contribute Dust: An Elysian Tale. Most of it is happy go lucky as the amnesiac protagonist and his cute and cuddly and obnoxious companion fight against the evil military with some good laughs. But it also touches on the theme of “you can do everything right and still people get hurt” which works REALLY well in the video game space where you are conditioned to believe the golden ending will always be happy and perfect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No Man's Sky: Voyagers update releases today, introduces customizable "colossal, fully furnished, completely bespoke Corvette-class starships"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I fell off E:D a couple years back because of a lack of progress and how FDev treats the suckers who bought the lifetime expansion pass (also I am not entirely sure if my VKB+Thrustmaster mess will work in Linux and am procrastinating…). But apparently space legs are still restricted to basically the tie-in FPS from EVE?

  But nah. Hello Games did a HORRIBLE job of marketing this but the game that should REALLY be angry is Starfield. Because the Corvette system is just their ship builder but in a game where you can actually fly them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No Man's Sky: Voyagers update releases today, introduces customizable "colossal, fully furnished, completely bespoke Corvette-class starships"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  While I wouldn’t quite call it a Journey Game (a la Elite Dangerous), it is very much not about The Destination.

  People play it because they like to play it. The idea isn’t to build an endgame character who can do anything and everything. The idea is to build a lot of different characters that do a lot of different things and so forth.

  And, grain of salt, but based on my own personal experience and non-rigorous polling of the discord and reddit, the vast majority of regulars are just playing it seasonally. A new update/season drops and a lot of folk hop on to play it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are those of us who grew up on older games more attuned to latency?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And there is a reason the +/- (?) buttons literally changed the render window for DOOM and the like. Like… those iconic HUDs were specifically so that those playing on a 640480 monitor might actually only have to worry about a 640360 game and so forth.

  Same with those of us who played games like Unreal Tournament at 18-24 FPS on an 800*600.

  Like I said, there are definitely some problem children (again: Team Ninja). But it is also worth remembering that most games are still targeting a previous gen console SKU at 1080p. And, ironically, the optimizations are going to be geared more towards that.

  Which… is why upscaling is such a big deal. Yeah “AI Upscaling” is a great buzzword. But it really is no different than when we used to run OFP at a lower resolution on the helicopter missions. It is just that now we can get “shockingly good” visuals while doing that rather than thinking Viktor Troska looks extra blocky.

  Like, I’ll always crap on Team Ninja’s PC ports because they are REALLY bad… even if that is my preferred platform. But it took maybe 2 minutes of futzing about (once I got to Yokohama proper and had my game slow to sub 20 FPS…) to get the game to look good and play at a steady 60 FPS. No, it wasn’t at Epic (or whatever they use) but most of the stuff was actually on High.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are those of us who grew up on older games more attuned to latency?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m going to push back on that a fair bit.

  I used to agree it was “optimization” problems. And there are definitely some games/engines with those (I love Team Ninja but… god damn).

  But it is also that mindsets have changed. Most people know of the “can it run Crysis?” meme… if only from Jensen. But it was a question for a reason because Crysis (and other games) genuinely pushed the envelope of what desktop computers could handle. It was an era where you really would put a LOT of effort into figuring out what settings would get you what framerate and “ultra” was something that only the super rich or the people who JUST built a new computer could expect to run.

  But around the launch of the PS4/XBONE, that all changed. Consoles were just PCs for all intents and purposes and basically all games “worth playing” were cross platform. So rather than taking advantage of the latest nVidia card or going sicko mode for the people who got the crazy powerful single thread performance i7, they just targeted what the consoles could run. So when people did their mid-gen upgrades of PCs… suddenly “ultra” and “epic” were what we began defaulting to. Just crank that shit up, turn off whatever you don’t like, and see your framerate and go from there.

  The refresh SKU consoles bumped up the baseline but… not all that much since those games still had to run on a base XBONE. And then we got the PS5/XSEX which… you know how it is never a good time to build a new PC? It was REALLY not a good time to build a new console as ray tracing and upscaling/framegen rapidly became the path forward in the hardware/graphics space. But also? Those launched during COVID so the market share of the previous gen remained very large and all those third parties continued to target the previous gen anyway.

  Which gets back to PC gaming. Could more effort be put in to improve performance? Yeah, definitely. But we are also getting reminded of what things were actually like until the mid 10s where you might only play a game on Medium or High and wanting that new game to be gorgeous is what motivates you to drive down to Best Buy and get a new GPU.

  But instead it is the devs fault that we can’t play every game on maxed out Epic settings at 4k/240Hz… because this generation never knew any different.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are those of us who grew up on older games more attuned to latency?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “Lag” does indeed come from network/signal theory and does indeed refer to networking. Been a minute, but I want to say lag is the round trip delay and latency is A to B but don’t quote me on that.

  That said? Nobody cared. “Lag” was always the time between action and response. Some of that might be input delay. Some of that might be display delay (which has always been over-exaggerated but…). And a lot of that really was network delay. These days it tends to be more rendering/logic delay because people who are playing on shitty internet connections know it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are those of us who grew up on older games more attuned to latency?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes and no.

  Different games (really engines) had different models for it. Some games you would feel things grind to a halt while you waited for a packet. Others you would have rubber banding where the prediction of what your opponent would do was wrong and they teleport 2 meters to the right. And a select few would result in endless double kills as you both killed the predictions.

  The big difference was that arena shooters (which DOOM effectively was) tended to have encounters where you might have 3 or 4 players all shooting each other at once with a high enough TTK that it was very easy to lose track of one enemy because you saw a more immediate threat. So it was a lot easier to just assume the rubber banding was a you problem or not notice it at all.

  Then we had CoD and it all became about super short TTK and 1on1 fights. And now? Now it was incredibly obvious when someone warped because they were your only concern.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are those of us who grew up on older games more attuned to latency?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part.

  HA!

  Older games were laggy as all fuck and had very significant input delay.

  But ignoring the rose tinted glasses: I DO think there is some element of truth to this: My formative years of online gaming were 56k and an ATI Rage. I probably logged at least a thousand hours of UT at 20-ish FPS and my ping was regularly in the hundreds. I can definitely appreciate lower latency games, but I mostly just need VRR (for screen tearing and the like) and I am set. Whereas one of the younglings from work pretty much can’t play anything below 60 FPS… and we have tested this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The Switch 1 launch was also a shitshow. Their big launch title was literally a Wii U game and they had the same hodge podge of “what if wii sports but now”. They just had “the nindies” and… yeah.

  Considering that Nintendo have actually always genuinely innovated in terms of marketing and more or less set the gold standard for the modern “just communicate direct to consumers”? I increasingly don’t believe that they have this secret vault of finished games that are ready to go whenever. They are just as fucked as everyone else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It is also nonsense. You might as well say that they are blocking devkits because people sold too many third party controllers.

  A few youtube channels over the years have gotten access to devkits. They pretty much all lock instantly the moment you go online because there is a permitlist of IPs that can connect to the servers. This is a solved problem that can be further limited by only providing them to major dev studios.

  That is very much not what is happening here even if we ignore all the insider information about Nintendo delaying third parties. Again, plenty of studios are very open that they have not received devkits and these are established studios that have been around for literally decades.

  This has jack all to do with emulation.

  But people always need to insist Nintendo is doing their shit for the right reasons and blah blah blah.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This was a real thing and it "makes smoking easy"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah.

  If you are going to insist on giving yourself and everyone around you cancer AND making your house smell like rat shit (not a euphemism…), this seems like a really good invention. Basically ALL the “spontaneously combusted” folk are believed to be people who dropped a lit cigarette while sleeping and it is still a somewhat common cause of house fires.

  But yeah. Hookahs and the like already existed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework Laptop 16. Upgraded!⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Too lazy to dig for it myself but would love to see someone do a deep dive on what an “upgrade” actually would be.

  How many of the gen 1 parts are just plug and play in a gen2 chassis/mobo? How much of the gen2 parts can be put into the old gen 1 case? The upgraded heatpipes already make that questionable.

  I am obviously not the biggest fan of Framework Corp (and I genuinely think they are contributing to significantly more e-waste than traditional “upgrade” paths). But this also feels like a good use case to study for anyone who actually thinks they are going to meaningfully upgrade their laptop every 5-10 years without just buying a new laptop.

  Because didn’t the 16 just get a pretty massive (possibly backwards compatibility breaking?) design upgrade like last year? I remember all the tech youtubers (except GN for whatever reason…) talking about the adjustable keyboard layout for people who hate their wrists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And there goes the usual Nintendo Defense Force.

  These are not random fly by night devs asking for devkits. They are pretty major players in the industry, many of which make games that make Nintendo a lot of money. Contracts and tracking (which already exist and are why game dev halted during COVID) are very much doable here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah.

  Before the theory was just that Nintendo was actively snubbing devs with ties to tencent and the like (Digital Extremes have been pretty open that they did not have a devkit to port Warframe). Which, to be fair, would actually be a large percentage of the market because… Tencent.

  But there has been increasing backdoor reports from devs that this is a broader effort and that many of the studios who DO have dev kits are under contract to not release until (if memory serves) early 2026. Jeff Gerstmann talked about this on one of his recent podcasts after a studio reached out to him and he corroborated it with his contacts (can’t imagine who they would be…).

  Which makes sense when you remember how anti-consumer Nintendo is. The Switch 1 was more or less carried for the first two-ish years by “nindies”… many of which were cross platform anyway. And if their console is just the place you go to play third party games but at lower framerates and resolutions… we call that The Wii U.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The recent Steam censorship debacle actually sort of opened me up to adult games.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Its inherently a gamble. Yes, it limits you to that audience (which is increasingly villified by christofacists and the influencers who “don’t want people to think they are gooners”). But it also makes you the king OF that audience.

  Subspace is a great example. It had an incredibly vague and over ambitious crowdfunding campaign and it did gangbusters. Because people are hungry for a horny game that is actually a game. That said, it feels like other devs realized that was a thing and the patreon-style sites are now the main focus and discoverability went to zero.

  Which is why I think the next big step is a blogsite that actually covers these without feeling like you are just reading a guy’s wank diary (… which we kind of are but it is nice to not think about that). Its the same problem onlyfans et al have. The biggies keep getting bigger but there is almost zero way to find out about the newbies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Switch 2 game-key cards not eligible for preservation by Japan’s National Diet Library, officials say⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  … why would it be? It is literally just a transferable serial key that is fully dependent on nintendo’s content servers to download the games.

  Might as well say that the scratch off card in a PC game box should be preserved.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After stretching the definition of 'beta' for 8 years, Escape From Tarkov is finally hitting 1.0⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Conceptually?

  It is a looter shooter (a shlooter, if you will) cranked up to 11. Since now you need to actually be vulnerable while you spend time sorting through the loot pinata you just shot rather than holding a button to vacuum up all the purples and oranges.

  And when you get into an actual gunfight with someone, it genuinely feels like you are in a big budget “prestige” action film as you play cat and mouse, barely miss someone, take a shot to your chest plate, and are frantically trying to wrap a bandage around your arm while listening for footsteps or, even worse, a grenade.

  Then you add the humans into the mess and it all goes to shit. Because now? They know where everything that matters for progression is on a map and just camp it. There is no gunfight because they are just aiming at where you head will be when you bend down to get the key you need to unlock a vendor.

  So then you need to watch a bunch of videos online to learn where the popular camping spots are for every extraction and objective. Which means THEY need to watch videos to learn where to hide to camp those anti-camping spots and so forth. And, because Tarkov is so hardcore, nobody has any maps or compasses and you need to memorize the layout of every single map visually.

  And if you DO luck out and actually get one of those gunfights? Yeah… the other person has been playing the game for 90 hours a week and has L5 body armor that you literally can’t penetrate without half a mag. And they have thermal scopes and armor piercing rounds that shred through your plate carrier instantly.

  And that assumes they aren’t just hacking where you get the telltale sound of a burst going from between the center of your head to just above it as your body falls before the audio shuts off.

  All that said: Tarkov with the SPTarkov mod is actually fucking amazing. Although you still have the problem of needing to memorize maps because paper maps cost a lot of money and take up slots because The Failed State That Is Totally Ukraine doesn’t have photocopiers or even scraps of paper to jot down landmarks on while staring at one of the few maps in The Legally Distinct And Much Less Interesting Zone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After stretching the definition of 'beta' for 8 years, Escape From Tarkov is finally hitting 1.0⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I would say that most of the “legacy” live games are. Warframe is to the point that the developers, Digital Extremes, outright make fun of it being a 13 year old beta and jokes about what Soulframe counts as these days.

  And a lot of it is because they launched into beta/early access/whatever before there was even a model for what that means.

  Contrast that with the “newer” games like tarkov that assign milestones to leaving beta. Well, it used to be that leaving beta meant that tarkov would go to Steam but now it mostly is just being done so they can keep releasing expansions/modes without needing to put it in the deluxe preorder edition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After stretching the definition of 'beta' for 8 years, Escape From Tarkov is finally hitting 1.0⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t speak to those streamers in particular but Anissem (and whoever else) should understand that milsims inherently attract chuds. And Tarkov above and beyond because nikita and BSG are… very very very pro-russia.

  Not saying that everyone who plays tarkov is a fascy chud. But if you are looking for a community to hang out in, maybe listen for some dog whistles.

  Which is why I wish Incursion Red River had taken off more. Set in fantasy war that never ended Vietnam so it is borderline The Last Jedi in that chuds just can’t talk about it without spewing hatred and bigotry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After stretching the definition of 'beta' for 8 years, Escape From Tarkov is finally hitting 1.0⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They spent the past month or two making this a wipe for ultra sweaties (Flea Market doesn’t unlock until level 80 or some nonsense) so that only the most diehard of fans are playing and they refuse to accept that the game they spend 90 hours a week watching other people play has problems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If copyright on a work expired immediately after death, would be that a bad or good idea?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Define “death”.

  For a book? There is very much an argument that the listed author would make sense. But… good authors tend to have ten or twenty solid pages of thanking their editors and beta readers and researchers and partners and so forth for very good reason. And while they tend to not get royalties (outside of the partner), those associated with the publisher sort of do in the sense of getting a continued paycheck in part because of their demonstrated “value”.

  But let’s bump that up to a movie. Is the screenwriter the creator? What about a case where there were multiple “script doctors” brought in to punch up a premise? The director? The lead actor? The ridiculously good performance by the supporting actress that held every scene together? The people in the editing bay who turned “I want this scene to pop more” into actionable edits? The VFX team who did the entirety of every action sequence and half the dialogue because the costumes weren’t finalized until a week before it hit theatres?

  And so forth. The time where works tended to have a singular creator was… closer to millennia ago than not. Even a lot of the “Willy Shakespeare was a fraud” is rooted in a misunderstanding of what editing and collaboration is.

  I don’t know what a good model is. I like the concept of a fixed period with the idea that if you are continuing to use an IP then people will pay for the new stuff. Then I look at all the cash-in horror slop because Winnie the Pooh became public domain and… does that help ANYBODY?

  My mind keeps coming back to the end of Sebastien de Castell’s Spellslinger series. He left a LOT of loose ends (in part because of the themes of the story he was telling which would be spoilers to elaborate on) but did a quick epilogue sequence of two characters reuniting. And then he wrote an afterward where he talked about how (paraphrasing) that is just one possible ending and that it doesn’t actually matter what he wrote because, after the years we all spent reading about Kellen and Reichis and Ferius and Nephenia and Shalla… they aren’t just his characters. They are OUR characters too. And what he can see as a potential future isn’t necessarily what we see. I forget if he explicitly said writing fanfiction was a good idea but… that is kind of the reality of it.

  And in that sense? I increasingly come down on: Let the companies and creators keep their IPs. Only they get to profit. But also heavily strengthen fair use so long as there is no direct profit (we do need to understand the idea of ad revenue for a youtube channel or a website or something). Fill up AO3 with ALL the slop but keep it out of theatres unless they are gonna file the mormon off and Fifty Shades of Grey it. Beyond that? Whatever.

  And just for those wondering what those themes were:

  Spellslinger series spoilers

  A huge part of the series, and de Castell’s writing in general, is the idea that the viewpoint character isn’t the main character. Yeah, Kellen Argos is a really cool con-man with limited casting capability who does heroic stuff. But there is little he can do against the horrors of the world other than to inspire, and force the hand of, those who can. And, in turn, he is inspired by those he loves. Kellen isn’t Frodo or Aragorn. He is Eowyn and Faramir.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Random Things that I never expected: Infinity Nikki × Stardew Valley Collab Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nikki is a shockingly competent hoyo-like hiding a gacha game about making an insane number of pulls to build an outfit while you play dress-up. Also, the overall metaplot among the franchise is Evangelion levels of batshit insane. But, at its core, it is still a ridiculously predatory gacha game.

  And it looks like the Stardew side is just letting IN call itself “cozy”?

  But yeah. At this point I think most people can probably find a farm/town sim that is a better match to their specific interests than Stardew, but Stardew Valley is still basically “Harvest Moon but actually good” and pretty much revitalized the entire genre singlehandedly. It is very much the jack of all trades in that it does everything really well but doesn’t excel at any one thing. Also the background plot is shockingly dark but most people will never pay enough attention to realize that.

  Oh, and many of the romanceable NPCs are very much coded as underage so nobody tell Chris Hansen. Again, it is one of those things you only pick up on if you actually listen to their dialogue and think through what kinds of jobs they had before being swept off their feet by the new farmer in town.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do new Silent Hill entries attract so much negativity?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah. Modern day gooners are all based on how Arsenal fans just can’t stop touching themselves. Like, if you ever go to a game there is an entire section dedicated towards group edging.

  In all seriousness, I have no idea what the actual origins of “gooning==masturbation” is. But the word “goon” mostly just is a synonym for thug or henchman. So a lot of groups used it because they are the bogeymen and blah blah blah.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do new Silent Hill entries attract so much negativity?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Woo, time to see how many gooners are actually on lemmy.

  The modern “video game essay” format came out of people on the Something Awful forums who were REALLY into Silent Hill. It was Japanese style horror in a Western setting with a lot of fairly heavy themes and implications so it was the perfect confluence of weebing out and “it is dark so it is deep” level discourse. And what started as people writing thousands of word arguments for what the shovel being at an 80 degree angle in that shed meant became people making 60 minute youtubes on what it meant that Heather ALSO saw the titty nurses and how it represents her repressed lesbian urges. And 3 hour videos about Pyramid Head that would make even Freud roll his eyes.

  And… basically all of the later Silent Hill games REALLY sucked. The Room has its defenders but pretty much everything after that is universally panned and with good reason. Up until last year-ish with the remake of 2.

  Which was a different kind of shitstorm. Because now you had all these essayists who were The Keepers Of Silent Hill lore (one of the most famous ones wrote her master’s thesis on SH2 I want to say?) seeing the greatest of the games being remade. And by fucking Bloober team? Pretty much every essayist had keyed in that Bloober have some very questionable themes in some of their games. Uhm… trigger warnings but

  spoiler

  Bloober at least used to really like the trope of “The only way to stop this great evil infecting you is to kill yourself and it with you” and “They were a victim of abuse and should be pitied even as they perpetuated the cycle”. That are both, fairly unarguably, shitty mindsets but are also horror tropes going back literally centuries

  So it was the mix of “This is MY game and MY story and how dare they change it” combined with “Also they picked the bogeymen that I hated on so hard last year that I could buy a car”.

  And then… Bloober kind of made a masterpiece? Like, most of their changes are fairly loved/appreciated and everyone but the most hardcore of the SH2 Video Essayists loved it.

  But now we have Silent Hill f that very much DOES feel like a cash in and a way to make a Fatal Frame but with a more marketable IP. But also… Fatal Frame fucked hard?

  Either way? The most important thing ever is to never stop saying that Silent Hill (the town) is really smokey because it was built on top of a coal mine that caught fire and has been smouldering for decades. That is some real Silent Hill fan lore that not many people know but is really cool to share.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elden Ring on Switch 2 Is a Disaster in Handheld Mode - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You can basically ignore stances (Rise of the Ronin was TN experimenting with making that not an option). Just pick the stance you like (usually medium) and MAYBE swap to heavy against oni if you feel like you need to. Conceptually it is basically one handing or two handing (or… half handing?) a weapon in a Souls game. You aren’t swapping mid fight and are more deciding as you approach an encounter. That said… Nioh 3 by all indications is gonna make that integral.

  Burst counters are all about figuring out what moveset you want. I personally love yellow (?) yokai because I rush forward. Which is baller as fuck but ALSO means that even if I parry too soon I have good odds of intercepting the attack and getting the punish. Whereas other people prefer blue for blocking or red for attacking.

  But yeah. The Niohs are HORRIBLE for tutorialization even beyond the boss design. It took me up until the penultimate core boss in Nioh 1 to realize that I was an idiot for not using the special attacks. What went from hit and run with a katana became just holding r1+square to melt enemy HP with dual swords or doing massive ki damage with a katana or flying across the room with the kunai wit chain and so forth.

  But once you figure out what parts of the game you can ignore and what matters? Oh there is nothing like that.