cerebralhawks
@cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Submitted 54 minutes ago to games@lemmy.world | 3 comments
- Comment on macOS 26.4 will notify users of Rosetta 2 discontinuation - 9to5Mac 2 hours ago:
But why would you? Those Intel Macs were terrible. If you’re thinking “cheap Linux box,” IMO the best way to do that is get a used PC from a corporation that is unloading them during an upgrade (like a Dell or HP workstation), like an i5 with 8GB RAM (or 16 if you’re lucky), they pull the hard drive for security (and it’s almost always an HDD), you drop a SATA SSD in it, put Linux on it, and you have a pretty good computer, even (and maybe especially) if you run a headless server and remote into it with your daily driver computer (what you surf the web on, which could even be an Android phone or maybe an iPhone, not sure about that).
- Comment on No swiping involved: the AI dating apps promising to find your soulmate 1 day ago:
So if you’re a woman in your mid-20s, single, and ostensibly, reasonably good looking, AI can find you a soul mate? Maybe. I mean, you probably give it a lot of information on your preferences and it knows a bit about all the male suitors you ostensibly seek. So there are like ten (or more!) times as many men on these platforms.
What it almost certainly can’t do is, do the same for a man who is below average. It’s just a numbers game at that point. If there are ten men for every woman, then you need to be in the 10% of the best men that women seek, otherwise you don’t have a mathematical shot at finding a mate. If you advertise that AI will find you a soulmate, maybe you increase the female membership and you give more men a chance, but it’s still a gamble and most men will still be left without.
Now if it had profiles on all available consenting adults in the world, maybe? But that would be super invasive. And if it told you accurately (as in, with 100% confidence) that your soul mate is out there but they live in another country, and there’s a 100% chance they will be right for you… do you take the trip? Or deprive two people (you and this other person) of finding their perfect mate?
- Comment on Kate Mulgrew Defends ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ And Captain Ake From “Disrespectful” Online Attacks 1 day ago:
I haven’t seen STA yet, but it seems like, with a few exceptions, the most recent Star Trek has always been controversial, since The Next Generation. I feel like Enterprise deserved it the most, and SNW escaped most of it. Discovery probably got it the worst? Though TNG was by far the least deserving of it.
- Comment on Sony-led program offers PS5 rentals starting at $13.50 a month in the UK across 12, 24, or 36-month leases — console has to be returned at the end of the contract 1 day ago:
I paid $30-something a month for an Xbox Series X and GamePass for 2 years. And I got to keep the Xbox!
(Xbox All Access. It’s no longer offered. And you saved $20 if you did it, at the original price of GamePass Ultimate, $15/month, it’s since doubled in price since they told Congress buying Activision would lower prices for consumers.)
- Comment on Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse - Announcement Trailer 4 days ago:
There were Metroidvanias outside Castlevania as well. And that’s my point. You take the person who made the games what they are for most people, it’s just another one of the clones, but with official branding.
It’s like when Call of Duty started adding multiple developers so they could churn out the series. People were paying for the name, they didn’t really care about who actually worked on it. But, those games were super formulaic.
A better example would be Rockband and Guitar Hero. Harmonix made Guitar Hero, but they wanted to add drums and vocals, and publisher Activision said nah, just stick to the one controller. But Harmonix were all musicians (mostly indie bands around Boston) so for that and other reasons, they left. Activision kept remaking Guitar Hero 2 with different songs via the Tony Hawk developer, Neversoft, and it was mostly okay, until Rockband started getting big, and Activision realised they needed drums and vocals as well. Long story short, they did very poorly. They kept churning out games, mostly to flood the market with crap. Guitar Hero is now dead, and Rockband is now called Fortnite Festival (I’m not kidding).
So yeah, Castlevania without the guy who made Castlevania what it is and into something people want to play? It might be successful, but it’ll be a soulless husk at best. Maybe it’ll even be fun, but it just sounds to me like a game dreamed up by suits in a board room who hate gaming except for the profits, not a game made by gamers for gamers and for the love of the game. Like most shit churned out by Activision, Bethesda, Ubisoft, EA, etc. (And yes, many of those publishers have storied histories.)
- Comment on Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse - Announcement Trailer 4 days ago:
So, the good ones, minus Simon’s Quest.
- Comment on Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse - Announcement Trailer 4 days ago:
Looks interesting…
…but you should know the guy who made the Castlevania games left Konami a while ago. He makes the Bloodstained games with a different publisher. So it’s a new IP but it’s basically the same thing. And they have a new one coming out. The first one, Ritual of the Night, was a spiritual successor to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. They also made a handful of 8-bit games in the IP to satisfy the old-school crowd.
So there are basically no “real” Castlevania games. If it uses the Castlevania name, the creator isn’t involved. If he is, it’s called Bloodstained and not Castlevania.
- Comment on Epstein survivors Sunday Super Bowl ad to send the message that they will not “move on” from the largest sex trafficking scandal in the world 6 days ago:
Would Hulu show all the ads? With broadcast, local affiliates are able to replace certain ads with local ads, which is why if you watch the Super Bowl (or anything else syndicated), you will see local ads among national ones. Streaming usually skips them, but the Super Bowl is kind of “special” in that some people watch for the ads.
- Comment on David Bowie Criticizes MTV for Not Playing Videos by Black Artists | MTV News 6 days ago:
When/where did MTV not play Black artists? I saw a bunch of rap and R&B. I would have liked to see more Black artists in rock, like Lenny Kravitz, and the guy from Sevendust, or country, like Darius Rucker (of Hootie and the Blowfish fame), or pop that wasn’t R&B. I felt like, growing up in the 80s and early 90s, that some music was predominantly white and some was predominantly Black, with ample evidence it worked both ways (like Eminem in rap).
Overall it was plenty diverse. But within genre, it seemed racially scripted. As a white kid, I felt like rap wasn’t a space I was meant to be in, though I liked to listen to it. And still do. Though I listen to a bit of everything — just finished listening to an Enya album, haven’t decided what to play next yet.
- Comment on Epstein survivors Sunday Super Bowl ad to send the message that they will not “move on” from the largest sex trafficking scandal in the world 1 week ago:
Doesn’t load for me (browsing in Firefox on macOS).
Anyway, YSK that a lot of stations blocked this ad by playing local ads over it.
They did play the pro-Israel one, though.
- Comment on The Nebraska legislature has approved a bill that lowers the minimum wage from $15 an hour to $13.50 an hour for teen workers 1 week ago:
$13.50 is less than 16 years of age? How does that math work? Is it $2 per year or is there some other formula you’re using?
Age of consent in Nebraska, USA is 16. This is easily Googleable (I used DDG though, which uses Bing on the back end). Here’s the top result: www.ageofconsent.net/states/nebraska
P.S. I broke out the calculator to justify your original statement. To get 15.9 as an age (lower than the age of consent in Nebraska, USA), you would have to consider $1.18 to be the value of each year. In other words, if you really did want to compare $13.50 an hour to an age that is lower than the minimum age of consent (I used 15.9), you would have to value each year to be worth $1.18. Or each dollar to be worth 1.18 years. I’m not sure. I’m not great at math. Maybe someone else can explain that better. I tried to make your argument make sense!
(I think you were trying to say that Nebraska’s age of consent is 13, but you didn’t think anybody would go look it up.)
- Comment on Where do I find cool stickers? 1 week ago:
Stickers of what? Because that matters. Etsy and Redbubble have a lot so you’re halfway there. Amazon has them but a lot of that is stolen art. Cheaper but also cheaper sticker material that won’t hold up. They’re trying to maximize profit after all. On the other two you’re typically buying from the artist.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
The remake isn’t really a remake. It’s obvious to anyone who played the original within an hour.
It’s a sequel and I don’t think that’s a spoiler. However, the characters aren’t aware of the events of the first one by chapter 13, where I’m at. So it’s a spoiler to the characters? But not to gamers.
The original on Xbox has cheats that make the game easier and less tedious. I don’t know if they affect achievements but the OG didn’t have them, so I’m fine not earning them. Fortunately the OG comes with Remake on Xbox, but anyone can grab a PlayStation emulator and play the OG that way.
The original is dated graphically, but you gotta realize it was basically the first ever cinematic game of its kind. These days that’s most games. Back then in 1996 or 1997 it was a truly novel idea. It was even advertised as being too big for Hollywood to make into a movie. They stopped just short of saying it was better than a movie. And it exceeded all our expectations. Hearing everyone talk about it in high school was wild. It seemed like everyone was playing it, even people who didn’t like video games. Even the preppy girls and jock boys were getting in on it. Everyone found characters to admire. It really was a cultural phenomenon.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I like my Mac. It has AI, like every other computer out there, but it’s like the Forrest Gump of AI. Except it can’t even tell you that life is like a box of chocolates… but with Apple Intelligence, you never know what you’re gonna get. We just accept that it’s useless. And I hope they do tell us our phones and computers aren’t good enough for the next version. I’m totally okay with that. I’ll stick with what I have.
- Comment on Lcars at home 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, because Apple Watch sucks for customising. I say this while wearing a Series 10 aluminium (the cheap one), with an iPhone next to me, typing on a Mac. I like Apple tech. But the Watch absolutely sucks for customizing.
- Comment on I can be considered Trekkie or just a viewer? 2 weeks ago:
Lifelong Trekker here. FWIW, there terms are interchangeable. It was once explained to me that Trekkers are more casual fans while Trekkies get into the nitty gritty technical details about how stuff works. I’ve also heard it’s the reverse. I’m more of a casual fan but I also like a good debate on transporters and replicators, so I really fit in both camps and can choose my label.
LLAP
- Comment on What is a good present to get your dentist and dental assistant as a way of showing thanks? 2 weeks ago:
Pay your bill on time. If you’re in the US, you’ve paid them for an hour’s worth of work what you might make in a day or a week or a month. (Or they were paid that between you and your insurance.) They’re good.
If you’re not in the US… same as anyone, I suppose. Start with a well-written note (like in a card). Unless you’re in a third-world country, I still think dentists and their assistants are paid well. So a gift card might not be so well received. Flowers are often linked to romance, and chocolates are the same and kind of go against the spirit of clean teeth. One of the best gifts is something more personal that they’re not likely to think of. That’s harder. Something from your life, your interests, that will remind them of you. Think of it like a video game and a quest reward. It’s fine to get a sack of gold coins, but it’s cool when it’s something you can decorate your home or office with that reminds you of the quest. Well, I’m a gamer so I think like that. I’m coming up short on examples, though. The best personal gifts require a lot of thought, but, I think once you come up with something, it’ll click and you’ll know it’s right.
- Comment on Players are returning their Dispatch copies due to Switch censorship 2 weeks ago:
I listened 100% on my AirPods.
- Comment on Players are returning their Dispatch copies due to Switch censorship 2 weeks ago:
Stephen King’s best (solo) book, IT, has probably over 200 N-bombs in it. It’s still his best book. Very much a product of its time (and an author who was so coked up he doesn’t remember writing a lot of it), but still his best book.
Your novel is Young Adult, or no? It’s not clear. I don’t know what the rules are for YA in America/Europe, but I’m reading the Sword Art Online series (rather, having anime lead Bryce Papenbrook read it to me, via the audiobooks) and SAO (which is LN which means Light Novel, which is Japan’s version of YA) has dismemberment. Arms being chopped off, people being chopped in half… the anime is known for its scenes of SA, but the first two weren’t SA in the books (the anime exaggerated what happened). The one in season 3 absolutely is an SA though. I haven’t gotten to the one in season 4 yet but I’ve heard it’s not. There’s also torture, but it’s not too serious. They’re playing video games, VR based. At one point the pain is amplified and a character is viciously attacked, so he feels it 10x more. In another case, people are trapped in a world that moves 1,000x slower than real life (so like a year in the game is like an hour in real life or something like that). The kind of stuff Black Mirror did (White Christmas, Black Museum, USS Callister). But not a lot of profanity. (Of course, I’m also reading it translated to English. I have no idea what Reki Kawahara actually wrote, because I would not be able to read the original Japanese text.)
- Comment on UK proposes forcing Google to let publishers opt out of AI summaries 2 weeks ago:
Nice, but we should ALL (UK and beyond) be able to opt out of AI manipulation. Of course, the ideal would be, we’d have to opt in in the first place. And those below the age of majority cannot consent, so that would solve that problem.
- Comment on Playback speed past X2 is now a YouTube paid feature 2 weeks ago:
Thanks! Should have known I could install it with brew. I installed that pretty early on. It’s now updating a bunch of stuff because I really don’t use it that much.
I think some of your commands are Linux-specific but I’m going with the homebrew installation.
- Comment on Is it weird that whenever there's an internet disruption, the first thing that I assume is happening is war, civil unrest, or government censorship, or some sort of conspiracy happening? 2 weeks ago:
People in the US actually should. You have a fascist-leaning, borderline totalitarian regime which has tried to incite civil war several times, with the assumed goal of declaring martial law and suspending elections. They’re also on social media (including Lemmy!) trying to discourage people from voting, either by saying the other party is just as bad or saying it won’t do any good. It actually sounds like attacking the Internet is the next step, since they’ve been attacking education, health care, and nutrition lately. In fact, Twitter has been used to create and spread CSAM, and Twitter is run by an ally of the ruling party, almost like they want that social network banned in other countries (but it won’t be banned in the US).
- Comment on Playback speed past X2 is now a YouTube paid feature 3 weeks ago:
Nice, but that doesn’t work on my machine as of yet.
It’s weird that the default archive utility we (Mac users) all use (The Unarchiver) can’t do .7z files, but if they’re downloaded through jdownloader2, they unzip just fine. The actual 7-Zip application is only available as a command line interface on Mac, whereas on Windows, as you probably know, it’s more like a file manager.
One of these days I’ll get yt-dlp working on my Mac. Even being in the same folder as it, typing yt-dlp in the terminal doesn’t open it. That’s how it worked in DOS/Windows (or you had it in a folder you declared in PATH= in Autoexec.bat, back in the day), but Mac/UNIX terminal is something I have very little experience in. Comfortable with it, but inexperienced. So I suppose I have some reading to do. Especially if the subs work as well as you say.
- Comment on Starmer says he won't 'choose between' the US or China 3 weeks ago:
Translation: Popular adages equating China with low quality haven’t been true in years (if not decades), everybody knows it, the real “problem” with China is their military/space programmes. As for the US, well, 51st state and all that. Sorry… Brexit was a mistake, the UK should have stayed with the EU. Now they have to kowtow to the US and they shouldn’t have to.
- Comment on Who Listens? 3 weeks ago:
As a static background. As I expected, it made the skull into a semi-3D object.
iOS has been able to do this for a few years now. Take a picture of someone, press and hold on the subject, and you can make it a sticker. Now it automatically picks the subject (in this case, the skull) and tries to render it 3D. It has enough data to extrapolate what is behind the skull since it is a repeating pattern. I would imagine a more capable AI would look around the skull and realise it’s a repeating pattern, and then render the pattern entirely. Then it could find a 3D image of a skull that looks exactly like that, delete the 2D one, and place a 3D one in its place. Then it could maybe even animate it.
- Comment on Who Listens? 3 weeks ago:
Anyone on a recent iPhone? Download the image, open in Photos, and tap that new icon in the top right of the image to make it 3D. As I assumed, it looks awesome.
- Comment on Playback speed past X2 is now a YouTube paid feature 3 weeks ago:
I use jdownloader2. I think it uses yt-dl on the backend though? Like the original yt-dl. I’m not sure.
I was curious so I downloaded the Mac version of yt-dlp (as I am on Mac), couldn’t get it to run. And I’m comfortable with the command line.
YouTube kinda is cracking down on downloading though. If a video is marked as adult (you need to sign in to view it), it can’t be downloaded. A lot of “official videos” (like trailers from the studio) can’t be downloaded. Subtitles can’t be downloaded. That’s in jd2. Not sure about yt-dlp.
- Comment on Playback speed past X2 is now a YouTube paid feature 3 weeks ago:
That’s what I wanted to know. Until I realised I don’t care how people watch YouTube and that it’s more annoying to me that Google is paywalling something that costs them nothing to implement.
- Comment on Fable - Gameplay Teaser 3 weeks ago:
There is that — that it will probably be an easy game. There aren’t too many of those around. Or at least getting attention. Last year’s Game of the Year talk was all about three games that are just stupidly hard: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hollow Knight Silksong, and Blue Prince. I love Blue Prince, but I caved and looked up how to beat it. I fully accept that I probably never will. And “beating” it really just means beating the tutorial. There’s so much to do after. But it’s fun, even when you lose. The other two are just exceedingly punishing.
And that’s fine — games were hard in the 80s. They eased off a bit in the 90s and 00s, but I think PlayStation was always pushing hard games while Xbox and Nintendo were more casual and “gaming is for everybody” (as opposed to “git gud or GTFO”). Then smartphones came out and easy games pretty much swept the app stores. I respect a good challenge if it’s fun, and I respect a game that pushes you to be your absolute best… I just don’t have the time for that. I like games with Story difficulty where you can do the motions if you want, but you’re basically guaranteed to survive every battle, and falling off a high ledge just returns you to the ledge you fell from.
Final Fantasy VII (both of them: the emulated PS1 version on modern consoles, and the remake) actually come with cheat codes built right in, and from what I can tell, they don’t even disable achievements. (Actually, the last one disables one achievement. The last cheat code maxes the level of your materia, and this disables the achievement for learning about materia. Once you get that achievement, go crazy.) The game even offers a Head Start mode that makes all your characters start powerful with high level gear. Of course, Final Fantasy VII is a special game. It’s often credited as being the first truly cinematic game. I’m not sure it was, but it was definitely one of them and absolutely the most popular of them at the time. The game plays like a movie, so they absolutely do not want to hold you back because you can’t push the right buttons fast enough. They want you to experience that story.