Stovetop

@Stovetop@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This will definitely make you smile⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It made me happy, and then sad at myself for having to question if this was AI generated or not.

  I have so little trust these days, I had to watch it 15 times through to confirm that there was visual consistency with the background objects and therefore the video is probably real.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Astro Bot wins Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2024⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It won by being a well-made, fun game. That’s really all there is. Exclusivity limits audience but it doesn’t affect quality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indian start-up Yes Madam fires employees who indicated being stressed in the survey⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s normally standard to send mass emails using BCC to avoid someone using the Reply All button to spam up people’s inboxes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Life is Strange: Double Exposure developer Deck Nine lays off staff for the second time this year⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it’s hard to keep track after they quickly abandoned the numbered naming scheme after 2. And I think that was partly because people were confused by the un-numbered prequel featuring the same setting and cast of characters while the numbered prequel was almost entirely separate.

  Caveat: I have not played Double Exposure yet so I am not sure how directly connected it is to the first game, but the others are disconnected enough that anyone can basically just jump into the series with any title at any time. Exception would be Life is Strange 1 and Before the Storm, which are directly connected, but I’ve heard it said that they can still be appreciated in either release order or chronological order. Only notes I have on that are:

  • Life is Strange 2 - A character from the original game and Before the Storm plays a minor role in the story, but context is not required to understand the plot.

  • Life is Strange: True Colors - A character from Before the Storm features prominently in the story, but context is not required to understand the plot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Life is Strange: Double Exposure developer Deck Nine lays off staff for the second time this year⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There is more than one developer behind the Life is Strange games. Titles, developer, and other notes listed below for each:

  Life is Strange (2015)

  • The original game.
  • Takes place in 2013.
  • Developed by Dontnod.
  • Released in chapters.
  • Remastered in 2022 by Deck Nine.
  • 81 on OpenCritic.

  Life is Strange: Before the Storm (2017)

  • Prequel to Life is Strange.
  • Features much of the Life is Strange cast.
  • Takes place in 2010.
  • Developed by Deck Nine.
  • Released in chapters.
  • Remastered in 2022 by Deck Nine.
  • 80 on OpenCritic.

  Life is Strange 2 (2018-2019)

  • Sequel to Life is Strange.
  • Features a new cast of characters.
  • Takes place in 2016-2017.
  • Developed by Dontnod.
  • Released in chapters.
  • 76 on OpenCritic.

  Life is Strange: True Colors (2021)

  • A sequel to Life is Strange 2.
  • Features a new cast of characters.
  • Takes place in 2019.
  • Developed by Deck Nine.
  • Released in its entirety.
  • 81 on OpenCritic.

  Life is Strange: Double Exposure (2024)

  • A sequel to Life is Strange: True Colors.
  • Stars the original protagonist of Life is Strange.
  • Takes place in 2023.
  • Developed by Deck Nine
  • Released in its entirety.
  • 71 on OpenCritic.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨definitely⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Conventions of English be damned, I spell it defiantly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Day 136 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As someone who has not played Silent Hill 2 and likely never will…what’s under the blanket?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Trump's Tariffs Could Cost Gamers Billions⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s like how back when the Euro or the Pound were worth nearly 2x what the dollar was, a new device or piece of hardware would sell for $399/€399/£399.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I guess at least I can opt out...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re just admitting to what everyone else has been doing for years now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazilian's impression on the united states(i have never been there and this is based on nothing)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh you got close to Reno, close enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Life goal: accomplished⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Meanwhile, my shitty brain:

  My brother My sister who
  who’s an graduated
  engineer valedictorian

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨10 Most Disappointing Games of 2024, Ranked⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t believe they would have the audacity to put the world’s only AAAA game on a bad game list.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a way to exclude topics from what I see on Lemmy?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Jerboa does not

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Beer, I summon thee⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is your refrigerator running?

  Yes?

  Then you’d better go catch it!

  Shit fuck there it goes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bodycam video shows Oklahoma City officer slamming 71-year-old to the ground after traffic stop⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Should we even act surprised that this sort of thing only happens to people of color?

  I can’t watch the video that the department uploaded to Facebook since I don’t have a Meta account (ridiculous by the way that they use a closed, insecure platform as their way of “public disclosure”) but I’m willing to bet the other woman they just let leave with a ticket was white. I’ll reply with a surprised Pikachu face if someone is able to verify that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yakuza creator Nagoshi says the era of game size being most important is coming to an end⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.

  Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.

  Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.

  And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.

  And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.

  But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.

  Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.

  When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.

  Image

  But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.

  And don’t forget to do your dailies!

  If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.

  Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made it more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To appease a Steam user's demands for straight representation, Webfishing added a 'Straight' title that costs 9,999 fish bucks⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In a world that is controlled almost entirely by heteronormativity, policing straight representation in a queer-friendly game made by a queer developer does not seem like an equivalent situation at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European Geography Lesson #12⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe they prefer to be called Shrekia now, actually.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨whatcha gonna watch?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Only problem is that the paint fades eventually, and if no one cares to redo it it’ll end up looking like those sad old fading Soviet murals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Here are the patents Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are suing Palworld over⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Filed before, approved after.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨whatcha gonna watch?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Aww yeah it’s time for some Eyewitness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"The American experiment endures," Biden said. "We're going to be OK."⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There were several. Why didn’t these hypothetical single-issue Trump supporters vote for Cornel West or Claudia de la Cruz if their priority is narrowing the income gap? Even Harris promised to implement at least a billionaire tax.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"The American experiment endures," Biden said. "We're going to be OK."⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If people were pissed about income inequality, they’d vote for the “tax the rich” candidates. Donald Trump’s agenda is the exact opposite about that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"The American experiment endures," Biden said. "We're going to be OK."⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think there are two separate but related metrics at play here. Addressing income inequality would certainly go a long way towards improving quality of life for the working class, but Americans don’t care as much about someone having too much money as much as they care about having too little themselves.

  Despite large movements like Occupy Wall Street bringing the topic of income inequality to the forefront of news for a while, the fact that it petered out and has ceased to be an issue means that enough members of the working class were still contented enough by their bread and circuses, so nothing came of it.

  These voters don’t care if their CEO gets a $10 million bonus at the end of the year as long as they can still afford groceries and housing, but they do start to care a lot when they don’t. Only, blame is being directed at the government (inflated cost of living) rather than their rich bosses (wage stagnation).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"The American experiment endures," Biden said. "We're going to be OK."⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you have a graph that includes 2024? That one seems to stop at 2021.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"The American experiment endures," Biden said. "We're going to be OK."⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Part of me blames the collective memory loss of the COVID years and a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect.

  It’s like everyone forgot there was this massive global pandemic which absolutely killed entire industries. And even though the important parts were propped up during the lean times by government support, that support ended eventually, with the economy still a mess that couldn’t just be put back together like nothing happened.

  I mean, people at that time didn’t even have a concept of what was going on. They have no idea how much money was spent keeping the lights on. People collectively lost their shit over the billions it would cost to forgive student loans, but had no idea how many more billions were spent on—and abused by—businesses whose pandemic loans were forgiven by the government.

  Everyone forgot the pandemic was only as bad as it was in the US because it was so completely mishandled by the Trump administration. We could have had everything back to normal a lot sooner if there was even a little bit of national preparedness, not to mention if we didn’t have all the misinformation spread by his own administration.

  So when the economy goes to shit in 2021-2022 during the Biden administration, people shrug their shoulders and put blame on the old man in the white house, despite the fact that it’s on a recovery trend during this last year. And so Trump’s first year is going to start with stronger markets, he’ll get the credit, and then things will get worse just in time for someone else to take the blame for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lemmy rn⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  We’ll have to get Trudeau to step down first.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do Americans win their country back?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Can be a bit of both. Everything is prompted by a desire to return to the “before” times. For Trump’s supporters, that is a hypothetical, undefined time when America was “great”. For the Brexiters in the UK, that was the pre-EU period when Britain was a global empire. For the conservatives in Russia, it is the yearning for the USSR days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do Americans win their country back?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The western world as a whole should be terrified. There has been a sharp dip towards conservatism that will only accelerate with Trump back at the helm in the US. Brexit didn’t occur in a vacuum.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do Americans win their country back?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah yes, because nothing says “change” like “unchecked conservatism”