Stovetop
@Stovetop@lemmy.world
- Comment on Beer, I summon thee 13 hours 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 21 hours 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 days 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.
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 6 days 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 6 days ago:
I believe they prefer to be called Shrekia now, actually.
- Comment on whatcha gonna watch? 1 week 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 1 week ago:
Filed before, approved after.
- Comment on whatcha gonna watch? 1 week ago:
Aww yeah it’s time for some Eyewitness.
- Comment on "The American experiment endures," Biden said. "We're going to be OK." 1 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week ago:
We’ll have to get Trudeau to step down first.
- Comment on How do Americans win their country back? 1 week 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 week 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 week ago:
Ah yes, because nothing says “change” like “unchecked conservatism”
- Comment on Veilguard Isn’t the First Dragon Age Game to Face ‘Woke’ Criticism 1 week ago:
I’ve seen a few valid criticisms, which I get. It’s hard to make a choice-driven narrative in the post-BG3 market and not get held to a higher standard. “Written by committee” is one such descriptor I’ve heard.
For me, as a fan of Dragon Age: Origins, I also can’t say I prefer the dip into the actiony, grindy sort of combat mechanics the game appears to have now.
- Comment on Morrigan isn't just my favourite Dragon Age character, she's the greatest fantasy RPG companion of all time 1 week ago:
There’s probably a reason why people apparently like her. Or two, actually.
- Comment on Digital Foundry - PlayStation 5 Pro Unboxed, 16.7 TFLOPs GPU Compute Confirmed 1 week ago:
I bought a PS4 pro back in the day but am giving this one a pass.
I’m all for incremental mid-gen upgrades, but not at that price point. If it can’t be priced competitively with the prices people have been paying, then it should not be made until the hardware you want meets that price point.
Should have made it $499 and drop the base price of the PS5 to $399.
- Comment on PSA: Break Your New York Times Games Streak Today. 1 week ago:
Gotta get that daily login bonus in [insert live service game here].
- Comment on it’s hard being a twisted fucking cycle path 1 week ago:
Maybe that other guy probably had his own “Oh no what have I done” moment when he thought harder about why the person next to him on the bus was being weird about cycle paths.
- Comment on I need a thermometer 🌡️ 1 week ago:
I think the intentionally hideous face is the top of a pie, not meat.
- Comment on Linux hits exactly 2% user share on the October 2024 Steam Survey 2 weeks ago:
Surprised it’s not higher. I would have thought more than 2% of people on Steam were using Steam Deck.
- Comment on Improvement suggestions for civ6 2 weeks ago:
Agreed. I remember there being some controversy around including figures in the game like Poundmaker, whose major mark in history was advocating against the colonial practices his people were submitted to.
Forcing anti-colonial figures to compete in the colonial model of success just doesn’t seem right.
- Comment on Red Barrels partners with Lionsgate Studios for movie adaptation of horror series Outlast 2 weeks ago:
Surely this will be the movie to break Lionsgate’s streak of complete flops.
- Comment on PS5's 'Resume Activity' Feature Apparently Gone for Good - PlayStation LifeStyle 3 weeks ago:
But the Sony implementation wasn’t meant to take you back to where you were, it was meant to take you to specific predefined starting points. That’s all. Both meant to be “time savers” of a sort but different strategies were used. One clearly didn’t work as well as the other.
- Comment on PS5's 'Resume Activity' Feature Apparently Gone for Good - PlayStation LifeStyle 3 weeks ago:
While I don’t believe the PS5 has any feature that is up to snuff with quick resume, just wanted to mention that I think this feature was a bit different in function. It was more like a shortcut to specific things within a game, such as if you wanted to just go straight into a multiplayer match or to a specific level of a game, you’d use one of these activity cards, the game boots up, and there’d be minimal to no menus to navigate through. Just launch direct to gameplay or as close to it as possible.
I don’t believe many games used it, though. Not even all of Sony’s own offerings.
- Comment on Technotopia, a city builder with card selection and roguelite mechanics and a Bioshockesque theme, released on Steam 3 weeks ago:
The BioShock logo (and the art of the game itself) uses an art deco style that was relatively commonplace around the early 1900’s.
Whether this game’s usage of that style is a deliberate move or if it’s just borrowing from a shared aesthetic, who can say.
- Comment on 'It Has Plateaued': Should We Be Worried About Console Gaming's Future? 3 weeks ago:
Super Mario Wonder was also a big one. Critically acclaimed, too.
