MudMan

Flavio: “The guys from GOG are great, and they contacted me directly once to talk about Heroic, and they totally support the project and what we are doing, especially on Linux. I would say we have a really good relationship with them.”

Paweł: “Adding to what Flavio said, we currently have the affiliate deal with GOG, so any purchases made using our link support the project financially.”

Huh. I didn’t know this. This seems like a big deal. Makes me even more willing to consider Heroic’s GOG support semi-official, considering they support autopatching and cloud saves under GOG. It really feels close-to-native, especially given how sluggish Galaxy can be on Windows for large libraries.

Well, yeah. Half as much in Europe as in the US, it should be noted. But yeah, it does seem many corpos will either spread the US hit globally to mitigate the sticker shock in the US at the cost of giving some to everyone else (or just as a convenient excuse to squeeze more money out of people). It sucks.

But you would still have to report that you refer to global GDP or to global prices if that’s what you meant. Those numbers are going to be different either way. And that’s not what they are referring to anyway.

OK, so I get the headline for the US edition, but why is it the same in the UK/AU/CAD editions? Whose GDP, Tom’s hardware?

The fashy outrage engine where any trailer with some amount of melanin triggers endless “WOKE FAIL” videos is in full force.

The process is watch trailer>check for nonwhite>RAGE video>if game bombs: GLOAT video> if game is a hit: quietly STFU and move on to the next target.

I have to assume the algorithmic boosting of this garbage is the result of someone at Google arguing that groceries haul videos and reaction videos were the bottom of the barrel and someone grab-my-beering that shit.

I mean, these idiots spent months doing “Expedition 33 is WOKE” outrage videos. That was, in fact, the top couple of threads on the Steam community forum for the game on launch day. I checked. Besides one thread hilariously trying to do “It’s a hit because it’s not WOKE” on the top page, the word “woke” is no longer in the first ten pages of discussions.

It’s such an obvious grift and it’s so pointless to even call it out. Everybody knows it’s bullshit. The creators know it, the fascistoid children following them know it, the game makers know it, the politicians taking advantage to indoctrinate young men know it. And yet here we are.

Honestly, I seriously doubt that the harassment is from the AC fanbase, and as a side sucky thing in an ocean of suck, it also sucks for Ubisoft that their game is getting associated with the backlash. It really seems like these are just political actors and opportunists exploiting the nazi child outrage farms for views, more than anything else.

I’d be shocked if most of the outrage, even the one whitewashed as “Asian men erasure” was genuine at all. Especially in the game series that opened with “hey the Crusades were bad, maybe” and spiraled out into assassinating the pope and playing as multiple black people murdering slavers.

Ooooh, THAT’s the joke they were trying to make. Believe it or not I hadn’t put that together until just now.

Well, yeah, but games would still have an eighty dollar sticker price in that scenario.

Yeah, I mean, free to play is the future, right?

That’s… not how inflation works.

Inflation is a measure of price increase. If inflation goes down prices keep going up, just slower.

If prices go down that’s deflation and its own whole separate problem.

Oh, man, you may be right. I’ve gone back and forth the Igavanias so much I definitely don’t remember which “go underwater” upgrade goes where.

Gonna look it up because it’s gonna kill me otherwise.

Okay, yeah, got it. I remember now. They do a weird thing in that one where you have a bad way of moving underwater by using a weapon and you unlock the proper walking underwater thing after. So yes, you do need to kill enemies to get it as a random drop. It’s a super high drop rate, though. I think I didn’t remember because you have to be fairly unlucky (or be speedrunning and not killing enemies, I suppose) to not get it naturally, but you are correct.

RotN doesn’t have any progression requirements that aren’t scripted drops, off the top of my head, but I could be wrong about that. What ability are you thinking of?

Dawn and Aria of Sorrow do, but in fairness those are communicated in other scripted drops and are part of the “get the good ending” puzzles.

Yeah, well, the original Zelda flagged bomb spots even less, so…

It’s weird to me that Simon’s Quest gets so much grief for this when Zelda 1 and 2 (and particularly the localized version of those) were full of that exact “defer to the guide” nonsense.

In fairness, some of that stuff comes from trying to play older games out of context, since a lot of tutorializing used to happen in the manual, but not on any of those NES examples.

I don’t know, man, I ran around hugging every wall of deserted Doom and Wolfenstein 3D levels that a) noclip became the default way to play those games, and b) Half-Life felt like an amazing breath of fresh air.

Well, Quake 2 did, I guess. Half-Life felt like the next-gen take on that idea.

Such a great hangout game. As a kid with a vivid imagination and not enough English understanding to follow the plot I enjoyed my time just roaming around crafting spells and exploring samey dungeons a whole lot.

I don’t think these two academics are suffering from disinterest or a lack of subject expertise.

I think they are in a space where they don’t think it applies to their output in this particular venue. Maybe in a space where they are subconsciously tied to a “here/now/default” take on the world that is just the US and everything else is this othered “elsewhere” that gets perceived as somehow smaller, less relevant or exceptional.

Part of it is a cultural disconnect. They may think the implications of “capitalism” when used to an American audience are clear. My observation is that this is not just a cultural disconnect in the use of the world, but instead that the word when used inside the US is fluid, poorly defined, deliberately imprecise and more or less tautological.

Capitalism is whatever the US does now, as perceived by whoever is using the word. I think that’s a very purposeful result of US politics and, had they gotten to it on time, Americans may have benefitted from putting an end to it before the entire system lost all meaning.

People around me will definitely conceive of a noncapitalist alternative because a significant number of them have lived in one.

That doesn’t mean they will approve of returning to the systems they experienced previously. In many cases those systems were demonstraby worse and less sustainable. Plus “from an European perspective”, the current system most of them live in is heavily social democratic, so again how we define those terms will be relevant.

If you want to argue that this is not the “default” human experience, then with all due respect that just sounds like ethnocentrism to me. On the authors’ (and Jameson’s) part, at least. Probably a bit of internalized cultural imperialism on our part. It’s not the first time I notice a lot of the European left is trying, and often failing, to import some US left concepts that don’t really apply.

This is telling me very little about the value of standards in a non-capitalist model, but man, is it telling me a lot of how pressure-washed the brains of US academics are. ‘It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism,” the saying goes’? What the hell? Is that a “saying”?

I mean, part of the problem is I have no idea what Americans are talking about when they say “capitalism”. Some mean everything up to and including outright fascist or communist centralized management as long as some form of private property exists. For others any glimpse of social democracy past radical anarchocapitalism is “not capitalism”.

But even beyond that, how hard could it be to picture a non-capitalist form of trade or information sharing when it actively exists right now and always has? Capitalism has sometimes been the hegemonic form of structure for commerce or society, but it has never been the only one in place.

Oh, and as a note, I do like that this example comes from what seems to be a clearly left-leaning source. I often struggle to explain to well-meaning progressive Americans that their systems of value and meaning are built from the exact same pieces as their conservatives and in many casses approximate those more than the systems of progressives in other parts of the world. Which is true both ways, not just of Americans, but often not highlighted.

For sure. Good UX is not “simple” UX. Professional software doesn’t need to be flashy and clean, but it does need to be efficient and usable.

Bad UX is bad UX, though.

I bring up Blender because Blender vs Gimp is my favorite example of how FOSS can find a very functional alternative AND compete with the paid side with no compromises… but also of why it often doesn’t.

Blender is for power users, but it’s well designed enough you can dabble with it or follow a tutorial and have fun doing it. Gimp will make you hate the very act of opening a file and trying to make the most basic crop on it even if you’re a Photoshop master.

Sure, I can agree with that.

The problem with OSS tends to be that engineers are more willing to work on it than UX designers and it’s quite rare for them to have the lead on that area. Forget convention, just on quality. There are exceptions (hey Blender!), but not many.

More often than not what you get is some other paid upstart hit some big innovation and then that propagates and sometimes it gets to open source alternatives before it does to fossilized, standardized professional software.

I do think there’s some value in having UX that makes it easier to jump back and forth, though. Especially if your positioning is “I’m like this paid thing, but free”. The easier you make it for the pros to pick up and play the easier you can carve some of the market and the more opportunities you give to newcomers learning on the free tool to migrate to the paid tool if the market demands it.

I mean… cool, but by that logic you want to design all your graphic designers from painters and artists to do posters with brushes again.

That’s just not practical, and “it’s not efficient, but” is a massive dealbreaker for a whole lot of applications. Artisanal product has a premium and is very cool and if you can get away with making a living out of it I find that amazing.

But sometimes somebody just needs a poster made or a shop logo or a trash bag removed from their wedding picture background. Industrial work at pace is important and the baseline for a work area.

I’m also not sure what time was before the standardization and consolidation of software. Word replaced Wordperfect. Photoshop replaced the Corel Suite. Premiere replaced (or at least displaced) Avid. It’s not like there weren’t industry standards before.

Some companies still use proprietary stuff and train people on their in-house software, it’s doable. It’s just easier for most of the pack working with multiple clients and vendors to be using the most popular thing at any given time.