Strange. I have more playtime in starfield than Skyrim. And the thing that draws me in is the story.

It’s like it got most things right that Outer Worlds got wrong.

Honestly, I think just making the forward-burst functionality work for controller users instead of as a “keyboard hack” is enough.

If I had to guess, each graphics cycle is a little less dominant than the last. The iterations on graphics are becoming lesser and lesser. A game from 10 years ago is far improved from a game 20 years ago, but not that much worse than a game from last month.

There are moments of awe (imo, especially in VR when a game “nails it”), but we’re pretty desensitized to high-graphics video games of late.

Ah yes, belittle your interlocutor when you can’t respond to them. Thank you for justifying this block

Yeah, not the same thing. I’m not saying microtransactions can’t be stopped. I’m saying it won’t happen through US-based legislation.

And this iPhone monopoly suit is apples-and-oranges to a microtransaction litigation. They’re being charged with being in breach of an 1890s law that has held strong, but that has nothing to do with microtransactions. In fact, no relevant law exists except some flimsy gambling statutes that simply do not work. Most importantly, there is no legislative piece to it. Apple broke a big law and has been doing so with virtually no consequences for decades. Nobody’s passing new laws against Apple. They’re just finally facing the justice that they should’ve faced a long time gone.

There’s a difference between fatalism and realism. I’m not saying the problem isn’t solvable. I’m saying it won’t happen that way.

Say it with me: nobody is ever going to legislate this in the US.

It’s the deal with the devil.

One could argue we have the world’s strongest economy because we are business-friendly to a fault. People actually question the fairness of unions, but even with unions our labor protections are more third-world than first-world. But in return, the median income is at least world-competitive, and the typical individual buying power is through the roof. All we had to do to get here is sign away our collective souls to these megacorporations and be ok with the sacrifice of a million lives a year devastated by it all.

This here. Through the years, if I ever pirated a game and liked it, it was instabought.

Execs that know they’re producing shit are the ones that really double-down on anti-piracy measures. When piracy is considered, it turns into a challenge of quality. When piracy isn’t considered, it’s just about return on marketing spend.

The real lost sales are the people who pirate a game, spend 15 minutes playing it, and delete it saying “thank GOD I wasn’t stupid enough to buy this”. Make a refund policy just hard enough on Steam and most of those just keep the game with regret.

New England, huh? I love that they texted us again to correct themselves.

I’ve tried Balatro. It’s pretty fun. But you’re probably also right that it’s a great “watch someone else do the hard work” game.

Yeah, people seem all over the place about whether a copied mechanic is “ripping off” or just a genre.

These pokemon-likes have no more in common with Pokemon than Street Fighter with Virtua Fighter, Tekken, MK, KI, Fatal Fury, Guilty Gear, DBZ, or even Super Smash Bros… and about 2 dozen other games

Basically look at the AI generated cover, and you got Dresden Files. It’s awesome and worth the read. A little rocky at first but it’s the king of urban fantasy for a reason.

This image screams “Dresden Files” to me. About the only outlier is the girl. It seems a hybrid of Molly and Susan.

And the weird shark-jet, but my headcanon is that it’s Sharkface, He Who Walks Before…

I don’t think we can know for sure, but the typical reason SCOTUS refuses to hear an appeal is that they do not feel the case represents a significant question of law. As SCOTUS generally sees it, they’re not about “swooping in to right injustice”. They’re about being the final arbiter of actual questions of law. If there are no actual questions of law worth addressing, there’s no reason to take the case whether the verdict was just or unjust. There is more than one defensible outcome to a lot of trials, and SCOTUS is often not trying to “find the one right outcome”.

I think the exception to that would be if appeals courts go rogue and rule in direct contradiction to established law. Well that, and if SCOTUS wants to go rogue and themselves rule in direct contradiction to established law (like Dobbs)