Megalovania

I’ve had some issues with Invidious being unable to play specific videos once or twice, but the issues tend to go away after a couple of days.

I mean, we know Google and Youtube are both multi-billion-dollar corporations that are absolutely enraged by the idea that there could be any possible way for a commoner pleb like you to NOT have your online experience absolutely crammed with as many privacy violations and hyper-targeted ads as possible. Invidious having to constantly stay ahead of such powerful entities’ attempts to block them out means that some errors and periods of downtime are perfectly excusable- what’s important is continuing to support them in their fight.

Oh yeah, I wouldn’t say that Nintendo are paragons of virtue or anything. But they are far, FAR better at making games that offer a wide variety of experiences (edit: when compared to Sony/MS. Indies are king). Similarly, sure the Switch control scheme isn’t something nobody had ever conceived of before, but it’s very distinctly different from the Xbox/Playstation controllers.

They’ve got like… what, 7 or 8 IPs that they actively maintain, right? And about 10 more derelict but still iconic IPs. Plus some stuff made by other companies that’s exclusive to their hardware.

-Mario -Zelda -Pikmin -Splatoon (Hey look a gun game) -Fire Emblem -Donkey Kong Country -Super Smash Bros

Dedicated 3rd party: -Xenoblade -Pokemon

All these games have really different themes and gameplay styles and aesthetics, and that is the reason why I’m convinced that the Switch 2 is perfectly positioned to just completely take over the market the way the Wii did- Nintendo is large and competent enough to avoid the issues that plagued the PS5 launch and later life, and fresh enough to get people interested, unlike the Xbox.

Where Sony/MS have uhhh… Looks at the PS5 exclusive games… Looks at Halo/Call of Duty/Fortnite…

Pffff. The AAA industry is notorious for being about as stale as a three week old french baguette. If it isn’t a Gun Game made for chasing the most recent trends, then chances are they don’t even want to sniff at it. To say nothing of the absolutely egregious thirst for Profit that plagues a lot of titles. It’s one thing to be a $70 game, and another thing entirely to be a $70 game with a subscription, ingame puchases, and day 1 DLC.

Sony and Microsoft can have their pathetic little ‘arms race’ about processing power and framerates and 150GB+ games.

In the meantime, Nintendo is likely going to step right up with something that has a nice fresh, intuitive control scheme like the Wii or the Switch, with a solid release library that covers a variety of styles and appeals, and promptly curbstomp the living shit out of the competitors. The market is absolutely wide open for a smash hit console in the near future, coming off the backs of the PS5’s no-games failure and the fact I haven’t even heard about the Xbox in about 3 years.

Oh yeah Bethesda’s actual valuable talents just straight up don’t exist anymore.

Basically it’s a lot cheaper to bring in underpaid, non-unionized contract workers with short contracts. So as far as I’m aware, Bethesda got rid of all their skilled programmers who were highly familiar with the coding and engines of Bethesda games, and brought in people who didn’t have any talent or familiarity, resulting in terrible outputs just because the actual people that make Bethesda’s games good were all fired for being good at making games (and thus being on ‘permanent hire’ wages instead of ‘shitty short contract’ wages).

But it gets worse. A lot worse.

See, Bethesda is pretty notorious in the industry for the low quality of their code documentation. Even in their prime they were notoriously bad at this. Code documentation is essential to allowing people to read and understand code, which is notoriously one of the hardest things in the job to do- code is a lot harder to read than to write. Bethesda keeps little to no documentation, which is why most of their games have so many glitches. But not having documentation is a particularly dastardly combo with frequently cycling your workers to keep their wages low. Because their unfamiliar, underpaid workers now don’t have any way to quickly learn how the code operates. And adding your own code to existing code in this way makes the problem a LOT worse, since now even if someone understands one part

Frequently cycling workers also makes it a lot harder for workers to communicate with each other. This is primarily useful to companies who want to prevent the formation of unions so they can underpay people, but it’s also something that REALLY shows when making games because people need to talk to each other and work together in order to make assets that all go well together. If people aren’t talking to each other… well, think of all the ways that tasks and goals can be interpreted. Two people assigned to different sections of the same task can produce fundamentally incompatible work.

I’m sure you can see how this could be all be an obstacle to making classic games with rich environments that are prized for their immersion, storytelling and fun gameplay decades later.

I know it got quashed; I’m not saying there was a revolution. “Free Hong Kong, the revolution of our times” was the anti-oppression slogan said by the victor of a heartstone tournament (which there was no rule or stipulation against), which caused Blizzard to ban the player from all tournaments, and refuse to pay him the prize money he’d won in an attempt to suck up to the chinese government.

To clarify: I don’t expect a gaming company to stand up to a full blown authoritarian regime. But I certainly won’t support a company that willingly goes the extra mile to sell out to them.

Used to, but I’m a little past the age.

It’s over bro, the developers who made the game you love are long, long gone. That isn’t your company, it’s a corporation wearing that company’s bloody torn-off face as a mask

Source: Former Blizzard fan (Free Hong Kong, the revolution of our times)

Adblock my beloved

Holy sunk cost fallacy, batman. How fucking much does it cost to operate an ENTIRE GODDAMN NUCLEAR REACTOR just to fuel a tech project that nobody wants???

Babe wake up, new forbidden snack just dropped

Listen. I do not want fucking ads in the start menu. I have no idea how to code and I can’t use the command terminal to save my life but I swear to god I’m going to switch to Linux before I touch Windows 11 with a 10-foot pole