Only one I got to try was Approximately Up. I’ll probably get it if they keep going with it. I might over-simplify it as Archean I can run without a raytracing GPU.

Got the first one purely because it had soundtrack by Sidewalks & Skeletons. Turned out to be a pretty good game. Hopefully this one won’t go the way of Wizard of Legend 2 and turn into a big disappointment.

Now I’m chuckling at the thought that the view from these glasses is likely to be used for training AI, so you could have a bit of fun just aiming them at the most horrifying but legal porn you can find and plonk them down aimed at the screen while you go do other stuff.

Yeah. There is unfortunately a lot of media being made as just a cynical attempt to milk people via nostalgia. Remind everyone you can: just because it has the same name as something you once enjoyed doesn’t mean it will be good. Nostalgia marketing is always a lie.

There are inherent limits to the idea.

Videos are almost never the best medium for advanced learning. That’s why universities aren’t just collections of DVDs. Books remain the best method for the dense transfer of ideas, and are unlikely ever to be surpassed.

YouTube algorithms don’t analyse content, only user behaviour. Someone who likes an in-depth discussion of Anti-Oedipus might also like a Japanese music video. YouTube does not care why, only that they engaged. YouTube also actively fights niche feed curation. Liking A, B, and C, will get you A, B, and C, but also G (because it’s kind of like C, even though a human would know they’re different) 8 (because it’s vaguely similar to B) and whatever the current versions of pewdiepie, the Paul brothers, mr. beast, etc. are (because if they can get you to watch their BS, they can sell more ads for more money) regardless of how disimilar they might be to anything else you watch.

When the first guy who called himself a king’s swordsmen fell asleep. Should have peasant mobbed his oversized hovel and never let anyone do it again.

Yes and no. I’d be amazed if any code from the original was/could be used for the second. One was unity. Two was unreal. C# vs C++.

The other thing is money. It doesn’t get the second dev team paid as well to spend a figurative 5 minutes polishing an old game when they can milk 5 months of pay out of the publisher by making a de-make. If the publisher is paying they might start from scratch just to have it take longer. I can’t say for sure, but I would bet real-life money the contract on the second was much more beneficial to the publisher vs the devs on the second than the first.

Then there’s marketability. Offer people the same game from 2016 and they’ll want to pay the same price as the game from 2016 and many of them won’t want to buy it at all because they still have the old one. Offer them something that looks like an upgrade (‘Look! It’s 3D now, and higher resolution.’) and milk people’s nostalgia for a game they loved ‘in the before times’ and you can squeeze modern inflated prices out of them.

Best answer I’ve ever had for this was ‘find something to support.’ It can be anything. Just find a space where you have people trying to do something for the benefit of others with some bare minimum cost of entry. The group coming from people trying to help others will bias it toward nicer people. The cost of entry, even something small like $5/mo or physically present volunteering, deters anonymous trolling.

The other good option is classes. Doing things to improve your skills in something is generally worthwhile anyway, but it also puts you in contact with other people who share an interest.

Seems like an obvious answer. Changing hands. The original creator of a thing is usually obsessed with it. Someone hired by a publisher to milk an IP is usually just there to work. I’m sliding more and more toward just assuming any game that isn’t basically 100% made before publishers get their mitts on it is going to suck.

The bland-ing of the art and the sluggishness were the things that hit me most. The snappy action and well-matched visual art/hitboxes were key to my enjoyment of the first one. Also, really hate the voice acting. At no point playing the original did I think, ‘man these generic filler text lines would be so much better if they were being unskippably forced into my ears as audio.’

I use a bunch for browser isolation. The one I have for general use is librewolf, though.

Heavy Rain was one of those for me. I sometimes enjoy a cinematic game. Even if there aren’t any ‘choices that matter’ in it, it can be nice to just go through a cinematic interactive story game. But Heavy Rain fell into the same hole so many others do: bad interaction UI. I hate any game that gives you the option to say ‘I agree,’ ‘I disagree,’ and ‘What?’ but makes selecting ‘What?’ the option to fly off the handle because ‘What?’ is actually short for ‘What should I insert into your nostril, you filthy worm?’

Got that in a bundle not that long ago. It’s essentially the same game as 1, but worse. Very disappointing.

It does have a certain shift once you reach a certain checkpoint, but it is so long to get to that point. The progression curve is just not right.

The trailer looks so technically impressive. That is a LOT of destructive environment. Sad if it’s not so good though.

I tried Thunder and Jerboa, ran with thunder for a bit, then tried Voyager because I liked the idea of the user-specific up/down vote tracking (I.e. if you up/down vote this comment on Voyager, it will increment/decrement the comment score as usual but, for you specifically, it will also show a cumulative score next to my username if you see me somewhere else.) They were all fairly similar.

Welcome to con-lang-ing

I dunno. Maybe. They get up to some… shenanigans.

Given the motivated, well-funded, well-staffed nature of many nations’ intelligence gathering divisions, it’s safe to assume anything you do on a computer with any kind of internet connection is probably available and ready to be analysed if/when you ever cross the threshold from potential target to target.

Things like SMS also are used for a lot of illegal activity by people who don’t know better. Commonly used doesn’t mean much.