Chebucto Regional Softball Club

'This systemic theft is against adults.' *'Yeah, man, voluntary extinction.'* ????

Fuck them kids. Children aren't why these bastards are offering *financing* for this industry-swallowing abuse.

Bu-si-ness mo-del. Not: genre. Not: content. Not: players. We are talking about corporations committing systemic abuse for profit. Abuse that's gouging so hard, you might need FINANCING... to play a VIDEO GAME. How big a hint do you need that something has gone wrong?

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Ban the entire business model.

It's easy to mock the Xbox brand like it lost a fair fight and is on its last legs. But this is Sony acknowledging that consoles don't matter anymore. The war is over. Who won is irrelevant. There's just color-coded interchangeable platforms now, like releasing on both Steam and EGS. This was always the purpose of the Xbox project, from back before DirectX had a proper name... though admittedly Microsoft assumed they'd still control the PC gaming market. Whoops.

... right, and the reason nobody's done that, despite the aggressive availability of local models, is that even a few static assets lead to shrill backlash. Like this article. My man is frothing at the mouth because a complex systemic city-builder used a program to draw the "you can't cut back on funding!" guy. We can assume the same people would screech that any game with generative dialog was "written by AI." Like a text parser being able to respond to insults means the whole plot came from a ten-word prompt. It's not a rational environment for selling studios on a multi-million-dollar investment.

Huh, it's almost like this new tool is fine for placeholder art, and placeholders can be good enough to ship. Did you know The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" was supposed to have a brass section? That driving riff with the fuzzbox guitar was a placeholder. They released it as-is, the song hit #1, and distortion became mainstream. At what point do we stop lamenting all the horn players who were robbed?

Hard to convince a studio to embrace it if this article is the kneejerk response to some PNGs. Which leads the loudest complainers to act vindicated, because what could it possibly be good for, except the few PNGs they notice?

JokerPoolCue.gif

"Amazon got Lik-Sang'd" would be a fun note for this shite year.

Copyright is only a monetary incentive. If Riot's not going to do anything with all that work and art, it should be public-domain.

American politics are kind of fucked.

Bill Hicks was right.

> Minecraft but better > Minecraft but not Java Cautionary tales demonstrated by Minecraft itself.

Lady Marshmallow travels like a Wooloo.

Dead skin mask capitalism.

A game with that title shipped. I don't think it was, in any sense, the same project. Not even as a ship-of-Theseus situation. A different studio started from scratch.

Moreover: changes that big go in the *next* game. If you decide to roll your own engine, from the start... awesome. Especially when content-creation tools aren't a huge deal, like if your game world is procedurally generated. Understand your scope, steal freely from existing libraries, avoid wasting your artists' time. If you try to switch engines mid-development, you are fucked. John Romero couldn't make that shit work, just going from Quake to Quake II. Daikatana could have shipped before Half-Life and only missed colored lighting. Instead it's a cautionary tale. Duke Nukem Forever didn't even ship. They had a nearly-complete game, several times, but threw those out and started over. You don't have to throw anything out, to start a new project from scratch. Ship the damn game. Put different tech in the next one. If you don't ship, there won't be a next one.

"Achoo!" "Gesundheit."

It's not a coincidence. I know DN2 began with a talk-show cutscene promoting his book, Why I'm So Great. It's a narrative self-awareness where the character is not in on the joke. DNF referenced that, but really whiffed on the tone. The oft-forgotten origin of the character is as a beeftank dipshit who nevertheless does save the Earth. DN3D's immutable extension of that was crass humor and lurid sensibilities - but that doesn't require manosphere bigots would celebrate the end result. Duke, the character, can be just as intolerant of any human fuckboy who disrespects "our chicks."