Belmont’s curse is good, but it’s kind of a different beast.

Rose is somewhere in between classic Belmont and “igavania”. She has some advanced/traversal moves, but most of the time she’s slow, doesn’t jump very high and has little air control. Any bad input can be severely punished, and three or four hits are generally enough to kill you.

I do like Igavania but unless you’re going into challenge modes like fixed exp level/hard mode, they are never that brutal.

I did have some fun on OoE hard mode though, even trying to get the boss medals (they hit so hard in this mode you kind of need to be almost there anyway).

I saw a thread about a guy trying to buy a second hand item from someone on a website and suspecting the seller might be AI from someone running a scam. It’s a long string of messages, and all kind of funny, but it’s in French.

The most absurd part of it was that the bot actually agreed to in-person delivery, with a real address (it probably went off-script). So the guy is like, why the hell not, let’s try it and goes there. Of course nobody’s there so he messages back the “seller”.

The conversation goes like :

"Okay, I’m here.

_ Yes, i’m here at address too, I am waiting for you with the item.

_ Uhh. Where?

_ I am just in front of you.

_ Well no you’re not.

_ I get why you might be confused, but from my perspective, I can confirm that I can see you in front of me right now.

_ What are you wearing ?

_ I am wearing appropriate attire for in-person delivery. It’s comfortable and adapted to the current meteorological conditions."

Even when the goal isn’t misinformation…

Removing filler words, personal and colloquial terms, replacing words for more appropriate ones according to an “internet search”.

Who would be subjected to that willingly? Why even use a real human in the process at this point?

I really don’t think I would. If you want one that at least gives you stuff to do from the beginning and is easier to fast-track (but still fairly long if you want to do everything and talk to everyone) I’d say go for Three Houses first. I liked it.

I didn’t play Engage, its presentation and character design made me nope the hell away, so I have no opinion.

If you want to experience some good Fire Emblem that are just a cool, simple fantasy story and focus on the core tactic battle gameplay, my favorite ones would be Fire Emblem GBA (that’s its western title, it’s actually FE7), Sacred Stones also on the GBA, Path of Radiance on Gamecube (Radiant Dawn on the Wii is its direct sequel, wouldn’t recommend starting with that one).

Special mention for Fire Emblem Echoes - Shadows of Valentia on the 3DS. It’s a remake of a very old game (Gaiden, FE2 on the famicom) which means it has kind of very basic battle rules compared to all the others I listed. However the presentation is incredible, and I really liked what they did to the dialogue and music. Very enjoyable for its characters IMO.

Awakening and Fates on the 3DS have their fans. I’m not one. I think they make all characters one-dimensional and unbearable, they suffer from terminal anime-tropeness and their focus on breeding just makes everything weird. Yeah. Really.

We used to give our cycles for free to help probing the universe and understanding the building blocks of life

Nowadays it’s about selling them to assholes ruining the world.

Well, kinda glad it ends up not profitable enough for them.

Be ready for loooong bullshit. I’m more than one hundred hours in and only ending the second “part one” (there are 4, then a common part two as far as I understand).

This game has good moments, but it doesn’t respect the player’s time. Leda’s part in particular felt like it took hours to let me do something.

If the writing was good, that might be less of a problem, but, it mostly isn’t. Awkward and very stilted at times.

Dietrich’s part does drop some major and rather crazy lore about “those who slither in the dark” from three houses and about ancient human history though. From what I’ve seen in Leda’s path and the impressions I got from meeting the other two sets of characters, it feels like Dietrich’s is the one part that has a lot of ties to the other game.

like skyrim before it, it’s a bad game in its franchise.

Is it? I don’t disagree completely, but I still think it’s a big improvement from Oblivion. Both for environmental design (holy crap, the copy-pasting in Oblivion) and for game mechanics. Yes, they’re still very dumbed down, but at least they kinda work.

Sure, I’d prefer they kept designing games like they did for Morrowind (Daggerfall is a complete other beast). But hard to consider one game in 25 years is representing the base level of the franchise.

The interviewer in the article had the same reaction I had to this sentence : today, gen AI is very close to be the “cool thing five years ago”. Rejecting it is not rejecting the new thing anymore.

We’ve already seen how it does, we’ve been suffering its consequences, and we hate it.

I’m way before gen Z by the way. If you can’t get young people on your side, maybe you’re not the visionary you want to be, Sam.

Please do. It sounds like the perfect plan for reddit to finally sink to complete irrelevance.

“We can’t have two billion-dollar projects running at the same time! The only solution is to choose one and fire everyone working on the other!”

Well, that’s one way to manage a company, apparently.

The problem is that you start thinking the robot tentacles are a neat tool and that you’re a centaur.

But before long the tentacles take over and you haven’t even realized you’ve become a reverse centaur.

Source : the ancient wisdom of Spider-Man 2 (2004).

I don’t know, Jewish tradition has golems. They’re basically human-shaped machines that are powered by the words written by their creators.

Though golems are supposed to be mute, and LLM are anything but. Maybe that’s why AI is bad.

I’m sure we can find something written millennia ago that describes precisely why we shouldn’t use gen AI now, we just have to look for it.

So you can’t oppose outsourcing your brain power to a megacorp that will take zero responsibility for any consequence of its spicy autocorrect…

but you can oppose outsourcing your brain power to “the machine” because it’s against your beliefs.

I mean, if it works, yeah sure, call it a religion.

A way less extreme fee was once proposed for steam greenlight, the process that was once supposed to filter new games released on Steam.

Principle was the game studio would present their game (in various states of completion) with a video, a couple screenshots and a blurb, maybe a demo (rare) and Steam users would check their page and vote on them if they wanted it on Steam.

For lots of reasons, it didn’t work. Like now, one problem was that no barrier to entry meant anyone could half-ass a page for their asset-flip or even other people’s work, eclipsing real games that had a hard time being approved (even a few that had a reasonable following outside Steam already).

At some point Steam tried going the fee-to-entry route, even making it a payment to charity so they were not accused of making money from the situation. It was way less than 150k, and it was already seen as rather unfair. Especially for people living in countries where the average wage was lower than in the US.

Greenlight finally imploded because it made nobody happy, and we ended up with the current situation of “anything goes, and the algorithm will recognize real games over the crap”. It’s always been a shit show, and it only became worse with genAI slop.

Regarding the fee you proposed, something that high would make it basically impossible for an indie to get in there without a publisher deal, and even then would make their relationship to said publishers even more one-way, if by chance they get one to absorb the risk. Have you read about small studios being conned out of their work by their publishers? Prepare for more.

They’ve “cracked the code” and need other cynical assholes like them to praise their genius. And possibly buy their training course.

Seriously. The guy’s not even trying to make slop entertainment, he’s gloating because he made an empty slop teaser. Just a shitty mascot that fakes a story beginning and never delivers. Because it’s enough to reap some monetisation.

Wouldn’t be surprised if he was partly faking how well it works too. That’s like 99% of that slop content entrepreneurship.

I have Ridiculous Fishing on Android as an APK from a very old humble bundle.

Some time ago I still managed to install it, though Android complained a lot because it was not supposed to be compatible (made for a way older version). Only minimal issues with unused screen space.

Just tried again, but now newer Androids just block old apps completely. For “safety reasons”. Shit.

In the end LLM are just predicting what is statistically the most likely follow-up for a sentence, according to what they’ve been trained on. That’s how they work.

For this they cut sentences into bits called tokens. The text they are working on is a sequence of tokens, and they predict the next one.

A token could be a whole word (generally if it’s short and usual), often it’s a syllable, and if you’re trying to use uncommon words/names they might even cut them down letter-by-letter in part to try and fit them into something they can swallow.

Of course tokens would be very language dependent, and some languages just use more characters/longer words and sentences than others on average.

Basically way larger audience. The big thing in gaming around 2005-ish is that everyone is a potential gamer, including people who mostly don’t care about or are not used to specific console releases.

Also I’d argue a “Super” is a clearer mark of upgrade than a single, very random letter or number (that is specifically not used like a version number like “GameMachine 4” but instead a weird portmanteau).

Also counterpoint : Nintendo of America used a lot of marketing to try and make people stop calling consoles “a Nintendo”, and part of this was the lack of distinction between NES and SNES (the other part was confusion with the competition).

Usually the thing that’s mentioned as a big marketing mistake is the name.

If you were already looking into it you’d probably know it was a new console. But to casual gaming enthusiasts (and those were a huge part of the wii/DS success), or to people that just didn’t follow Nintendo news closely, it really wasn’t clear.

Some believed “Wii U” was just a new attachment for a wii, or just a new wii edition, rather than an actual different console with about halfway gen7-8 capabilities.

They did the exact same mistakes with the "3"DS and only survived a very rocky launch with a quick repricing and a lot more marketing. Wii U never really recovered.

Dragon Age’s inception was long before EA too. I remember them talking about it in the Neverwinter Nights community forums.

Back then very little was known beyond the title, the fact it would be an original IP and that the “Dragon Age” title would be about a literal calendar “age of the Dragon” rather than indicating the presence of actual dragons.

Hard to say how much of it was conceived then, but they were probably already writing stuff.