HeyListenWatchOut @ JDPoZ @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Reminds me of an old favorite CollegeHumor video comedy skit series - "A Message From Your Favorite CEO" featuring the Tumblr CEO...

Flying on the balloon was used to mask some loading times, but that was waaaaay longer than transitions from space into the world in Astro Bot.

It DID outdo Nintendo’s equivalent - the previous mainline Mario entry - Super Mario Odyssey - in every way except maybe 4 :

1. Quantity - Mario had more moons than Astro had Bots to rescue… so more collectibles.
2. replayability - with the Luigi balloon challenges, they extended the game’s longevity with this feature and it is better than Astro Bot’s simpler “speed run challenges” because of Mario’s unique game mechanic of allowing players to create and compete by crafting one-of-a-kind challenges for each other.
3. Nostalgia - Mario’s New Donk City party was absolute peak love letter to the origins of Super Mario and the sequence with the song sung by Mayor Pauline honestly brought me to tears…

…But everything else - the scale of and pure ingenuity of the boss mechanics, the visuals - from both a stylistic and technical standpoint, the Dual-Sense’s controller gimmicks, the complete lack of load times… it brought into stark contrast how far Nintendo has fallen behind - not so much from a game design perspective necessarily - but certainly at least from a hardware power standpoint.

Looks like it’s a behind the scenes image from the recent film starring Margaret Qualey and Demi Moore - The Substance.

Wanted to better illustrate my point about asset modernization, here's an example of what I'm talking about.

This is a 7.45MB animated GIF embedded among several others on the page for Helldivers 2 store page on Steam :

Here's that same animation converted into an animated WEBP around 800KB... (I did an AVIF at 215KB with default settings from some random online conversion tool, but apparently Lemmy won't allow those to be embedded / shown directly) :

It is literally ~10% the size, looks nearly identical (could make 1:1 with less compression for just a few KB more), loads faster, and will play back in everything except e-machines from the late 1990s.

Additionally, modern formats support things like wider color gamut - which means you can create HDR assets.

It’s not flat out “bad,” but it IS visually inconsistent when it comes to their overall design system element library… but their visual hierarchy, their arrangement of said elements, and layout - is overall pretty well done.

My personal biggest gripe is less about element appearance, but more on how inconsistent their tab layout ends up being from page to page.

When browsing, I always struggle to find a couple of elements - usually something from the specific set of tabs I want to navigate to like the “community” home, my wishlist items, or the shopping cart.

…But really my very biggest gripe is on my Steam Deck. I have the mod for allowing customized animated grid images… and when I go to the Collections section, the loading of those images grinds browsing to a nearly unusable halt.

I would LOVE it if they did overhaul their element library to unify things, and did away with older more bloated raster formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF and H.264+MP3 in MP4s… and instead switch to something like highly optimized HEIC / AVIF / WEBP and SVG, custom fonts with embedded symbols, and VP9+opus WEBMs to modernize and shrink their asset libraries. They could even have fall-back compatibility when they detect an ancient device that can't decode them for some reason.

Not that anyone cares, but I am a Sr. UX designer who used to work in games but switched to general software like 12 yrs ago… so if anyone from Valve browses Lemmy… PM me. 😅

If we're just mentioning internet connectivity, the PS2 did end up getting the ethernet + HDD expansion adapter

I remember playing MGS Online that way with friends back in the day.

Nintendo is competent at exactly 1 thing - designing great video games.

They are run by the equivalent of dwarven master blacksmiths... They're one of the few gaming companies with employees on staff with more than 40 years experience of game dev (and whom have ONLY ever worked at Nintendo their entire careers) in charge of things.

That's great if you like Zelda and Mario games... but because they're run by a bunch of old-school grandpas... they're not good at much else.

Terrible store, multiplayer, ancillary modern network-driven services like voice chat and partying up, little to no 3rd-party support (whether it's games, media apps, or even tech integrations with formats like Dolby ATMOS), and - as a benefit - really terrible device security so it's usually pretty easy for folks to reverse engineer, run custom boot-loaders / jailbreak / scrape their store servers / etc. - stuff that companies like Sony and Microsoft either never had issues with - or have taken seriously long enough that they have locked down.

The only reason they're still in business is that they still do the one thing that matters most the best - design really great game-play mechanics for IP that is beloved by multiple generations of gamers who will overlook everything else.

Just need to check again later. I had this same error at first.

My shitty cartoons that I moved to a new animation-focused YouTube channel that now are getting less than 1/10th the views after seeming like non-subscribers liked them but subscribers were leaving my channel every time I uploaded them.

I really want to switch my main desktop to Linux, but use it for remote work too, so I have MS Teams… is there a way to reliably virtualize it?

Dave is awesome. Great dude.

Even as a silent GIF I hear something like this masterful rendition of the song play in my mind’s ear.

And Biden pardoning said “kids for cash” folks when they are actually held to account.

Still can’t believe that (spoiler for Astro Bot)

… :(