I feel like a lot of what made the Bioshock games good was Ken Levine's social commentary. And while we've had Bioshock games that he didn't write or direct, and it would be silly to argue that he is the only one capable of writing a good Bioshock story, I do think he understands that it's more important to say something with a game, than just churn out another title within the same world.
Rapture wasn't just a dark underwater city, it was a Libertarian utopia, with all the exploitation and unchecked capitalism that would come from that. Columbia was a Christian Nationalist utopia, with the cultish brainwashing, revisionist history, and racism that is common in that worldview. I hope the team in charge of the new games understands that the series is more than the locations, and the "Big Daddies" and "Little Sisters."
Don't get me wrong. I'd love more Bioshock (if it's good), but
I'm glad we're also getting Judas from Levine's new studio, because I have a feeling it's going to feel more like Bioshock than whatever the next official Bioshock game ends up being.
I remember ordering some samples from them when they were a newer company, and how cool it was when they added metal as a material option. Sad to see them go. Seems like much more of another company ruined by going public than a failure of their business model. I guess the silver lining is that they simply went under rather than morphing into a worst possible version of what they were trying to squeeze every penny in the pursuit of infinite growth (or maybe they tried that for a while and it failed too, I'll admit I haven't been paying attention to the scene for the last several years).
Just so you're aware, Match owns OkCupid now, as well as Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and a bunch of other smaller dating sites. I don't think they've all been ruined as much as Match yet, but it's probably only a matter of time.
Compiled shaders are unique to every GPU model and often driver revision. The console versions don't studder because they all have identical hardware, so compiled shaders can be shipped with the game.
Steam will eventually download a shader cache specific to your hardware, otherwise if you jump straight into a new game on PC, the game is going to have to compile them during gameplay, or make you wait 30 minutes to play while they compile (similar to how a lot of emulators for modern consoles like the Switch make you wait). And since nobody wants to launch a newly downloaded game just to sit at a boring 30 minute loading screen, they do their best on the fly.
This isn't about defending Fromsoft, they're just another company trying to get your money. I'm just saying that's how PCs work, and new games with complex shaders are probably pick being accused of having performance issues at launch than hitting players who are expecting to launch a game and play right away with a long loading screen (that a patent prevents them from putting a mini game on while you wait).
From what I saw the negative reviews were split between complaints about difficulty, and performance complaints. On the performance front it looked to me to mostly be shader compilation studders, which is relatively common with most new games.
Difficulty wise, yeah, it's hard. That's a big part of the appeal of Fromsoft games. They have made some adjustments since launch to bring the difficulty down a bit, but it's probably better that they launched a game that is "too hard" and patching the difficulty down, than releasing something that everyone can steamroll through in a day and getting complaints that it was too easy. The game also rewards exploration, and if you just try to rush the bosses without exploring you'll make things much harder on yourself.
Alternatively, this could be a good opportunity to educate people on how much of a presidency is the cabinet rather than one person. Run ads highlighting the people actually responsible for things in Biden's administration. Make the narrative more about Biden's team and contrast them with Trump's chaotic mess of a cabinet.
No matter which old man gets elected, there is a solid chance the next president dies in office of age-related causes. Showing that we'd be in good hands if/when that happens, and that there are people paying attention to catch things Biden might miss could go a long way towards reassuring people.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love a different candidate, and voted for someone other than Biden in the primary in 2020, but I also don't trust the DNC to pick a replacement without making things worse. At least the Biden campaign has been admitting today that the debate went poorly, rather than pretending it was fine.
I think it was an interview with Seth Meyers, but somewhere Heidi said she had seen them in costume, but Mikey's lip prosthetic/makeup was much more extreme in the live performance than in rehearsal, and that was what caught her off guard and made her break.
While I would never wish for a trans woman to have to endure that kind of environment, I'd love to see a trans woman take that as a challenge and go win just to make the "you can always tell" crowd lose their minds. Unfortunately it would probably be super dangerous considering how violent people can get when they discover they can't always tell, so it's probably a horrible idea. But a person can dream.
Yeah, I know a lot of the smaller, independent search engines are lacking, but the people using the "udm=14" trick to remove Google's AI results now, as if that won't be removed as soon as Google needs to show investors the AI is more profitable.
They know the meaning. Most of the ones I grew up around chose to believe that since "separation of church and state" doesn't appear in the Constitution that it was a fringe idea a couple of the founding fathers had, that "liberals" today have made into a bigger deal than it should be so they can keep "persecuting" Christians.
Christian nationalism takes all the dogmatic thinking they have about the Bible being instructions from an infallible, all knowing God, that must be followed, and applies that thinking to the US Constitution and the founding fathers. Once you're in the mindset of reading something like it's absolute truth that can't be questioned (at least the parts that tell you you're wrong, the parts that say I'm wrong are different), it's easy to get stuck in that mindset for everything you read.
To add to this, Scarlett Johansson took on Disney and they settled. And Disney is like the final boss of litigious companies (either them or Nintendo). If she has the same legal team for this, and they think she has a case against OpenAI, this could open the door for OpenAI to get rightfully clobbered for their tech-bro ignoring of copyright laws.
Yes, if this is regarding the stimulus checks, then wouldn't it all having been spent be good? Yeah, we spent it, we stimulated the economy during a time when the government decided it needed stimulation. Unless the conversation is about the economy needing more stimulation and that giving stimulus money to consumers works better than tax cuts for the wealthy, because the working class actually put the stimulus into circulation rather than hoarding it.
Does anyone know of Gullikit is still doing the thing where their joysticks have the square active zone as opposed to round like the stock sticks? I bought a set for my LCD SteamDeck a bit over a year ago, and after learning about the square active zone causing issues for some, I haven't bothered to install them.
I think launchers are allowed, they just have to be usable with controller input. Hitman 3 is verified, and still shows a launcher on Deck, but when launched on Deck the launcher shows and accepts gamepad navigation.
I work night shift and use blackout curtains and earplugs to improve my sleep during the day. Rather than cranking the volume on my alarm so it's loud enough to consistently wake me up, I use Home Assistant to turn on some smart bulbs as my alarm. When I started, and even now if I have to be up extra early, I also have an audible alarm set to go off a few minutes after the lights come on - just in case the light doesn't wake me up, but at this point my brain has gotten used to waking up to the lights, and I usually wake up and turn off the other alarm before it goes off.
Another useful automation for me is I have a buggy Samsung PC monitor that has all sorts of annoying issues; like not consistently waking from deep sleep which requires a hard power cycle to correct, and when it is asleep there's some weird high pitched whine that beeps when the standby light flashes. I use a couple of smart plugs with power monitoring and monitor my PCs power draw to turn the power to my monitor on and off at the wall depending on if the PC is on.
Also the possibility that the son knows his dad is a dick, and knows one of the best ways to stick it to his old man is to donate some of his own nepo-baby money to something that is in direct opposition to his dad's donations.
A heist at the Vatican is my best chance at being able to afford retirement at this point, I'd appreciate if one of the more ethical options to steal from isn't destroyed before I can get to it.
I feel like a lot of what made the Bioshock games good was Ken Levine's social commentary. And while we've had Bioshock games that he didn't write or direct, and it would be silly to argue that he is the only one capable of writing a good Bioshock story, I do think he understands that it's more important to say something with a game, than just churn out another title within the same world.
Rapture wasn't just a dark underwater city, it was a Libertarian utopia, with all the exploitation and unchecked capitalism that would come from that. Columbia was a Christian Nationalist utopia, with the cultish brainwashing, revisionist history, and racism that is common in that worldview. I hope the team in charge of the new games understands that the series is more than the locations, and the "Big Daddies" and "Little Sisters."
Don't get me wrong. I'd love more Bioshock (if it's good), but I'm glad we're also getting Judas from Levine's new studio, because I have a feeling it's going to feel more like Bioshock than whatever the next official Bioshock game ends up being.