I feel like a lot of games these days make it difficult to get into, ironically by trying too hard to make it easy to get into, with excessive tutorialization. Part of it might also be the types of games that you like. For example, I want to play a game to have fun and challenge myself, not to sit around watching a story play out for a half hour while I walk around doing nothing. So the majority of popular games that people are always talking about are the kind of games that I would absolutely hate. I want to just jump in and play. The new Super Mario Wonder game is a pretty good example of something that just gets out of your way and lets you play the game, so I have been enjoying it quite a bit for the past few days. The recent F-zero 99 is also an enjoyable racing game for me, for the same reasons. I have also been getting into fighting games more in the past few years, so I've been playing Street Fighter 6 a lot.
So the most important thing I have learned, is that I can no longer just look at which games are considered "good", because in many cases I'm going to hate them. When I was younger, I would love just about any of the popular games. But now, I know what I like, and that's what I gravitate to.
It sounds like it will be a fun game, but I worry about replay value. When I was a kid, I played the heck out of all the Mario games. It was often out of necessity because it just took so much time to learn all of the courses to be able to progress.
When I was older and the NSMB series came around, not only did they just feel kind of basic and lacking in new ideas, but I was able to complete most courses on the first try, and then never have much incentive to go back. The 3ds game was probably my favorite of those, actually, because the coin collecting mechanic actually gave a reason to keep playing.
I guess we will just have to see how this one works out.
But the bigger question is, how will this be abbreviated? SMW is already taken!
I've probably been subscribing to Netflix for a decade now, but this is the largest price increase they have ever done on the basic plan, and this is the first time I have seriously started to consider cancelling.
I need to go through my list and figure out what I really want to watch, and then just binge it. (I have never binge watched anything, but this is giving me an actual incentive to)
I have recently been experimenting with odysee for videos that I can embed into a web page or something, but the service itself doesn't have enough users to get you views just because you're there.
I've already been using the fakespot extension for a few years, and honestly, it feels pretty useless. I've seen it give A and B scores for products that I know have fake reviews. And on Amazon or Walmart and similar sites, we already know that the reviews are bullshit, so what difference does it really make for it to tell me that? It's not like I have any better option in most cases.
There is an app called Object Detector which does this. It's not particularly accurate and can't recognize a lot of objects though. It does run on phones in realtime though.
Insightful post into fzero as always! I've definitely noticed that it does feel more and more difficult to place well as time goes on and the game becomes more populated with seasoned players. I'm currently A+ rank and have yet to get a win. I only play a few races per day usually, though. I got 2nd place in a grand prix yesterday, so maybe I'm not too far off from a win.
I started out playing as Blue Falcon, but I've switched to the wild goose, as it just feels easier to do well with it. I think the nature of the game having so many players, it's beneficial to be able to freely attack them without much consequence. Especially in the Grand Prix, getting early KOs feels like a huge advantage.
A few years ago, a new guy started at my workplace and was assigned to sit next to me. From the first day, he just acted like we were already friends. Constantly talking to me and asking me about myself and telling me about himself. Eating lunch with me. Asking me to go for a short walk together or something during break times. We ended up becoming friends because he made it so easy. I've never really been able to do that.
There are lots of powerful tools, such as pytorch, which take a lot of the complexity out of creating neural networks. A lot of people are studying this stuff in college now, so tons of young graduates are coming out of school each year with the ability to create these networks. There is also lots of open source code out there where someone has done all the hard work, and you can just train new models on top of it. Not everything needs to be ChatGPT, a lot of kinds of models can be trained relatively quickly and with little resources.
No specific person's art is being put into my generated image, unlike if I were to copy an image from Google. If a model is trained on 1 trillion images, then every single one of those images influenced the weights in the model which then resulted in the output.
But my argument there is that when the generation becomes very integrated into the workflow as a tool, then it can be nearly impossible to separate out what was actually created by me vs what the ai did.
I'm kind of mixed on this, because I think AI art is pretty cool, but I also hate our current copyright system. I kind of agree with the copyright office that images generated by a prompt should not be covered by copyright. What if I just type in "cat" and set the seed to 1, and try to copyright that? What if I copyright the image for EVERY seed with that prompt? Literally anyone else could easily generate the exact same image, and are they going to be in violation of my copyright now?
It gets really complicated though. What if I draw a sketch and then feed it into stable diffusion to flesh it out further? Then I do extensive inpainting across the whole thing, then I take it to Photoshop and do further edits. At this point, I think it's fair to say this is an original image of my own creation, which should be eligible for copyright protection.
Mute City and Big Blue both feel challenging to me. I tend to do much better on all the other tracks. I think it's more to do with the fact that these tracks are the most commonly selected and also the easiest, so most of the other players are able to do pretty decently, and everyone ends up bunched up together.
Well, building on that question, why do they need a constant supply of clean water? My desktop PC has a water cooler, and it just recirculates the same water.
I feel like a lot of games these days make it difficult to get into, ironically by trying too hard to make it easy to get into, with excessive tutorialization. Part of it might also be the types of games that you like. For example, I want to play a game to have fun and challenge myself, not to sit around watching a story play out for a half hour while I walk around doing nothing. So the majority of popular games that people are always talking about are the kind of games that I would absolutely hate. I want to just jump in and play. The new Super Mario Wonder game is a pretty good example of something that just gets out of your way and lets you play the game, so I have been enjoying it quite a bit for the past few days. The recent F-zero 99 is also an enjoyable racing game for me, for the same reasons. I have also been getting into fighting games more in the past few years, so I've been playing Street Fighter 6 a lot.
So the most important thing I have learned, is that I can no longer just look at which games are considered "good", because in many cases I'm going to hate them. When I was younger, I would love just about any of the popular games. But now, I know what I like, and that's what I gravitate to.