leftzero @ leftzero @lemmynsfw.com

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2 yr. ago

I just replaced “red balloons” with “little drones”.

The song has always been about world war three being triggered by a silly innocent little thing, and the English version is almost as old as the original German.

We do have another senile hollywood "actor" in the white house, though...

(As for the perfidious Albion... as much as I despise that witch at least she didn't pull a brexit on them... luckily I ain't afflicted with being British, so I'm not up to date with the extent to which they are fucked, but from outside things are looking about as bleak as when she was infesting the place, though thanks to brexit the effects seem to be more contained to the isles, at least...)

Only online "games" this maybe wouldn't apply to would have to be peer to peer, serverless, and probably open source to be safe... and, even then, you'd have to provide a sufficient amount of players to replay them a decade on, as, lacking any actual game, they're useless without other players.

As for offline games, sure, publishers might attempt to use them in the same way, but it's much more expensive since a minimum amount of game must actually exist in order for players to fall for it, and they can't fake it using other players. Asset flips are obviously a thing, but easily detected and avoided. And, most importantly, even those will remain equally playable or unplayable in a few decades, while an online "game" will be unplayable the instant it doesn't have enough players.

I'm not sure what you mean by

get your customers to make the content for you for free

I mean that (besides always-online DRM, and scamming your victims with subscriptions and microtransactions) the main reason for perpetrating an online multiplayer computer game is that you can get away with not writing a story, or lore, or quests, or puzzles, or NPCs, or AI, or any actual gameplay, or anything even remotely resembling a proper game through the magic of scamming your customers (or rather victims) into paying you for the privilege of filling in the gaps and acting as NPCs, and gameplay, and whatnot.

You get away with selling the rotting carcass of what could have been a game, and scamming your customers into believing it's still alive just because it's (temporarily) crawling with maggots.

I can get any old single player game and, provided I can replicate its environment, play it and enjoy it just as much as I could have when it came out, or even more.

Even if it was possible to enjoy an online game, on the other hand, it will have been stillborn to start with, a mere shell of a game, an insult to real games, a sad parody only resembling a game as long as there's enough victims trapped in the scam; the second they start leaving (supposing the scammers don't turn the servers off before that, to drive their victims to their latest shiny defecation) it'll go back to being the empty unplayable shell it's always been, utterly devoid of enjoyability or replayability.

The very concept is insulting, revolting, and a clear intentional predatory attack on computer game players and the very concept of computer games.

Online computer games are not games. They're a cheap (as long as you can afford the initial investment), fast, and easy way of extracting as much wealth as possible from their customers using the least effort.

The companies making them don't care about computer games, or about whatever setting they're raping and tearing apart in order to promote their crap, or about their customers. They just care about extracting as much wealth as possible from them, and moving on to their next scam.

And if left unchecked they'll destroy the very concept of computer games as an art form, or even as an industry, and they won't care, because they'll have already extracted everything they could.

Why the hate for multiplayer?

Extremely lazy and scammy way to get your customers to make the content for you for free (and as a result what little content there is is absolute garbage).

Just an excuse to implement always-online DRM.

Either subscription based or ridden with pay to win microtransactions, or both. In any case, evidently not worth a fraction of what you end up paying for it, and therefore a scam.

Extremely hostile and unenjoyable experience.

Nothing wrong with being a masochist, but I ain't one.

I play games to get away from people, not to get an overdose of the damn fuckers. If I for some self destructive reason wanted that I could just go outside.

And, in this particular case, means the game is being sold as a successor to something it's the opposite of, making it extremely offensive and even more of a scam than most multiplayer games.

Or 99 Luftballons in the original.

And I don't know about old... it's starting to feel like we're right back in the eighties... at least for the bad bits...

You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a box of drones with the money we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
'Til one by one, they were gone
Back at base, sparks in the software
Flash the message "Something's out there"
Floating in the summer sky
99 little drones go by

99 little drones
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it's red alert
There's something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky
The 99 little drones go by

99 Decision Street
99 ministers meet
To worry, worry, super scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we've waited for
This is it boys, this is war
The President is on the line
As 99 little drones go by

99 knights of the air
Ride super high-tech jet fighters
Everyone's a superhero
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify and classify
Scrambling the summer sky
99 little drones go by

As 99 little drones go by

99 dreams I have had
In every one, a little drone
It's all over, and I'm standing pretty
In this dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here is a little drone
I think of you, and let it go

Well, at least it'll probably be better than Starfield.

Jay-son web token.

In the summer..? Sure, no point in putting anything on if you aren't going out.

This guy doesn't need a GoFundMe.

He could start an Only Fans where he talked about his ideas with his shirt off and he'd be set for life, or at least until Nintendo sued him off the Internet.

Just picked the best picture that showed up when I looked up encyclopedia. 🤷‍♂️

I'm not British, or a native English speaker, so mine really looked more like this:

Get ready for a large file transfer...

I'm not that old.

I'm warning you. If you say jury nullification once more...

Ankh-Morpork.

Mostly, I presume, because I don't live there, and can safely experience it through the pages of a book, which are thankfully unsuited to transmit the sense of smell and, while still able to cut, are less likely to kill me than a dagger or any of the other deadly instruments one is likely to encounter there.

The rest of the Disc can be quite enjoyable too.

Say what you will, I still ain't eating no bats.

I really dislike the hero worship going on. For all we know, that particular dude might be a paid hitman.

Yeah, but death of the author and all that.

Maybe the guy was hired by the victim's wife because she thought he was cheating on her or something, and the casings and whatnot are just a misdirection... but if desperate people with nothing left to lose and a lot to avenge get inspired by it and start shooting (or just harassing) CEOs, it doesn't matter what the original reason was.

For now, American health insurance company CEOs seem to be afraid enough to remove their personal details from public sites, probably more because they see the reactions to the murder than because of the murder itself... so that's something, at least.

Given the political situation in the USA I very much doubt anything positive will come from politicians and the corporate class learning the sheer extent to which these CEOs and their corporations and their practices are despised by the general population (if anything, they'll attempt to tighten the yoke, which will just further radicalise people)... but revolutions have started for less.