There are many wishes I have that are more important, but one of them is to get everybody who has run Google Play into a room so I can give them a powerpoint presentation about how they are all morons.

Google Play and Android represent by far the largest gaming platform on earth it is infeasible, unconscionable, and irredeemable that such a platform has failed so catastrophically to curate high quality games, curate a cottage industry of game reviewers and make prospective buyers feel confident that the games they are looking at in the store aren’t scams or just crap.

Before MiniReview it was like walking blindfolded through a grocery store trying to find the item you wanted by randomly grabbing things and trying them.

https://minireview.io/

How do these people call themselves business people? Google has left SO MUCH MONEY ON THE TABLE HERE it is hard for me to actually comprehend. I know mobile gaming IS massive as it is but the industry could be so much bigger and the games could be so much less predatory.

Why, when I want to spend money on a premium game will the Google Play store funnel free ad-ridden crapware games at me instead of letting me browse more premium games? It feels like trying to buy expensive frontrow seats at a concert and having the ticketperson downsell you crappier seats that blare advertisements at you in the hope that you might be the 1 in a 100 person that will become hopelessly addicted to a system of microtransactions that make the experience marginally better by muting the ads slightly and making the musical performance go faster.

Google owns Youtube, the largest video game and board game review platform on the internet, why has it not managed to nurture and encourage a whole range of content creators who bring value to Youtube AND Google Play by reviewing games?

It is because Google thinks it can do everything with AI, with automation, it is that the execs at companies like Google have a terminal case of the brainworms where they just CANNOT see human beings as valuable without placing them in an exploitive context.

In reality what Google has done is train people not to think things in their store are valuable enough to buy, and it is pathetic. I realize I throw this word around a lot but in this case there is no other word for it. I will spend 5$, 10$ on a good quality premium video game, I don’t care if it is on my phone or on my steam deck or whatever. Google play won’t ever even show those premium games to me, it just clogs the search results with shit free-to-play adware microtransaction traps.

“Something Somewhere Sequentially”

this would be a great name for a computer science/computer science history textbook

I wanted to like that film but couldn’t get into it. Thought it tried to hard to be quirky.

I think that is definitely something the film risks, but the ultimately very grounded central story about the character relationships, fantastic fight scenes and awesome costume design keep it from feeling frivolous to me like that, to each their own!

Swiss Army Man I did not feel like avoided this fate on the otherhand so yeah I can dig that kind of criticism of the movie.

(There is a clear parallel to the Luddites here, who were skilled technicians and clothmakers who weren’t worried about technology surpassing them, but the way factory owners used it to make cheaper, lower-quality goods that drove down prices.)

I think we need to start putting this on billboards.

It only is if you are a piece of shit company that doesn’t allow modding of your games.

What they mean is EA cut too much developer talent to innovate in that direction and there is no longer enough market competition for them to bother innovating in the first place.

Check out the cross platform! Easy Red 2 for a moddable, awesome WW2 multiplayer shooter with vehicles.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1324780/Easy_Red_2/

Also check out Operation Harsh Doorstop for a totally free moddable modern multiplayer shooter with vehicles.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/

Don’t give EA your money and time, they don’t deserve it. The hype is a mirage, turn around and give smaller indie multiplayer games a boost in playerbase instead!

edit it doesn’t have modding but Angels Fall First is an awesome multiplayer spaceship combat fps hybrid, it has been out for a long time but it is still being added to by the developers. Low playerbase but bots are quite fun to play against however.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/367270/Angels_Fall_First/

or maybe check out Wildgate?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3504780/Wildgate/

Lol I love how people assume they won’t load the AI up with even more ads than the traditional search results.

According to who? I have seen zero evidence in my life capitalism requires a legal framework, it simply requires the threat of violence.

Except that piracy has always been explicitly endorsed by the beneficiaries of the system, they simply change the name, structure the conditions such that their piracy is considered part of the system even if it isn’t and then proceed to be pirates.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privateer

Things get even more muddled when you consider that selfish agents may believe they are structuring a system for selfish gain when they are in fact destroying the system for everybody including themselves.

I mean, you can do something illegal and still be a hero.

This man’s name is Brad Smith, he is directly complicit in profiting off of the Genocide Of Palestinians.

Brad Smith is a mass murderer but more pathetic than the typical one because he just wants to profit off the genocide without having to witness the actual violence of it firsthand.

I propose a toast to Brad Smith living a long and painful end of life with a debilitating disease that destroys his quality of life or some other form of small justice befalling him!

I raise my glass

During a press conference on Wednesday, Smith said Microsoft has launched a formal investigation into Israel’s reported use of Azure. “We are committed to ensuring that our human rights principles and our contractual terms of service are upheld in the Middle East,” he said.

BULLSHIT

If we continue to let men like this rule society with no meaningful consequences for them we will be utterly subsumed into violence, it is only a matter of time.

Yeah then I think it is a no-brainer thing for you to get the Steam Deck, the only situation I see someone like you being truly disappointed in your Steam Deck is if they REALLLLY wanted to play more graphically intensive games and the Steam Deck just couldn’t quite cut it. If you already own a gaming computer worst comes to worst you sit there and think “damn, I will have to play this once I get my hands on my desktop gaming rig again!” and move onto another game in your library.

Another note in the Steam Deck’s favor for gaming, the suspend feature where if you press the power button the Steam Deck instantly sleeps is incredibly useful for jumping in and out of games. Even if you don’t hit pause the way the Steam Deck runs games the environment the game is running in is paused when you press the power button… so you can jump in and out of games really easy that weren’t necessarily designed to be rapidly started and stopped.

I would recommend getting a dock so you can use a keyboard and mouse sitting at a desk with a larger monitor when needed. Bonus points you can use the steam deck dock for splitscreen local gaming hangouts with friends, normal ass bluetooth gamepads usually work fine connecting to the Steam Deck (xbox controllers are great) and with the dock you can bring a backpack with everything you need to set up awesome indie splitscreen gaming sessions. It is a blast and the Steam Deck is underappreciated in this realm especially given how many good indie local splitscreen games there are out there.

Yeah the Logitech k780 is a bit bulky, but it is by far my favorite keyboard ever. It isn’t a mechanical keyboard but the keys feel AWESOME (and yet are still nice and quiet unlike most mechanical keyboards) and I really like the typewriter-like circular keys.

The phone holder is amazing. I cannot live without it now lol.

Also, heck yes! I love hyping people up on the Steam Deck because even if you purchase one impulsively they are just so useful and flexible as fun handheld computers that you will find uses for it for years to come.

Do it!!!

I love my steam deck and regularly run all sorts of non-gaming software on it like Blender, QGIS, emacs, logseq, Kdenlive, Inkscape, Gimp etc…

You just gotta find a keyboard you like, for me it is the Logitech K780 because it is a large keyboard with superb feeling keys and an awesome built in stand for a phone so you can switch between using the keyboard for different devices quickly.

The Steam Deck definitely isn’t insanely powerful, if you are going to lean on it as your main gaming device you have to understand that but if you aren’t someone that needs the latest and greatest graphics on all the most processing heavy new AAA games, the Steam Deck’s advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

The simple fact is that because the Steam Deck is handheld you end up using it far more than you would a non-handheld device (or even laptop) simply because it is comfortable to do so in more situations, and this fundamentally is the reason I think the Steam Deck is such a good buy. You will use the shit out of it in a ton of different contexts you don’t even expect going into getting the device.

A slight annoying thing is that people are still getting used to what a Steam Deck is, most people really have a hard time understanding they are looking at a general computing device not a disposable recreational toy like a Nintendo Switch. People act oddly about it because they weren’t told this was the future by massive corporations and that makes people confused and almost…uncomfortable? If you use your Steam Deck for a presentation or to demonstate something to someone else they will barely listen because they will just still be staring at it going “wait… so that is a… computer…? Like a laptop computer not a Nintendo Switch? Why though?”.

I am not saying I don’t like battlefield, I don’t like EA and that has become a dealbreaker for me… or rather it did quite awhile ago.

I mean… compared to a call of duty experience i think they do. Even arcadey battlefield games have combined arms, naunced teamwork and battlefield awareness at play that most team shooters don’t have.

If you would like a really arcadey recommendation however Heroes Of Valor looks good though I haven’t tried it (and it is in early access).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2504090/Heroes_of_Valor/

It isn’t worth the nonsense, check out the new community I started for battlefield-like indie games !indiefields@sopuli.xyz

A good alternative recommendation is Easy Red 2

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1324780/Easy_Red_2/

That developer deserves a measly $10 far more than EA does, and the game is better than any recent battlefields in terms of realism and depth of gameplay. The game has a full inventory system and extensive easy to use command controls for AI troops (that are actually tactically useful) that creates along with the polished gunplay and tank combat mechanics a very compelling gameplay loop.

ER2 is a blast on my Steam Deck!!

Give your money to artists and game developers so they can live decent lives, the executives of EA won’t know what to do with your money except fire more developers and buy an even bigger yacht.

You cannot trust Microsoft to consistently provide your organization a foundation to get things done on anymore.

No, Aliens successfully genetically bioengineered our eyes to have “eye floaters” that look exactly like their interdimensional starships flying overhead so they can fly them around on Earth without anyone noticing. It is all part of their evil genius plan!

That is only because Aliens monitor all aircraft on earth and will if given the chance teleport-swap your hat for a UFO while it is thrown in the air (it is the perfect time to do it unfortunately). Notice how most politicians don’t wear hats, it is because they know their hats were long ago replaced with alien monitoring UFOs that only look and feel like hats and they are keeping the truth from us.

There might be some truth to aspects being made here, but overall yes I completely agree I think this is leaning precisely into the kind of worship of the aesthetics of violence/guns that leads to things like the fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins by Alec Baldwin on the film set for the movie “Rust”.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/11/23/alec-baldwin-threatened-to-assault-30-rock-director-was-challenging-on-show-new-book-says/amp/

If you want to learn how to safely handle a firearm or other weapon and integrate that knowledge into the games you make, cool… and I mean I guess this is news? but it turns out integrating genuine outside knowledge into video games can be interesting. However you could have chosen literally any other hobby or niche body of knowledge to obsess about and integrate into your video game development and gotten a similar if not larger return in your investment of effort spent not directly practicing getting better at making video games.

By the logic being argued here about weapons, would be game developers should prioritize becoming experts at fishing wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy before guns because fishing mechanics are in an absurd amount of video games and no matter what type of game you make you can probably integrate a fishing minigame into it. Further, it is very rare that game developers actually try to create realistic fishing games even though there is evidently a lot of interest in fishing in videogames.

Also… Euro Truck Simulator 2 has sold 13 million copies… do we need to consider the fact that game developers should maybe get a commercial truck drivers license before developing games because of the indication of how clearly players desire realistic truck driving games?

HEADPHONE JACK - I scream into the void