I left in February of 2021, but at the time it was competent but unexceptional. Rival Wings and Conquest(?) were the two big battle types, and I think overall Rival Wings was more interesting, while Conquest usually devolved to a round robin rotation of objectives or endless stalemates unless you had a competent caller directing your nation’s team. I didn’t like it at all, but Rival Wings was always dead outside of events. Rival Wings was like a “MOBA mode” plus vehicles, so a big thing was objective and resource management so you could push an organised vehicle fleet down one of the lanes. Engagements were also typically smaller than in Conquest.

5v5s were very unbalanced but fun for casual play due to job variety, although the high end was being griefed by some notorious hackers around November of last year (which is when I lost touch with the PVP community on Twitter).

In terms of activity levels, I could basically always get a Conquest match or a 5v5 match, but I basically finished my 5v5 achievements and then only ever played Rival Wings when there were enough players to start a match. They’ve recently introduced a reward track for all PVP, so maybe Rival Wings has finally seen its Revival Wings.

Definitely not the oldest, FFXI and EQ are still alive and getting updates, and Anarchy Online is in maintenance mode because it’s presumably still turning a profit for Funcom.

I have cognitive impairments and it does my head in that it's still hit or miss whether games have rewindable text and voiceovers. Definitely my favourite thing in a game is eing ale to open a dialogue log and even replay voiced lines. Should be in every game, it's such a small accessibility thing.

I'm not sure how the tech is progressing, but ChatGPT was completely dysfunctional as an expert system, if the AI field still cares about those. You can adapt the Chinese Room problem to whether a model actually has applicability outside of a particular domain (say, anything requiring guessing words on probabilities, or stabilising a robot).

Another problem is that probabilistic reasoning requires data. Just because a particular problem solving approach is very good at guessing words based on a huge amount of data from a generalist corpus, doesn't mean it's good at guessing in areas where data is poor. Could you comment on whether LLMs have good applicability as expert systems in, say, medicine? Especially obscure diseases, or heterogeneous neurological conditions (or both like in bipolar disorders and schizophrenia-related disorders)?

Game budgets are too big.

Old game, but Cannon Fodder was an anti-war satire, and also self-aware about the ridiculousness of making a fun game in the context of the horrors of war.

Yasumi Matsuno’s career was also built on quite rich and sophisticated crypto-Marxist critiques of superstructures and warfare, although he slid it under the radar via medieval fantasy. Tactics Ogre is probably the most famous Japanese game about genocide and class struggle. Probably the double whammy for why Western games criticism tried so hard to make it flop.

Yeah, the thing with neural nets is they’re neuron-like. Saying they’re mind-like is like trying to say your visual or auditory cortices have consciousness. Intelligence, sure; but that’s a low bar. Single-celled organisms have cognitions about the environment. So do plants. They’re both intelligent, in the same way that a lot of the low level machinery in your brain is intelligent, the same way that neuron-like software and hardware is intelligent.

Just another example of hierarchies embedded in capitalism. Artists have no rights, humanities are disdained; but big businesses that treat people as “resources” and “consumers” are privileged.

Not better and cheaper, but cheaper faster and worse. And that’s what a lot of dodgy business care about.

I remember when I thought that Bungie self-publishing would make them less evil. But no, they’ve actually become innovators in being the actual shittiest company that isn’t Plarium Games. Maybe they have their eyes on the top spot though? Is that what they’re building up to?

Odd Giants is based on the old MMO Glitch, and in that, when your character succumbs to empty stamina, you go to the underworld to recover. It’s a truly special game.

Yeah, there’s a “back path” that was originally intended to be found with a breadcrumb left if you went rogue and killed Vivec, but thanks to UESP’s documentation, you can find your way there at any point. Very fun for roleplay.

Also, Sonic Colors on Switch used Godot code in violation of the license, whoops.

Kind of sad. I got some EPOS mic+phones for pretty cheap, albeit not as good value as just micless Sennies, and I think the space saving is actually really good. I barely have room for my mic, and it gets worse when I’m somewhere with very little desk space to work with. It seems very difficult to get something that combines all the needs of: flat frequency response and an adequate quality mic, very little by way of space requirements, and a not-outrageous price. I just fold the mic up and put it where I have space for my headset, ezpz.

I’m open to suggestions for replacements, of course.

If Super Metroid is on the Nintendo Switch emulator, that’s a good spooky game, including an explicitly horror-themed level, the Wrecked Ship. There’s a layer of removal since it’s 2D and zoomed out. Not all of the game is all that spooky, I think it’s mainly Wrecked Ship and the end of the game.

Metroid Fusion is much spookier, including sequences where you’re being hunted by a Samus clone. Very creepy vibes throughout too. Other M has a lot of thrills as well. And Metroid Dread is, of course, dread-inducing. Actually it was the first Metroid game I couldn’t play because the stealth sequences were too much for me, lol.

Majora’s Mask is mostly more eerie, but there are some good high tension moments as well.

Was playing Wayfinder, but they broke most of the game’s farms in an attempt to fix a “bug” that was allowing people to actually level up in a reasonable amount of time.

Back to NMS for the expedition. Starfield who?

Absolutely indeed! I’ll never buy an Nvidia card because of how anti-customer they are. It started with them locking out PCI passthrough when I was building a gaming Linux machine like ten years ago.

I wonder if moving people towards the idea of just following the companies that don’t treat them with contempt is an angle that will work. I know Steph Sterling’s video on “consumer” vs “customer” helped crystallize that attitude in me.

I think it works really well with the game’s commitment to diegetic UI too. Really feel like NMS is something special.

“You fight like a dairy farmer!” “How appropriate, you fight like a cow!”

If it is “Deckard” I hope they fix the current snares with inside-out tracking. Also hope I don’t have to wait two years between EB Games restocks here in Aus.

I think it can’t be overstated how good VR is in NMS too. There’s so much attention to immersion, even some things that bugged me at first like the mime controls for ground vehicles.