On the one hand it’s kind of disgusting, but it’s also heartening: this is a studio that had done nothing but asset flips. Their artists didn’t even know what a rig was. They were completely out of their depth.

And while the game is the most cynical thing I’ve ever seen, its creature designs are blatant mash-ups of Pokemon, and its media hype is absolutely bewildering and somewhat suspicious… but by all accounts it’s decently good fun and looks decent visually too.

So, a studio with no idea what they were doing managed to poop out a moderately good game and smash it out of the park in terms of success.

That should be heartening. That should say “maybe I can do it too” to all the hopeful indie devs out there. That should be a massive endorsement of the tooling that the industry has developed, that a completely unqualified group of guys can make a fun and successful online multiplayer action game.

I’ma call him Totoraichu.

Wasn’t there an official branded pokemon dotalike for a while? I mean, they tried the approach of “let’s make a conventional PC genre game but with Pokemon” and it didn’t stick.

Rescheduling an event in Google Calendar with your voice. You can still schedule a new event.

This feature is underutilized because I could never get it to work.

Fun bit of context: if I, an individual, found a way to remote into Sony Playstation and hack them in such a way that they disconnected from their controllers?

I would be in prison. For years. Remember what happened to Aaron Schwartz? Kevin Mitnick? They do not fuck around on computer crimes.

But when a corporation does it to their customers and competitors? Pay the fine and get back to business as usual.

I don’t think the controllers are literally “damaged”, it sounds like just muddling legal terminology with technical terminology.

The controllers are still physically functional in the same way they were before the patch, they’re just mo longer consistently connecting to the ps5. If Sony rolls back the patch they will return to normal.

That said, returns and reputational damages would be substantial to these companies and the fine does sound too small for such blatant anti-competitive and anti-consumer action.

Sony’s excuse is bullshit. If they really were convinced these were counterfeit 3rd party controllers, they should’ve popped up an on-screen message “defective counterfeit controller detected, please only use properly supported hardware”. That would’ve made the error clear. But random disconnects are just sabotage.

It’s not really about the strategy – jumping from board to a digital counterpart, it’s the book keeping that is the huge difference. All the stuff that happens automatically between turns - in civ, this is income, maintenance, trade routes, research, culture, production, population growth, happiness, religious pressure, diplomatic decay, auto move, terrain development, experience, etc figuring in all the bonuses and penalties applied by every citizen, every trade deal, every tech, every wonder, every cultural development, every special land, etc.

In theory in a 4X you’re supposed to be aware of all those rules and factors that are in play but in practice the game is too large to account for every instance.

In a boardgame, you’re executing that by hand, so it’s much more direct.

Well yes but actual no. While 4X games are turn based strategies where most rules are implemented through simple math, the obscene scale and complexity means they’d be impossible to implement on a board. And that’s before even considering fog of war.

For a TBS to work as a boardgame, it must have a real-world mechanical solution to its secrets (cards, Stratego units, etc) and it must be simple enough for humans to execute all of the logic within the game.

Google messages (the only real implementation) still sucks at automatic failover when a data connection is unavailable.

Google Messages RCS is basically flip a coin on delivery if you don’t have consistent data for your phone.

Give me an F-zero 99 + Mode7 Mario Kart Mario Maker game. Simple 2D maps.

http://angryflower.com/513.html

I think I saw some co-op in the Golden Axe. If they lean into the multiplayer I could see it being good fun as a co-op soulslike without the oppressive grimdark atmosphere that tends to define the genre.

Shinobi looks cool, but there are enough amazing pixel-art platformers out there already.

No interest in Streets of Rage.

Crazy Taxi looks like Crazy Taxi. Which is neat but I don’t really have nostalgia for that.

I’m mostly disappointed they missed how awesome Armored Core 6 was and didn’t jump onto that bandwagon with a new Virtual On game.

Powerstone 2 was basically a Super Smash Bros-style 4-player fighting party-game but with the 3D-platformer gameplay of a Wrestlemania game. Instead of Smash Balls, there were a set of “Stones” where you’d get an ultimate if you got 3 of them. Very fun party/fighting game, much like Smash.

That’s Capcom. It was a Dreamcast flagship game but resurrecting it still isn’t up to Sega.

Huh, that’s disappointing. It’s funny how everybody keeps experimenting but nobody seems to have topped the Pebble for watch form-factor: low-power gameboy-ish LED screen and more of an old-school micro-controller chip instead of a phone-like chip and just use the “shake to wake” functionality to brighten the backlight.

Pebble might not have been the smartest smartwatch, but it was definitely the watchyest smartwatch. Always-on screen and week-long battery.

Fair point. Will correct my above post. But either way: unless you find screens particularly eye-straining or have extreme battery-life desires, I don’t really see e-ink tech as worth the downsides at this point, at least for non-text content. For a watch where I want an always-on screen and endless battery and I’ll never watch video on it? Yes, I want more e-ink and low-power LED tech and the like. But for tablets? I’m good with the vibrant colors of a glowing LED screen.

Ahh, yes, well I suppose if you’re mostly reading comics that were made in the '70s and you really want to capture that faded 32-colors-Ben-Day-dot-printed-on-newsprint feel, that’ll be just perfect.

e-ink isn’t (edit: good) color.

Tablets are the ideal form factor for things that would traditionally require a large, full-color book. That is: passing around a photo album, reading magazines, textbooks, comics, playing turn-based games like board-games and strategy games. If you use a stylus they’re excellent for things that require free-form pen-and-paper like math homework and creating art.

Now, when they were a $600 luxury item that didn’t really make sense as a product. But now that they’re like $150 for a solidly good tablet they’re absolutely a worthwhile purchase for those use-cases.

I have one of those Lenovos for reading comics, and they’re great. Nothing amazing but you can’t beat the bang for your buck.