Pycorax

There was a Sims movie?

That season was brutal with The Place Further Than The Universe having similar themes for their episode on the same week. I went in expecting some slice of life joy after being destroyed by Violet Evergarden, only to be destroyed yet again.

Man, that was one hell of a ride. I don’t think I remember seeing something so… experimental (?) before in anime. Man, I feel like I’ll need to watch this a couple more times to catch everything and give it the attention it deserves. Kyoani really are in a league of their own.

Having tried it out at the store, it feels like a downgrade in every way in the usability and functionality department. No pen support, what’s the use of such a large screen if you can’t write on it? Wider screen so now it’s actually impossible to use one handed while folded. They got rid of the under display camera on the inner screen which people don’t use often to begin with.

Perfected it by removing features?

You’re using an extreme example which is fine and I agree that what Candy Crush is doing is clearly trying to exploit people. However, I do believe there’s a stark difference between that and the examples we were discussing.

I mean I get what you mean and I do agree that it plays a factor but your example here only makes a lot of sense for multiplayer games. CoD is a really good example of this in my opinion. The skins there are ridiculous and the amount of effort they spend to show it off is absurd for a full priced triple A game. On the other hand, most of Ubisoft’s games are singleplayer so this FOMO effect doesn’t really apply for those games.

I also don’t think we can deny the agency of the player too if they do choose to make these purchases. If someone does do their research and justifies the micro transactions after looking at it rationally, is it fair to say that they’ve been completely manipulated? I’ve personally given money to EA for Titanfall 2’s prime titan skins because I felt that it was a good value and wanted to support it. So I think there are somewhat more ethical micro transactions.

I mean they’re not technically wrong, if it wasn’t fun for people, people wouldn’t be buying them. Considering the context and all, I guess it makes sense. There’s too many whales enabling them. We get the games we voted with our wallets. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Headline makes it a bit misleading that Ubi thinks it’s referring to all their players, but the actual line does say specify that it’s for people who choose to buy them.

Also their refusal to admit to blatent usage of AI generated art for their assets.

Since we’re talking about Apple, there’s an upcoming library and spec called WebGPU that, contrary to it’s name, is a higher level cross platform graphics library. It’s an interesting idea, write once and depending on your platform, it would use the corresponding platform’s preferred backend (e.g. Direct3D on Windows, Metal on Macs, etc). It’s supposed to be promising and provide a easy way for any existing dev to hop in until they had to give up on SPIR-V support and come with a Metal-like shading language just to appease Apple so that they would support it due to Apple’s existing legal disagreements with Khronos.

And from what I’ve seen from WGSL, it’s nowhere as nice as GLSL and HLSL.

So yea, if you need any more evidence of Apple’s shitty attitude in the space.

I liked 0 far better but I got to give credit to the original for setting it up so that the strong notes of 0 could hit as hard as they could. That ending of that one episode where they played Lyra still destroys me to this day.

Is that Mio? That’s the same surname, hair and it definitely sounds like her. Can’t wait to see her.

Who was expecting this to be console pricing? This is essentially a full laptop in a tiny form factor, of course it’s gonna cost more like a laptop or you know, all of the other handheld PCs out there.

After so many years, can’t say I understood the appeal of facial recognition on a phone. You’re already going to be holding it so fingerprint readers still seem superior in every way. You can unlock it before you even take it out of your pocket too.

So glad I got my Fold 6 last year to upgrade from my Fold 3. The removal of pen support is a unnegotiable downgrade for me. Can’t say I’m a fan of the larger screen and thinner profile either, the Fold 3 proved to me that a narrow and thick device is a far more usable device than normal form factors because of how easy it is to hold it. I already find the 6 way too big.

I didn’t think a show could make me laugh harder than Nichijou did but Arawi and Kyoani did it. It was way better than I could have ever hoped for. The whole champon scene killed me and I actually had to pause the show because of how much it tickled me. And man did it really make me miss the dry champon I had in Nagasaki.

The fact they are making changes to windows and partnering with Asus on releasing Xbox hardware in the same space is more than enough evidence, but also, the steam deck is a tiny part of the market(it might be the best but it is still tiny).

I do wonder how this works for offline play which is fairly common for handheld PCs. Does Game Pass work offline?

I don’t think it will simply because the way game pass is implemented is via the MS Store version of those games. Using Steam would likely require them to switch to the Steam version of games and might not be that straightforward? Who knows.

Piracy always exists and will always be there once you get an awful deal as a customer. That’s what’s already happening to streaming services. If they don’t learn from that, they’ll just suffer later on.