MudMan

Oooh, Outer Wilds. Did a couple of puzzles, I think I got around the loop once or twice, bounced right off.

I swear, I don't know what it is. The sense of wonder just isn't there. Maybe I'm too aware that all the pieces are put in by the designers and that withholding some pieces doesn't inherently make the puzzle more interesting or even harder. I guess I find myself tapping my foot playing first person Lunar Lander while I wait for the thing to get around to the real game while I do rolling ball puzzles or whatnot.

Hah. Wasn't into the "multimedia" era as much, either.

But still, I'd say context is important in that distinction. Old point and click was a AAA genre, through and through. Big, cinematic visuals and storytelling were at the core of that.

I'm not saying that's better or that I like it more. In fact, I'd say I'm less into that kind of thing these days. But it was a different moment in time to get hold of one of those compared to an indie release overcomplicating the self-revealing world concept from Myst.

Why I haven't been into that idea since all the way back in Myst is harder to parse for me. Maybe I'm just less metatextually enamoured with the idea of self-revealing games as a flourish than I am about having the reveal be a fully functional narrative? As I said above I adore Obra Dinn. There's a lot of the same connective tissue there, but maybe I'm just more in touch with it when it's a medium for a good, old-timey gothic horror story than when it's this abstract world-in-code thing.

No, I don't think so. I love puzzles. Hard puzzles, even. I really, really like Return of the Obra Dinn, I spent the 90s fawning over point and click adventures. I have zero problems blasting through the Portal games and a bunch of their derivatives.

For some reason it's specifically this setup of "figure out the rules of the world and peel off the layers of the game" thing that misses me. I don't know what to tell you there.

I wanted to like it, couldn't really get into it.

I see what it's going for, it's just... not my thing. It never clikced with me moment to moment and the self-congratulatory aren't-we-smart information discovery stuff just doesn't work for me in most cases (this applies to Fez and The Witness, too).

I'm not mad that people do like it, though. There's nothing in there I find... objectionable, or poorly designed. I just didn't get into it and that's alright.

I mean, even without FOSS zealotry there are plenty of Android derivatives without Google services in them on weird Chinese emulation handhelds and SBCs and the like. Never mind fricking Huawei, at least until last year, and depending on how much you think their newer one counts as not-Android.

Well, the huge brand helps.

Which is probably why what was even at launch ultimately a somewhat outdated Farmville-like got so much attention.

Downloads have always been a weird metric for mobile games. I've downloaded this game on maybe five or six devices during this decade, but I'm pretty sure I haven't played it al tall in the past nine years and six months.

Incidentally, The Alters is out now and available on GoG.

Did I say that? At what point did I say that? Is the snarky straw man thing a coping mechanism? Because it certainly isn't an argument.

I don't know that cloud gaming moves shovelware in either direction, but it really sucks to see the percentage of people that don't factor ownership into the process at all, at least on paper.

That's the problem with surveys, isn't it? What's "latency being eliminated"? On principle it'd be your streamed game responds as quickly as a local game, which is entirely achievable if your target is running a 30fps client on a handheld device versus streaming 60 fps gameplay from a much more powerful server. We can do that now.

But is that "latency free" if you're comparing it to running something at 240Hz in your gaming PC? With our without frame generation and upscaling? 120 Hz raw? 60Hz on console?

The question isn't can you get latency free, the question is at what point in that chain does the average survey-anwering gamer start believing the hype about "latency free streaming"?

Which is irrelevant to me, because the real problem with cloud gaming has zero to do with latency.

What happened where?

Since when are elections revolutions? If everything is a revolution nothing is. If you define a revolution as a change of regime then all changes of regime are revolutions, it's a useless, entirely tautological definition.

The OP is asking if fascist regimes have been reverted "without a war or a revolution", presumably meaning without violent conflict.

This is a thing. It has happened multiple times, no matter how low of a bar for violence you set in place.

I mean, as written the headline statement is always true.

I am horrified by some of the other takeaways, though:

Nearly 3 in 4 gamers (73%) would choose NVIDIA if all GPU brands performed equally.

57% of gamers have been blocked from buying a GPU due to price hikes or scalping, and 43% have delayed or canceled purchases due to other life expenses like rent and bills.

Over 1 in 4 gamers (25%) say $500 is their maximum budget for a GPU today.

Nearly 2 in 3 gamers (62%) would switch to cloud gaming full-time if latency were eliminated, and 42% would skip future GPU upgrades entirely if AI upscaling or cloud services met their performance needs.