I mean, it feels kinda obvious. If there’s any company in this space that would never need to use generative AI, it’s Nintendo. They already employ some of the most talented art teams in the industry, they’re not exactly struggling to produce art or assets.

If this was from a developer who maybe hasn’t been a gaming monolith for the last 30+ years, that’d be different. This is like if Bill Gates says he promises not to open his 401k early; like, okay cool, I don’t think that was ever in doubt in the last 30 years, Bill, but thanks for letting us know.

That’s not really what astroturfing is. Astroturfing refers to groups pretending to be a small startup, but are actually organized by and working toward the interests of a larger entity.

For instance, a group of activists may petition their local government to request new laws that restrict how corporations can exploit local water sources, under the guise of environmental protection concerns. But it turns out that activist group is actually owned by Nestle, who are trying to carve out laws that would drive out their competition and do little for the environment.

“Fake grassroots” = astroturf.

I’m going the 100% free-to-play route and I’m actually enjoying this game so far. I’ve tried to get into some other Hoyoverse games, but had a hard time because of how cheesy a lot of the writing was, and just not being that into the general gameplay loops for those games, so I wasn’t going into this with very high hopes. But the writing is significantly better this time around, and the gameplay is a pretty good balance of being engaging enough to be fun while not being a total grind.

I put about 6 hours into it, and it largely feels pretty shallow. I don’t know if the gear you get later in the game significantly changes the gameplay too much, but the basic combat loop is pretty simplistic. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of variety in your abilities, as each character you can play as seems pretty locked-down. Right now it feels like 99% of the player base is using a single character, Bunny, so you and all your teammates are basically just doing the exact same things all the time.

The PS5 version has some pretty bad performance issues. Certain areas just drop the game down to 30 FPS as soon as you cross an invisible boundary. Some player/enemy animations start rendering at lower framerates when there’s a lot of things on the screen. The “fidelity” mode is basically unplayable, and enabling ray tracing is literally unplayable; I’m not sure why those options are even available on the PS5 version in the first place, to be honest.

The plot is kinda weak and generic. Half the time I spent playing was listening to characters exposition-dump on me, and I still have no idea what’s supposed to be going on or why I’m doing what I’m doing. The game does little to compel you, as a player, to actually care about the plot.

The monetization doesn’t seem too out of control. I’ve not looked too deeply through the shop, but it looks like it’s mostly cosmetics. I didn’t see anything that screams “pay to win”, and at no point did the game purposely direct my attention to the shop; I had to find it on my own, which is actually great because I hate when games stop you to force you to look through the shop as part of the tutorial.

If the gameplay gets more engaging or exciting in the endgame, that’d be great, but so far it really doesn’t look like it. I want to like it, so I’m probably gonna keep playing throughout the week and see how it goes as I progress further. But right now, I’m at least just glad it’s free.

If it’s the same game I’m thinking of (but can’t remember the name of), I remember it feeling like a much more shallow version of Katamari. You never realize how important the rolling physics truly are to the Katamari experience until you take them away. It was a pretty neat idea, but just didn’t capitalize on it very much.

Good. Hopefully we see some similar suits take place over here in the US, as well.

EDIT: Not “good” that they discriminated against him, but good that the tribunal determined it to be discriminatory.

different work ethics

This is a pretty big one that would get overlooked, I think. What we in the west would consider “crunch” conditions are often considered normal, or even bare minimum in some Japanese companies.

A lot of it is going to be game-specific, and spending time tweaking the control settings until you find what feels responsive to you.

The rest of it is going to be technique, and a lot of trial and error to find out what works best for your play style. For instance, I can’t do fast-paced, twitchy movements on a controller (even things that are technically possible to do on a controller; I just don’t have the dexterity anymore), so I have to adopt a different play style when using a controller. I usually will go for a more support-based role, if possible; opting for long-range weapons/abilities, and playing a more patient, campy game. I play slower and more methodically this way, and try to position myself so that I don’t ever get into the situations where I need to react to somebody closing the gap on me in the first place.

For me, it’s an entire mindset shift. If I play the same game on M/K, I’ll be playing with a much faster, reaction-centric style instead of one where my movements are more premeditated.

Some other tips will be learning to do things like using your left stick for fine-tuning your aim (you can get very precise horizontal micro-adjustments by leveraging your player’s position, which can be useful for getting your shot off before the other guy does), experimenting with gyro controls if that’s an option for you, or trying joystick extenders (small gadgets that clip onto your sticks to extend their effective length, which may make aiming easier).

As far as what to practice in, I don’t know of any aim trainers that are designed for controller, so I’d say you should just practice with a game that you either don’t care about or where it doesn’t matter if you lose a bunch. I’d recommend The Finals; it’s free to play, the default quickplay mode is active and puts you into a match quickly, and it’s super low-stakes so you don’t have to feel bad about experimenting during a live match. Your teammates don’t have loot drops or anything hinging on your success, so if you play badly, nobody cares. And it’s got pretty robust customization options for the controller settings (dead zones, acceleration curves, etc), which can help you figure out what settings you respond best to and what to look out for in the settings of other games. It has a huge variety in movement/weapon options, so you’ll end up developing skills/habits that will transfer over to other games quite easily.

I didn’t mean to weirdly steer this into becoming an ad for The Finals. But it’s a very controller-friendly FPS that I think will be beneficial to practice with. I think it’s also pretty fun, but that’s subjective.

I feel it! I feel the cosmos!

Oohhh, that sounds delicious! My old boss at work was telling me about Brazilian lemonades a while back and I’ve been meaning to try it at some point.

While it’s a series, it’s really the only franchise like it, so it kinda is its own genre: Katamari.

So what’s the reason to go to a mall? Crappy food court food?

The last dozen or so times I’ve been to a mall, the only thing I’ve spent money on was food. It’s hard to justify spending money at the mall when I know I can get just about anything there from an online retailer for a lot cheaper. But I can’t get an Orange Julius online. Yet.

Naturally there is always going to be a certain amount of player decline over time, but I have to wonder how much of this could have been saved had Sony not created a PR nightmare for the game with the required PSN account linking.

That said, I’m sure there’s going to be a sharp spike in players very soon, as Arrowhead should be releasing a new enemy faction into the game very shortly, which is going to bring a lot of players back again for a while. Hopefully they’ll find a way to keep those players interested again.

Probably move on to YouTube Shorts or Instagram reels.

Likely YouTube. While neither are great, between Google and Meta, Google’s got the better reputation. YouTube also has a larger audience, because it includes a ton of users who wouldn’t fall under traditional social media usage. Reels might be used as a periphery platform to drive more people to their main channel on YouTube.

Any TikTok creator who moves to Instagram full-time is either shooting themselves in the foot, or got a good contract from Meta.

I used to buy these little pocket-sized Sudoku books that I’d keep with me, usually play a puzzle or two while commuting to work or something.

That’s really cool! I wonder if there’s a way to find the previous owners of the house, that’d make for a really fun story if you were able to track down the original owner somehow.

I missed an opportunity to nab a free ticket to a George Carlin show because I couldn’t get the day off work. That ended up being his last tour before he died.

I think most people these days don’t use browser bookmarks as a “check this out later” tool, and instead as more of a “I frequently need to access this page” function. For me, I only bookmark a page if it’s something I frequently access; things like my email, Lemmy, some work apps, etc. In my use-case, bookmarks are a more “permanent” installation to my browser.

Also, “read later” apps generally strip the web page formatting and advertisements, and usually have an offline function of some sort; both of which you typically can’t do with bookmarks. These are especially useful for those who like to read on their commute.

Finally, a SIM card that can run Doom.

Reminds me of something you’d find on the Dreamcast.

I was thinking this, too! The level design looks like a mix of Jet Set Radio’s architecture with Katamari’s color palette.

This game looks really adorable. I wish there was a PS port.