Farewell to the Old....

[AdamCrock]

They're gunning for "subscribed to, but with microtransactions."

The indie game market is truly bogglingly vast and good, though. It's vastly better than the mainstream market from 15 years ago, maybe. Would you say so?

Microtransactions are a plague we need to develop antibiotics against.... but Yeah indie games are great like the "Battle for Wesnoth" for example but I'm not that well aware of the latest indies Nowadays I mostly play classics. I'm lucky to have a shop in town with old box edition PC games (golden colections and such) so it's basically like GOG offline xD

Speaking of old games there's another thing I am noticing. It's that games nowadays are much easier than older games , have You guys noticed that too ?

 

[El_Machinae]

In comparison to televisions, I find that I listen to most podcasts at 1.3 times normal speed. Back in the day, I was able to put on subtitles and use double speed for DVDs, but it didn't quite work.

 

[civvver]

Yeah, it's a bit more than that on the DVR with fast forwarding through the commercials, but not much. I figure if I have forty minutes I can watch something I have recorded, but it usually takes more like forty-five because I end up letting one commercial break run while I am getting a snack or fooling with the dogs or whatever.

I don't have dvr because it's an extra $15-20 a month and I wouldn't use it much, everything I want is on demand except sports. But for football games I hate watching in real time. I do have pause and rewind and stuff so I usually turn it on and pause it, go do something for a half hour and fast forward all the breaks. It's amazing. You can watch a whole football game in like 20 mins if you skip not only commercials but all the breaks in between plays walking back to the line of scrimmage and setting up. Just watching from when the ball is snapped to the whistle blows is very little time.

Microtransactions are a plague we need to develop antibiotics against.... but Yeah indie games are great like the "Battle for Wesnoth" for example but I'm not that well aware of the latest indies Nowadays I mostly play classics. I'm lucky to have a shop in town with old box edition PC games (golden colections and such) so it's basically like GOG offline xD

Speaking of old games there's another thing I am noticing. It's that games nowadays are much easier than older games , have You guys noticed that too ?

Microtransactions are ok if they are done right as like an add on or to support a free game and don't affect gameplay. Dota2 has a fantastic model for them, and I believe path of exile does to but I've not played it. However most of the time the exist to unlock functionality that should be in the base game, but publishers don't want to charge $80 or $100 for a game so they give you half the game for $60 and make you buy or unlock the rest.

Modern games are not easily, just more user friendly. Whenever I hear people talk about how hard old games are it's due to artificial constraints. Think ultima where you have to eat or you die and there's no map. Or final fantasy where you can only save at towns or by using an expensive consumable. Or any game that has a very limited inventory space. Those things make games feel challenging but it's not, it's just mechanics. Challenge is if it requires strategic or dexterous skill so beating deity in civ4 for example (some consider this easy just saying it requires learning and making proper moves) or landing all the jumps in mario. And a lot of platformers today are very hard, requiring precise jumps. Strategy games I think are about the same. Even older games like moo2 and civs basically gave the AI raw advantages to make it harder. They didn't have more challenging, smarter AI.

Have you ever played FTL: Faster Than Light? It's I guess 7 years old now but damn, it is hard.

 

[Farm Boy]

FTL is a part of the rogue-likes. They're a bastion of absurd difficulty and I love them. Dungeons of Dredmor is fun too. I think mainstream action games are, in large part, actually easier. NES twitch is really twitch.

 

[civvver]

I don't enjoy twitch games much. Spelunky is too hard for me. Super meat boy? Volgar the viking? Forget about it!

 

[Birdjaguar]

I'm looking forward to vat grown meets. Vast herds of game gave way to vast herds of domesticated cows, pigs and chickens; next up should be acres of farm fresh vats of factory grown "real beef" protein slabs! The sooner, the better for all of us.

 

[Farm Boy]

... those still eat, man.

 

[Birdjaguar]

... those still eat, man.

My vats of lab grown meat? Sure they do, but they don't take up huge swaths of grassland or fart methane.

 

[Farm Boy]

What do they eat? And what does the food turn into?

 

[Birdjaguar]

I guess they eat delicious nutrients and chemicals in a broth of spring water and bask in a sunny array of artificial sunlight. From what I've read you get hunks of meat without the bone and grizzle.

https://www.wired.com/story/lab-grown-meat/

 

[Farm Boy]

You should delve into what the "nutrients" are. They're food! If they get better at it, it'll start to resemble simple food, rather than basically straight extracted and refined blood.

Ah screw it. I messed the images all up. But open range cows eat grass. Confinement cows eat grass, we just call it corn at this point. And lab grown meat, if we refine it, will eat grass. It's that the grass is refined. I think they use blood for now. We might gain some efficiency and increased production off it. That's likely. But if people think that pre-treating cows with antibiotics is a food safety problem...well, mass consumable tissue farms with the immune systems of the cows removed are going to have their own issues. Times will change. The grass will still be grass. Rice, wheat, corn, potatoes. Almost everything is built on grass or refined from grass. Potatoes aren't grass. Seafood isn't grass.

 

[AdamCrock]

Microtransactions are ok if they are done right as like an add on or to support a free game and don't affect gameplay. Dota2 has a fantastic model for them, and I believe path of exile does to but I've not played it. However most of the time the exist to unlock functionality that should be in the base game, but publishers don't want to charge $80 or $100 for a game so they give you half the game for $60 and make you buy or unlock the rest.

Well I guess micro-transactions are not bad if they don't make people "pay to win" or "the richer guy wins" in multiplayer Still my own personal feeling is that they are some sort of scamm nonetheless.

 

[Birdjaguar]

You should delve into what the "nutrients" are. They're food! If they get better at it, it'll start to resemble simple food, rather than basically straight extracted and refined blood.

Ah screw it. I messed the images all up. But open range cows eat grass. Confinement cows eat grass, we just call it corn at this point. And lab grown meat, if we refine it, will eat grass. It's that the grass is refined. I think they use blood for now. We might gain some efficiency and increased production off it. That's likely. But if people think that pre-treating cows with antibiotics is a food safety problem...well, mass consumable tissue farms with the immune systems of the cows removed are going to have their own issues. Times will change. The grass will still be grass. Rice, wheat, corn, potatoes. Almost everything is built on grass or refined from grass. Potatoes aren't grass. Seafood isn't grass.

Growing meat cells in a vat is more like hydroponics than grazing cattle. The nutrient baths are manufactured somewhere. The cells just reproduce as if they are in a petrie dish and at some point are harvested as a meat patty!

 

[Farm Boy]

That's correct. However, hydroponics grow plants. These are growing meat. The "baths" they eat have different inputs.

 

[Zkribbler]

My vats of lab grown meat? Sure they do, but they don't take up huge swaths of grassland or fart methane.

Eating grass results in methane emissions.
17% of US greenhouse gasses comes from agriculture.

 

[Farm Boy]

Nutrients for meats primarily involve sugars. If you're growing algae, or a plant, in hydroponics you're taking fertilizers and sunlight and converting them into plant cells. If you're growing meat in a vat, you're need sugars. Which will be refined from grasses. Proteins. Heavily refined to replace the digestive tract like the immune system will be heavily artificial. The refining processes will have waste products. The vats will still eat the produce of grasslands. Farming crickets is significantly more promising unless I am way off base. Vats will be a process efficiency when they come online profitably. Think of them, inputs wise, as confinement farming 2.0.

 

[Broken_Erika]

I've forgotten the last time i saw this.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Can't get a cheap mouse anymore.
After sveral years of left-clicking my old one gave out and even my favourite cheapo store Dragon Discounts only sells overpriced wireless mice that eat batteries at a ridiculous rate and only last a few months

 

[Lexicus]

I'm actually not really commenting on 'using up' leisure. We want leisure. I am more drilling into the subtopic of 'recharge'. Of everyone I know that cannot do anything in the evening, an incredible number of them 'have time' to watch TV in the evening. It's not because they'd rather be watching TV in the grand scheme of things, it's that TV is the best alternative they can think of to recharge.

To me this implies they do not view leisure as an end in itself, but as an activity that can only be justified by explaining how it, ultimately, contributes to 'productivity.' I don't like that.

 

[El_Machinae]

To me this implies they do not view leisure as an end in itself, but as an activity that can only be justified by explaining how it, ultimately, contributes to 'productivity.' I don't like that.

That's fine, you're free to not understand. You seem to enjoy it