Someone read that quote from The Witcher, not recognizing it was planted right at the beginning of a character arc of growth.

I’m still a bit baffled it doesn’t work.

Like, the Left not doing enough SHOULD lead the right to decide “Dang, we need a message that appeals. Let’s blame the rich, and champion power over corporations!” But…instead they blame nonsensical things, promise nothing, and appeal to hatred, and get more than one vote.

That should just…never happen. That faction should be gonezo, making plenty of room for an independent party.

Valve hasn’t gotten the memo yet. Someone email them again?

The trick is, they don’t really care about enforcing it - just having it as a potential charge to pursue when they hate someone.

This just in: Breathing is illegal. They’ll only bother prosecuting critics of Trump though.

There is some motive to use the stick to motivate industries - after you have shown them a carrot.

It’s like if you see a child has abusive parents, so you just drain the bank accounts of those parents, and nudge to the child “Hey, you should look for new parents”.

Look at Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. He actually encouraged growth of solar production in red states so that clean energy could actually become a profitable industry here. Once that went into full swing, THEN tariffs on Chinese panels would make sense.

There's a movie called Rebel Ridge in which this practice, and a corrupt police department, serve as the antagonists. It's a very harsh movie but very vindicating conclusion.

You know how police are regularly accused of having racial prejudice? The common joke is that you join ICE if you're too racist to be a regular cop.

I’m mostly PC. I have a PlayStation, and I just like the rental tryout system of PS+. I still think it’s a nicely cost effective way for someone new to gaming to try a lot of stuff.

But yes, even then you can often get much of the same through Steam key bundles.

I'll admit, this irks me in mystery shows. Those don't seem like something you'd reliably get.

"Sir, just as you predicted, we found the kitchen knife in the third drainage grate of the northern side of the city sewage system, wrapped loosely in five layers of cheesecloth, wadded with human waste. And, we've performed a DNA and fingerprint analysis on the handle. The prints perfectly match your suspect, sir!"

Oof. I like the joke…but not the AI.

I’ve always wanted a tv episode or something that works out like this; a long lead-up of “Why doesn’t he notice she’s interested in him?” ending with the guy finally stating he’s just not interested.

“He heard a loud BANG through the phone”

Sentences that can be taken in two ways.

I still don’t understand the sentiment that turn-based doesn’t sell. We just got Clair Obscur breaking expectations.

Part of it is, you have to make the combat interesting visually, tactically, and sometimes even tactilely. Some games get that right: Persona 5, Like a Dragon, etc.

I would also go on a limb and say that 99.9% of strategy in turn taking games is terribly designed. Buff attack, use strongest attack. The one that I really wanted to see more of is a system like Cosmic Star Heroine’s.

Thing is, we’ve seen it at least a few times. Nintendo, for instance, did not increase the Switch 2 price. Many companies are afraid of adding a “tariff tax” label on goods.

I personally don’t understand it. What I’ve heard is that part of the issue is when companies are in many fields, the government could choose to retaliate on any of them. Reject their H1B visas when they set higher product prices, for instance.

I mean, there’s a fair reason most exclusivity is dead.

There’s a lot of cool PS4 games that just don’t run well on the PS4. So, it’s a much nicer experience to get them on PS5, at 60fps, full resolution, with instant load times.

It’s also honestly kinda nice that someone with low income can buy a used PS4 and still join for most of those games online.

Recently, Clair Obscur told another story of ex-publisher success. So far, we only know of the review success and I don’t actually know if it’s a financial success.

If it is, I can only hope it leads to some investor understanding in just how done the world is of lottery-planning in the game world; seeing one victory, and having every single publisher chase it.

• Cover shooters
• Candy crush mobile games
• NFT games
• Battle royales
• 5v5 Overwatch clones

She doesn’t have to be struggling herself to see other people’s struggles and try to amplify their voice.

Even when people are millionaires, it’s a reality that they likely can’t just turn over their whole fortune at once to fix things. I’d generally guess people like this donate a lot to programs trying to fix these issues.

I don’t mind saying, I’m writing a book, and this is one of the conversations near the end. One character says to another: “Yeah, things are better. But can any of us truly say that things wouldn’t have improved if that terrorist hadn’t threatened everyone?”

Thankfully, in the story’s case, the reply to that quote is that while explosions and deaths were far more visible, a variety of powerful people were already making broad changes - just in a slower and less risky way. Of course, that’s fiction; and is not saying those things are a guarantee in the real world.

That's the thing, though. I respect the analogy, but the equivalent here would be if the game was also checking your drive for other games, for financial apps, scanning your browser's cookies to see which sites you visit, etc.

If, while playing a singleplayer game, they're recording what actions you take within that singleplayer game, it's understandable some people wouldn't even want that - but I also don't see that as nearly so invasive as other data travesties. Worse, highlighting it here feels like a "cry wolf" situation where you'd desensitize people to the most harmful privacy breaches.

Based on the article text, it’s only citing things like how long you play. I thought most games collected telemetry like this?

Don’t get me wrong, if it was scanning your drive to sell data to harvesters, I’d be extremely unnerved. And you should definitely be able to turn this off. But I feel like even Valve has recorded things like “60% of players quit after losing to this boss”