Fantastic article.

I’ve got nothing against cosplay, but these right-wing nut jobs pretending to be Roman conqueror’s just take it too far.

Maybe if the game was anymore more than an uninspired mess, it would have sold some copies.

So, AI that is strictly incapabale of generating new ideas is going to be fed decades of police reports as it’s database, and use that data to discern that makes a good police report?

Surely this won’t replicate decade old systematic problems with racial profiling. I mean, all these police reports are certainly objective, with no hint of bias to be found in the officers writing.

The point of treating companies like people is so no one in those companies can be held accountable. The worst case for them that the intangible “coorporation” did something wrong and now it has to go away, so the entire board moves to a new company under a new name that owns the same properties and has the same practices. Only now they have practice obfuscating their crimes.

What ends lives and careers for people are just a minor inconvinience to coorporations.

It’s not a good article. I was following along until, 5 minutes in, it suddenly decided to be detailing and describing exactly what AI and LLMs are. Like, long after showing some of the ways it’s hurting the industry, presumably to pad words.

For every shitty article pushing AI hype out there, there’s a shittt article pushing AI hate. Extremism generates clicks.

I thinks there are some nuggets of good information in there. The bits on first-hand accounts from former and current Activision employees, and on how it’s mostly the concept artists that are hurt is interesting. But you really have to wade through a mound of shit to get there, and I genuinely don’t have the patience to wade through the second half and see if there any more truth in this soft mound of turd that Wired called journalism.

BPM: Bullets Per Minute. A boomer shooter had an affair with he rhythm game genre and this was the outcome. Amazing game, assuming you don’t mind rhythm games, and an immaculate one if you actively like rhythm games.

Neon White is technically a shooter, but in most ways does not play or feel like one. It’s better described as a first person puzzle/platformer, but I would still recommend it, as it is an incredible game.

Both of the Doom ports run insanely well on the Switch. Seemingly impossibly well considering how dated the console is.

Warframe is good, free and playing surprisingly well on Switch.

Splatoon is just awesome.

Hi-Fi Rush might genuinely be one of my favorite games of all time.

These guys did great, and I’ll be thinking twice about any Xbox product I consider purchasing in the future.

I just fucking want Elite to be good. I could shoot pirates and 'goids all day if getting a ship ready to do so wasn’t as enjoyable as running dental floss into my mouth and out my asshole.

As a “space games guy” is there anything out there that is as satisfying to simply fly around in as Elite Dangerous is without the absolute shit fuck of ass-backwards, tedious and boring mechanics?

I fucking love flying ships in that game with my HOTAS and VR headset, but I will be damned if I am going to roll around on a moon praying I trip over some precious metals just so I can play logistics hot potatoes trying to figure out how I am going to get my module to the relevant station, upgraded, and then placed into the ship I designed it for. Elite is such an incredible space cockpit sim, and they’ve gone to great lengths to prevent me from wanting to actually play it. I just want a good cockpit sim with HOTAS support that doesn’t make me want to scoop out my own eyeballs whenever I think about loading it up again.

Cassette Beasts kicks the ever loving shit out of Pokemon across the board, modern or retro.

Retro games weren’t better than modern games as a “full-stop” statement. They tended to be bug-ridden messes, but there was still a heart and soul behind them that tends to be missing in the AAA industry. Continuing on the Pokemon example Red/Blue were an absolute mess. I mean, moves and items that were supposed to massively increase critical hit rate massively decreased them instead. Stat calculations were all over the place. Hell, the ghost-psychic interaction just straight didn’t function as intended. It was a mess, and yet for some reason, it’s touted as “better” than the modern Pokemon games.

Plus, not all big studio games are soulless cash grabs of releases, either. Hi-Fi Rush is my favorite game of 2023 by a huge margin, and was a Bethesda published game. Sure, the dev studio was “smaller” compared to Ubisoft or Activison, but I wouldn’t call the game indie - it was AAA in polish and scale. I’m currently really enjoying Unicorn Overlord, getting major Ogre Battle 64 vibes from it, and playing a lot of Monster Hunter Rise thanks to a Steam sale. These games slap, and have all the depth and passion of games of old without alI of the horrible jank we dealt with in the pre-internet “no such thing as a post-release patch” world.

It’s easy to see the yearly Call of Duty, Pokemon, generic EA sports, and obligatory Ubisoft open world games release and think “man, AAA gaming sucks”, but they’re honestly a very tiny portion of the conversation.

EDIT: I take everything back, Bethesda just closed the studio that made Hi-Fi Rush. AAA gaming is a cancer that needs to be surgically extracted.

Weird take, imo. Mobile games are probably the best they’ve ever been. They were traditionally a place for rampant p2w garbage gacha machines, and while those are still there, the platform has actual decent games nowadays. Real PC games are being ported to mobile and the platform is being taken seriously. Even in the world of micro transactions and gacha games, there are far more that are actually decent as games then there ever has been.

I’ve been playing Monster Hunter Now and I’ve been really impressed with it. The entirety of the Riot games are good games with reasonable microtransactions. Vampire Survivors, my go-to “I am offline” game, is the exact same game on mobile as PC, save the fact that it’s free and you have a choice to watch ads for marginal farming speedups (which can be disabled if you buy literally any of their ~$1.50 DLC expansions, which are hilariously large considering their price). Fucking Warframe is coming to/already on (?) mobile.

I genuinely can’t say mobile games have ever been in a better place than today, despite the existence of the shovelware P2W games that continue to roll out.

Vampire Survivors.

The android version is free with optional benefits for watching ads. If you buy any of the paid DLC (~$2 per DLC?) you are given a menu option to disable the “watch an ad for free shit?” prompts, but they’re hardly in the way if you don’t want to pay a cent. Playable offline, controller supported and is tbh a massive game.

Suicide Squad bombed so hard that it’s killing every indie game under their umbrella.

Is this that “trickle down economics” I keep hearing so much about?

I play a lot of genres of games and as a result like weird genre mashups, so Helskate really stuck out to me. Hades meets Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater isn’t a game I would have thought up myself, but it seems hella cool.

I just messed around with the demo a bit. There are some rough edges and no meta progression yet, but the core concept feels good. Landing a trick on an enemies head to proc stone effects and then following with a couple attacks to put them down is a super fun concept when you hit everything just right. A little bit of tactile feedback when you get hit and land things would really push the gameplay into the amazing territory.

People tend not to like gyro aim.

People are wrong, but I am not surprised.

I just bought a series of 8bitdo controllers, and they are fantastic. The off green/purple USB Xbox controllers are literally $20 USD a pop and imo feel better than the Series S controller. And that’s their cheapest option; if you are willing to spend money for more features, they keep getting better.

OP said he wants motion control though? I feel like his options for motion control controllers are EXTREMELY limited. Like Nintendo proprietary limited.

Apparently the 8Bitdo Ultimate DOES have motion control. I’d dare say it’s just hands down the correct option, unless you want to just flat buy a Switch Pro controller. That said, if off-colours don’t bother you, the Switch targeted Ultimate C Bluetooth is cheap af, has motion controls and actually has ABXY in the correct format.

Unpopular opinion: I fucking hate noise-canceling headsets. It creates something of a booming, echo-y sound, and I just cannot stand it. Open ear acoustic headsets are an absolute godsend.

I use the Sennheiser Game Zero, because if you want a combined headphones/microphone headset, and you want an open ear acoustics, your options are extremely limited. That said, it is awesome. The “flip up to mute” feature broke extremely fast, but beyond that the quality of both incoming and outgoing audio is fantastic. And I drag the thing around with me quite a bit, so, despite one feature breaking, it has survived quite a bit of abuse.

Maybe we let professionals decide what tool is best for their field

Hey, really appreciated. Having random potentially uneducated, inexperienced people chime in on what they think I’m doing wrong in my classroom based on the tiniest snippet of information really shouldn’t matter, but it’s disheartening nontheless.

While I take their point, I also wouldn’t walk into a garage and tell someone what they’re doing wrong with a vehicle, or tell a doctor I ran into on the streets that they’re misdiagnosing people based on a comment I overheard. Yet, because I work with children, I get this all the time. So, again, appreciated.

I use it as a brainstorming tool. I haven’t had a single question make it as-is to a student’s worksheet. If the tool can’t even count to 20 successfully, I’m not sure how anyone could trust it to generate meaningful questions for an ELA program.

I regularly use ChatGPT to generate questions for junior high worksheets. You would be surprised how easily it fucks up “generate 20 multiple choice and 10 short answer questions”. Most frequently at about 12-13 multiple choice it gives up and moves on. When I point out its flaw and ask it to finish generating the multiple choice, it continues to find new and unique ways to fuck up coming up with the remaining questions.

I would say it gives me simple count and recall errors in about 60% of my attempts to use it.