That said, they’re not likely to license an already made AI for their projects either, which is also nice.

Falkon is better for privacy than stock Chrome or Firefox, but I still find Brave or LibreWolf better than that.

Basically my stance. Do I like all the anti-competitive crap they pull? Absolutely not. But they do still make and/or publish most of my favorite franchises. This isn’t like, say, Microsoft or Google who bake their evil directly into their products.

Seems even more odd because to my eyes Nintendo probably had a better (but not super-good) chance of winning on copyright for some of the models used on the Pals than anything patent related. Stuff like riding/transforming mount animals and vehicles are basic exploration gaming functions. If they failed to defend the patent on other prior games that used those mechanics, they don’t really stand a chance here.

If they’re just scraping tweets, it’s probably looking at mentions of a million and one regular guys in the US named Sam Fisher and not the character.

Then they come up with the rating system whose only enforcement is on the AO rating, and don’t bother to actually clean up their shit. As the post above yours mentioned, the problem is lack of enforcement anywhere outside the AO rating or even anyone involved actually caring. Devs and marketing teams push for M if they want to actually sell a game to kids above 7 years old, retailers will sell anything to anyone lest they lose out on the money, and parents who ask about it will just ask the kid who wants to buy the game and will lie about what the rating means. We can crab about movie ratings all we want, but at least most studios and theaters actually enforce the MPAA’s rating and parents know what movie ratings mean. Game ratings are basically like TV ratings, so irrelevant you wonder why they even bother.

Sounds like the community of every competitive (or coop campaign) multiplayer game I’ve ever been in. I prefer just to not play online multiplayer, I don’t have the time (or disposable income) to “git gud” enough to be able to even stand a chance against all the obsessed people who pour hundreds of hours into it in the first month and drive everyone else out.

Even the ESRB, another example of gaming industry self-regulation, hasn’t stopped gaming companies marketing M-rated games to kids or really slowed down sales or access to such games to underage players at all. If anything, they use the M rating as a direct marketing tool to kids: “your parents wouldn’t want you to play this so you totally should”.

EDIT: autocorrect is dumb

Most people don’t, or only throw something like 5 bucks at games like that here or there. But some F2P games are pushing 10 years or more in existence, so somebody’s paying to keep the servers running. The backbone of that industry is the small population of “whales” who spend their life’s savings to get the superior rare new cosmetic or in-game currency to gamble their life away to maybe pull enough copies to max out their waifu. Then they’ll use said cosmetic or waifu for about a month before the next super-ultra rare amazing once-in-a-lifetime hat or weapon comes along, or another waifu who totally eclipses their original one is released, then it’s rinse, repeat ad infinitum until the whale is flat broke and their life is ruined. But at least they maxed out their waifu and got to the top of the rankings in the leaderboard.

Yeah, at least some in-game currency is really the least they could have done if you’re gonna pay money to just get the base game to begin with since it’s F2P (pay-to-win) otherwise. Complete waste of money even for people who play and regularly spend money on these types of games.

I’ve been a part of two different friends’ attempts to quit addiction to MMOs. A high school friend had a problem with Everquest back before WoW. His brother recruited us friends to help give him alternative stuff to do like movie and other game nights. We succeeded, and he was able to put the game down. Some college friends and I were not so successful in pulling one of my roommates away from WoW. Activision Blizzard have it literally down to the science of addiction.

It just wasn’t a problem to them and it was a problem for people they didn’t like (whom they call Nazis, various “-ists” and so on if they dare think differently from them). Now it’s flipped and it’s a problem for them but not the people they don’t like. Every platform needs some form of moderation, but that moderation can run the risk of being too harsh on certain groups depending on the opinions of the moderators. Dorsey himself admitted this was happening at Twitter (being too harsh on legitimate conservative views (not just real Nazis) because the mods didn’t like them) to Congress before it was sold, and he did little to nothing about it. Now the moderation seems to be at the whims of however Elon is feeling on any given day, and due to his own stances, liberals are now getting the brunt of it. It really would be nice to just have somewhere where only the very extremes of left and right, and any actual illegal content, would be moderated out and the mods could keep to that no matter what “side” they or ownership is on. But I know that’s just a pipe dream.

I think I still have one of those. It was Logitech. I thought it was good unless I wanted to use the thumbsticks or triggers. I always thought the Sony design of putting the thumbsticks down in the lower-middle was really awkward, and for some reason, using the triggers on the Logitech controller sometimes felt a bit painful.

Aside from Microsoft selling it as one, there’s a reason the 360’s contoller design is basically the de facto basis for most PC controllers. It’s the most comfortable one I’ve used for 3D games by far. Everything you need is easy to access. Nintendo lifted essentially the same design for their Wii U and Switch Pro controllers.

That and Math Blaster. Good times.

The SEC also regulates trading in stocks, which are contracts that show ownership, just of a portion of a corporation instead of a piece of art. They’re both classified as securities because they can be bought, sold and traded as investments where people can stand to gain or lose large sums of money in said trades. They work in very similar, if not identical, ways. If the NFT did not function so much like a stock investment and was just something you could buy or sell as a regular good, then the implementation would not be so weird.

My mistake, I meant Telegram. I get the two confused.

With the proliferation of actual illegal material on Telegram I can at least understand Durov being arrested, even if I’m undecided on whether I agree with it. But why in the heck would they reasonably go after Rumble? It’s just American conservative YouTube. I haven’t heard of any actual illegal/illicit material (political opinion pieces don’t count, that is in fact free speech) at all connected to Rumble, or at least no worse in proportion to YouTube or Twitch.

EDIT: And as far as I’m aware, Rumble does have moderation, it’s just not as strict as YouTube’s at least when it comes to expression of opinion. I wouldn’t doubt they have a policy in place for that kind of illegal/illicit material to at least be taken down. Perhaps France was threatening them because they wouldn’t cooperate by handing over user data after that? /shrug

There were popular MMOs before WoW, such as Runescape and Everquest. WoW just took a popular genre and rocketed it into the stratusphere.

Legend of Zelda OoT followed up with popularizing a targeting button (good ol’ Z-targeting) to focus on one object or enemy in a 3D space and move around it or fight/otherwise interact with it. Such targeting has been a standard feature of 3D action-adventure games ever since.