But it is shoved into everything. My friends are constantly telling me to try it. There's even a blue cheese spread you can get and it's...... grey... 🤢
We're probably all looking at AI "art" constantly without realising it. It's blended into everything now because the economics of it are so appealing to anyone with overheads and profit margins. There's no point fighting it.
It's like blue cheese. Just cos I hate the stuff, I'm not gonna try and stop people making or consuming it. Although.. ew.. I mean why?? It's mold inside curdled milk! But to each their own I guess.
The odd thing about "Art", AFAICS, is that no one’s ever really agreed on what it is. You've got your Renaissance period that's all "precision" and "beauty". Then here comes post-modernism where you could tape a banana to a wall and call it a masterpiece. Every era's different and it feels like “Art” is just whatever enough people decide it is. Then the next generation comes along and changes everything again. Feels like AI "Art" is just the next stage. It's kinda fascinating because what happens if artistic skill suddenly has nothing to do with it and it's all about how creative you can be with a prompt? Suddenly millions of people can join in and yeah, most of it will be painful slop, but then suddenly it won't be and that's pretty exciting I think.
I don't think there's a group more doomed to fail than people who try to convince others to hate AI art. It just keeps getting better because that's the nature of progress but their arguments stay the same. Where do we think that's obviously, without a doubt, bitch please, going to end up?
I saw a clip recently that suggested that the closer a cult or movement get to extinction, the more outrageous their behaviour. It helps to provide some context for this kind of action. This feels like bottom of the barrel "anything that annoys the left" type stuff cos Trump doesn't give a damn about this obviously comically corrupt idiot. MAGA can only implode now. There is no scenario where their shtick suddenly makes sense to everyone. It's just going to be this type of stuff until their day is done. I have to say I am kind of curious what the next desperate troll move will be.
Really fun demo. Do yourself a favour and ignore Hond's review. I have no idea what they're talking about or why they're so filled with hate.
I'll go negatives first - It definitely needs optimising, but I was getting a pretty smooth 55 fps on my 4060 RTX on medium settings with DLSS set to "Balanced" on my Ultrawide at 2560 x 1080. Also, why is it having to precompile shaders every time I launch it? I found at least one hilarious bug where a mountain bike would suddenly appear glued to the front of the bus sideways when I pulled into a bus stop. And that's it... pretty much.
The rest of the game is really fun. I've been looking for a decent Bus driving game (not so much sim) for AGES. Also, going into this I had no love for Sabre Interactive. They absolutely ruined Dakar Desert Rally. What a horrible mess that game turned out to be! I have to admit though... they've redeemed themselves a little with this demo. At least I think so.
So, the good things that come to mind are...
It worked immediately with my T-248 wheel. No messing about with confusing settings like in THE BUS. It just worked and it was really easy to adjust all the settings.
I love how you have fixed side mirrors but you get a temporary mirror that appears only when you indicate and only on the side you indicate. It works really well and doesn't clutter up the UI when it's not needed. ETS2, for example does offer UI mirrors but they're either on or off and not cleverly tied to the indicator like in this game.
The people in the town look good and walk around naturally. At least a LOT more naturally than the pedestrians in BUS SIMULATOR 21. There's also a decent amount of people and a nice variety of cars as well.
I love the town itself. It feels like a city that's buzzing with activity and looks really nice. The lighting is great and the sunshine and rain effects feel perfect to me. Compared to the weird plastic town feel of BUS SIMULATOR 21 this is a breath of fresh air. I wanted to love BS21 so much but I just couldn't play it because the environment was so jarringly fake feeling.
I also really liked the game loop. How you unlock extras routes and buses by getting "likes" from your passengers for each bus stop by following all the good driving rules. It made me want to keep driving the routes till I'd filled up each bus stop's "Like" meter and got that all important star. I also really like not having to fiddle about with change and tickets for passengers because bus travel is free in this game. I really didn't enjoy BS21 where you have to get up and go check each passenger for tickets and figure out if anyone's trying to ride the bus for free. I just wanna drive man!
I'm really excited to see how they improve this game and for an early access demo this seriously impressed me. It feels like there might FINALLY be a good bus game on the horizon 😁
G-Rebels demo is back. I just love how nimble the ship is in this one. Fully upgraded you can get up to insane speeds with it darting around the cyberpunk style city. Personally I think they should make more of that, so that you can fly through more narrow gaps and maybe even underground tunnels. Also I've been watching their Discord for a while and they seem to be really going full steam ahead (no pun intended) with this one. Can't wait for the full game 🙂
Absolutely. Also, I'd love to make it a rule that you can't start a review with:
"I really wanted to like this game but..."
Aww... Did you pumpkin? Are you SO disappointed that you don't get to like a thing you wanted to like? That must be so rough for you.
Anyone using that opener is immediately suspicious to me.
You've just reminded me actually, there was a game I loved playing the demo for called "Truck World: Australia - First Haul" I saw back in June that got hugely review bombed (maybe by ETS2 fans?). "Worse than a mobile game" and "It's way too red" were two I remember 🤣
I believe how it works is people buy the game, write the negative review and then refund it. Review bombing is not only definitely a thing but Steam have gone to great lengths to combat it, which would be odd if it was imaginary.
You're right. He doesn't tend to kick the little people, unless they're nicking stuff. I still remember that episode with those two owners (Amy and Samy) at Amy’s Baking Company. They were just such completely unrepentant, terrible people. Apparently they shut the place in 2015 and left the country lol
Oh ok 🙂 It was Seafarer: The Ship Sim. A day after they launched they got a load of negative reviews that took them down to a "Mostly Negative" rating. That's improved since then, presumably once more genuine reviews came in.
I've never seen a sequel fumbled as big as Just Cause 4. I'm still utterly befuddled as to how they could mess it up so bad. JC3 had such fantastic, well rounded characters. Di Ravello, Mario, Dimah, Sheldon and even side characters like Looch and Annika. Not to mention that awesome remix of Firestarter in the intro and getting David Tennant involved. It's been 10 years and I can still picture them and hear their voices perfectly "Looch talking!" 🙂 I hope it's the JC4 team that are being referred to in that headline and that the team that did JC3 all went on to great things.
But it is shoved into everything. My friends are constantly telling me to try it. There's even a blue cheese spread you can get and it's...... grey... 🤢