It’s the game that was already said to be overflowing with shitty abandoned player bases even though it was in closed beta, right? And their answer was like, “be responsible, players, destroy your own base when you don’t want it anymore”.

This is going to be… interesting.

I think it’s a funny way to point out how absurd that monetisation is.

Made me think of an old James Stephanie Sterling review of Dungeon Keeper (not the real one, the shitty mobile game made 20 years later by EA). It made you wait forever for the basic action of digging rooms to add to your dungeon, in order to sell you speed boosts of course.

The comparison Sterling made was something like, for the same price right now, you could dig up 20 squares in this pseudo-game, or buy several copies of the actual Dungeon Keeper .

Reddit is getting there fast really, popup after popup of constant nagging and such a terrible enshittified UI they just had to kill any effort to make it better by closing their API.

Discord servers are invisible to the outside world, which means you can’t discover the ones you might be interested in. And once you’re in, hope you don’t have to look for something in particular, because search function is terrible and the UI is actively fighting against you when you try to look any message farther back than a page or two. It’s really made for discussion, they tried getting better at being a content source but they still suck at it.

But yeah, any content that’s on Facebook may as well not exist for me. My account (that I had already created only so I could access walled stuff) has been closed for more than a decade now.

You used to be able to find forums on any weird subject. Tech stuff has always been the easiest to find, it’s basically one of the only subjects for which you can even find somewhat active Lemmy communities (!).

Almost everything else has become Reddit communities or Discord servers.

I’d hope even if it exists on managed workstations, it wouldn’t be able to change settings that are managed by administrators… If it can, what the fuck.

I am pretty sure Microsoft doesn’t need an AI agent to access your settings.

However, that AI agent might be a new attack vector for someone else.

A map made of blue rectangles with white outlines joking, saw quite enough of those already.

A pet peeve of mine : a new ability should not be used to just go through one or two obstacles and never again. Best case is it has potential uses outside the ability gates, for example it gives you new moves or options you can exploit in combat and such. Because if not it may as well be just an ordinary key, and though it’s okay to have a couple locks and keys in your game, your new “power” being reduced to that is frustrating.

As an example of what not to do IMO, there’s an item called the Spinner, a cogwheel machine you can ride in The Legend of Zelda : Twilight Princess. It looks crazy and cool as fuck… And you use it 3 times in the whole game, because it works on rails, there are very few rails and it’s completely useless everywhere else. Boo.

In any case, Mario doesn’t exactly need picture perfect ray traced lit graphics where you can see every fiber of his mustache or how his overalls reflect light just right so you can see the denim texture.

Nah, the only thing he needed was nose jiggle physics actually.

I still can’t understand how that even crossed someone’s mind. It’s funny though.

If you don’t think it’s weird to draw funny cartoon animals all over official documents, and somewhat attempt to guess people’s marital status out of nowhere when they do, you might be a bit weird.

Please keep your weird stuff private, furries/scalies.

My cousin’s out fighting dragons, and what do I get? Chat duty.

On a still picture taken in the right place, maybe. Bright, cartoony graphics also help. The Mario style is probably not the kind that’s best to showcase graphic power.

Anyway, animation, lighting and physics is where you can see the gap between Odyssey and Sunshine. Also richer, bigger environments, even though Sunshine used a lot of tricks and already looked rather impressive for the time on that front. Well, until framerate dropped into single-digit halfway through Noki Bay.

Mario games have done that for a few episodes after this too. And also for 2D games that baffling thing where you can only save after finishing a castle or fortress.

Then Super Mario Odyssey just gets rid of lives completely, and nothing of value was lost.

Publication 1988-06-05, latest amendment 2004-12-01.

I almost expected the two dates to use different formats, but no, they’re just both “the American way”.

So, assuming you got the time wrong and meant you could confuse year and time of day, ISO also puts time after date.

2025-05-01T18:18:03Z

Which makes sense. Higher unit to lower unit.

Won’t be true after 9999-12-31, however.

It could happen, but especially if the game has at least some popularity on a platform like Steam I expect someone more tech savvy than average would smell a rat and start looking, or ask around, and it’d be found out.

I don’t know exactly how those work, but I imagine on top of weird CPU usage it would make very suspicious network calls too. There’s always a guy that sees stuff like that and goes “where the fuck are my cycles and packets going?”

They certainly don’t review code, but on those there must be at least a scan for the most obvious malicious stuff. I am not sure it’d detect something hidden like in the article though. After all even on the guy’s PC it was only detected once it tried to actually download stuff.

The good thing about workshop is visibility, if someone notices something shady it’ll be known fast. Not perfect, but probably better than getting your mods from random sites nobody knows.

If someone builds a base on freaking sand instead of rock they deserve to be eaten by a worm.

I literally have a Rimworld mod that calls an external python script as a feature.

It’s a special case, of course said script is not part of the mod package, it has to be installed manually. What it does is allowing generating portraits for characters externally.

I even rewrote the script to use local generation, but the one provided as an example calls an online API.