It’s a hard question to answer I know! Racking my brains here, the most novel thing I can think of is Portal.

You make excellent points. Personally, I rarely have a problem paying for proper DLC (and buy proper DLC I mean, additional story content that wasn’t obviously cynically cut from the OG game). Notable past examples for GTA, stuff like ‘The Ballad of Gay Tony’ were amazing expansions.

Also sticking with GTA, they’re a good example of bad practice nowadays (imo). They pivoted to online-only DLC once they realised how lucrative a pay-to-play system can be when leveraged against not being bullied by players with more disposable income. There was amazing single-player content in dev for GTA5 and they cut it to focus on MP. Worse, they left the dregs of that content in the game, allowed a ‘GTA5 mystery’ concept to flourish and left people hunting for the mystery thinking they were going to find something like GTA4’s bigfoot. Knowing all along it didn’t exist. But of course, happy that people were still playing and hoping they would get bored and try online mode.

Yep, it’s a real quandary. I’m not sure what the solution is, or if there is one from our perspective… it’s no point voting with my wallet when there’s millions of others who won’t.

This was what I meant. It’s these smaller devs that seem to be innovating to any extent at the moment!

Maybe I’m just a bit jaded due to being an old fart nowadays… I remember playing the original Doom / Wolfenstein so especially FPS feel so overdone to me. When was the last time you saw a truly novel game concept? I’m sure I’ve seen a few over the last few years but can’t remember (see, old fart).

This is the big problem with modern gaming. Too many companies are now in hock to investors and publishers. To those at the top of the hierarchy, making a game is an investment, a bet. Innovation is stifled in favour 9f ‘safe bets’, no wonder gaming is stagnating.

It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still exceptions to the rule. But it’s certainly not looking good for fantastic single player games.

I’m expecting gta 6 to have a much shorter single player campaign with most of the focus towards online (and more obscene earnings from shark cards 2.0).

Yeah I’m the same. I’ve got DDG set as my default search, if the results aren’t useful then I go to google as backup.

Is it just me, or has autocorrect on phones also gotten way, way worse? When would I ever want to type ‘thbnks’?

Spotify iirc pays $0.003 per stream, so for 80m streams he’s got $24,000.

If he’s got less than that then he should be directing ire at his label or publisher.

We are as unready for this shit as we were for social media.

Genuinely concerned this will tip the balance enough for trump to win.

Bregg

Russia just cannot be trusted. Over and over and over again, they show this to the world.

Countries need to stop giving Russia ‘one more chance’. Treat the Russian government like the fraudulent, evil pariahs that they reveal themselves to be.

He even looks like a cartoon. His moustache looks like it’s made of sausages

Shreks all day, baby. Why the heck would I want to be a stinky vegetable that makes people cry, when I could instead be a stinky ogre who makes people cry?!

Get oot 'o ma swamp.

I’m cautiously optimistic for Light No Fire. The main thing I learned from the NMS initial launch experience (am a day 1 player) is not to allow myself to get too hyped for games (this knowledge was cemented by the launch of CP2077 haha). And, you’d hope that Sean / HG learned also not to overpromise in terms of feature set… would hope they learned a hell of a lot from the long cycle of updating NMS.

I hoped he wouldn’t, but at the point where he was massing troops at the border it was surely a sign of what was coming.

“We’re not planning on invading, just putting all our troops here for shits and giggles!”

Bit of a copout, but all the main characters from Dispatches From Elsewhere (though I guess that’s by design).

“I want you to think of yourself… as Peter”

It’s not a show for everyone. But I was quite moved by it.

Leigh can be pronounced like ‘Lee’ or ‘Lay’

You can have a use for something, and you can also use something (first one is pronounced the same as the end of ‘papoose’, second one is pronounced the same as ‘ooze’)

Yes, English is weird.

‘Bough’ and ‘cough’ are not pronounced the same. ‘Bough’ and ‘bow’ are pronounced the same. ‘Knee’ and ‘Leigh’ are pronounced the same. ‘Neigh’ and ‘nay’ are pronounced the same. ‘Polish’ (the nationality) and ‘polish’ (as in what you do to a metal object) are not pronounced the same. ‘Tear’ (as in to rip) and ‘tear’ (as in to cry) are spelled the same, but not pronounced the same. Other words which are spelled the same, but pronounced differently:

resume / resume present / present record / record close / close use / use live / live

Sorry I’m well late replying to this! For some reason I didn’t get the notification.

I’ve been trying really hard to boost my visualisation skills. The best I can do is a vague suggestion of an image, it’s like made out of mist and dissipates instantly.

I think there’s probably like you said, a lot of people who think not being able to conjure a distinct internal image = aphantasia. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I’m aphantasic as I score extremely poorly on any tasks that require mental image projection (eg manipulation of 3D objects, spatial reasoning etc). Iirc last time I did an IQ test which broke down IQ into various regions, I scored 17% on that part. And there’s practically nothing there when I shut my eyes and concentrate.

I would wager that without having done halucinogens a number of times, that score / my ability would be even lower.