Stovetop
@Stovetop@lemmy.world
- Comment on GeoGuessr's Steam Release Hit With Overwhelmingly Negative Reviews For "Completely Pointless" Monetization 18 hours ago:
No arguments here. I used to love Geoguessr when it was 100% free, but have never once paid for it since they switched to a subscription model. I just blame Google more than Geoguessr is all.
- Comment on Stop Internet Searching and Start Asking on Fediverse? 18 hours ago:
Depending on who you ask, a lot. Or very little.
For me today, though, it was the large downtime earlier. It’s big by Fediverse standards, microscopic by Reddit standards, and as-is it struggles to keep stable uptime some days.
- Comment on GeoGuessr's Steam Release Hit With Overwhelmingly Negative Reviews For "Completely Pointless" Monetization 22 hours ago:
My understanding is that Google charges for use of their API. The game could switch to a traditional flat price model, but the moment they stop making enough in sales to pay Google for API access, the entire game is dead for everyone.
The subscription sucks but it’s basically a requirement to continue running. Would be nice if there was any sort of open map standard with even half the street view data Google has so they wouldn’t need Google at all.
- Comment on US popularity collapses worldwide in wake of Trump’s return 2 days ago:
Simple answer is that the majority of Americans still either completely agree with him, or they just hate the Dems so badly they’d vote for a potato before they vote for anyone with a D next to their name.
That or we continue entertaining the January 6 type of fantasy where we believe the entire thing was rigged.
- Comment on Doom: The Dark Ages' PS5 physical release reportedly has just 85MB on disc, and Xbox isn't much bigger 2 days ago:
So much for physical media.
- Comment on Onion 3 days ago:
Shattered by someone…or something.
- Comment on Vote manipulation bots using sh.itjust.works? 3 days ago:
Good catch. I linked this post in the comments of that other post you linked, and it looks like the moderators have since removed the post entirely.
There was another one linking out to that same site (maybe the other post you saw as well) which I recall had an extremely misleading clickbait-y headline. It also seems to have been removed, so at least mods are staying on top of it.
Does Lemmy have the ability to automatocally block/remove posts leading to certain domains? Seems to be a common thread of these accounts trying to promote this one “news” site. Though I don’t imagine this sort of thing will stop at one site.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
I think it’s unfair to say that the US is what dictates the direction and usage of the English language. It contributed, maybe, but it’s not because of the US that English is so widely-spoken in the first place. We have Britain to thank for that.
If the US ever adopts a second language to use for trade, it will be Spanish, just by virtue of who its neighbors are and how many native Spanish speakers live in the US already.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
It’s more a reflection of global power. Before English had that standard in Europe, it was French. We still describe such languages as a “lingua franca” even in contexts where that lingua isn’t franca anymore.
Esperanto isn’t anyone’s native language by design, but it meant that there was no major global power which necessitated its use.
- Comment on [Game Bundle] Xbox Games Studio Bundle 4 days ago:
Ori is very good.
Would recommend playing Ori and the Blind Forest before Will of the Wisps though, the plot might seem a bit confusing if you don’t.
- Comment on Or a shrimp 1 week ago:
Don’t know who the heck downvoted or why, but thanks for the info!
- Comment on Or a shrimp 1 week ago:
Fuck that is dark, what is this from?
- Comment on We pink inside too :( 1 week ago:
Then why the heck we call them gray matter?
- Comment on Every new car park may have to be covered with solar panels [UK] | Solar canopies would be compulsory under proposals estimated to save £28,000 on electricity bills at an 80-space car park 1 week ago:
Usually these solar arrangements are just feeding back into the grid to offset energy consumption for whoever owns them (or to make some money themselves), but it could in theory also directly supply local infrastructure like EV chargers, streetlights, other utility lines that draw power, etc.
I guess I’m of the opinion that this may as well be done. Parking lots are already terrible for the environment given that they just trap heat and, you know, take up valuable land space that could better be put to other uses. But if they’re going to exist, may as well turn them into solar farms to offset their net burden somewhat.
- Comment on Zelda 64: Recompiled (Majora's Mask) adds modding support, texture pack support, optimizations and more 1 week ago:
At first I was like “Why would anyone want to change OoT’s art and mess with perfection?”, but I do have to admit that I have really been craving a modern Zelda game in the vein of the N64 releases, which is a formula they haven’t touched since Skyward Sword in 2011.
Wind Waker at least is a game that (visually) aged very gracefully and I think can still stand against newer games even now, but I’ve played it to death and just wish we had something new.
Also not to discredit BotW/TotK or anything, I think they are still great games and I also really enjoyed them, but they’re just built different. Zelda is now a franchise of 3 distinct styles, but only two of them (2D and open world) are still getting new releases.
- Comment on Zelda 64: Recompiled (Majora's Mask) adds modding support, texture pack support, optimizations and more 1 week ago:
This is the video I didn’t know I was looking for in life.
I’ve been very into Zelda rando stuff lately, but the mod support shown here just seems above and beyond what I’ve seen so far from my limited experience with Ship/2Ship.
- Comment on Zelda 64: Recompiled (Majora's Mask) adds modding support, texture pack support, optimizations and more 1 week ago:
Is this similar to the Ship of Harkinian recompiles, just as a different project?
- Comment on This is a photo of irony. 1 week ago:
I don’t think that is how the song went, the guy who was afraid to fly ended up getting on a plane, which crashed just like he was afraid it would.
Mr. Play-It-Safe was afraid to fly He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye He waited his whole damn life to take that flight And as the plane crashed down He thought, “Well, isn’t this nice?”
- Comment on Speedrunner already beat Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Nintendo Switch 2 1 week ago:
No, those sorts of things can absolutely happen. Newer versions of games often either patch issues on older versions or there may be some glitches that are not as easy to take advantage of when the hardware isn’t struggling as much.
The Zelda Speedruns site even maintains a list of version differences for various Zelda games which make a difference to which version is optimal to run.
- Comment on Speedrunner already beat Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Nintendo Switch 2 1 week ago:
Yep, even going way back, there are differences between speedrun times for Ocarina of Time on N64, Ocarina of Time on GameCube, Ocarina of Time on Wii VC, and Ocarina of Time on NSO. And that’s also not factoring in the native PC port recently assembled by the community.
And that’s why speedrun leaderboards always factor in game version/region and platform when measuring runs against one another.
- Comment on Judge in Epic v. Apple bans Apple from charging commission on purchases made outside App Store 1 week ago:
It’s always fun when two terrible tech giants fight it out.
- Comment on Oblivion remake is... really making it apparent how outdated Bethesda is in its approach to making games 2 weeks ago:
I think Bethesda has definitely fallen off in recent years, but I am a bit confused by the point this post is getting at. We all learned at launch that Oblivion is a remaster, not a remake, and it’s literally the original game running under the hood with a new coat of paint and some minor tweaks.
It’s not a half-assed remake, it’s a pretty high-effort remaster. But I think it’s a bad example to use of how the company isn’t getting better when the point of the remaster was to change as little of the core game as possible.
Starfield is what should be killing everyone’s expectations of Elder Scrolls 6.
- Comment on Asking the hard questions 2 weeks ago:
If someone had 3 eyes, would they trink?
- Comment on Oblivion Remastered Impressions (and Discussion Thread) 2 weeks ago:
The main problem with it in Oblivion was that the enemies grow stronger as you level up, and since a lot of people didn’t understand the leveling system, they’d wind up with horribly underpowered characters in the late game. Some people deliberately remained at level 1 to keep the enemies easy.
Yep, the old “optimal” way to play, if you didn’t want to focus so hard on efficient leveling, was to make all of your major skills ones that you never planned to use. That way, for the skills that you do use frequently, you can increase those as much as you want while still sitting at level 1, allowing the player to become considerably stronger while enemies stayed at the same difficulty.
Alternatively, if someone messed up character creation, they could also simply choose to never sleep and never trigger the level up dialog. But there are a couple of quests which require the player to sleep to trigger an event, so folks would have to be smart about how they go about engaging with those.
- Comment on Day 281 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games l've been playing 2 weeks ago:
Ghost of Tsushima is not quite as big as more recent Ubisoft games, though. Valhalla was just a stupidly large game with not much meaningful content in it. Just big for the sake of being big.
I heard that Shadows was supposed to be a bit smaller, but guessing they still don’t know how to really pare down the scale to match the content.
- Comment on Oblivion Remastered Impressions (and Discussion Thread) 2 weeks ago:
As someone who played waaaaaay too much of the original game back in the day and was very concerned about a remaster doing it justice, I have to say it turned out about as well as it possibly could have.
It didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel or make fixes for things that weren’t broken (other than the leveling, at least), it just turned Oblivion into a modern game while still being Oblivion deep down inside.
I am curious to hear perspectives on what Skyrim-only players think about it, because while the Oblivion remake is arguably now the most modernized Elder Scrolls game, it still doesn’t have some of the gameplay and QoL improvements that later came to Skyrim. It’s a perfect remaster for me, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are folks out there thinking, “Why is there no dual wielding,” “What’s with the weird zoomed in dialog system,” “Where are all the skill perks,” or “Why are there no NPC companions,” and similar.
I also do hope that Bethesda or the community releases an updated version of the construction set soon so the modding scene can take off again for the game. From what I hear, the original Oblivion construction set is able to be used in the remaster with a good deal of messing around, but modders don’t currently have the tools needed to interact at all with the Unreal Engine 5 wrapper.
- Comment on Need a tiebreaker 2 weeks ago:
Something like this would probably work well:
- Comment on Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remake Reveal Livestream (starts in 23 hours) 3 weeks ago:
Wouldn’t be much of a point, though. Skyblivion is already just about done, if they C&D it later this year there will still be a 99% finished Skyblivion floating around on various hosting sites that they’d never be able to stop people from getting their hands on.
It’s not the same sort of situation as teams making mods or romhacks of Nintendo games who (foolishly) announce it early and get C&D’d immediately before there’s anything to play. Skyblivion is something you can play in an almost-complete state right now if you wanted, and I don’t think a C&D in a few month’s time will stop modders from finishing it anyways since it’s so close to completion.
- Comment on Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remake Reveal Livestream (starts in 23 hours) 3 weeks ago:
It wouldn’t be the first sort of game that Microsoft has remastered in that style, though.
The Halo 1 and 2 remasters used a separate rendering layer over the original game which included updated art assets, and a setting to toggle between the original graphics and the updated ones on the fly. For the most part it was fine, but there were a couple of (primarily out of bounds) areas where the original collision did not always align with the updated geometry.
But I am hoping that it is more than just a simple rendering layer over the original game, because like you said it would require more hands-on work to improve things like forest density and interior clutter. It would look odd if they just increased the polygon count of foliage while still leaving it as sparse in places as the original. At least based on the leaked screenshots, the side-by-sides do give the impression that things have moved slightly and additional objects have been added, so extra rendering layer or not, my guess is that edits to the original game are also still involved (and likely means there won’t be a Halo-style graphics toggle button).
- Comment on Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remake Reveal Livestream (starts in 23 hours) 3 weeks ago:
My copium is maybe we get a little update with this announcement. Not thinking it likely, but this whole Oblivion shadowdrop move would tie in well with a statement that ES6 is still coming and this is their way of tiding people over until then.
