Ashtear
@Ashtear@piefed.social
- Comment on Quidk! I need a chili recipe. What would you add to a pound of hamburger, diced jalapenos, chili powder and bloody mary mix? 1 week ago:
Don’t use bloody mary mix. Add tomatoes, whether skinning and cutting them yourself, using a can of diced or crushed tomatoes, or tomato paste. If fresh or paste, add chicken stock.
You’ll also want an acid. Can be vinegar, lemon juice, or even mustard.
- Comment on BREAKING: PlayStation is shutting down Bluepoint Games (Demon's Souls/Shadow of the Colossus remakes) 1 week ago:
I’d forgotten that was on the Nvidia list. Wasn’t many misses on there. Final Fantasy IX remake was another big one that never surfaced.
- Comment on Young gamers in Japan may not be forming the same attachment to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest because modern dev cycles are as long as their childhood, users theorize - AUTOMATON WEST 1 week ago:
I agree this is a much more plausible reason. Not only was there less choice, there was less opportunity. Adjusting for inflation, I paid over $150 for Final Fantasy VI when it came out. Games were precious, and the good games were ones you replayed because–unless you were quite privileged–you didn’t have a big library to choose from.
That’s the kind of thing that endears players, and it takes truly exceptional products to get there now. There are also far more studios that have the game-making formulas to work with today, too. I don’t think that’s a bad thing in any way.
- Comment on The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk: Ad makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we're unhappy and looking for solutions. 1 week ago:
The wild thing is how this is a complete 180 for the marketing industry. They went through a paradigm shift into authenticity, or at least the appearance thereof, not all that long ago as millennials aged into their prime spending demographic.
That demand didn’t go away, but now as wide swaths of people continue settle more into a post-truth world, I have to imagine the most effective mass market communication is the kind that can successfully serve both sides of the divide at once, almost like quantum superposition. I think of the success of The Boys, which did well because it simultaneously carried a scathing critique of fascism and capitalism while presenting fascist “heroes” that some could see as validation of their beliefs.
- Comment on Dragon Quest VIII is so charming 2 weeks ago:
I think it’s a testament to the series’s formula that DQ8 managed to keep charming me despite how dark it got. There’s a late game twist with a character that I still think about from time to time.
DQ5 is my favorite in the series by a mile–it’s also rather popular in general–so that’s an easy recommend for people that like the series. There’s also Chrono Trigger if you haven’t played it yet, as another in the lighthearted/JRPG/Akira Toriyama vein.
- Comment on SOMA, off the backlog after nine years 5 weeks ago:
Safe mode is the better experience, unfortunately. Probably the most common criticism for the game, the stealth sections just don’t do much for the game and take away from the experience at times.
- Comment on QWERTY Phones Are Really Trying to Make a Comeback This Year 1 month ago:
Having to use something like Windows IME on a phone for Japanese is nightmare fuel
- Comment on New Life is Strange Game Spotted, And Yes, This One Will Finally Bring Back Chloe 1 month ago:
Not gonna lie, if they get Ashly Burch I’m gonna pick it up.
- Comment on ‘Just an unbelievable amount of pollution’: how big a threat is AI to the climate? 1 month ago:
It’s also going to get more efficient, like Amazon’s data centers have been over time. By the way, where was this zeal over water usage from people back when AWS and other data centers started popping up all over the place?
The water issue will end up being more in how local water tables are affected, not overall consumption.
- Comment on Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore 1 month ago:
I run 11 LTSC on a local account with tweaks from privacy.sexy. Zero issues.
Ultimately not worth the hassle of an upgrade until it’s required for an important app, though. I only did it because I had a congested 10 install and wanted to wipe anyway.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 1 month ago:
Yeah, that’s part of why it was so disappointing! Hah. I had a really good time with Kingmaker, really the only big complaint I had about it was the encounter density. Just far, far too many fights. The kingdom management fell off the rails at the end, too, but at least that was a pretty small part of the game. So I figured I’d love WotR. Most of my complaints are with the story (especially since I loved Kingmaker’s villain, so that’s a tough bar to clear), not the gameplay, but yeah, so much of it didn’t land for me.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 2 months ago:
Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader. Other than a couple of hours in Dawn of War, this is my only experience with the setting and I’m really digging it. I also already like Argenta more than any of the party members in Kingmaker or WotR. I’m nearing the end of Chapter 1, I think.
I have an interesting feeling about this one, like it could possibly be an all-timer for me, although my experience with gaming is telling me it’s more likely it’ll end up being more of a near miss. I had a good feeling about Kingmaker early too, but that game always felt very raw, obviously a product of a young studio. WotR was massively disappointing, unfortunately. Hoping Rogue Trader ends up more like the former. Just wish I had more time/energy to play it.
- Comment on Visa says AI will start shopping and paying for you in 2026 2 months ago:
This is where I sit on it. I think there’s a way to create a personal shopping assistant that would save people time, but the problem is I don’t make enough money to have a comfortable enough margin for the error rate it would certainly have, to speak nothing of whether it would find the prices I’d be satisfied with. I don’t know how many people are in affordable enough living situations where using this to save time would even be responsible.
And that’s assuming the agent is working in the best interests of the user, which we all know isn’t how this is going to work. In general, I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable with agentic AI spending my money without it being codified into law that AI agents must have a provable fiduciary duty to end users. As far as I know, no one’s even talking about that.
- Comment on Jason Schreier's List of the Best Video Games of 2025 2 months ago:
He’s kind of a JRPG traditionalist, so I’m not surprised he wasn’t big on the game.
- Comment on Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases 2 months ago:
It took me forever too. Doesn’t help that I insist on playing these games turn-based.
- Comment on Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases 2 months ago:
Yeah, I’m planning on leap-frogging this time for this very reason. I tend to get GPU-bottlenecked more often than not, so hopefully whatever I pick up next year will extend my system long enough for a little more sanity to return.
- Comment on Stardew Valley Creator Says 1.7 Update Will Contain 'More Character/Social Stuff' and a New Farm Type 2 months ago:
Someone just needs to clone him so he can actually finish the new game.
- Comment on Video Game Physical Software and Hardware Sales Just Had the Worst November in the U.S. Since 1995 - IGN 2 months ago:
First year recorded.
- Comment on No AI* Here - A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter - Waterfox Blog 2 months ago:
Mind explaining what features and why?
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 2 months ago:
Considering we’ve already got the one former Larian employee speaking out against this, it’ll be interesting to see how many more show up off the record (or maybe on the record anonymously). I’m sure there was an internal battle over it.
There aren’t many (possibly none) with more goodwill banked among enthusiast gamers than Vincke, so I feel like we’re about to see just how far a popular figure can step into this particular puddle without coming out soaked.
- Submitted 2 months ago to games@lemmy.world | 7 comments
- Comment on 2025 Game Awards Results Discussion 2 months ago:
Yeah, pound-for-pound, as far as collecting stuff goes, these games get crazy expensive. Some of them are more generous than others with the in-game currency outlays, but that can become its own problem with daily grinds.
- Comment on 2025 Game Awards Results Discussion 2 months ago:
There is some very high quality writing and gameplay in the genre right now. A lot of talented people are working on these games. And generally speaking, yes, you don’t need to spend a dime to see the main content.
I tend not to recommend them because you never know who has a gambling problem (and sometimes people don’t know until they are exposed to it for the first time). There’s also the other odd quirk–not just in gacha, but in live-service and other self-insert media in general lately–where character romance is omitted from the game world because they don’t want to offend insecure men. Can make things feel flat at times.
If one knows they are fine with both of those issues, there’s a lot of great content out there.
- Comment on The Game Awards begins 11 hours from now. What are you looking forward to? 2 months ago:
Close enough
- Comment on The best games of 2025, picked by NPR's staff 2 months ago:
Their reviews aren’t frequent. This is more of a “we ask around the org for what everyone liked this year.” It’s a consistently good list year after year.
- Submitted 2 months ago to games@lemmy.world | 11 comments
- Comment on Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence 2 months ago:
Slightly different? Comparing a dead simple plot of employment vs. the performance of the S&P to a DID Poisson regression event study is the coughing baby vs. hydrogen bomb meme.
This Stanford study is just one in a very active field of economic research, so it’s reasonable to be skeptical, but I really hope you don’t think people make decisions based on the kind of thing in that Tiktok video.
- Comment on Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence 2 months ago:
This study controls for the post-COVID hiring spike in three ways: the researchers generated results without including the tech sector, they separated out remote work, and compared trends from 2018-2022 to those after. The hypothesis holds in all cases. The primary regression analysis also included a standard set of controls for hiring trends (such as interest rate fluctuation).
There’s enough here to find a negative correlation between generative AI and entry-level employment.
- Comment on steam vs gog, which game store to buy from? 2 months ago:
In my experience this is the biggest knock against it, and it can be fatal for multiplayer games. I had to wait several days for a patch to get pushed to continue my Baldur’s Gate 3 campaign with a friend because she’d picked it up on Steam. We eventually had her keep Steam offline.
Considering the condition games can be released in lately, it can really suck to wait in general, too.
- Comment on US adults social media usage by platform 2 months ago:
Not sure how you got to that conclusion. The survey prompt was “Please indicate whether or not you ever use the following websites or apps.” 29% responded that they do not use the platform, less than 1% did not respond. That’s 70%.