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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • games that I really do care about and want to be able to experience on authentic hardware.

    Crack the console then, ps2s have software cracks by now, and sideloading cartridges exist for a fair few portable consoles.

    Basically the only one where you can’t really do it is the cartridge era stuff but those can be approximated with a decent emulator, a controller adapter and a CRT screen, if you’re willing to tolerate a bit of latency with output converters.

    Games are fundamentally software, the hardware gives the experience but the cartridges/disks, with some exceptional cases aside, are literally just a delivery system and a means to maintain ownership.

    It’s nice to have them for that feeling of tangible presence but realistically that’s never going to be more affordable the further we move from when they were made, but that doesn’t mean you can’t at least approximate playing on the hardware or straight up just do it.




  • People can be correct about something for the wrong reasons.

    This guy is a bellend, there’s plenty of reasons to cheer on the demise of Ubisoft without having to be a “DEI is in the room with us” obsessive like Grummz, and ignoring that because it’s easier to call the people who don’t like you chuds shows a similar level of detachment from reality.

    Ubisoft’s fuckups are too numerous to list, and the latest one was indeed too fall for a swindler who convinced them to try and sell one of the least marketable ideas in history, but the volume of sales lost is not in the same order of magnitude as the politically obsessed lunatics online on either side of this conversation, blaming them is like blaming sharks for all animal related deaths.






  • You realise this isn’t make believe at all, right? Stocks are ownership.

    If a stock dips low enough it’s possible to do what microsoft did with Activision Blizzard and buy out another company wholesale, for instance.

    Speculation on the stock market isn’t the reason the market exists, it’s a side effect of its pricing mechanisms, the actual point of it is to gather money for companies and gather stake for buyers.

    If a major company like Ubisoft keeps tanking, odds are you can look forward to another major buyout and merger which will make the already horribly oligopolistic game industry even smaller, which is not good for anyone involved.


  • Because it’s pressvertising.

    Veilguard has had a year (at least) of relentless, shameless astroturfing, ever since BG3 got GOTY, because EA knows it’s not gonna be even close to competing with it and they (rightly) fear Veilguard will get shat on, especially since Bioware is on a 2 games abject failure streak with Andromeda and Anthem both failing horribly and Inquisition having at best a mixed reception with how buggy and repetitive it was at launch.


    As a rule of thumb: if an article comes out before a game’s actual release, it’s positive about an aspect the game or franchise is known to be lacking in, and it sounds like John Oliver’s parody of a corporate shill? It’s pressvertising.

    It’s access-for-coverage, a trading of favours that stays undisclosed because technically no money changed hands; however, in the past we’ve seen what happens to outlets that don’t kiss the ring and use the access to actually speak negatively of the product, or even neutrally, so we know there is an implicit (and explicit if you know the history of these dealings) pressure to be positive at any cost.


    So in short: it’s a bad article pretending to analyse the content they have early access to when really they’re just advertising the game uncritically. It’s literally just source-washed marketing material.