Pxtl

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Whenever they say “I don’t want to drive down prices” that demonstrates a fundamental unseriousness about the crisis.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Supply and demand control prices. Period. Adding supply will only fail to control prices if demand keeps rising. And if buyer demand keeps rising to keep up with prices? It would suck, but there’s actually a silver lining to that: Rent goes down then.

Remember, now that we’re punishing vacant units, every investment unit must be rented out. So as the investors make a mad dash to build and buy our endlessly-rising housing units, more and more inventory gets dumped onto the rental market.

Now, there’s obvious downsides to this story, I’m not going to pretend the “own nothing and be happy” end is ideal. But it’s better than the “own nothing and live in a fucking tent” ending.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Okay but we got like 5 years of free updates for OW1. If they had an option to play 6v6 and locked out the new characters, that would basically be “the game you paid for”.

I mean, I hate the 5v5 too, but I can’t say I didn’t get my money’s worth for OW1.

Pxtl, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I’m just old enough to remember when you bought a game and that was the whole game, not the game plus years and years of free content. I paid like $30 for OW1 at the first anniversary (or was it second? whichever), then didn’t drop a dime into it. Got a bunch of new characters and maps and balance tweaks for free after launch. For other games that would be DLC, or back in the '90s paid boxed expansions.

Yes, OW2 has been a big let-down. If I had to pay up-front for it? I wouldn’t. I haven’t put a dime into OW2 and I won’t because of the company’s problems.

But in terms of its relationship with OW1? I’m mostly a satisfied customer. I can still play Overwatch, I still have all the drops I got in OW1, and I got many years of complimentary loot in OW1.

Now, would I have preferred to get stuff at the rate I did in OW1? Of course. But I’m also realistic that this isn’t a sustainable business model, especially if they want to go f2p. Also paying for random loot boxes is increasingly illegal in many places, so no matter what they had to switch to a cash shop at least partially (but afaik random drops would’ve still been legal, but still - sustainable business model, remember?)

My biggest complaint is that they didn’t keep OW1 (2-2-2 with weaker tanks) as a mode in the arcade of Ow2.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

My youngest is 10 now and I’ve gotten back into gaming after stopping completely for a decade or so, so yeah the parenting does slow down and you can get back into it. Overwatch is good for that since the rounds aren’t super long like an RTS or a Moba, at least in QuickPlay.

The new support seems fun but i kinda don’t like how she doesn’t have any game-breaking crazy power like some of the other supports do. Mercy’s Rez, Kiriko’s suzu, Ana’s anti-heal, and Lucio’s speed & boop are all amazing for big plays that shift the whole course of the game, and they’re not even ults.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

“avalanche of bars and numbers”

It’s not that bad. It’s basically just your Battle pass score, and your progress on the various goals that contribute to the battlepass score. That plus your kudos from other players thing. Not a crazy amount.

You want a real “point salad” FPS, play Deep Rock Galactic. I’ve got a decent number of hours in that and I still have no idea what 90% of the explosion of post-mission data is.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Yay, muzzle flashes! So, anybody know if old mods will be compatible? Like, can we bring back Transformers Quake 2?

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Big feature I want is remote keyboarding, so I can open the keyboard on my watch and say “actually I’d like to type this from literally anything else because that’s a 1 inch screen”.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

I miss my Zire

Pxtl, 10 months ago

If you’re okay with some very black comedy (all spoken-aloud, nothing shown) and the occasional blood splatter when you get shot, the Portal games are good. The villains are robotic turrets with machine-guns that are defeated simply by tipping them over - so while they’re acting in very violent and lethal ways, the player is just teleporting around and nudging them over to fall down onto their side. But I remember my kid being very offended when GlaDOS called the player character fat, and later reveals she mass-murdered a building full of scientists using nerve-gas.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Well, some 5-year-olds have watched a half-dozen Marvel movies that have very similar content. That’s why I’m giving details onto what’s age-inappropriate about the Portal games so the parent can make an informed decision.

edit: And if just the constant black comedy from GlaDOS is okay, but the blood-splatters when you get shot are concerning, there are ways to disable it (although they’re console-commands and not part of the menu). In Portal 2 the blood was removed altogether because the game didn’t really need it anyways.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

I obviously haven’t played it yet since it’s not out yet, but I kickstarted “Girl Genius: Adventures in Castle Heterodyne” which is based on the Girl Genius comics. The comics are a bit violent and cheesecakey but the game looks like a more cartooney take on the story.

The “Girl Genius” setting is like a fantastical take on 19th-century Europe if it were run entirely by mad scientists - basically taking the Steampunk concept into more fantasy direction. The plot of the game: Agatha is a mad scientist with a heart of gold but she’s also the lost last heir to the evil and depraved Heterodyne Family. To prove her claim to her birthright and save the city of Mechanicsburg she has to get the badly-damaged and utterly crazed AI-powered Castle Heterodyne under control.

The game is a puzzle-platformer.

…steampowered.com/…/Girl_Genius_Adventures_In_Cas…

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Does this fix the context button being broken?

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Looks like it works! Yay!

Pxtl, 10 months ago

So did he. “tell me you didn’t pay money for this” from TMNT movie

Pxtl, 10 months ago

1. Adulthood is when you realize nobody else is going to do that for you.
2. Realize you’re not just procrastinating about the things you have to do, but also the things you want to do. Be ready to start blocking sites like Lemmy and Twitter and Reddit on your phone because those things are neither work nor fun just time-filling.
3. Talk to your doctor. Get the the drugs. They work, and not only do they work they will make you realize just how bad it actually was.

Pxtl, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Fix the goddamned failover to SMS you morons! My kids don’t have data plans and I usually keep data turned off on my phone (because Canada), I keep having to turn off RCS altogether because if I try to send them a message over RCS it doesn’t failover to SMS (yes, I have the option turned on), it just sits there dumfounded saying “can’t deliver”.

You fail at failing.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

I actually have a dirt cheap $15/mo Public Mobile Canada plan that has 250MB data and 100 minutes… and even that has unlimited SMS.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

It’s literally the cheapest plan I can find anywhere that includes any data. I can get $8/mo for unlimited talk and text but zero data.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

As in “data plans are stupid-expensive here”.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

I mean maybe but that is not a thing you say to somebody who isn’t a very close friend or family. That is not a line I’d ever cross with a coworker.

Pxtl, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I’ve been on it for only two weeks.

Everything. Everything was surprising. It’s not just the motivation, it’s emotional complacency that’s gone too. My doormat instincts are gone, I can politely engage with problems instead of avoiding them. I do the things that I want to do.

On Saturday I did yardwork, took my youngest kid out for a run, then to the beach with our dog where tiny sunfish nipped at our legs, then rock climbing (she’s training for a team), then I made dinner from scratch, and then we went to a local free festival for bazaar shopping and a reggae concert with her big brother. It was amazing.

I’m in my 40s and I’m retroactively angry about my life.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

It’s over, you can go outside and play now

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Stone Age. Worker placement and set collection point salad and not much else.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Yeah. I like worker placement games, but Stone Age seems to think “oh player X goes before you this turn and gets dibs on spot Y so revise your plans” is the most interesting part of worker-placement. Which, no, it isn’t. It’s an important mechanic, but it feels like that and collect-em-up is basically the whole game in Stone Age.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Unfortunately now somebody is bedazzling the Canadian flag:

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/4d7244ef-7b07-4a12-b2a8-3e07bbab45ad.png

Pxtl, 10 months ago

I confess I did hold off for a minute so I could place the last pixel.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

If you want my attention with Star Wars, give me a sequel to the Squadrons games. Play with the formula, set it in the Mandalorian post-empire setting so you can l mix up the fleets instead of just Empire Vs Rebels.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

I tried playing War for Cybertron and the single player campaign did not do it for me. Good art for its day, but the gameplay was generic 3rd person shooter but with extremely stingy ammo rationing and the transforming mechanic that felt like an afterthought.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

See with the brown coloring and the working-class subject-matter I’m thinking this is more 19th-century French Realism than Renaissance.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Can USB hubs even allow the phone to be charged and simultaneously control things through the same port? I know I tried that back in the USB2 days and found it infuriatingly false, since had set up a wired USB mouse and game controller to my tablet for portable shooters. One particular hazard is I’ve found that combining bluetooth headphones and game controllers can result in unplayably-bad latency on Android, so wired options would be nice.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

On the plus side it’ll make waterproofing way easier. And ports are often the first thing to break on phones in my experience. Honestly my biggest disappointment will be the loss of the SIM slot, since e-SIMs give me the creeps. I like that my relationship to the cellular provider is on a part I can pop out.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

I’m disappointed Moto Mods didn’t take off. They would’ve been a great way to provide a hermetically sealed phone with all the optional stuff you wanted slapped on the back. Beefier battery, better controls, all the ports you want, etc. Like, a phone with a weak internal battery but then a magnetically attached external one so you don’t even have to open open the back of the phone to hot-swap.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Oh I agree but it’s obviously easier to waterproof a phone with ports. Besides that ports and buttons are the most common point-of-failure (I’m looking at my kid’s headphones on my desk where the power button was crushed in and my to-do list is to open it up and see if it’s repairable). Honestly my biggest complaint comparing the old Walkmen to modern phones isn’t the buttons and ports (I remember how miserable the buttons were on my 100-meter waterproof Casio watch back in the '80s) but rather the screws. I hate that glue has become a standard tool in electronics assembly. If I never have to do the gamble of the “hot enough to loosen the sealant but not to hot to damage it” dance with a heat-gun again it will be too soon.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

To give more details since somebody else gave you the short answer: Not only is it possible, most mid-to-high-end phones and all watches have that feature today. Google “Qi charging”, which is the modern global standard (although many devices are still on their own incompatible standards – Galaxy Watch, I’m looking in your direction).

Pxtl, 10 months ago

This sounds neat until you need to use the camera or actually phone somebody on it. Which end is the mic?

Pxtl, 11 months ago

They’re talking about Mastodon, where there’s no algorithmic feed and likes are only visible when you focus the toot, and so “likes” are kinda useless, only retoots. Lemmy is different, likes matter here.