Vordus

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Vordus,

I would suspect that the real draw to working with Starfleet for non-federation personnel isn’t any concept of wages, but a comprehensive benefits package. Presumably Starfleet membership confers some level of personal federation membership, possibly for both you and your immediate family, which may mean that you get to move your loved ones to a mostly-utopic federation world.

The horrible morals of a show supposed to teach them

I’ve been watching the various Star Trek shows for a while now, and while not finished I saw most of them, I believe. And I cannot shake off the feeling that the messages given by these shows, especially (and almost exclusively) recent ones are pushing horrible morals that most people seem to not care about....

Vordus,

Yep. The show was written by humans, humans are flawed, therefore the show is flawed. It’s constantly undone by an unholy mix of things that seemed okay at the time, things that were written to try and correct the things that previously seemed okay at the time (but which made things worse), the personal flaws of the creators seeping into their works, and a pile of crappy tropes that TV can’t help but lean on. It’s weird that you think this is something that isn’t a consideration of the show ‘anymore’; this all goes back all the way to the 60s. Original Trek is occasionally misogynistic crap, and once went so far as to describe Nazism as the most efficient form of government. TNG had episodes that were straight up racist, and characters that are accidentally written as creeps. This is a problem the show has always had, and sometimes you just have to deal with that to get to the good stuff.

Vordus,

Elim Garak, because how can you not love a patently duplicitous and yet still somehow generally benevolent smooth-talker who chews all the scenery and exudes the queerest energy simple tailor?

Vordus,

Especially when it released almost immediately after the new Harebrained Schemes game flopped. Paradox was absolutely not in a position to let a tentpole slip, re: investors.

Vordus,

Heck, Lower Decks already did it with Boimler, with the status quo being back to normal after two episodes of fun B-plots on the Titan.

Vordus,

It’s a shoe-in for Merriam Webster’s word of the year, I reckon.

Vordus,

Unfortunately, Steve Ditko’s ‘Mr A.’

Vordus,

That’s why we praise RollerCoaster Tycoon’s dev, he wrote the entire thing in assembly.

It’s ironic that we always seem to praise RollerCoaster Tycoon specifically, as that’s one’s based on the Transport Tycoon engine, which was also by Josh Sawyer and also in x86 assembly.

Well, Cities: Skylines 2 is here, and it's another broken game release.

I don’t really understand how people make the review threads, but we’re sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it’s even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the...

Vordus,

My suspicion is that the game would have been delayed had the new Harebrained Schemes game not just flopped.

Vordus,

Not Trombone Champ, 2022’s best indie game?

Vordus,

Heck, even before you take into account differing xenobiologies, this has precedent on earth; different cultures are often unused to how other cultures smell.

Annotations for *Star Trek: Lower Decks* 4x07: “A Few Badgeys More” (SPOILERS)

The title is a play on the classic 1965 Sergio Leone spaghetti western, “For a Few Dollars More”, starring Clint Eastwood. That movie was a sequel to “A Fistful of Dollars”, which was referenced in the TNG episode title “A Fistful of Datas”....

Vordus,

The choice of Bynars as the latest victims was clever; if you’re going to remind everyone what’s going on with mysterious ship, but need to get through the entire sequence as quickly as possible, go with the species that transfer information at the quickest rate!

Vordus,

And it’s even on Game Pass! Oh, wait…

Vordus,

I mean, if we’re gonna namedrop completely unique indie darling difficult puzzles, then Return of the Obra Dinn also deserves a mention.

Vordus,

But wootz! Don’t you see! Fortnite was making inroads into the metaverse, and we all know that whoever cracks the metaverse concept is going to reap infinite profits right? Because that’s certainly not a weird dystopian sci-fi pipe dream or anything! It was going to be all smooth sailing straight into forever profits!

Vordus,

GIMP is free and also doubles as a way to express just how much I hate myself!

Vordus,

The Wolf Among Us 2 is straight up a cursed game at this point.

Vordus,

It went to Songtradr, who are mostly a music licencing company. So I’m guessing that at least initially things are going to stay the same but that musicians are going to get nagged into letting Songtradr put their stuff up on their big licencing store. And then enshittification, because that’s how absolutely everything is going.

Vordus,

They wanted to use it to sell music licences for games and media production and the like. But it never really worked out, so they’ve sold it to a company that already actually knows how to do that.

Vordus,

Quality, no. Reception, yes. These two things aren’t necessarily the same.

Vordus,

Give it a few weeks and it’ll be $7.99. Maybe even $5.99 depending on how many sales they got last time it hit $7.99.

They keep it at this price because it allows them to advertise an ‘80% discount’ several times a year, which gives them better visibility in the sales.

Which is a wholly different level of suck. But hey, ho.

Vordus,

It’s not entirely against their own self-interest. More accessible engines on the market means more beginner devs who may graduate to Epic in a few years, and more products to sell on the EGS. Also more devs potentially means more asset store customers.

Regardless, it’s certainly more helpful to the industry than Unity at the moment.

Vordus,

Honestly, whilst it would be nice for the mysterious ship of destruction to actually reach the central plot someone soon, I’m enjoying the little snapshots into lower deck life on other ships. It’s a shame it always inevitably ends with vaporisation.

Vordus,

spoilerGood call!

Vordus,

No, that’s the Xbox One S. This is the Xbox Series S.

Vordus,

It becomes even more confusing when you think about the fact that the Xbox One is not the Xbox 1, which was just the Xbox. And that the Xbox One X, the souped up version of the Xbox One, can be abbreviated as the XBOX, which again, is not the original Xbox.

Vordus,

Depends on whether you’re willing to spend $20 to turn your Series S into a devkit, at which point the S can be an utter beast for emulation.

Vordus,

If you have a quest marker, you can jump straight there using the quest log, no fiddling around with the map required!

Vordus,

Until reasonably recently, Embracer was known as Nordic Games. Their plan was simple and quite effective; buy old game IP, release remasters, make reasonably-budgeted sequels aimed at niches of the industry being missed by the increasingly laser-focussed AAA publishers.

It worked for a good few years, and they became a Katamari of game development studios. An increasingly unwieldy Katamari. And like any good Katamari they started picking up bigger and bigger things. Suddenly instead of spending a couple of thousand on a struggling legacy developer, they were paying upwards of a billion at a time, swallowing up things like Gearbox, Asmodee, Dark Horse Comics, Middle Earth Enterprises, Square Enix Europe. They lost focus and just kept buying things, including things they couldn’t afford to buy. Eventually, a planned deal with the Saudis fell through, and that Katamari just slammed directly into a wall.

Vordus,

If I remember correctly, it was originally intended to be an episodic game, but plans changed late in development. As a result, the first half of the game is a really good bit of moody character-driven slow burn storytelling, and then suddenly it’s like the entire corkboard full of plot ideas gets vomited out at once.

Vordus,

Considering that this thing runs great on a Series S (which is CPU-heavy, but with a weak graphics card) that makes so much more sense.

Vordus,

In previous Bethesda games I eventually just started doing calculations in my head constantly about whether the stuff I was grabbing was worth the weight involved. I’m still not quite at that point for Starfield, but I’ll get there.

Vordus,

That would be the famously torso-sized PS5, right?

Vordus,

Robert Picardo lobbied so hard for that cameo!

Vordus,

Now there’s a difficult job!

Vordus,

Counterpoint: If not having room for a $70 game because there’s a $60 game already on there (which also isn’t normally a problem for him because his main gaming system is his $500 gaming console) is an issue, then the article is already being written from a position of privilege.

Vordus,

A shame, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Volition was never quite the same after the THQ bankruptcy, and that was still several years before Embracer took over.

Beyond good and evil on Steam Deck

Hi, I was interested in playing the HD version of Beyond good and evil on my Steam Deck. I did some research online and I found out that at least to 1 year ago the Steam version of the game had many issues (only french language and settings related problems). Anyone knows if those issues are still there or I can buy the game...

Vordus, (edited )

The fact that a 20th Anniversary Edition of BG&E exists leaked today, so you might want to wait for that to be a thing.

In its first week, Immortals of Aveum had a peak count of just 751 players on Steam. (steamdb.info)

After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.

Vordus,

Honestly I’m not sure you can make a AAA game in a brand new franchise and have it succeed in the current market. Nobody wants to pay the big bucks for something completely unproven, especially not when there are so many huge but familiar games around.

Vordus,

It certainly did have a very Titanfall 2ish ‘sent out to die’ feel to it, didn’t it?

Vordus,

I’d make a joke about the pistol having repeatedly fired blanks over the last couple of years, but I think that’s the point of a starting gun isn’t it?

Braga: ‘I still cringe when I hear it.’ Apparently, it was a long road to the franchise’s most despised title music (www.slashfilm.com)

Working from the oral history in The Five Year Mission: The next 25 years, this is a fascinating deep dive that answers the question “How did a recycled cover of a 1998 song written for Rod Stewart, ‘Where My Heart Will Take Me’ aka ‘Faith of the Heart’ become the title music for Enterprise?”...

Vordus,

It’s not the original recording, but it’s one of those covers that sound so similar that you ask what the point was.

Presumably, the point was lower licensing fees.

Vordus,

Now we wait for XBLIG/XNA emulation…

Vordus,

GTAV has had quite a bit of polish, comparatively. Of course, I’m sure that if they weren’t mostly doing it to keep GTA Online looking vaguely fresh it would still look like a PS3 game.

Vordus,

EA chose neither.

Vordus,

Part of me wants to argue that the games industry has a long-standing history of under-compensating workers, which makes being within the top 25% not particularly impressive, but instead I’m just going to admit that you caught me ragging on EA with an easy jab.

They did lay off a shed load of workers earlier this year mere days after announcing record profits though. Still, they’re not quite the miserable black hole that they were in the ‘EA Widows’ era when they were forcing unpaid overtime on a straight up illegal level.

Star Trek executive producer wants more Strange New Worlds episodes, and I’m nervous (screenrant.com)

Strange New Worlds has been my favorite Trek since Next Generation, and if the quality continues, could easily be my favorite Trek ever. But with the e.p. wishing for more episodes per season, there’s a danger of diluting the show by adding weak episodes that would have never made it in a 10 episode season....

Vordus,

Honestly, I think SNW is in a pretty decent position for a larger episode order. Heck, having more episodes to create more space between TOS character guest appearances would probably do the series good.

Vordus,

Bloody ChatGPT

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