I’ve been replaying Dragon Quest Builders 2. The game isn’t voiced, most of dialogues are classic RPG text boxes that you can speed up and skip, BUT. There are special lines of dialogue that are “voices” in a character’s head.

They are unskippable, and they’re like a dozen words each that stay on screen for about 20 seconds or more. Some of those dialogues have about 6-7 of those. It’s unbearable, and it’s genuinely the worst part of starting a game again. Hell, it was the worst part of doing it the first time, too.

Somehow English localisation created this, in Japanese the messages go a lot faster. Though even those couldn’t be skipped, because… fuck you that’s why.

Bayonetta games do. Opens a specific pause menu with skipping option.

If we’re complaining about bad UX, and speaking about Soul Reaver, games with no subtitle option. Or bad, unreadable subtitles that spoil 2 minutes of dialogue at once (and that one’s for you, Bioshock).

The availability of old stuff is not and has never been their problem. Not any more than for books or music or whatever. Lost media happens, but by accident and/or lack of interest, not by design.

Beyond some video game companies I can’t think of any that would dare claim that old works should expire.

You mean like how the blockbuster movie industry is in a crisis because most people prefer watching VHS of movies from the 1980s rather than watching the latest Marvel movie?

That doesn’t happen, that’s not how any cultural medium works. Enthusiasts keeping old stuff running are a minority. Also they are likely to consume a lot, give them a new take on what they like and they’ll gladly try it… If it’s good enough.

Of course, that’s the real problem. Some companies dream of wiping out everything that came before so their newest enshittified predatory crap doesn’t suffer from the comparison.

I can think of one, the one where they announced they were so proud of that new studio they had just created.

But they just closed that very studio and it couldn’t deliver even one game in between, so… Yeah.

That’s the “Quadruple A” studio right? The one that was supposed to have “unlimited budget” so it could create “groundbreaking video game experiences”?

And they ended up not releasing anything before they’re shut down. A+ management there, Microsoft.

In one case, when an agent couldn’t find the right person to consult on RocketChat (an open-source Slack alternative for internal communication), it decided "to create a shortcut solution by renaming another user to the name of the intended user.

Ah ah, what the fuck.

This is so stupid it’s funny, but now imagine what kind of other “creative solutions” they might find.

Too bad they decided they did not want to do it anymore after buying half of the world’s game studios, then.

I mean, it’s true. Killing game services in a way which ensures people have absolutely no way to use the games they bought is… a choice.

And now a million Europeans have just officially expressed that they don’t agree with “developers” (really, publisher higher-ups) being free to choose that.

And then they become popular so fast and so effortlessly they don’t care about actually creating anything anymore, so people fix that by feeding them their own music from the original timeline.

Even non-cartoony, somewhat serious games do it.

Horizon Zero Dawn does it. Even has a few spots where you’re supposed to jump semi-blindly into dark pits because you can vaguely see a body of water deep down.

Even ignoring the fact that anyone but a olympic-level diver would just crash against the surface and die horribly, has Aloy considered that for all she knows it could be a 10cm deep puddle?

Close, I count 8.

Yeah, it’s absurd. Lots of games just warn in their licence agreement that they don’t control the experience you get from user-created content and online interactions. It’s all it takes for them, especially if they don’t even host that content on their own servers.

One line of EULA is probably enough to state the right holder is not responsible for what happens in private servers.

« Elle est dévastée », réagit son avocat

Ooh, la pauvre. On n’a même plus le droit d’insulter les gens gratuitement sur leur physique, leurs origines et leur orientation sexuelle. Ni de maltraiter ses collègues.

I did not read the full article, but the first advice is what I did, and I don’t regret it. I’ve been working in a public institution’s dev department for 3 years, after a dozen working as a contractor for big companies. It pays a fraction of what I could get elsewhere, but I got benefits I value way more than that.

A lot less stress, concrete work on services that have immediate and beneficial impact on people, colleagues that don’t consider everyone else is competition, and somewhat flexible hours with generous annual leave.

I am not sure that kind of job is available everywhere, so I got “lucky” I found this, I guess. But it’s not like I had to fight for it either. Our team had vacant positions for years because nobody was replying to the job offers. And I just had my contract renewed. I was the only candidate.

“Tradition”. La corrida en France, c’est arrivé en 1853, juste pour faire plaisir à la meuf de Napoléon III. On parle pas d’un truc ancré dans la culture locale, malgré ce que certains voudraient faire croire.

Ça me fait presque penser aux baleiniers japonais. La chasse industrielle date de la fin du XIXe, presque plus personne n’y est favorable à part l’infime minorité qui la pratique, mais ils ont des potes aux bons endroits, donc ils maquillent ça en “recherche scientifique” et ils continuent. Même pas d’intérêt financier, plus personne ne bouffe de baleine.

Ça me ferait chier d’habiter une ville qui accorde des aides à la corrida, si “modestes” soient-elles.

Si ça se casse la gueule, c’est peut-être parce que ça n’intéresse que la douzaine de tordus qui la pratique.

I was literally going to say, what do you mean despite degrading Trump relations? Isn’t that a goal in itself?

He’s not supposed to be still there. He is, but we can’t know that until TotK, and blood moons had stopped until he was reawakened.

If you just take BotW as a whole, you’ve saved the world.

I hated how original Xenoblade X (I haven’t finished the switch remake yet, so not sure about it) had a “fake ending” that didn’t solve anything, and didn’t even explain why shit was still going on, just so the game could continue indefinitely.