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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was literally going to say, what do you mean despite degrading Trump relations? Isn’t that a goal in itself?
Not a problem, dragons are extinct. or invisible. Or flying so high you can’t see them.
I won’t say where I saw one. Maybe I did not.
Regarding Order of Ecclesia, it’s even less connected than Portrait of Ruin, which at least has a central hub. Only the very last part opens up a bit but it’s not a big area. The rest is almost completely linear and made of separate, small levels, featuring a bit of backtracking for specific quests. Calling it a metroidvania is almost a stretch at this point.
It is pretty good though and I liked it a lot. It almost feels like the missing link between classicvanias and metroidvanias, especially in hard mode.
I had no idea there was a trademark on the JavaScript name.
Return to Dreamland is an original game though. Which is even more confusing in Europe where it’s called Kirby’s Adventure Wii, while being completely different from Kirby’s Adventure.
However, Nightmare in Dreamland (GBA) is an actual NES Kirby’s Adventure’s remake.
Kirby game titles are a mess, especially since they’re almost all different in every region.
IMO I think it’s less “understand” and more “find a way cheese those bullshit Iron Knuckle fights”. I’ve completed Zelda 2 a few times. Those are still torture and terribly un-fun.
I was going to recommend Bomberman. Super Bomberman 4 on SNES in particular is very fun, you can grab not only bombs but opponents too, and there are cool mounts with special powers. A bit chaotic in some arenas, but the classics are still there of you want them, and then when everyone gets better ot wants a quick laugh, you can go for the crazier ones.
Dragon Quest Builders (2) attempted something between RPG and minecraft-style building, and at least it released. It looks pretty good for a blocky game, it has spectacular block and item diversity, and great building tools. As a mostly creative game with a bunch of silly NPC villager interactions, it’s fun.
Unfortunately, there’s only the hint of a great base/town builder in there, but it’s too shallow in the end. You’ve got different classes of NPC villagers with needs and skills, but there’s no challenge, only the satisfaction of seeing your town run sort of well.
Story mode also teaches you to build defenses and traps against monster attacks but monster raids are scripted and very dumb. After the story ends and you get into full free build mode, you’ll never have a monster raid again, making it all basically useless.
And also there’s very little procedural gen in the game. Main islands are big, but static. Small islands are procedural each with a set biome, but their primary goal is to be destroyed for materials. You can only save 3 of them to use them as (small-ish) new landmasses for your builds.
The AI answer mostly just parrots whatever the site that has won the referencement war is spewing. If it’s easy enough, it can luck out and find an easy ready answer on wikipedia or something. Beyond that, most of those high referenced sites are the shitty aggregators that already pollute the search results.
I often search for the correct way to do do something. For example, there’s a lot of baseless bullshit in gardening. If there wasn’t an AI answer, I would not trust the first result and stop there, I would look for a few, check what sources they have. I would not even take the wikipedia answer at face value without at least confirming where they got their info.
We know AI doesn’t do that. We have examples of it not even recognizing obvious parody, it can’t be trusted with recognizing unsourced shit.
Given how wrong/ridiculously oversimplified those AI summaries usually are, it scares me that so many people would stop there like, “Ehh, good enough”.
I bet some people will find a way to disalign generation through the original model and get stuff like that anyway.
I had CPC Jaws, it was an action game.
Pure videogame logic. You had the tiniest submarine and you had to explore underwater caves full of killer starfish and other unspecified marine creatures. The goal was to fish out parts of the ultimate anti-shark gun and use it on the shark.
Said shark patrolled the area just below the surface. Not sure how big the submarine was supposed to be, but comparing sizes, I think that shark must have been a freaking megalodon.
A lot less than 20% when it comes to specific subjects. The great thing about reddit was finding communities around just about every topic or hobby. If 100 people had a passion for something they could meet on Reddit and still have a comfy, somewhat active sub reddit.
On Lemmy you’ve got generic technology, generic news, generic videogames, generic pics, and almost everything else doesn’t get enough traction to keep living. It’s a basic population problem, the fraction of people knowing about Lemmy is just not enough to gather around shared stuff. Even those that do use Lemmy are probably not aware of every community attempt that could interest them.
I still see more communities being abandoned than new ones appearing.
Nah, they evolved way past that in the following decades.
Sometimes when they’re in a hurry they create GUI interfaces using Visual Basic to track IP adresses.
And sometimes, if they’re very good, a hacker can manually carve a virus in a piece of bone using fractal patterns. They can use that to hack the computer scanning the bone so it adds a zero in thresholds for CPU heat monitoring and make it instantly catch fire.