That part of the support email almost made me puke of how fucking awful it was. "Why complain about ads when you get YouTube Music for free by paying us money"

I really wish I could stop using shit google stuff for work...

I haven't played it yet, still unsure if I will, but everything I've seen of it is nudging me towards not playing it. The dialogues I've watched were poorly written, cutscenes were okay at best, and the new companions seemed all to be obnoxious teenagers.

To me, Dragon Age Origins is the only game in the franchise that's worth playing. The Warden is your character as the player, and that, to me, is the hallmark of a good rpg. None of the other Dragon Age games put as much effort into allowing you to choose and make your own character. The fact that DA:O had entirely different intros, that were both long, well written, and nuanced, based on your combination of class + race was the thing that sold me into that game. Hawke is not your character, but a character they wanted you to play for a reason, but I'll give it a pass since the idea of Hawke's story was fairly good, just not as well implemented (DA2 should have been a spin off and not part of the main series). The Inquisitor is even worse, it could have been your character, but it's some weird generic character that's there just to perform a function in the world. I've played most of DA2, but only a couple of hours of Inquisition, and it was enough to know that both those games fell short of Origins, and this one is looking even worse.

An RPG needs excellent writing above all else. Good gameplay comes as a close second, but it should be mostly about allowing players to forge their own path and have their own interpretations of the world. RPGs need nuance and subtlety, you can't just constantly regurgitate something to someone's face and expect them not to be annoyed by it.

I think of this anytime I see some alleged leftist on Twitter talking about anything as if they were paragons of ethics and morality. It might be a bit of cynicism on my part, but I can't take it seriously whenever someone can't take a hint that maybe they shouldn't be in a platform owned by a Billionaire that makes a point in basing his personality on the fact that he is an imperialist bigot. I wish Twitter had stayed banned in my country...

This could be cool if you managed to grab a second-hand board for cheap.

There's a point made at the end of the article that most people seems to have missed entirely:

Existing facilities that can filter carbon dioxide out of the air only have the capacity to capture 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 globally today, costing companies like Microsoft as much as $600 per ton of CO2. That’s very little capacity with a very high price tag.

“We cannot squander carbon dioxide removal on offsetting emissions we have the ability to avoid,” study coauthor Gaurav Ganti, a research analyst at Climate Analytics, said in a press release. The priority needs to be preventing pollution now instead of cleaning it up later.

It's obviously a matter of "why not both?", and both the article and the scientists behind the report agree on it. However, a lot of people are betting their eggs on the idea that climate reversal technology will suddenly become a lot more effective and cheaper than it is right now. And sure, that may be the case, or not. For how many years have we heard of flying cars or self-driving autonomous vehicles and predicted that they were just around the corner, at most a few years away, but nada so far? Betting on the invention of a new technology that'll make a very expensive process today way cheaper is a VERY naive and bad approach.

They can dick about as much as they want, piracy will make sure to preserve the things they want gone. The reason they don't want older games to be preserved is that new generations, whilst playing them, may come to realize that you don't need gacha mechanics, stupid fomo, micro transactions, 6 different currencies, 3 different shop menus, 2 battlepasses and so forth to have a good game.

Baller move from the devs. I wish we lived in a world where the source code of older games were all released and freely available for non-commercial uses.

This article made my day a bit better. Google complaining how "radical" the changes proposed are is a sure indicator that they would likely cause some damage to them.

The alternative to Ryujinx... Is Ryujinx itself. And soon something else. It has been forked, archived and mirrored. Someone will pick up the project, even if just out of spite against Nintendo.

That's a mentality that was the norm back in 2010, and one of the reasons the og dark souls got called a "very hard game". It wasn't that hard of a game, it was just a game that let you die as many times as mistakes you made, and it's both objectively a better game for it, while also being hugely influential to the industry on this particular matter. To the point that it has been given the title and award of "ultimate game of all times". Deserved for reminding that games are supposed to be games, and failing is 100% supposed to be part of it.

My boss once asked me to take a look at her computer that was super slow and barely functional, and the thing that surprised me the most was that she had been running Chrome without any adblock since ever, and when I asked her about adblock, she answered: "adwhat?". Mind you that she's still a millennial, and only a few years older than me.