Both of those are coming back, but I’m curious to see how you make Crazy Taxi make sense more than two decades after the death of arcades.

Unity somewhat fits that description, but it was definitely net negative for their business, and with how long it took them to walk back from it, I don’t think they had any plans to walk back before the backlash. Microsoft has been slowly making Windows worse for a long, long time; it wasn’t something they did all at once and then issued a “we hear you”. They are legitimately scared of losing their market dominance right now.

I am not aware of any company that has reversed course on enshittification once it has begun

It happens when they’re punished for it in the market. Microsoft finally realized they’re bleeding Windows and Xbox users, so they’ve got major initiatives to improve both. Unity tried to make the worst business pivot I’ve ever heard of, and their customers were very clearly and vocally jumping ship in response, so they undid that pivot. Plex’s only competition is an alternative that doesn’t have a business model, so if they bleed enough users to Jellyfin, they’ll either reverse course or stop just shy of some threshold where people leave Plex; or their business will die, which is also an option on the table.

I’m still learning what I need to do in order to get up and running on the internet, but I think my plan for my dad to connect to my Jellyfin is to build him a Raspberry Pi and just hand it to him.

It’s extremely easy to see that that’s what’s going on, if you’ve tried buying your own memory or storage lately. They’d love to lower the prices of their hardware, all three of these console manufacturers, so that you end up spending more in their high-margin ecosystem, but this is the reality of the situation. Too many companies are bidding on the same parts right now, at least until the AI bubble fully pops.

In response to component price increases.

I agree, but it’s still difficult to tell someone who spent years of their life building something that it isn’t very good.

Weird. When I went to PAX back in the day and a dev asked what I thought about the game, I felt like it was really difficult to say that I didn’t like it, even if it’s what they wanted and needed to hear.

It does, but it’s functionally a burst mechanic, which ArcSys ought to be all too familiar with, and Tokon doesn’t have one. The combos seem long enough in this game for that to be a concern for me, but more concerning is how long it looks like you’ll just have to sit there blocking with no parry, pushblock, Faultless Defense, etc.

Eh, hundreds of other people worked on the game, too. Borderlands is not Randy. I’ll give you something to look for as you attempt to sink your teeth in: the skills and skill trees are sort of based around a meta game. If you choose to engage with its systems and optimize, you’re not just mindlessly shooting stuff. For instance, I played the Gravitar, who gets feedback loops going around “entangling” enemies; by endgame, my ability was basically never on cooldown, and I had incentives to pick weaker guns because they fed into my gameplan better. My friend that I co-oped the game with played the Siren and had a build where he could loop Kill Skills into one another so they’re all proc-ing all the time. I hope you like it! (The story’s not great though.)

I’ve heard that a lot as a reaction to BL3’s writing. I only played through this series in the past year, and BL2 was good, but after playing the sequels, I think it would wear thin for me by comparison over extended periods of time. Especially once you get a new computer down the line that can get past the performance problems, I’d recommend trying out BL4. The story won’t be as good as 2, once again, but man, the encounter designs and class designs are so good.

How did you feel about subsequent Borderlands games? I thought the character classes and skill trees only got more interesting as the series went along, generally.

Skullgirls, for sure. Steam has me at over 1800 hours, but I’ve also played at locals and tournaments. It had 14 characters for the longest time, but now it’s got 18, and the ways you can combine them are nearly limitless, so there’s a high chance one of its most powerful strategies hasn’t even been discovered yet even though it’s now 14 years old. Now and then I’ll see a tournament match where someone brought out something brand new that I’ve never seen before, and I love it for that.

I would love for this game to be as good as its marketing wants me to believe, but I’ve seen far too many large teams form to put out a first project that seriously underwhelms, regardless of the pedigree of the people who formed that studio. I remain pessimistic but would love to be wrong.

From reviews, it sounds like it functions as a normal Xbox controller without Steam running to augment it. Most of the time. I heard Retro Arch reads it as a mouse and keyboard, which is how the old Steam controller worked.

$100 is fairly steep, but I’ll shell out a bit extra for quality. My Xbox controllers have lasted me years, but at least one of the recurring problems I’ve seen with them after so much use could be remedied by the better tech in the sticks in these things.

You gave me a mini heart attack, but I’m pretty sure you mean ~10 years ago.

It’s not that long, and I think the nuance is more interesting than a yes or no answer, but @[email protected] 's answer is the shorter, less interesting answer.

They certainly feel they have to spend hundreds of millions. I agree those budgets can come down, but you need something desirable enough to make the console purchase feel worth it, and Astro Bot didn’t do the trick (with a budget in the tens of millions, not to say that budget is the only variable here).

I haven’t really heard anything to corroborate telemetry as the reason for the PSN requirement, though it could be true. I always figured it was just that they wanted to inflate their active user numbers, which are already inflated by people continuing to use PS4s as streaming TV machines.

They started putting games on PC to recoup some of their costs on these enormously expensive games, and now they’re pulling back to exclusivity because they believe it negatively impacts their ability to sell PlayStations. It just seems very damned if you do, damned if you don’t.