It kept getting delayed so the release really caught me by surprise!

It’s on Steam, and it’s very short compared to a lot of games so long as you’re not too rusty with the controls.

I waffle between preferring Jet Set Radio cell shading and hand-drawn pixels on any given day.

I feel that sometimes realistic graphics are what a game needs- like some simulators or horror titles going for that form in immersion. We’re not quite over the uncanny valley in AAA titles, and pushing the boundaries of real-time rendering technology can lead to improvements in efficiency of existing processes.

Other times, pushing the boundaries of realism can lead to new game mechanics. Take Counter-Strike 2 and their smoke grenades: they look more realistic and shooting through them disturbs only a portion of the cloud.

I do miss working mirrors in games, though.

Once the encryption schemes are broken, it’s not just posterity, but every malicious actor with access to encryption-breaking tech will have a field day.

I don’t mind a large collection of data about me being made available to historians, I just mind that happening with my contemporaries.

A better comparison is with studio-owned movie theaters, which eventually led to the United States’ Paramount Antitrust Consent Decree (which was the law of the land for movies until the DOJ killed this ruling in 2020.)

I don’t feel that studios should get to have their own streaming services much like how I don’t feel movie studios should be allowed to run their own theaters.

For all of its faults, cable had a ton of competition between studios on the same distribution system, often with multiple channels with the same focus by entirely different studios. With current streaming services, ther are more accounts to keep track of, completely different (and often lackluster) UX between each streaming service which can make navigating a pain, and instead of competing with new content it can be just as- if not more- viable to buy up as much pop culture video content as possible and centralize it behind one studio-owned streaming services’ paywall. (Looking at you, Disney.)

If streaming services weren’t allowed to have their own studios, we’d probably have a better streaming landscape than we currently do.

This reminds me of the internet discussions around Avatar: The Last Airbender years back and whether it counted as anime or not.

To piggyback on this, I used to play Counter-Strike 1.5 (and later 1.6) a lot. There were servers that ran scripts to automatically chuck people into the air and deal them damage (often called a slap) if they didn’t change coordinates on the map for too long. Some would just auto-kick players for doing so. The anti-camper hate was common.

The server I frequented was far more lenient, but camping that prolonged the round(since dead players could only watch, and the rounds were 5 minutes long to make walking and crouching more viable) was generally frowned upon if they weren’t outnumbered or defending an objective.