MudMan

I need to spend more time with it, but there is an unexpected level of nuance to that, isn’t there? You can drag your feet a LOT, and you can promise a choice on the next law to be enacted or to research a technology without comitting to it actually being deployed. Accurately conveying democracy in a game is pretty much impossible, but I do like how well they let you play the policy delay game.

Anecdotal, but relevant: I had forgotten what the “smears” were supposed to be until I saw this and went “oh, right, they did that”.

Right now I’d say on that continuum it’s probably FP2>Against the Storm>FP1, but I need to play more FP2 to know for sure.

I mean, I will give you that Frostpunk does trade off some procedural complexity for the ability to give you narrative scenarios, but that’s not a bad thing. I am waaaay past needing every game to be an evergreen forever thing these days.

That said, if anybody is just hearing about Against the Storm now, they should go play Against the Storm. Against the Storm is also good.

It is the exact opposite of that. Easily the best paced strategy game in years. This thing moves. It flows. If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.

It’s really, really good.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.

From the linked article:

“Ryan deeply believed in that project and bringing players together through the joy in it,” said one former developer, who said he felt Ellis had poured a great deal of himself into the game, leading to a ton of stress. “Regardless of there being things that could have been done differently throughout development…he’s a good human, and full of heart.”

Sources told Kotaku that Ellis was too emotional to speak at points during a post-launch studio-wide meeting after it had become clear that the game was bombing.

You are vastly overestimating how good contracts for creative roles in the industry are, especially for a mid-sized studio of under 200 people. But even if that wasn’t the case, the guy isn’t quitting the company, he’s apparently stepping down as creative director and staying on in some other role, according to the article.

I would assume the inability to complete a single sentence would be a tell way before you get into the skill carryover between micro and macroeconomics. But then we’re way past being surprised that anybody could look at this guy and go “ah, behold, a functional candidate to elected office”.

I don’t know. I mean, he does sound like he catches himself, and he isn’t that good of an actor. But then, who the hell has that just… ready to go to the point where it just blurts out by itself? Like, how often do you have to say that out loud for it to just hijack your train of thought? It’s almost less damning if he did it on purpose, honestly.

Well, that’s a new one. I wasn’t expecting the leopard to be resentful about all the face eating.

Man, this is true now, but this conversation makes me very nostalgic for the good old days of the 1080Ti, where PC games were absolutely a “max out and forget” affair.

Sure, that was because monitors were capped out at 1080p60, by and large. These days people are trying to run 20 year old games at 500fps or whatever. But man, the lack of having to think about it was bliss.

Well, sure, but that’s also because on PC I can choose to buy DRM-free games and have guaranteed backwards compatibility for the foreseeable future. Plus it’s not a closed system based on a console that launched with a drive. People (me included) already own PS5 discs, not from a previous generation, but from this one. It’s bad enough that I need to keep my PS3 around to play PS3 games, it’d be absurd to not be able to play PS5 games I already own because the thing is physically unable to ingest them out of the box.

So yeah, for people in that position the Pro is a hundred bucks more expensive than it says on the sticker, which is already a ridiculously high number.

I do feel for Sony’s PR teams. Trying to explain the concept of visual improvements in 4K over Youtube’s increasingly vaseline-smeared compression is an impossible task.

He shipped enough clunkers (and terrible design decisions) that I never bought the mythification of Jobs.

In any case, the Deck is a different beast. For one, it’s the second attempt. Remember Steam Machines? But also, it’s very much an iteration on pre-existing products where its biggest asset is pushing having an endless budget and first party control of the platform to use scale for a pricing advantage.

It does prove that the system itself is not the problem, in case we hadn’t picked up on that with Android and ChromeOS. The issue is having a do-everything free system where some of the do-everything requires you to intervene. That’s not how most people use Windows (or Android, or ChromeOS), and it’s definitely not how you use any part of SteamOS unless you want to tinker past the official support, either. That’s the big lesson, I think. Valve isn’t even trying to push Linux, beyond their Microsoft blood feud. As with Google, it’s just a convenient stepping stone in their product design.

What the mainline Linux developer community can learn from it, IMO, is that for onboarding coupling the software and hardware very closely is important and Linux should find a way to do that on more product categories, even if it is by partnering with manufacturers that won’t do it themselves.

You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you’ve missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.

The published spec sheet says it does dual book with Android 13.

Wasn’t Snapdragon support added recently? I feel like I saw a note on that having happened when I was looking up what SOC this thing was packing, but I could be wrong.

This thing is supposed to be fairly powerful, I don’t know that the straightforward, minimal approach of Garlic/Onion makes sense on it. Ideally you’d want a bit more versatility. For that I think the Anbernic SP and that class of slightly cheaper devices probably make more sense.

I mean, as I said above that’s my thing with these flagship ARM handhelds. At some point it takes a lot to justify spending a couple hundred on one of these instead of a bit more for a more flexible Steam Deck. The smaller, cheaper ones are a lot more charming, and they fit in your pocket, so they can be a throwaway toy to carry with you.

But hey, we live in the handheld golden age, I’m not gonna complain about more options.

Nah. This is running a Snapdragon 865 SOC with an older Adreno GPU. If you think Windows on ARM gaming is a struggle this isn’t going to be your Linux handheld killer. There’s also no reason for it to be, the Steam Deck already exists.

For its intended use case as a retro handheld (or an Android gaming handheld, I suppose), this seems like it’ll be fine, but I’m also less excited about these mid-tier ARM handhelds now that we have good x64 alternatives with decent battery life and better performance that aren’t much more expensive. I still think the cheap, tiny ones are cool, though.

I guess this is nominally cool because other comparables like they Ayn Odin 2, need a bunch of tinkering to run Linux, but beyond that it seems Linux is well represented on both extremes around this awkward middle ground of more expensive ARM handhelds.

Hah. It may be, I don’t know. Maybe both?

I mean… is this a big deal? Every retro ARM handheld out there runs some version of Linux or Android. I gues Retroid was an Android-focused brand, hence the name, but if you wanted to run Batocera on a handheld there is no shortage of options.