• 2 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle



  • I think that’s one of the dilemmas of westworld. William starts off as you describe: peaceful, not really wanting to hurt the hosts at first. But he’s kind of like a fish out of water. To me it seems heavily implied that the only ones able to afford to go to Westworld are the rich psychopaths who exploit their own environment for personal gain. And we also get a look at how William turns out by the end…















  • Sorry to make you feel old but 10 years ago 4k was already mainstream, and you would have already had difficulty finding a good new 1080p TV. That is roughly the start of proper HDR being introduced to the very high end models.

    Also, maybe you’ve only experienced bad versions of these technologies because they can be very impressive. HDR especially is plastered on everything but is kinda pointless without hardware to support proper local dimming, which is still relegated to high end TVs even today. 4k can feel very noticeable depending on how far you sit from the TV, how large the screen is, and how good one’s eyesight is. But yeah, smaller TVs don’t benefit much. I only ended up noticing the difference after moving and having a different living room setup, siting much closer to the TV.




  • Prince of Persia, Sprinter Cell, earlier AC and Farcry games deifinetly have a cult following; and for good reason. Some of these were not only inventive, even genre defining games but also commercial successes, meaning many people got to enjoy them and have fond memories.

    It feels like these days the focus is on extracting as much shareholder value out of gamers via microtransactions which means game design has changed, often for the worse: making longer, more drawn out games and progression which you can speed up by paying and also forcing the player to spend more time on the game hoping you will buy more microtransactions, loot boxes or tiered gear (pay for higher number - more damage, etc.)

    It also doesn’t help that writing has also generally suffered. Not that older games had perfect storylines but at least they had loveable characters. Try playing a modern ubisoft game and it is this designed by committee, appealing to the widest possible audience slop that even Giancarlo Esposito can’t make interesting.

    Overall, older games feel like they had some soul. Even if it was a huge corporate machine back then too, there were more passionate people involved in their creation. The modern games are technically better in many ways, but they lost some of what made them special.