Completely fair. That was mostly for the joke, but I do have a lot of digital media, at some point you don’t have much choice in the matter. Most of mine is games though.

Got my first e-reader because someone was getting rid of theirs… And well, that’s a kindle, a very old one. I never bought any digital book from amazon, only used it with calibre and stuff found elsewhere. Some public domain, some bought through bundles and stuff, some… “found” elsewhere. i’ve not had amazon wipe it yet as some say it happened to them, not even sure it could happen on mine, they haven’t even supported it forever. But it’s a tiny minority of my books anyway.

I’ve got a pet peeve of spotting French ads using English language songs that they would never think of using if most people listened to and/or understood the lyrics.

Some examples :

A car manufacturer using the same song for decades, Johnny and Mary. Hard to tell who the song is really about, but it’s clearly about a broken, quite unhappy and mentally unstable couple.

A big mart chain using Prayer in C in its happy, “let’s be optimistic” clips.

And see the children are starving / And their houses were destroyed / Don’t think they could forgive you

Hey, when seas will cover lands / And when men will be no more / Don’t think you can forgive you

A perfume ad with Sia’s Chandelier blaring out. Yeah, suicide by booze, definitely what I want to feel classy.

I have DRM-free versions of How To and What If?.

They’re made of trees.

I have literally no idea how that came to your mind immediately. It’s very funny to me that it did though.

Exactly, ear in particular was what I thought about. There are very tiny bones in there. I’m pretty sure they didn’t replicate a functional human ear, so those have no impact on anything.

Many bones in the hand and foot are also locked in place together, so modeling each one seems, well, I don’t think it’s a waste of time, but at this point you’re making an art performance.

Kinda, Balatro is still largely a more traditional card game which couldve come out just as easily 30 years ago at least from a mechanical perspective

Yeah, that part feels irrelevant to me. Sid Meier’s Civilization VII just launched.

And really, Balatro has as much to do with Slay the Spire and other deckbuilders as traditional card games.

I don’t understand separating puzzle games from gaming, either. Tetris was a huge part of why the Gameboy became a thing, and it keeps being more or less reinvented today. Back then, someone playing Tetris or even just chess on a computer was playing video games, period. And that was almost enough to call them nerds. That was “only” 40 years ago, compare that with any other medium.

What I am saying, is that this separation is blurry. Also look at the vast majority of games on any current platform, including Steam, and tell me it’s not full of poorly made barely interactive piece of shit on the level of the worst phone “games”.

Where do you draw the line?

I passed the Balatro virus to my mother, she plays on a tablet. Is Balatro casual?

It’s clear they made this weird on purpose but still, so many questions…

the robot hangs suspended from the ceiling as its limbs twitch and kick, marking what the company claims is a step toward its goal of creating household-helper robots

Oh yeah, definitely a huge step in that direction…

Clone Robotics designed the Protoclone with a polymer skeleton that replicates 206 human bones

That’s all of the bones of an human adult. Yeah, I’m sure absolutely all of them were necessary.

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Every time there is news about that thing, I’m like, it’s at least as weird a game concept as a whole game about Gollum.

Who knows, maybe it’ll end up better… Maybe.

Not that extreme a time gap, but there was a shitty PS2 game in 2007 supposedly based on the first Fievel movie (1986). It had basically nothing to do with the movie and played like a terrible Super Monkey Ball for some reason.

Someone saw a cheap IP floating around and thought they could sell slightly more copies through vague nostalgia. They’re probably right too, they’re not losing any sale from people who have no idea what the original cartoon was, and they might earn a few from people who recognize it and are curious.

Sure, but I think the key word here is quietly.

They’ll try to hide the most embarrassing stuff, long after the fact, but I wouldn’t expect them to comment publicly on it. It’d be bad for their business.

But Groobo’s record is still listed as the “Fastest completion of an RPG videogame” by Guinness World Records, which has not offered a substantive response to the team’s findings (Guinness has not responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica).

Of course they didn’t. Guinness has never cared about being correct. People pay Guinness to have a record listed. The record holders are the Guinness records’ customers.

I don’t want him to find it because I want the over-the-top movie dramatization of that guy’s descent into madness.

He can have part of the movie revenues, if he’s smart.

I have a sign that says “Shout to enter”.

That definitely sounds like usual Ubisoft meddling. Hell, at that time Guillemot’s good friend Hascoet must have been in full directing power, shitting all over the Assassin’s Creed creative team’s decisions. While the company protected his sexual and moral harassment gig.

I can’t care less about Ubisoft being sold to whoever. Guillemot and his asshole clique don’t deserve shit.

Since most of Elder Scrolls nostalgia today is around Morrowind, it’s always interesting (and a bit funny) to find people (involved or not) who think the series started to derail with Morrowind.

I am not mocking them at all, I get it, Daggerfall and Morrowind are very different games with a different scale and focus. Daggerfall is also… quite overwhelming, and rather impersonal for 99% of its gameplay. I really don’t know what a “modern” Daggerfall would look like.

First thing first, rename the country as American America of America.

“You don’t know it yet, but deep inside you’re already a cryptobro like us.”

Ah ah they wish.

I’m working in (local) French public service. We’ve developed apps with basic gender inclusive language (not iel, more like including genders in form titles and messages), a while before the government banned it from official communication.

As of now, nobody has done anything to remove that from the apps, because we don’t see the point and we have way more important things to do to actually improve services.