I played the first one, and found it to be extremely boring but with potential. Unfortunately, playing 3 and Syndicate afterwards showed me clearly that Ubisoft smothered the potential and cranked up the boring. The worlds they’ve created are certainly immersive, but they’re also devoid of energy. 3 has a half-Native American protage who spends five minutes in his home village and then goes off to the colonies with barely a thought spared for his home, so when it’s played for drama it falls flat because we haven’t seen his relationship to his family. And Syndicate’s characters had might as well be carved from soap with how crude and flat they are. There’s a transgendered gangster from New York who joins the Assassins’ gang, and he has absolutely nothing to add for the entire game. Characters with seeming potential come in, have one side quest, and that’s their lot.

Not only that, but trust from a self contained community is not the same as safe for the general public outside of context. Imagine asking for a summary of the Gamestop shortsqueeze and getting an answer from Superstonks.

honestly, not sure I -ever- found a useful answer on Quora.

Reading them taught me one thing, Quora had/has a weirdly strong hardon for Steve Jobs and is/was all too happy to talk about anecdotes of him buying the authors’ lunch or reconciling with his estranged daughter. The only time I read criticism of Apple or him was when the question specifically asked for it.

There’s ways to rate limit, like increasing response time per IP address per hour to make rapid, massed requests slower and easier to handle. Taking them all down at once is an extreme move.

Let me add one thing more, that a realistic aesthetic brings with it certain expectations. For example, I don’t question how Security Bots in Bioshock refuel themselves, or fly, or recognise intruders. I don’t ask how come the turrets in Portal never run out of bullets (though it’s answered as a gag in one of the videos). They’re not presented as realistic, and I don’t expect them to be. But when you make the choice to use realistic miniguns in Talos, those questions are going to bubble up to the surface, like “Where’s the ammo box on that thing?” and “Who’s maintaining these on islands in the middle of nowhere?” and “Scratch that, who’s making them?” and “If Elohim (yeah real subtle name there) did all this then why bother with a machine that requires maintenance in the first place instead of a magic pillar of fire or smth?”

The author is the host of Behind the Bastards, and produced a pair of episodes to accompany the article on the same subject: https://pca.st/episode/96a1d3d1-7966-412b-bc8b-492c817b9f93

I can say I was put off at first glance by the “realistic” aesthetic, with props like jammers and minigun turrets that have an unnecessarily detailed, grounded look when as a puzzle game, graphics should not be the focus of the experience. A stylised, or minimal, graphical style would put the focus firmly where it belongs - on the puzzles themselves.

The commentary said they wanted to do rival criminal gangs, which would have made a lot more sense than the construction magnates they went with, but my guess is they realised West Side Story already did it.

a firefox extension that does this automatically?? removing the redirect/tracking link and convert back into normal link)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/utm-eraser/

Be sure not to leave fingerprints!

I highly recommend you watch Netflix’s Downfall: The Case Against Boeing.

As a free alternative/companion, I would also suggest the PBS documentary Boeing’s Fatal Flaw, which features the CEO subtly throwing the pilots under the bus for one of the MCAS crashes.

…that’s not hypocritical at all. Hates one because / so he uses the other and is used to the luxury.

Soon to be followed by “Spain should be Russian”, “Czechia should be Russian”, and of course the old favourite, “Germany should be Russian”.

I believe autism was linked to gut bacteria a few years ago. Let me check: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9355470/

They aren’t in the job market, the EIC formed a new company with the staff that quit.

I swear the courtroom sketch artist has a grudge, he looks downright ghoulish in the article’s picture.

I expect any war game or film to be at least somewhat propaganda-ish, though some do it with more nuance than others.

My go-to example of an anti-war war game is Ace Combat. Despite having licensed planes from Lockheed, Grumman, Sukhoi and many other real life defense manufacturers, every single depiction of the wars in its games are negative. In fact, one of the most often cited criticisms of Ace Combat 5 is that it took the anti war message too far and became preachy.

This is the Ace Combat 04 between mission storyline, it’s twenty minutes and is a nuanced view of the war you fight in those missions, from the perspective of a young boy in a city occupied by the enemy.

Bioshock games (and System Shock before them) have in-game systems for reviving protagonists after death. Sometimes they’re Quantum Reconstructors that need to be turned on in each level to use them, sometimes they’re Vita-Chambers ready to use, sometimes it’s your all-in-one utility companion Elizabeth with a medical bag. In all cases you’re free to continue the fight after your death, though sometimes with penalties like restored enemy heath or monetary costs.

A Hat in Time has quite a spooky level in a swamp with a Deal with the Devil involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIrPsJMRJmo I also suggest Little Nightmares if the little guy’s tougher than he looks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ6Jcftf-c4

It was put under seal, because the complaint is solely about Lindell being an asshole while giving information, not what the info was.