… Is it?
I genuinely haven’t encountered anything broken using it, short of Youtube. And that’s less Firefox and more all the extensions trying to make it usable, I think. There are a couple of bits of functionality missing, but in terms of sites working, it seems perfectly fine.
Hah. I almost wrote that I also think the two Ultima Undergrounds are better than Deus Ex despite being much older and having an objectively very clumsy interface. Then I thought that’d get us in the weeds and pull us too far back, so I took it out.
Look, yeah, Deus Ex rolled in elements from CRPGs and had good production values for the time. But all those things were nothing new for an RPG, they were just new for a shooter. Baldur’s Gate and Fallout were a few years old. The entire Ultima franchise had been messing around with procedural, simulated worlds for almost a decade at that point, which in the 90s was a technological eon.
And yeah, System Shock had created a template for a shooter RPG, they just applied it to a lone survivor dungeon crawly horror thing, rather than try to marry it to the narrative elements of NPC-focused CRPGs, which is admittedly a lot more complicated. And Deus Ex was fully voiced and had… well, a semblance of cutscenes. In context it’s hilariously naive compared to what Japanese devs were doing in Metal Gear or Final Fantasy, but it was a lot for western PC game standards.
But it wasn’t… great to play? I don’t know what to tell you. Thief and Hitman both had nailed the clockwork living stage thing, and at the time I was more than happy to give up the Matrix-at-home narrative and the DnD-style questing for that. The pitch was compelling, but it didn’t necessarily make for a great playable experience against its peers.
I didn’t hate it or anything. I spent quite a bit of time messing with it. That corny main theme still pops up in my head with no effort on demand. I spent more time using it as a benchmark than Unreal, which I also thought wasn’t a great game.
Also, while I’m here pissing people off, can we all agree that “immersive sim” is a terrible name for a genre? What exactly is “simulated”? Why is it immersive? Immerisve as opposed to what? At the time we tended to lump them in with stealth games, so the name is just an attempt to reverse engineer a genre name by using loose words that weren’t already taken, and I hate it. See also: character action game. Which action games do NOT have characters?
Man, I am a grumpy old fart today.
Thanks for the link! International press is still running the 33% estimate they probably got from the French morning papers or have taken down the results, so my references hadn’t updated the number.
For the record, the image is not new, there was a lot of international coverage regarding Le Pen’s presidential chances in 2022. But presidentials are presidentials, only one person gets to win. Legislatives raise a lot of questions about parliamentary dynamics, alliances and the potential for the second round to generate another bout of Macron shooting himself in the foot followed by him shooting everybody else in the foot for good measure. That, and there is more paranoia about the tilt right across the EU and internationally about the US.
No, please, free me from this. Because in my head I’m super annoyed at how well this seems to work and I need rescuing from an expert.
The closest thing we had was the System Shock duology, since both predate Deus Ex. Deus Ex was basically accessible System Shock. Having dialogue trees and NPCs without losing the open-ended nature of System Shock’s more dungeon crawl-y approach was the real selling point. Well, that and the trenchcoats and shades. The Matrix was such a big deal.
But even then, each of those elements were already present in different mixes in several late 90s games. Deus Ex by some counts was one of the early culminations of the genre blending “everything game” we were all chasing during the 90s. The other was probably GTA 3. I think both of those are fine and they are certainly important games, but I never enjoyed playing them as much as less zeitgeist-y games that were around at the same time. I did spend a lot of time getting Deus Ex to look as pretty as possible, but I certainly didn’t finish it and, like a lot of people, I mostly ran around Liberty Island a bunch.
I played more Thief 2 that year, honestly. I played WAY more Hitman than Deus Ex that year. I certainly thought System Shock 2 was better. Deus Ex is a big, ambitious, important game, for sure, but I never felt it quite stuck the landing when playing it, even at the time.
I’m not of the opinion that more simulation and more “realism” are always better, but I would absolutely take a System Shock 2 remake, especially after the System Shock one (1 one?) turned out great.
FWIW, I’m seeing projections based on the counts that still have them at 34, but I guess we’ll see.
I agree that a resurrection of the cordon sanitaire is probably a positive and I agree that Macron was extremely clumsy, like much of the EU’s centre and demochristian right, in sliding towards far right positions they just can’t defend any better than the actual fascists. But still, from an international perspective France is now firmly in the club of Central European countries with a major fascist problem in a way it wasn’t yesterday, even if the outcome was already understood to be going this way.
I’ve genuinely never felt the need, but I also don’t post for clout or proactively, I’m more of a reply guy in that I prefer the version of social media where I talk with people rather than at people and I do not give a crap about followers, upvotes or starting popular threads. Believe it or not that tends to do a lot to minimize the use cases for blocking, in that people rarely take the time to chase me around or specifically target me, even when things get heated.
But hey, if somebody is bothering you block away. I don’t have a moral stance on it.
Kind of overrated? I mean, it was cool to see a bit more of a palatable cinematic presentation in real time to go along with the late 90s PC jank, and that theme did kick ass, but it’s less groundbreaking in context than I think people give it credit for. And it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as System Shock 2, in my book.
I get that immersion tends to normalization…
… but man, 34% is still a LOT. Especially when it’s 2x the previous result and the largest bloc.
It’ll be good if they are prevented from having easy access to legislative action, but it’s still an underpants-threatening result in my book.
Neat. Not the version I played, and arguably a lot of those issues were fixed in the PC port. But then, there are a lot more options for accurate hardware-level emulation and preservation of period-appropriate Amiga than the much muddier explosion of PC specs, so it’s weirdly a cleaner way to preserve an optimal version.
I’m never sure how much to push early releases like these, though. Is the clumsy one-unit-at-a-time approach to Dune 2 worth messing with? Or do you just go play the (extremely good) remaster of Command & Conquer at that point?
Even better. There’s a solid chance Bumble wasn’t even born when loss.jpg happened.
What a life.
“Under the age of 30”, huh?
Alright, nerds, just so we’re clear, that was more than 15 years ago. Assuming this is current, which it probably isn’t, that “53yo” dad was in his late 30s at the time, could very much have been posting about it when it happened. Given the current average age for having kids, “bumblebeebats” was probably wearing diapers by the time the Internet got to the point of entirely abstracting it to shapes. There is a longer period of time between loss.jpg and now than between the first rickroll and loss.jpg.
If it makes you feel any better, all of this is hurting me just as bad as it’s hurting you.
I wonder, too. Pro-EU centre-right parties and social democrat parties still hold a majority, so on these things I’m not sure we’ll see a major shift, but I genuinely haven’t checked the voting record to see if the far right parties generally take a different stance on the more pedestrian consumer protection regulations or not. I probably should do that.
I see next to zero discussion about Gaza here.
People seem to be arguing about whether vandalizing libraries is good or bad. It’s bad, for the record.
Of course that’s only failure if your goal is for people to talk about the thing you’re supposed to care about. If your goal happens to be to get people to talk about you, screw Gaza or anybody else… well, then yeah, mission accomplished. We can all go home now.
Oh, so it’s even worse. They aren’t trying to get any practical effect, it’s just pointless vandalism that won’t achieve anything. Cool.
Please explain to me how this keeps climate change in the public consciousness. We haven’t spoken about anything even vaguely climate change-related in this entire thread. None of the discourse around it is about climate change. It’s a distraction, at best. It’s the sand the “people and the media” bury their heads in.
I hate the defeatism, too. If it doesn’t do anything, then why even bother? Let the people who are… you know, actually working on it do their thing and get out of the way with the cornstarch and the stunts.
I also don’t get the necessity to be defensive about it. I get to very much advocate for climate change action (and take action myself, by voting accordingly if nothing else) and still acknowledge this was a dumb thing, which is… honestly pretty obvious. Speaking of bad optics that make you lose the culture wars, denying how dumb this was just makes you seem delusional. After all, if climate activists are so obviously wrong about the obviously wrong thing why would they be right about the other thing? There is literally no upside to this.
No.
And you can’t make me.
And since a protest is ultimately an attempt to manipulate an entire people into shifting the national consensus over to your opinion, if I’m refusing to stop being dramatic about the optics of what they did then what they did was an abysmal failure.
That’s the point people are trying to make here. That ultimately this thing is marketing, and that if everybody is pissed at you after your marketing impact you just did bad marketing.
Alright, you want me to tone it down? Here it is toned down: it’s not the puppy coat.
It’s Apple’s hydraulic press iPad advertising.
You do realize that isn’t any better, right?
Nah, when you deface a one-of-a-kind prehistoric monument that not only is of genuine historical relevance and recognizable worldwide but also a key cultural touchstone with deep identitarian components for a whole country you are deep into Cruella territory. In good faith. Genuinely. I’m not even English and I am pissed. You don’t even get the usual excuses about bourgeois art these idiots have used for other stunts like these.
This is literally supervillain stuff. It’s the stuff they put in Superman movies to show he’s gone bad. In the zeitgeist of normal humanity it’s shorthand for “these are the bad guys”, right alongside suspiciously spotted fur coats and shooting your minions for failing to catch somebody.
How anybody wouldn’t get this makes me not only question their ability to socially engineer a planetary revolution of the ways we generate power and consume goods, but the ability to function as an adult and put their pants on in the morning. If I hired a PR consultant to advertise “climate action” and they proposed this I wouldn’t just fire them, I’d sue them for trying to sabotage me. It’s incredibly stupid. Seriously. Genuinely. As somebody who wants these people to actually succeed.
Oh, is it? Man, this is such a Rorschach test of a thread.
Is the point of a protest to be in the news? I guess the clout economy has rotten our brains after all.
I mean, yeah, you can make news by acting like an idiot, in that the people that oppose your cause will thoroughly cover it. It’s not hard to be in the news with a protest, as long as you don’t care why you’re news. Stage a mass murder of puppies to protest against the lack of gun control and I guarantee you’ll get a spot in Fox News every day for a year, very much accompanied of a pro-gun lobbyist commenting the footage.
That may be the core of the confusion here. I’m saying that turning climate change activism into the puppy murder cause is not an effective way to curb climate change. I’m saying that feeling powerless doesn’t make it any more effective at curbing climate change just because it gets news coverage.
It’s not making anybody aware of the issue who already isn’t, because everybody is already aware of the issue. It’s not explaining anything about the issue to anybody, because all we’re talking about here is the stupid stunt. It doesn’t convince anybody who was neutral or hostile to the cause because they came off as complete idiots at best, malevolent assholes at worst.
So I guess my answer to your question is that even if the jet thing did nothing it still was more effective than this. Because it’s not about being in the news, it’s about making effective action more likely to happen.
Huh. I’ve used Sony’s site recently and I just opened it to see if I noticed anything broken but it seems fine. Of course somebody not seeing a bug doesn’t mean the bug doesn’t exist, it’s not that I don’t believe you. All I’m saying is I’ve been primarily on Firefox for a while now and that hasn’t been my experience.