It took several violent landgrabs and wars of aggression before Russian oligarch money wasn’t welcome around the world, and those guys were all but openly affiliated with the Russian mafia from the days of the fall of the Soviet Union. I fully expect American oligarchs’ money to be happily accepted just about everywhere for at least as long as it takes Trump to get around to trying to take Greenland by force.

Femme V really nails the emotional arc of V’s story in ways that the VA for masc V doesn’t, to the point that I’m truthfully less invested in my current playthrough (male street kid origin) than I was in my original (female corpo).

That said, everybody who did voice work in BG3 did fantastic in ways that have made other things I’ve touched feel hit-and-miss – I nearly dropped Avowed due to some early mid voice work making me worry about the overall quality – but Neil Newborn has been rightfully getting acclaim for Astarion, and you have to hand it to him – they gave him the character, but he was the one who decided “I’m gonna chew the scenery so hard I shit splinters” and made it work so damn well.

This feels like complaints over asset flips bleeding over into first-party asset reuse, because the people complaining don’t understand why the former is objectionable. It’s not that seeing existing art get repurposed is inherently bad (especially environmental art… nobody needs to be remaking every rock and bush for every game) but asset flips tend to be low effort, lightly-reskinned game templates with no original content. Gamers just started taking the term at face value and assumed the use of asset packs was the problem, rather than just a symptom of a complete lack of effort or care on the developers’ part

rimshot

Working on it, but for the overwhelming majority of people emigrating is a hell of a lot harder than just showing up in another country and saying “my place sucks, can I come in?”

There are sophisticated and nuanced critiques to be made of Western power projection, soft and hard. “Nuanced” and “sophisticated” are not words appropriate to the average hexbear or lemmygrad denizen’s take on geopolitics, and for those of us who live in the real world rather than living to argue over how many Maos can dance on the tip of the icepick that killed Trotsky, the loud and unrelenting naysaying of anything less extreme than “armed proletarian revolution now!” got to be incredibly tiresome, not to mention the constant cheerleading of brutally-repressive regimes that don’t have any values in common with actual socialists or communists just because they oppose the US and its allies.

Please be moddable…

Terrible. Take your upvote and get the hell out of here.

I had quite a bit of fun with it for a few weekends with my friends, but ultimately the lack of a system for mechanical progression left it feeling a bit shallow (ha!). As a primarily PvE game with light PvP it’s in a weird place where it doesn’t have quite enough RPG-like elements to hold my interest on the PvE side, or enough player-on-player combat to make it a gripping contest of skill.

It’s still a fun game to hop into from time to time, but it’s never been appointment gaming for me

From the industry journal I linked in another comment – it’s literally just an off-the-shelf Mireo Plus B. That’s it. The only thing Tesla about it is that it’s serving a spur line connecting Tesla’s factory to the existing Berlin light rail network, and was presumably financed by them for the PR benefit of not having the workers at an electric car factory arrive by diesel train.

I did a little digging and it seems like there’s a tiny kernel of fact at the core of this giant turd of a hype-piece, and that is the fact that they electrified this little spur line from Berlin to the new German Tesla factory by using a battery-electric trainset. Which is not a terrible solution for electrifying a very short branch line that presumably doesn’t need frequent all-day service, even if it’s a bit of a janky approach compared to overhead lines. But hand that off to the overworked, underpaid twenty-two-year old gig worker they’ve got doing “editing” at Yahoo for two bucks an article, and I guess it turns into “world-first electric wonder train amazes!”

For a second, though, I read the headline and wondered if Musk and co. had finally looped all the way around to reinventing commuter rail from first principles after all these years of trying to “disrupt” it with bullshit ideas like Hyperloop and Tunnels, But Dumber.

That’s at least more cultured than my brain shouting “MULATTO BUTTS! (Mulatto butts!)” at me

Quite sure – and given that one game I’ve been playing lately (and the exception to the lack of shooters in my portfolio) is Selaco, so I ought to have noticed by now.

There’s a very slight difference in smoothness when I’m rapidly waving a mouse cursor waving around on one screen versus the other, but it’s hardly the night-and-day difference that going from 30fsp to 60fps was back in Ye Olden Days, and watching a small, fast-moving, high-contrast object doesn’t make up the bulk of gameplay in anything I play these days.

The old one and the new one are literally side by side on my desktop, don’t know what to tell you…

At launch the 360 was on par graphically with contemporary high-end GPUs, you’re right. By even the midpoint of its seven year lifespan, though, it was getting outclassed by midrange PC hardware. You’ve got to factor in the insanely long refresh cycles of consoles starting with the six and seventh generations of consoles when you talk about processing power. Sony and Microsoft have tried to fix this with mid-cycle refresh consoles, but I think this has honestly hurt more than helped since it breaks the basic promise of console gaming – that you buy the hardware and you’re promised a consistent experience with it for the whole lifecycle. Making multiple performance targets for developers to aim for complicates development and takes away from the consumer appeal

Eh… Consoles used to be horribly crippled compared to a dedicated gaming PC of similar era, but people were more lenient about it because TVs were low-res and the hardware was vastly cheaper. Do you remember Perfect Dark multiplayer on N64, for instance? I do, and it was a slideshow – didn’t stop the game from being lauded as the apex of console shooters at the time. I remember Xbox 360 flagship titles upscaling from sub-720p resolutions in order to maintain a consistent 30fps.

The console model has always been cheap hardware masked by lenient output resolutions and a less discerning player base. Only in the era of 4K televisions and ubiquitous crossplay with PC has that become a problem.

Might just be my middle-aged eyes, but I recently went from a 75Hz monitor to a 160Hz one and I’ll be damned if I can see the difference in motion. Granted that don’t play much in the way of twitch-style shooters anymore, but for me the threshold of visual smoothness is closer to 60Hz than whatever bonkers 240Hz+ refresh rates that current OLEDs are pushing.

I’ll agree that 30fps is pretty marginal for any sort of action gameplay, though historically console players have been more forgiving of mediocre performance in service of more eye candy.

Are there a lot of people who individually hold chaotic, mutually-incompatible political opinions? Sure! I don’t think you can boil their ultimate decision-making process down to a box-ticking exercise, where if a candidate represents sufficient number of demographics they hold bigoted views about they automatically vote for Default Old White Guy. For example –

I can’t even tell you how many people had both Bernie and Trump as their top two candidates in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

– that’s very clearly low-information voters dissatisfied with the status quo, who would happily glom onto anybody promising to sufficiently shake things up. Sure, Trump and Bernie had wildly-divergent platforms, but Joe Sixpack – who probably doesn’t feel like he has a dog in the fight on any of the particulars like abortion or finance law and assumes anybody sticking it to the broader political class is a net positive for him – doesn’t see much practical difference, and is so little affected by the bigotry of the right that none of it bothers him, so of course the two candidates presenting themselves as outsiders with a plan to shake up Washington are basically interchangeable.

I just don’t think that’s a very big demo. Anybody who’s suddenly motivated to keep the White House white and estrogen-free is more than likely a foaming-at-the-mouth MAGAt, who was already motivated to put their guy back in office. There will of course be a few people who fit that description, and probably many more diet racists and sexists who will just stay home if their options are Trump or a “left-coast liberal woman,” but I don’t think they make up a significant-enough proportion of the voting public to outweigh that latter group you mention, who couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for Biden but are amped-up to vote for somebody younger, healthier, and more dynamic.

Obama won by healthy margins in '08 and '12, and Hillary – the least likeable candidate that’s made it to the top of the Democratic ticket since Dukakis – still won the popular vote. I think the people who would vote against a black woman for President were never going to vote for a Democrat in the first place, and given the general aura of relief and enthusiasm I’ve seen in left wing spaces since the announcement I think Harris is going to be riding a wave of support from the left, even if half of it is just from people who are glad they don’t have to hold their noses to support a doddering octogenarian because the alternative is fascism.