I wouldn’t say the writing for dishonored is terribly strong. The first game has a pretty bog standard plot, and the set up for the second was quite contrived. The gameplay and world are their strengths.
A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.
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I wouldn’t say the writing for dishonored is terribly strong. The first game has a pretty bog standard plot, and the set up for the second was quite contrived. The gameplay and world are their strengths.
He posted this update a few months ago, it seems to be progressing well!
Rock’n’roll racing got a pretty solid GBA port, it’s a fantastic little isometric battle racer from the 90’s
It’s extremely difficult for me to enjoy most 8-bit games, as there’s very little there to intrigue my tastes. However, there are a few standouts that I still play to this day on an emulator handheld, like H.E.R.O. or Mr. Do!
The good ones generally have a really solid little gameplay loop that’s quick to get into, with tight controls that let you get into a flow-state easily, and a difficulty curve that isn’t infuriating (something far too common from that era). The story heavy games from that era usually had mediocre or terrible writing paired with repetitive grinding gameplay, so the classics like Final Fantasy are sadly off limits for me.
H.E.R.O. is one of my favorites since it has somewhat uncommon gameplay where you control a man with a helicopter pack in a mine, avoiding various hazards to rescue a trapped miner at the end of each level. It rewards memorization, which is a knock against it, but even though I’ve played it heavily, I keep coming back to it as I never can quite remember the layouts of the later levels, and once control of the backpack is mastered, it just feels good to zip around all of these creatures and caverns of instant death without nicking yourself. I’m not sure how someone who has never played it before would feel about it, since it can take a while to get the hang of the controls, but I think it holds up pretty well from that era.
It also received a pretty massive number of ports to various consoles and home computers. The original Atari 2600 version is good, but personally I found the MSX port to be the most polished, and it adds some nice additional graphics as well.
No worries! :D
Ah! quite right, thanks for the correction :)
JPEG is getting old long in the tooth, which prompted the creation of JPEG XL, which is a fairly future-proof new compression standard that can compress images to the same file size or smaller than regular JPEG while having massively higher quality.
However, JPEG XL support was removed from Google Chrome based browsers in favor of AVIF, a standalone image compression derived from the AV1 video compression codec that is decidedly not future-proof, having some hard-coded limitations, as well as missing some very nice to have features that JPEG XL offers such as progressive image loading and lower hardware requirements. The result of this is that JPEG XL adoption will be severely hamstrung by Google’s decision, which is ultimately pretty lame.
ROCm is it’s own hell (unless they finally put some resources into it in the past couple years)
For those interested in an alternative, and especially if you are a programmer, the Ladybird browser appears to be the most promising independent browser that could someday take Firefox’s crown.
This is a summary from @Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world:
TL;DW:
This is a simplified version of simplified version.
Not everyone has the ability or spare time to become skilled in every field. Calling them lazy and illiterate for not learning a complicated thing (when they may already be learning some other complex subject) is kinda the definition of elitism.
Don’t be an elitist bung hole, dude.
GNU Taler could replace Paypal, we can only hope.
What’s the situation with donating in your area? :)
I was only offering what I knew to be true for my area locally, I didn’t want to speak on things I hadn’t researched. Looking it up, I guess it seems like it’s possible (with varying degrees of waiting period), in a pretty significant chunk of the world, so that’s even better than I thought, if still not ideal. ^^
Gay people can donate blood now! (In the US, at least) :D
History tells us that 85% of these people will move to Windows 11 despite what they say.
The interesting rub this time is the hardware. There’s tons of still powerful and useful CPU’s in use today that don’t support Windows 11’s TPM 2.0, so I wonder if that will push a few more people to Linux than when Windows 7 was EOL.
I agree that Bethesda’s RPG writing is amateur at best, and I can’t dispute that there can be some good points in Dishonored. But at least for me, a mark of bad writing is that I find myself unable to care about the outcome for any of the characters in a story, and in Dishonored, I personally didn’t care much about any of the character’s struggles or personalities, as they were all pretty one-note. I can’t recall a single character’s name from Dishonored except for Corvo, since I found it novel to hear Stephen Russell as a main character again (big Thief fan, which incidentally I would point to as a game with excellent writing).
There was one instance in the main base/hub of dishonored 1, where there’s a short excerpt of a story about a whaler in a book, I think in the room where Emily was supposed to chill out in. I thought the writing of that little short story was so compelling, I sat back in my chair after I finished it and thought “Why isn’t this game about that?”, because I felt it highlighted how boilerplate the actual game’s story was in comparison. So in that way you’re right, the micro-writing, the world building, the atmosphere, is all top notch. I just wish the characters and plot were able to match it, as then it would be a masterpiece.
I should mention that I’m pretty difficult to impress with writing in video games, as I don’t think most of them can compare to the quality of writing available in books except for a handful of examples such as Thief, Gemini Rue, Mafia, and the original Deus Ex.