BadlyDrawnRhino

The thing about the corporation paying less taxes is a myth. The extra contribution you make counts as revenue in their books, and that revenue is then offset as a donation, making no overall difference to their tax benefits.

That said, it does help them in other ways, mostly around marketing. They can then say they’ve made a massive amount of charitable contributions, when really it was their customers that did so.

As others have said, by making that donation at the checkout, you haven’t really made an informed decision about whether the charity is one you would donate to otherwise, so if that’s important to you you should stop doing so.

The way I look at it, if you are going to make a conscious decision to donate to charities you support, there’s no real reason to round up at the checkout. But if you aren’t really going to be donating otherwise and you’re not struggling financially, you may as well make that small contribution at the checkout.

Oh, absolutely. I was only commenting on the weird timing, the game was released 2 years after an adult rating for video games was implemented.

We definitely have an odd and often archaic view on things here in Aus. Personally I think the classifications should be a purely informative system rather than something that decides whether or not something should be banned. Films are given much more artistic leeway than video games, and I could rant for hours on the government’s stance on gambling, which is much more harmful than most things you’d find portrayed in any artistic medium.

We’ve had an R18+ rating for video games since 2013, so not sure why Hotline Miami 2 wouldn’t have been able to receive classification.

Funnily enough, I own the game on Steam, so at some point Valve also made the same mistake. But at least they won’t pull the game from my library.

This is useful for countries where the Steam Deck is unavailable but other handhelds aren’t. Here in Australia, Steam Decks are only available as grey imports, and that makes warranty issues a potential headache, but you can walk into most electronic retailers and buy a ROG Ally off the shelf.

That said, I personally wouldn’t buy a handheld that didn’t have touchpads, so I bought a grey import and have had no issues.

That probably would be a better solution. Particularly since the rating system is pretty easy to ignore. And if they do start slapping the R18+ rating on games that don’t really warrant it like Mario Party, people will be more likely to simply dismiss the entire system.

I would hope that the government and ratings board wouldn’t be that stupid, but look at how long it took to give us an R rating for video games in the first place.

I think the government could definitely be doing more, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to force companies to clearly disclose the nature of their products so consumers can make informed choices.

I think the major difference between the two is that in video games, the cost of the loot boxes is deliberately obfuscated through the use of whatever single-use currency the publisher has dreamed up, and made worse by the fact that the currency is only purchasable in select denominations, meaning you’re always spending more than you’re going to use.

You’re not wrong that there are plenty of examples of physical “loot boxes” marketed at children, but at least with those you know exactly how much it costs straight up.

I wish our government would look into the actual predatory practices that these publishers are using in these games, but this is a good first step. At least the EU is looking into it.

Just want to point out that it might not be OP’s fault. The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the one folks in the US will be used to) has a habit of switching the headline depending on whether you’re viewing on mobile or web. I wish they wouldn’t, the clickbait headlines can be a bit of a distraction from otherwise generally high-quality articles.

To be fair, half of the AAA gaming industry is all about trying to clone the latest successful game with a new coat of paint. Maybe using AI to make these clones will mean that the talented people behind the scenes are free to explore other ideas instead.

Of course in reality, it just means that the largest publishers will lay off a whole lot of people and keep churning out these uninspired games in the name of corporate profits, but it’s nice to dream sometimes.

Trebuchets aren’t really a tool for defence. They have tremendous range and aren’t exactly speedy to load, aim, and launch.

Unless you meant defence in the same way that a country’s military operations are known as “defence forces” regardless of intent, in which case carry on.

I’m playing through New Vegas right now. I have one of the back buttons assigned to quicksave. I also changed the default camera button to one of the back buttons, because I don’t use it often enough to warrant it being on the bumpers. And I have just assigned one to toggle collision, because sometimes you need that when playing something built in the Gamebryo engine.

Hifi Rush is in Humble Choice this month, and I noticed they have a redemption deadline which is a bit out of the ordinary. So it’s possible it’ll get delisted, or maybe Humble is just playing it safe with the keys they have.

That’s an oversimplification. All works are derivative to some extent. There’s a huge difference between taking inspiration from something, to taking the characters and setting from something. Particularly if you’re intending to make a profit.

If an author makes something that a large number of people enjoy, why shouldn’t they be able to make money off it for the rest of their life? Why exactly should an individual give up the rights to their creation simply so that someone else can use their characters and their worlds?

To be clear, I’m talking solely on an individual level. I think the system we have where a corporation can own an idea is very broken. I’m also talking about this from a perspective of the world we currently live in. In an ideal world where money wasn’t the endgame for survival, ideas would flow more freely and nobody would need to care. But that’s not the world we live in.

I think an argument could be made to set it to the date of death of the author. I agree with the other guy that it should only apply to commercial works though.

I also don’t think that the copyright should be transferable. The trading of ideas is an absurd concept to me. But then us humans do a lot of absurd things so I guess it’s just par for the course.

The seed is more like an address. It’s a number that gets paired with the prompt to tell the model what variation of the thing it should output. Given the same seed and same prompt, the model will output the same image every time, no matter what.

It’ll be on Steam day one, yeah.

It will be a few years before it’s on GOG, so it really depends how patient you are. Fallout 4 only appeared on there a week or two ago to give you a frame of reference.

But Microsoft is doing exactly the same thing, only instead of paying for exclusivity of one title, they’re buying developers so not just their next title, but all future releases will be exclusive, up until MS decides they’re not worth it and dumps them.

Sony absolutely participates in anti-consumer practices, but let’s not pretend that MS is any better.

Microsoft are no longer interested in selling consoles necessarily, otherwise they’d be holding stuff back from PC as well. They’re interested in getting people into their ecosystem through Game Pass.

And while I agree with you that Sony and Nintendo have used plenty of anti-consumer practices, Microsoft has also done so in the past and I think the only reason they’ve been more pro-consumer of late is because they’ve been the underdog for a long time now. I would be anticipating a change in their behaviour the more people they get to subscribe to Game Pass, and this Activision-Blizzard deal is a huge step towards that.

There was a sequel called Fade to Black. Not sure why it didn’t seem to be as successful as the first game, and it hasn’t been re-released on any platform other the Dreamcast in 2018 for some reason.

I remember as a kid I hated that they changed the perspective. I don’t think I ever did play the game because if it. I’ve played Flashback at least a dozen times over the years though.