Basman

Christmas is a time to connect with family and it's exciting for the kids. The culture tends to overhype it and make you feel pressured to do a bunch of stuff. Do no more than you feel like. I only bought a giant cookie each for my family members. It's perfectly fine to not be into it though. It can make people feel lonely in a counter-productive way.

I don't enjoy strand type gaming, but I don't see how you can call something like RDR2 or The Last of Us 2 the peak of gaming when it's whole design is being more like movies and less like an actual game. Death Stranding is weird and cringey. 10 hours is a generous chance given to any media. Really, you shouldn't waste more than half of that on something your not enjoying.

Realism is good and all and it can add a lot to an experience, but it is not a substitute for a good gameplay hook. When a game like RDR2 puts so much resources into shrinking horse balls and other extrenious details then that is a sign that the core game design isn't prioritized. These kind of details don't matter at the end of the day. It's part of a strategy to appeal to a wide an audience as possible, with fancy graphics and less pronounced gameplay in favor of story. Game design is inherently polarizing to a certain degree. Not everyone likes fighting games, shooters, Minecraft, etc. Therefor they minimize the game aspect in favor of making it more like a movie.

Rayman 2 and 3 are really easy. You can beat Rayman 2 in the time it takes to find out that RDR2 isn't getting any better.

Bongo Hills is the Vietnam of 2000s kids.

I'm playing Rayman as well on an emulator. Such a brutal game underneath that facade of childish wims. I'm about to do the 99 lives cheat for my own sanity.

Bro, we already went over this. Your like going through the bargaining phase of the stages of grief. It's really not a big deal.

I expected it to be fun. Fanboys hype it up too much. You act like your in a cult.

The financing of MLMs is pure hype and a circlejerk between various AI companies, Nvidia, datacenters and the US government. AI hasn't made a single dollar in profit and I'm not optimistic if that is even possible. It's way too expensive relative to the output, which is itself often dubious in quality. https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-everybody-is-losing-money-on-ai/ Every time you've used AI it has been at a loss. AI is actually more expensive (and worse in terms of quality) than plain human effort. That cost is just obfuscated and not talked about (and financed by billions of dollars of investments and loans).

A lot of modern AAA games tend to be poorly optimized and bloated in size. Not being able to run modern games is not necessarilly a hardware issue

Fanboy bot response.

Bro, 10 hours is generous when your bored all the way through. If a game can't get your attention after at least 5 hours it's a bad game. I could've read a whole book in that time.

For me, the worst part of not socializing and dating more in my early youth is that it is just very boring when those things are absent. I also regret not being more on top with developing a skill and a career. I'm quiet inexperienced for my age.

I had more a more fun and engaging experience beating Momodora: Moonlight Farewell, an indie 2D metroidvania for 15 dollars, than playing RDR2. I played both for circa 10 hours. It was more artisctic than RDR2, which isn't hard when the latter is just going for realism. Realism isn't artistically interesting to me. I find it funny how a game is considered groundbreaking just for graphics essentially and being more like a movie. That to me is not what video games are about. RDR2 is the absence of player agency in service of realism and story. Cinematic games are a very corporatized stage orange style of game design (even though many of the people who make these games are fairly green themselves), minimizing everything that make their game less accessible, primarily gameplay.

What else are you going to spend your billion dollar budget on? Cinematic games don't prioritize gameplay and minimize creative risks.

Exactly. It's excessive and uncreative. They are so risk-averse due to how bloated their budgets are that they push nothing but graphics and cinematic qualities at the expense of novel gameplay, since it is more accessible to play a movie simulator. You don't need realism to tell a compelling story. Most fiction isn't realistic. In fact, some light supernatural elements would make a western way more interesting, like Blood Meridian. It's about having an interesting hook, which RDR2 lacks in my opinion. It's part of why so many call it boring.

just riding in real life is not enough for these horse freaks. It's also cheaper. Gaming is in fact one of the cheaper hobbies relative to how much time you can spend on it.

RDR2 is unironically the best horse game on the market. You could buy the game just as a horse simulator.

After 10 hours you'd have read a 300-page book. If a game isn't good by 10 hours it's not a good game. There are entire games that are more or less 10 hours which I'd consider excellent experiences.

Minecraft is better than ever. You have so much freedom to create your own fun. You can just ignore the stuff you don't like. You are more likely to ruin the experience yourself by setting bad goals and doing uninteresting repetitive things, like grinding EXP.

RDR2 is one of the most overrated games of all time.

I played the game for about 10 hours. The gameplay is terrible and I don't care about the characters at all. The story skips over the hook of the story, which would be the boat heist mission. The game lacks fundamental player agency and opportunity for player expression. It's a self-indulgent game that doesn't do anything to justify itself to the player. Even the story.

AI isn't a person.

The circular financing of AI and how the government use the AI industry to hedge against a recession:

The whole alpha thing comes from misunderstanding wolf behavior. "Alphas" in a wolf pack are usually just the parents of the pack. The researcher spent the rest of his life trying to correct the mistake but the concept stuck. It speaks to a kind of cynicism about power in people. Even in a stage red society like that of the nords (vikings), where power is often achieved through raw domination, connections make and break you (literally in terms of traitorus in-laws).