I’m afraid you’ve failed the Voight-Kampff

‘Work laptop’. Unless you’re self employed or work with a very generous IT manager, you get what you’re given.

Wishing to become just a brain in a robot body sadly misunderstands the totality of the human body. It’s been shown that gut biome affects mental health, for example.

I still have my original CD-ROM! Techno Raiders was great fun.

Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless, but hey if folks really want to waste their money on snake oil like gold-plated cables then I say let ‘em.

I’m not sure how much use a particle physicist would be on a malfunctioning spaceship?

I can’t tell if you’re kidding, but just in case: this is for the 2021 remastered version. They’re not making new paid content for a game that came out in 2000.

It’s a stupid decision but I don’t think the people in charge of this are the same people investigating blackmail by foreign powers.

Makes about as much sense as the people who say ‘why do we bother researching space when we have problems here on earth?’

Office Space

If you know what curl is, you’re not the target audience.

The people this is targeting don’t even know what ‘CLI’ stands for, but they absolutely will copy/paste random commands into their computer if they’re told it’ll magically fix something.

You realise imgur is blocked in the uk, right? Anyone not using a VPN can’t see your posts.

MacBooks.

Plenty of reasons to hate Apple as a company but the hardware and build quality of MacBooks really is second to none. I know several Linux/OSS die-hards who swear by their M1 MBPs.

There’s this in Notre Dame as well:

In my experience it’s mostly Italians - ‘that’s not REAL pizza/bolognese/carbonara/etc’ whenever other people try adding their own twist to things.

Kind of ironic how angry they get about it, given pasta came from China and tomatoes are from the Americas, so their entire cuisine is imported.

People follow users here?

I subscribe to communities, and I often see the same people posting & commenting, but I don’t go out of my way to follow any of them. That seems odd to me.

I can’t decide if it’s hilarious or horrifying that a ‘security’ firm is openly admitting that they have no idea how their own software works, and that that level of ignorance is intentional.

Sure, I’ll throw you a bone.

Blatant self-promotion is generally frowned upon. That’s a rule across the internet, but especially here.

Like, you haven’t even made an attempt to engage with the community. No other posts, no other comments. It looks like you made an account solely to push your product, and in a place like Lemmy all that’s going to get you is a flurry of angry downvotes.

I think this is missing one other crucial factor in GOG becoming established: they targeted a niche.

Seems like a lot of people don’t really know this any more, but GOG’s ‘thing’ didn’t used to be a focus on being DRM-free, it was a focus on making old games accessible again.

GOG used to stand for Good Old Games.

Until GOG came along, publishers had next to no interest in making their older games available - things like Doom, Monkey Island, System Shock, Star Wars Dark Forces, etc. Hard to believe now, but none of these games used to be available to buy anywhere - if you wanted to play them you had to either own the original discs, find a torrent, or visit a dodgy abandonware site.

It was GOG who identified that gap in the market and established themselves as the store for legally owning digital copies of these old games for the first time. Steam was actually playing catch up on that front for quite a while, and many old games are still better maintained on GOG than on Steam.

We had to read manuals for tutorials, maps, and story exposition. Try releasing a game nowadays that does that and you’re going to get slapped with a 1/10 because people nowadays have less patience than a goldfish.

I kind of get where you’re coming from but your dismissive framing means it comes across as out of touch, ‘old man yells at clouds’ type stuff.

The shift has far less to do with patience and more to do with designers getting better at integrating tutorials into the games themselves. Games now are designed to teach you how to play through playing, so reading a manual became unnecessary. That’s not a flaw, that’s an improvement.

The only reasons this wasn’t done earlier was because the field of UX was still developing, and because cartridges limited how much text could be crammed into the games themselves.

That said, there are still well-received games that rely on manuals, but it’s now an explicit design or aesthetic choice rather than something everyone has to do to make up for limited tutorialisation. Check out Tunic, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, or TIS-100 as examples.

I’d rather games only include a manual because they wanted to, rather than because they had no choice.