And basically did the Action RPG equivilent of dying to the first Goomba in Super Mario Bros.’ World 1-1 at a live convention where your speedrunning skills are the main attraction

I’m pretty sure the current standard is playing Halo and fumbling so badly you have to turn the difficulty down from Legendary to Normal, and missing your target time by over an hour (see: the Cody Miller Halo GDQ speedrun).

Razors and blades - every console game has a, IIRC, ~$5 platform holder fee, which goes to Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo. So if you buy a Playstation at-cost and then buy 5 games, then Sony makes ~$25 in profit.

Bullet Heaven is an old bullet-hell game playable here. Naming the genre that is stupid.

Bullet Heaven is the name of an existing game, don’t clobber it with a genre name.

They disrupted the status quo back in 2003 (2001?), then in 2009 they were doing Linux ports, then in ~2015 they were doing HTPC stuff (and also funding Linux graphic driver dev the entire time, Linux gaming in its current state would not exist without Valve), there was their Steam Machine experiment somewhere in there (it flopped but that doesn’t make it cost any less), then they were doing Steam Deck stuff. They’re still paying Linux graphic devs BTW.

Yeah, Steam is a monopoly, but 1) they’ve been a monopoly since forever and there hasn’t been a Comcast-ish disaster, and 2) more competition doesn’t seem to actually benefit us here but could potentially make things a lot worse.

In principle, Steam is a Sword Of Damocles just like any other Monopoly. In practice, the alternatives are EA and Epic, no thank you (I know itch.io is a good competitor, but they don’t have any pull on AAA publishers so I don’t expect them to take the market if Steam implodes).

Also, Valve is innovating in ways that nobody else seems willing to - not just their Linux ports (represent!), but also their attempts on HTPC gaming (which was unnecessarily a huge pain in the ass on PC, for no good reason) and their steam controller. And their portable PC gaming with the Steam deck (which to be fair GPD probably did first).

All in all, I’m happy to pay the Steam tax for what they’re doing. I have no illusions that Epic Games Store would provide serious competition in terms of the goodies I want, because they already aren’t, and they’re still in their sweetheart phase.

The PineNote. Depending on your definition of “proper”, since it ships with GNOME and AFAICT only supports Wayland, and Wayland doesn’t have many compositors that work well on a device with no keyboard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p954EFd0VMI

The price has nothing to do with patents, it’s economy of scale - LCDs ship at a rate of billions per quarter, and are included in every device under the sun, whereas e-ink screens basically only ship in niche luxury devices (ereaders/enotes) that can be replaced by your phone and an ipad respectively. As a result, LCDs ship several orders of magnitude more screens, and reap the resulting economies of scale.

Yes, EInk corp has patents, but that doesn’t prove that the price is caused by the patents.

Currently, our best hope of seeing prices come down is 1) if the fast-multidye tech (i.e. the Gallery 3 thing) takes off enough to give e-notes mass market appeal (color drawing and comic book reading could be huge, maybe) and thus some extra economy of scale, or 2) if GoodDisplay’s DES screens get their PPI up to 300 and thus are able to compete in the ereader space against E-Ink’s MED.

DES = Display Electronic Slurry, AKA the cofferdam tech. It’s a different method of creating an e-ink screen that (apparently) doesn’t touch E-Ink’s patents, and it works by creating a grid of ditches to be filled up with the e-ink liquid and ink (where 1 ditch = 1 pixel). In contrast, E-Ink’s MED (=Microencapsulated Electrophoretic Display) produces self-contained microcapsules that have the liquid/ink sealed inside, and then the microcapsules are sprinkled onto the screen’s pixel grid like Hundreds And Thousands, and each microcapsule is substantially smaller than a pixel, and each pixel toggles several microcapsules. The microcapsules sometimes overlap the border of the pixel grid (since they’re a bunch of packed circles basically), which breaks up the straightness of the pixel grid and is what gives E-Ink screen their ‘grainy’ look where DES screens are more noticeably checkerboarding. This could potentially give MED a long-term aesthetic advantage, although that might turn out to be a non-issue for DES with sufficiently high PPI.

The advantage of DES is that because it skips a layer (the slurry is directly on the substrate, rather than in microcapsules on the substrate) it could potentially be higher-resolution(/PPI), and higher contrast. Also possibly cheaper, since it might be able to skip a manufacturing step of making the microcapsules. Maybe.

Okay then, how does Hungry Jacks fit into that chain of logic?

Oh absolutely, it’s asinine. But it does avoid Pokemon Red as prior art.

“In a 3D space” rules out Pokemon Red. Still bullshit, though.

You don’t just spam jump, you wedge yourself under an arch or something so that you can trigger more jumps per second.

If Bethesda started giving a shit, they’d just overhaul+bugfix their existing engine, rather than switching. Switching engine is entirely unnecessary, because it’s not the problem.

Their engine is not hamstringing them. Plenty of good games have shipped with Gamebryo/Creation engine, without massive numbers of bugs.

The problem is that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about fixing anything - they ship bugs that have been in previous games, that users have outright identified and fixed for said previous games. They apply the exact same we-don’t-give-a-shit attitude to their engine.

Also every engine is “20 years old”, Source2 has some code from GoldSrc and Quake Engine, because if the code works perfectly then you don’t just rewrite it for no reason. You rewrite parts of the engine - the parts that are holding you back in some way. And Bethesda has been modifying and extending their engine.

But, ignoring all of that, suppose the engine really was the issue: it takes 5ish years to write an engine from scratch. Starfield was in development for 8 years. Skyrim released 13 years ago. Skyrim also released 2 years ago, and a couple of times in between those periods too. Bethesda could have rewritten their entire engine from scratch if they wanted to, in that time.

The problem is that Bethesda just doesn’t give a shit about quality, they chose their engine development choice by development choice. The problem is that Bethesda.