Far Cry (1 is more analogous to HL, and from 2 onwards they go more open world, but they still sometimes funnel you through to segments that are more like Half-Life), the Crysis series, Singularity, Call of Duty 2 to... I don't remember which, FEAR, Wolfenstein 2009 and New Order...
I'm not saying these are better games in their context than HL1 and HL2, and they all owe a lot to what HL1 and HL2 did, but if all these games, and HL1 and HL2, released for the first time today, HL1 and HL2 would be to me at least some of the least interesting and impressive of that bunch. I feel like arena shooters and "boomer shooters" aged better because their appeal is more tied to addictive game mechanics and high skill ceilings than "being impressed by seeing what would have usually been a video cutscene done in-engine, in first person while being able to move for the first time" or "being impressed by seeing a physics puzzle for the first time in an FPS".
pigeonburger
1hr ago
The simplicity is part of the design.
I would argue that at the time, it was not designed to be simple. It seems simple in retrospect and whether you find that endearing is up to you. I do like simple games too. But I'm not convinced I would be impressed if I were in a mirror universe where it had never existed yet everything else about the industry was somehow the same, and someone released Half-Life 1 today as an indie game.
And your answer to my other question is basically that there has not been anything great in the last 10 years.
I know, but in between Half-Life 2 and Titanfall 2, pretty much all major first person shooters did what Half-Life (1 and 2) did as a matter of routine, and often better than it did. All the Call of Duty games pretty much have it beat in the "run a mostly set route between spectacular set-pieces". Titanfall 2, to me, set a new bar that's high enough above everything else before that it hasn't been cleared in 10 years, but after Half-Life 2 and until Titanfall 2, I thought the bar was being regularly cleared. It helped that it was an era of first person shooters proeminence and now isn't (at least, not single player FPS).
pigeonburger
2hr ago
I recall the excellent Westworld, Season 1 (and deny that anything else came after that) that the dividing line of sentience is a mostly illusory one: that it is a emergent property of the self-concept, of the internal monologue. That notions of a soul may either be chauvinist hubris: or perhaps God will endow them with one, as Providence dictates.
Ultimately that's really the point of Turing's Imitation Game. It was not to be a real serious test to use as a measure. It illustrates that we are not even able to discern sentience in other humans, we just assume it, and that if we afford the same leeway to machines, we will eventually end up with machines that have just as good a claim to it as other humans do to us. And as early as ELIZA, once it was clear machines could manage grammar and human language, it was obvious that eventually, without even needing a real paradigm change, we'd end up with machines that would be capable of fooling us.
I mean that if I were fully unaware of any video games, and you put in front of me Half-Life 1 and almost any major developer's first person shooters since, I don't know, Far Cry 1? it would feel boring and simple. Don't get me wrong, I respect the hell out of Half-Life 1 and 2, because they were pushing the envelope at the time they came out, but those things they did that were groundbreaking are old-hat now, and when it comes to pure shooting mechanics of it, I feel like some older games aged better too (the Doom and Quake series, for instance).
As for better newer shooters, sadly single-player shooters are a stale genre nowadays, with pretty much nothing but Call of Duties. But some years back (oh god, ten years ago! I'm old!) my mind was was completely blown by the campaign on Titanfall 2; if you haven't played that I highly recommend it. It doesn't even lean on open world to differenciate itself, it does the same linear, spectacle as Half-Life does but it does it with everything pushed to the next level. Like Half-Life 2 did, there's so much creativity and skill at work here that they could create and discard gimmicks for single levels that lesser devs would make the entire game revolve around. If anything was able to push the envelope from that point after, I was not made aware of it.
pigeonburger
5hr ago
Haven't had much time for gaming, but I picked up on Steam sale Tactics Ogre Reborn, HOMM Olden Era and RACCOIN (think Balatro but coin pusher instead of poker).
pigeonburger
5hr ago
I'm surprised, since I would have held HL1 and HL2 as examples of a shooters that pushed the envelope at the time but aren't necessarily mechanically better than newer shooters. But if as you say she's not a big singleplayer FPS person, maybe it's a better intro to it than most since it's not expecting years of built up experience on other shooters.
pigeonburger
1d ago
"The punishment should fit the offender, and not merely the crime,"
We can't sentence judges the same way we sentence the plebs, says judge. Very cool. Feels very fair, this instills so much faith in me that "all are equal before the law".
pigeonburger
1d ago
Congratulations!
pigeonburger
2d ago
At least I only had to take a single day off sick, after hitting the daily limit of ibuprofen without making the pain manageable.
Next time, I recommend looking at a cheap personal TENS machine. Like mine cost about 50 dollars off of Amazon, is as big as a walkman and the consumables are cheap (wired self adhesive electrodes and a 9V battery). Don't expect it to miraculously heal your back, but it's essentially "free" pain relief, at least during usage and sometimes longer. Having spondilitis, I'm on a steady diet of ibuprofen for back pain and inflammation reduction in general, but that machine permits me to give my system a break.
pigeonburger
4d ago
The French have a category of jokes, mostly the same as "blonde jokes" in english, specifically for Belgians. They are usually depicted in French media as dumb yokels.
pigeonburger
4d ago
France, Spain and Portugal had different objectives in establishing their colonies than England. They were establishing extractive colonies, with the goal of sending ressources back to Europe. England, sent people with the goal of expanding. While the early americans were building farming capacity, the french were going hunting for pelts deep into North America with the natives, and the spaniards and portugese only were interested in maintaining as many people as were necessary to keep the slaves under control. Of course when push came to shove (so to war) the english colonists had a large advantage by then.
pigeonburger
4d ago
Are we invisible? We're still here! Quebec is a large province with what, 8 millions of population? It's not just an historical eccentricity that some people and places have french names and a few people have learned french; the first language and the one everyone is expected and indeed in many cases forced to learn, is french. We've maintained as much control over our own affairs within the canadian confederation as we could short of independance. We fight and struggle as every western country to maintain our culture against globalism, with the extra difficulty of the political weigth of the canadian structure which finds us mightly inconvenient, and the juggernaut of American culture, but we are, so far, still here!
pigeonburger
4d ago
I think a counter-factual nation of French Americans seems pretty likely to have been hugely successful as well.
Excuse me, counter-factual?
pigeonburger
5d ago
Wait what?
checks my pockets You had me excited for a moment, but no, there's still a king on my loonies.
pigeonburger
6d ago
Yes, the problem is that this is a sacred duty in support of democracy, that has to be held by a solemn and sworn priesthood. And its orders have been thoroughly infiltrated and its mission twisted, not that they were ever too resistant to influence. We are after all asking people to hold massive influence, by delegating them as our eyes, ears and voice, and expecting them to never ever use that power to further their own goals. And then we pay them poorly, fail to punish them when they fail their duty and even reward them when they do fail in a way that flatters us. It's no wonder that with human nature being what it is and incentives being this grossly misaligned, journalism ends up being what Hunter S. Thompson described as "not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."
pigeonburger
8d ago
He did not utter the word bleach at any point in that conference, the science guy from Homeland Security mentionned they tested multiple disinfectants, including bleach, then Trump made some noises about how cool science and UV light and disinfectants are and expressing the hope that they find a way to use it internally to kill viruses. Then later in the Q&A a journalist (Jim; Acosta maybe?) implies Trump suggested to inject bleach and the media ran with this complete and utter fabrication.
pigeonburger
9d ago
there's long been an anti-institutional conservative-libertarian-borderer-frontiersman cultural streak in the United States that many Protestants were also a part of
That seems a much more likely reason, that early colonisation of the american frontier selected heavily for people who prefer to be away from centralized power, and that is not necessarily downstream of being protestants, lest we forget that the US states were not the only european colonies in early America.
pigeonburger
9d ago
Indeed, my own Catholic people's history since 1759 has been trying to set themselves free from Protestants, so I think the parent's opinion requires being very selective with evidence. I'm sure the Irish also would have some choice words about Protestants' will to power.
pigeonburger
10d ago
If they do decide to deport a bunch of them, they can do that without killing them all and/or bringing about the fourth reich.
If they did decide to deport Swedish citizens of non-swede ethnicity, they could technically avoid killing them all or bringing about the fourth reich, in the way that you could drive a car into a crowd and avoid killing anyone by just driving around them. It is not literally the fourth reich but you would be embarking on the path that led to the third reich, which happened not because of some freak moral failing of the german people, but because making laws that explicitly treat differently people based on their ethnicity, with the goal of getting rid of the unwanted ones, is inherently a morally treacherous path. How do you define unwanted ethnicities that deserve being stripped of their rights as citizens? Are ethnic finns or norwedgians to be expelled too? What about western europeans, like french? Southern europeans? Maybe you'll need to explicitely say which ethnicities are "good" and "bad"? Just by asking questions that arise naturally from the proposed process, the parallels emerge on their own. Eventually you'll be asking yourself if the Japanese are still honorary aryans.
pigeonburger
10d ago
Thanks for your observations! I planned for the end of august my first real roadtrip as a driver and with my wife, so your insights are relevant and interesting.
pigeonburger
10d ago
Indeed, what I mostly took away from the 2020 election is that US judges will not consider failure of integrity measures to be proof of fraud and will refuse to do anything about unverifiable votes, so as long as incompetence is a possibility all integrity measures are pointless.
So tell me, is Sweden deporting Swedish citizens (naturalized or children of naturalized) of non-swede ethnicity, or are they revoking residency status of non-citizens?
Because that sounds a lot like a bailey and a motte. The plan that was proposed here as far as I understand was to do the first one, a severe betrayal of the deal that was offered to those who took it, which for those who have renounced previous citizenships might mean stripping them of the only citizenship they have left, and then trying to send them back against their will to a place that doesn't have any inclination to claim jurisdiction over them. That Sweden can do the second one, a move that, despite liberal tears, was always uncontroversially a possibility for non-citizen residents has very little relevance.
pigeonburger
16d ago
Indeed, from what I understand, the Ford Maverick is a massive success, despite it having been common wisdom, before its release, that "Americans just don't like smaller cars/trucks".
I struggle to understand who this would be for.
Most people sometimes have to go between cities/urban centers, which, most of the time, will involve going around 65 MPH. The only people that could even be interested in a vehicle limited to 45 MPH, are rich people who can afford to have an extra vehicle that cannot do all of their driving. Average and poor people are going to maximise the vehicle that can do all of the driving they need to do.
But the capability gap got kind of filled anyway, not by slower cars or faster golf carts, but by low autonomy subcompact EVs and "compliance EVs". Stuff like the older gen Fiat 500e, the Mitsubishi iMIEV. They didn't sell well, as they were too expensive for how useful (useless) they were to most people. But again, you have to be pretty well off to be able to not just get that one car that can do all your driving, even if it's a rusty 15 year old abused Civic.
Bartenders too can clear large amounts of money in tips in hip, expensive nightclubs.
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