I’ll take persona, although it’s been way too many games with the same setup. Ditto for the Trails series.
Honestly, I don’t think it got any better than ATB systems in FF 6 and 7. Everybody else is either riffing on those or spending so much money they think they can’t be those and need to be Devil May Cry instead.
It is a hardware issue, in the way that those kitchen gadgets to peel eggs or neatly slice butter into perfect cubes are a hardware issue. The application is just not mainstream and the usability of it has built-in challenges that aren’t about improving the specs.
VR is cool and I hope it remains viable for enthusiasts, but it’s definitely not the next cell phone and it’s never going to be as long as it involves strapping a screen to your face.
Ah, the hallmark of mainstream usability: a four bar chart with multi-segmented portions based on different independent ratings of compatibility that don’t agree with each other.
There are a good couple of decades of Italian politics that would no align with that.
Honestly, all that is fairly misinformed and superficial. Cross-checks in politics are hard to design and very susceptible to details. I just don’t think we disagree enough on the fundamental (i.e. FPTP with no adjustments is an outright bad system) to be worth getting caught in the weeds. If I’m gonna argue I’d rather spend the time arguing with someone I actually disagree with :)
The US didn’t “subvert it”, they’re just running a pre-alpha version that never worked and was built for entirely different hardware.
Because ultimately all representative democracy is game design. Democracy isn’t majority rule, it’s majority rule tempered by a lot of pre-existing agreements and ongoing compromises.
Very representative systems have a lot of advantadges, but they also have different issues. Coalitions can be hard to sustain, manifestos and programs aren’t expected to see implementation. People argue, and they do have a point, that an overly fragmented legislative doesn’t represent popular will, since the policy implemented by coalitions necessarily will be mismatched to every option people voted for. It’s also true that in extreme cases you end up with systems where people run as an audition to get a job in the ruling coalition, rather than to push an agenda.
So yeah, ultimately all electoral systems are constantly being gamed by both politicians and voters. That’s just how politics work. But within that we can fine tune all these systems for optimal outcomes, and I do think that a legislative that genuinely needs to trade and deal and compromise is going to be more functional and less prone to extremism than direct majoritarian rule, where there are no checks beyond the other powers. I think even a system like the French would be a big improvement for both the US and UK systems, but it’s probably only applicable in the UK, where there is already a multiparty system. The US is so entrenched that at this point you probably need a full reinvention of their entire constitution. The thing was always a first draft at best anyway.
This. Democracy isn’t broken, FPTP is. Although, as the other comment says, this shows it still being functional in that party alignment substitutes for ranked choice by making it so that candidates the third party can tolerate get endorsed by a retiring third candidate. Less “broken”, more “convoluted and ambiguous requiring custom to take over for the design flaws”.
For one, EU immigration policy has already hardened significantly and is now being directly catered to Meloni’s far right government. You’ll notice the far right hasn’t stopped bleating about it.
And the reason for that is that immigration simply cannot be curved effectively without literally solving inequality worldwide. That’s why it’s such a convenient scapegoat. Xenophobia doesn’t need to make sense, and since desperate migrants being smuggled by human traffickers are unresponsive to posturing you can just bang that drum indefinitely.
So we can either explain this effectively to people (and also help improve the inequality bit) or we can resign ourselves to a fascist government elected by racist useful idiots.
I feel like the real lesson is being missed here:
Do not mess with Mbappé.
Hah. I almost wrote that I also think the two Ultima Undergrounds are better than Deus Ex despite being much older and having an objectively very clumsy interface. Then I thought that’d get us in the weeds and pull us too far back, so I took it out.
Look, yeah, Deus Ex rolled in elements from CRPGs and had good production values for the time. But all those things were nothing new for an RPG, they were just new for a shooter. Baldur’s Gate and Fallout were a few years old. The entire Ultima franchise had been messing around with procedural, simulated worlds for almost a decade at that point, which in the 90s was a technological eon.
And yeah, System Shock had created a template for a shooter RPG, they just applied it to a lone survivor dungeon crawly horror thing, rather than try to marry it to the narrative elements of NPC-focused CRPGs, which is admittedly a lot more complicated. And Deus Ex was fully voiced and had… well, a semblance of cutscenes. In context it’s hilariously naive compared to what Japanese devs were doing in Metal Gear or Final Fantasy, but it was a lot for western PC game standards.
But it wasn’t… great to play? I don’t know what to tell you. Thief and Hitman both had nailed the clockwork living stage thing, and at the time I was more than happy to give up the Matrix-at-home narrative and the DnD-style questing for that. The pitch was compelling, but it didn’t necessarily make for a great playable experience against its peers.
I didn’t hate it or anything. I spent quite a bit of time messing with it. That corny main theme still pops up in my head with no effort on demand. I spent more time using it as a benchmark than Unreal, which I also thought wasn’t a great game.
Also, while I’m here pissing people off, can we all agree that “immersive sim” is a terrible name for a genre? What exactly is “simulated”? Why is it immersive? Immerisve as opposed to what? At the time we tended to lump them in with stealth games, so the name is just an attempt to reverse engineer a genre name by using loose words that weren’t already taken, and I hate it. See also: character action game. Which action games do NOT have characters?
Man, I am a grumpy old fart today.
Thanks for the link! International press is still running the 33% estimate they probably got from the French morning papers or have taken down the results, so my references hadn’t updated the number.
For the record, the image is not new, there was a lot of international coverage regarding Le Pen’s presidential chances in 2022. But presidentials are presidentials, only one person gets to win. Legislatives raise a lot of questions about parliamentary dynamics, alliances and the potential for the second round to generate another bout of Macron shooting himself in the foot followed by him shooting everybody else in the foot for good measure. That, and there is more paranoia about the tilt right across the EU and internationally about the US.
The closest thing we had was the System Shock duology, since both predate Deus Ex. Deus Ex was basically accessible System Shock. Having dialogue trees and NPCs without losing the open-ended nature of System Shock’s more dungeon crawl-y approach was the real selling point. Well, that and the trenchcoats and shades. The Matrix was such a big deal.
But even then, each of those elements were already present in different mixes in several late 90s games. Deus Ex by some counts was one of the early culminations of the genre blending “everything game” we were all chasing during the 90s. The other was probably GTA 3. I think both of those are fine and they are certainly important games, but I never enjoyed playing them as much as less zeitgeist-y games that were around at the same time. I did spend a lot of time getting Deus Ex to look as pretty as possible, but I certainly didn’t finish it and, like a lot of people, I mostly ran around Liberty Island a bunch.
I played more Thief 2 that year, honestly. I played WAY more Hitman than Deus Ex that year. I certainly thought System Shock 2 was better. Deus Ex is a big, ambitious, important game, for sure, but I never felt it quite stuck the landing when playing it, even at the time.
I’m not of the opinion that more simulation and more “realism” are always better, but I would absolutely take a System Shock 2 remake, especially after the System Shock one (1 one?) turned out great.
FWIW, I’m seeing projections based on the counts that still have them at 34, but I guess we’ll see.
I agree that a resurrection of the cordon sanitaire is probably a positive and I agree that Macron was extremely clumsy, like much of the EU’s centre and demochristian right, in sliding towards far right positions they just can’t defend any better than the actual fascists. But still, from an international perspective France is now firmly in the club of Central European countries with a major fascist problem in a way it wasn’t yesterday, even if the outcome was already understood to be going this way.
Kind of overrated? I mean, it was cool to see a bit more of a palatable cinematic presentation in real time to go along with the late 90s PC jank, and that theme did kick ass, but it’s less groundbreaking in context than I think people give it credit for. And it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as System Shock 2, in my book.
I get that immersion tends to normalization…
… but man, 34% is still a LOT. Especially when it’s 2x the previous result and the largest bloc.
It’ll be good if they are prevented from having easy access to legislative action, but it’s still an underpants-threatening result in my book.
I guess that depends on the use case and how frequently both machines are running simultaneously. Like I said, that reasoning makes a lot of sense if you have a bunch of users coming and going, but the OP is saying it’s two instances at most, so… I don’t know if the math makes virtualization more efficient. It’d pobably be more efficient by the dollar, if the server is constantly rendering something in the background and you’re only sapping whatever performance you need to run games when you’re playing.
But the physical space thing is debatable, I think. This sounds like a chonker of a setup either way, and nothing is keeping you from stacking or rack-mounting two PCs, either. Plus if that’s the concern you can go with very space-efficient alternatives, including gaming laptops. I’ve done that before for that reason.
I suppose it’s why PC building as a hobbyist is fun, there are a lot of balance points and you can tweak a lot of knobs to balance many different things between power/price/performance/power consumption/whatever else.
OK, yeah, that makes sense. And it IS pretty unique, to have a multi-GPU system available at home but just idling when not at work. I think I’d still try to build a standalone second machine for that second user, though. You can then focus on making the big boy accessible from wherever you want to use it for gaming, which seems like a much more manageable, much less finicky challenge. That second computer would probably end up being relatively inexpensive to match the average use case for half of the big server thing. Definitely much less of a hassle. I’ve even had a gaming laptop serve that kind of purpose just because I needed a portable workstation with a GPU anyway, so it could double as a desktop replacement for gaming with someone else at home, but of course that depends on your needs.
And in that scenario you could also just run all that LLM/SD stuff in the background and make it accessible across your network, I think that’s pretty trivial whether it’s inside a VM or running directly on the same environment as everything else as a background process. Trivial compared to a fully virtualized gaming computer sharing a pool of GPUs, anyway.
Feel free to tell us where you land, it certainly seems like a fun, quirky setup etiher way.
Yeah, but if you’re this deep into the self hosting rabbit hole what circumstances lead to having an extra GPU laying around without an extra everything else, even if it’s relartively underpowered? You’ll probably be able to upgrade it later by recycling whatever is in your nice PC next time you upgrade something.
At this point most of my household is running some frankenstein of phased out parts just to justify my main build. It’s a bit of a problem, actually.
OK, but why?
Well, for fun and as a cool hobby project, I get that. That is enough to justify it, like any other crazy hobbyist project. Don’t let me stop you.
But in the spirit of practicality and speaking hypothetically: Why set it up that way?
For self-hosting why not build a few standalone machines and run off that instead? The reason to do this large scale is optimizing resources so you can assign a smaller pool of hardware to users as they need it, right? For a home set of two or three users you’d probably notice the fluctuations in performance caused by sharing the resources on the gaming VMs and it would cost you the same or more than building a couple reasonable gaming systems and a home server/NAS for the rest. Way less, I bet, if you’re smart about upgrades and hand-me-downs.
I got into the millions with a mid-to-high end CPU and was… fine. I mean, fine at 40-ish fps, not fine at 240 fps.
To me the bigger issues were with balance and broken features that were hard to diagnose because city builders are so opaque by design. I can play a strategy game at 30 fps, been doing that for decades, but I need to have some way to figure out how the game is supposed to work.
In any case, it’s less that I’m not “accepting” of games being broken, it’s that I think I and everybody else are starting to wise up to the fact that you can just… wait. Why play CS2 at launch if you can give it a year while you do something else and play a better version of it that costs half as much?