T w e n t y S i d e d

Well, I’ve been waiting for this game since E3 2019. I was hooked on the promise of a new game from AsoboYou might remember them as the team that made FUEL, which I and six other people really liked.. I was even more hooked on the idea of a game that covers the entire planet using satellite data and buildings generated by machine learning. 

The reviews on Steam are a mess. Apparently Steam just downloads an installer, and that installer downloads the game from Microsoft. This means you can’t properly pre-load the game, which means the Microsoft servers will get completely slammed at launch. Going by the reviews, this is exactly what happened.

Shit.

Moreover, this is a huge game. It’s ~127GB! It will probably take you more than two hours to download the dang thing. Since Steam launches the launcher, Steam thinks you’re “playing the game” while this launcher is running. Thus, by the time the game is downloaded you’ll have in excess of two hours of “playtime”. That’s long enough to burn through your allotted playtime, so that Steam won’t allow refunds.

Microsoft is basically doing the Uplay thing where they shove their shitty platform inside of Steam. This means you need to login to Microsoft Xbox for PC Xbox Games on Windows for PC, or whatever the fuck this ridiculous contraption is called. That’s exactly the thing I wanted to avoid by getting it on Steam.

I can’t get around using Microsoft services, so I might as well get it from Microsoft directly. 

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020: First Impressions”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Please forgive the dashed-off nature of this post. My plan was to spend yesterday writing something substantial and thought-out, but I got sidetracked with programming and the time sort of vanished. I don’t have many images to make it look pretty, but I’ve made up for it by having extra typos. Yo’ure welcome.

One of the great annoyances of talking about Big Tech is that for a lot of people, the word “monopoly” has come to mean “really big annoying company”. Facebook is a monopoly? Apple is a monopoly? Google is a monopoly? Microsoft is a monopoly? Steam is a monopoly? Monopolies everywhere!

In my understanding of the word, a monopoly is when you have one and only one company providing a good or service. My local gas company is a monopoly, because I can’t buy natural gas from anyone else. The pipes in my house lead directly to their… gas-making stuffLook, I have no idea how utilities work, okay?. Same goes for water, electricity, and garbage pickup. Not only are these companies monopolies, they provide essential services. And so there are all kinds of extra rules in place to keep an eye on them because of the special position they holdAre these laws any good? I don’t know..

But none of the big tech companies have the same sort of universal control. Apple users are always free to switch to AndroidHaving said that, I’m willing to bet that doing so is a massive pain in the ass.. Google users are free to switch to DuckDuckGo or (God help you) Bing.

I’m not sure if this shift in meaning is more international or generational. Maybe people outside the USA have different attitudes about what the word means and what should be permitted. Maybe young people have appropriated the word to mean roughly “companies that are so big it SHOULD be illegal.” I don’t know, but it really does make a mess of a lot of discussions.

I was surprised how many people were willing to cheer for Epic in the #FreeFortnite campaign. The thrust of the campaign is the idea that you should be able to sell stuff on Apple devices without paying Apple. That makes no sense to me.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Is Apple a Monopoly?”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I complained about this game when it was first showcased at E3 last year. At the time I didn’t like it because it looked like a lazy copy of the cinematic Avengers with all of the charisma and wit drained out of it. The action looked stilted and scripted. It had a bad case of too many quicktime events, not enough player expression.

But hey, this was just a first impression, right? This is an E3 showcase, so of course they’re going to lean into the more cinematic sections of the game. Star Wars™ Jedi: Fallen Order™ EA™ looked pretty uninspired at E3, and that game turned out great.

But then as the previews began I saw that my initial concerns were just small potatoes compared to the real problems:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Marvel’s Avengers: Ew, No Thanks”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.