T w e n t y S i d e d

The trailer for the upcoming Gotham Knights dropped last week. It leads off with a video of Bruce Wayne saying, “If you’re watching this, I’m dead.” As of this writing, there are about 11,000 comments on that video and the vast majority of them are some variation of, “Yeah suuure he is. I’ll believe it when we see the body.”

But while I’m sure everyone is correct and the most profitable superhero of all time is still alive, I think it’s safe to say that the Batman I loved – The ARKHAM Batman – is super-dead.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Gotham Knights: Batman is Dead”

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.

So Epic Games is in the news again. This time they’ve picked a fight with Apple and Google. That’s fine. Both companies are very worthy targets, but I don’t have much else to say about the lawsuit itself. This story is evolving by the day, and I make videos much too slowly to keep up with fast-paced stories like this. 

The interesting thing is Epic’s Nineteen-Eighty Fortnite campaign, which tries to rally users to their cause. They even have the #FreeFortnite hashtag, but it’s not about making Fortnite free for us, it’s about making the Apple store free to use for Fortnite.

This is not the first time the company has tried to frame simple corporate business tactics as something brave or heroic. 

I don’t know Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and even though I disagree with him on many things, I don’t have anything personally against him. But whether he intends it or not, the way he carries himself on social media makes it feel like he thinks he’s the hero because other people are worse. It actually reminds me of Jack from the Borderlands series: 

Jack will do something self-serving and deeply frustrating to people and then assume he’s the hero because some of his foes are bad actors, and then he acts like everyone should worship his “heroics”. 

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Epic is Not the Hero”

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.

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.