To be fair, Age of Empires III was bad, and the last project Ensemble was working on before they got shuttered was a Halo MMO.
Also, Robot Entertainment (the studio that rose from the ashes of Ensemble) were the initial developers of Age of Empires Online, which was P2W slop that 90% of players couldn’t run because Games For Windows LIVE was a buggy crock of shit. And since then they’ve released nothing but Orcs Must Die games.
Eighteen months ago, I was an advocate for Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, because I didn’t think anybody could have done a worse job than Bobby Kotick.
Phil Spencer has proven me wrong. This arsehole tried to shut down Tango Gameworks after they literally shadowdropped a critically acclaimed GOTY contender.
Yup.
Best kart/racer combination in the game is genuinely one of the Bowser ones, due to having the lowest acceleration and highest top speed in the game.
I’ll add some context, as I actually own a Switch 2 and Mario Kart World.
The game is full of “intermission tracks”, where the next race starts at the previous track and you effectively drive to the next track for the first two laps, then complete a single lap of the destination track. For example, in the Mushroom Cup, rather than start the second race at Crown City, you’d instead start at Mario Bros Circuit (the 1st track in the cup), drive to Crown City for two “laps” then complete a single lap of Crown City.
Many people voted Random in online multiplayer instead of picking one of the three interconnecting tracks, because the intermission tracks frankly suck for the most part, and are just straight-line roads. By picking Random, the game would actually pick a completely different course and you’d do a standard 3-lap race, like you would by selecting the course in Time Trial mode.
At least that’s what used to happen, before the latest patch… Now, random actually picks one of the three interconnecting courses, and no longer picks a random course.
To be honest, I think intermission tracks only really work in Free Roam and Knockout Tour. It doesn’t feel innovative to effectively drive to the next racetrack when you still have to wait between race results and loading screens.
Bernie is a whole lot more compos mentis than Biden ever was.
The right time to elect him would’ve been 2016…
He isn’t wrong. If they hadn’t pushed a senile 81 year old incumbent leader upon us as their candidate, in a blatant attempt to parachute an unpopular vice president into power once the 25th Amendment had to inevitably be invoked, then we would never have had a second Trump term.
Biden should never have ran for a second term, and allowed time for the Democrats to field a decent candidate for the White House. The fact that Harris literally lost to somebody who tried to stir up an insurrection against Congress four years ago says it all.
Another big problem is that we’ve been collectively trying to shoehorn everybody into programming careers for the better part of two decades. In fact, “just learn to code” is often thrown around by people in response to the prospect of AI automating and taking over everybody’s jobs.
What they don’t understand is that coding is actually very difficult, especially for people who are bad at math, which is a significant portion of the population if you look at statistics, grades, test scores, etc. Expecting a lowly paid call center worker who lost their job to AI to suddenly open up Visual Studio and write any code is a fools errand.
I bring this up because I think there’s a correllation between people asking low-quality questions and people being pushed into making a career move into tech.
I’m not a programmer (last time I seriously dabbled into coding was building a website for an A Level Computing project and I had to teach myself HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL because my sixth form was shit and was only teaching us Visual Basic 6 when the IDE/language had been obsolete for nearly a decade) and I have never personally posted on StackOverflow. In fact, the only StackExchange site I’ve ever been part of was EpicAdvice, a short-lived offshoot that was for World of Warcraft specific questions. But I do have a sibling with a computer science and software engineering background which is how I became aware of the site in the first place.
This isn’t my personal criticism of the site, it’s me echoing the sentiment of the many who have complained about the community across the web.
Maybe StackOverflow is dying because its community is full of incredibly toxic, passive-aggressive and hostile basement dwellers who will berate, downvote and lock the threads of anybody who dares ask a programming question. Genuinely the kind of people you often see moderating subreddits or Discord servers who have never been punched in the face.
ChatGPT hammered the final nail in the site’s coffin because it’s now become a tool where you can ask specific programming questions and likely get an answer that isn’t “use the search bar you fucking dipshit. Question closed as off-topic.”
Echo toxic sentiments for long enough and people are going to start believing it.
I’m about 95% sure that communities like 4chan, Reddit, Poal, 8Kun, etc are the reason why the American & European political climates are now so fucked.
No but they did ban a whole subreddit (WatchPeopleDie) dedicated to footage of people dying back in 2018 after they dared to show footage of the Christchurch mass shooting - without any prior admin warning whatsoever.
And honestly Reddit were a bunch of hypocrites for how they handled that situation, especially since WPD had tonnes of uncut ISIS execution videos hosted on their subreddit a few years back and nobody on the board gave a shit.
But it does make ya wonder why he wanted to run for a second term. He probably won’t make it to the end of the current administration.
There are already conspiracy theories going around that he kept his medical issues (dementia, cancer, etc) a closely guarded secret whilst running for re-election.
As for why I think Biden wanted to run for a second term, my guess is that his plan was to stand down and effectively proxy the United States’ first female leader in that way. Harris would have otherwise been eviscerated in the primaries.
He won’t live long enough to see the major impact of slow rolling Trump’s arrest.
Dude, with the way Trump is handling things, the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential elections are going to be about as Fair and Balanced™ as a Fox News broadcast.
This raises the question: why would you want to invest in US companies? Republicans are presiding over a $36 trillion mountain of debt and now want to run further deficits to raise that mountain, after imposing tariffs on everybody in the weeks prior.
It feels like it’s only a matter of time until the USA’s debt bubble bursts and takes out a good chunk of the global economy with it.
BRICS are getting exactly what they wanted with Trump. This is how you destabilize the dollar and make the Chinese yuan the world’s reserve currency.
So they’re wilfully ignoring the EU’s Digital Markets Act and a US court-ordered injunction that prevents them from punishing developers for trying to circumvent the use of the App Store for in-app purchases, after one of their execs was caught lying under oath and potentially facing criminal repercussions.
I’m not the biggest fan of Epic Games, but I really want to see this backfire spectacularly. Apple’s business practices are so bad that it makes me want to see Tim Sweeney kick Tim Cook’s ass in court.
You sound as bad as Trump now with the whole “electoral interference” allegations.
And before you call bullshit, why is it only bad when he says it?
At this point, US politics has gone far beyond the point where we can make jokes about morons voting for the face-eating leopard party. Anybody who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris because she wasn’t critical enough of Israel, didn’t do enough for LGBTQ rights, didn’t have enough left wing policies, etc. is now reaping what they sow.
It’s not even a good song.
80% of it is him and a crowd of black guys (who may or may not have been AI generated or paid a tonne to get in on the white supremacist grift) chanting “N***a heil Hitler!” The other 20% comes across as some kind of incel or MRA manifesto, where he’s whinging about being cancelled and denied access to his kids.
Kanye has well and truly lost the plot. He needs to be detained in a psych ward…
Aren’t there ways to treat the asbestos and prevent the fibers from becoming airborne and posing a serious risk?
I 100% believe the claim that Microsoft executives mistakenly thought they’ve just nabbed the Donkey Kong IP by acquiring Rare. Definitely seems like something some c-suite ghouls who are totally out of touch with the games industry would believe.
Also, I’m not sure how much of Rare’s downfall was due to Microsoft’s mismanagement or their core talent leaving to form other studios. Maybe a bit of both.