Nipah

I mentioned it in my reply to this comment, but Simple Tab Groups is a pretty solid alternative in Firefox.

Its not quite as elegant as the built-in Chrome ones, but it does make it easy to have a bunch of groups sorted out that you can flip between.

Generally, its not that I have too many tabs as much as I have some tabs I leave open all the time and want to condense down a bit.

For example, at work I use Chrome for my main web work, and FF for my… uh… shit like this. So I have a bunch of Chrome tabs open that I know I’ll have to make changes to again in the future, so they stay open. I also have ‘projects’ which contain a bunch of pages that are all related to each other. Being able to group those together and collapse makes it easy to quickly get back into them when someone wants a small, insignificant (sorry, extremely important!) change to them that needs to be done yesterday, and I can eventually just throw the group away once the project is mostly complete and not going to be touched by human hands ever again (until a year later, when it suddenly becomes a critical problem for someone, and thus a problem for me… I’m not complaining, you’re complaining).

At home, I mainly use Firefox. I have an extension that allows me to have tab groups, but its not as nice looking as the built-in Chrome version (Simple Tab Groups, which is actually quite nice, but not as pretty as the Chrome ones). I have a group for my usual fucking around stuff (Discord, YT, Kbin, DIM (Destiny app), wiki for whatever other game I’m playing), a tab for my streaming stuff (which I don’t use often, but as I have a few container tabs for logging in to my brother’s account for a handful. I like to just leave those open so I don’t have to worry about it), and a group for my “working from home” stuff like email/OneDrive and a smaller amount of pages I always keep open because I’m always editing them for work.

So all in all, I don’t have like a hundred tabs open at any given time, and I could make due with just having them all bookmarked and open them as need be… but honestly, that’s a bit of a hassle and would also either leave me with a ton of useless bookmarks after a month or two, or require me to curate my bookmarks every month or two. Versus just having a tab group I can just kill off once I know I’m done with their work.

I said this elsewhere, but essentially it looks like a “Turn your brain off” movie which kind of hits the notes that Borderlands is known for while also having a bit of a fun house mirror / “We’ve got [game] at home” feeling to it.

Overall though, it feels… forced. From the limited bits you can hear, I don’t think Jack Black really works for Claptrap (no reason to not just keep the original VA outside of “Jack Black is so in right now” or some shit); the dialog feels overly filtered, if that makes any sense… Like too many people edited it so that it achieved maximum ‘for the lolz’ (not that the first two games (the ones I actually have experience with) were the peak of writing, mind you); and I don’t have any feelings one way or the other for Kevin Hart, but for this role I think he was also a bad casting choice (but what do I know, I’ve only seen a quick trailer… maybe he nails it).

Action looks decent enough, and I do appreciate that (at least from the looks of things) they’re pushing Cate’s character as the lead.

Looking for a pure CSS implementation of a concept?

Best I can do is an overly elaborate jquery solution to your question, sorry.

Assassin’s Creed Origins the gameplay started getting repetitive very quickly. Even though I liked the ancient Egyptian settings and the beautiful graphics, I couldn’t follow the nonsensical plot.

Man, that was the only one of the newer style that I liked… Bayek was pretty cool, and it felt ‘fresh’… it doesn’t hurt that it ticked off two of my preferences: exploration and combat (say what you will about hiding in knee high grass, I love me some stealth). Some of the bits did rub me the wrong way, like no 1-hit kills, but I liked the weapon choices and combat options enough that I had a good time overall.

That being said, I can’t for the life of me remember anything about the story of the game so… I guess I just turned that part of my brain off after a while.

The more recent ones went too far in terms of world size, so it went from “I wonder what’s over that hill?” to “I’ll never complete filling in this map so why even bother?”… which sucks, because Kassandra was pretty cool too (not sure how the viking character was done because I didn’t even bother with that game after bouncing off Odyssey).

Shit, I forgot about GTA games in my reply…

I’m with you on this one. I can see the appeal, but for me it ends up being a cycle of: do a mission or two, get bored of the larger than life characters, do some open world stuff, get my wanted level up too high, die, repeat until I quickly get bored and shut it off.

Which is odd because I do that exact same thing in other games I love (BotW, WoW (long since quit) or Destiny) and its all golden… but in a game like GTA? Yawn.

For games that are in genres that I’d actually play:

Final Fantasy 6 (3): I grew up with the NES, and when we got a SNES I got whatever games I could from the $20 bin at Toys R Us. I had some friends who were a bit better off that loaned me some games, and I eventually managed to get my hands on a copy of Chrono Trigger (as well as other RPGs like Breath of Fire), but when I borrowed FFIII from one of them I was just… underwhelmed. I didn’t really care for the characters, it felt pretty slow initially, and I remember getting to a bit with a bunch of moogles in the party and I just put it down and never went back.

I’ve since tried to play it a few times here and there, but it never really manages to hook me… but people sing the praises of it high and low and I just don’t really get it because I can’t get over the hump.

The Witcher 1/2/3: I just really don’t like the combat, honestly. I’ve tried playing all three, and managed to get enough time into them to appreciate the good bits (voice acting, story, quest lines) but the main meat and potatoes for me in a game are exploration and combat, and only one of those really works for me in those games. I had a better time in the first game, all things considered, because I guess I was willing to allow a bit of jankiness from an older game, but I bounced off Witcher 2 pretty quickly combat-wise, and didn’t manage to get more than many 1/3 to 1/2 way through Witcher 3 before I just admitted that I wasn’t having fun.

Persona 3: I got into the games with P4G on my Vita, so part of this is ‘going backwards is hard’ in terms of QoL improvements and what not. But I also played the PSP port of Persona 2 (whichever one was actually ported in English) and had a good time (not so much with the PS1 version of the one that didn’t get the English PSP port… that one was rough) so I guess its just the game didn’t resonate with me as much as the other ones did… Maybe it was the characters or maybe it was the cuts that were made for the P3P version of the game, but it just didn’t hit the same.

Otherwise, a lot of military-style FPS games (stuff like Halo or Destiny or Timesplitters or even Goldeneye 64 are/were fun), the more recent sports titles (up to the Dreamcast/PS2 I was fine with them, but more realism doesn’t do anything for me), and stuff like MOBA or visual novels or ‘walking sims’ or battle royale or whatever those asynchronous horror games just don’t tick the boxes for me in terms of what I want from a video game.

When I used to work at a video game store, I used to try and dissuade parents from buying their 10 year old GTA 3/VC.

“So you can just walk down the street and shoot a random person, then when the cops show up, you can just shoot all of them as well.”

Oh, well they probably see worse things on TV!

“Uh huh… you can also pick up a hooker, drive to a secluded area, have sex with them, pay them, and then run them over when they leave to get your money back.”

Wait, it also has sex?!

My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?

My initial/gut reaction was “obviously relevant ads based on the content I’m watching”, but I don’t care how relevant the ad is when I’ve seen the same Raid Shadow Legend ad across multiple videos I’m gonna try to skip it (or as I did long, long ago: adblock it).

I don’t even know what actual YT ads are now, only the integrated creator ones that they’re personally sponsored by… the hello fresh and world of tanks and manscape and debrand etc., which I’ve started auto-skipping on a channel by channel basis based on very few criteria: the entertainment value/effort they’ve put into the ad (so Drew Gooden is usually always funny and gets a pass, same for channels like Wulff Den or Th3Jez or Critical Role) but certain ones just get manually skipped regardless (no matter how funny you are, I don’t want to sit here and listen to you talk about Manscape for 3 minutes) and how often I end up seeing them (which in these instances, isn’t often because they’re channel specific usually)

So I guess it mainly boils down to relevant ads that aren’t soulless and that I don’t see 3x every other video?

As someone who played/plays a lot of MMOs and stuff like Destiny/The Division: You’d be amazed at the number of people who don’t get to step two of that simple statement.

People who are just downright angry at a game but still actively playing… “Man, I can’t believe they’re forcing me to go into PvP to get [some arbitrary weapon or cosmetic item]!” they grumble, not realizing that they don’t need to tick that little check box in their collection.

People who say things like “I grinded out this holiday season and bought the event pass and I didn’t even like the stuff it offered!” is perhaps not technically ‘common’, but that kind of situation happens often enough that I’m a bit worried for gamers as a whole.

Its some kind of weird combination of a hoarder’s mentality, a sunk cost fallacy, and probably some FOMO sprinkled on top… all mixed together by some psychologist on a company’s payroll to maximize profits.

Or you need to spend half of the games managing inventory.

On the other hand, I enjoy this (to a certain degree, mind you). Going through all the random crap I’ve picked up off the ground in Skyrim to maximize selling potential, moving things around in Diablo II for the same reason, picking through my vault in Destiny 2 to figure out which guns to keep and which to dismantle, organizing my various bits and bobs in FFXIV:ARR across my retainers so that everything is where it should be… I kind of dig that kind of stuff because its a bit of a management game within the regular game and a nice break from mindlessly murdering everything (and a bit of a “ooh presents on Christmas” kind of feel when you dig through all the stuff you’ve acquired).

On the gripping (third) hand, sometimes it does become more of a second job almost… Destiny 2, as an example again, feels like a chore sometimes keeping on top of all the various currencies and whether this random gun/armor that dropped is an upgrade over one of the multitude of other options I’ve had collecting dust for the past couple of years. “But maybe I’ll use it if they buff [gun type/perk/build]!” I think as I toss it into the pile, only to forever become an icon I ignore in DIM.

I replay the “Metroid-vania” Castlevanias every few years (SotN, GBA/DS games), and one of my goals is always maximum map completion… obviously not required for actually beating the games, but I only consider the game completed if I get all the rooms on my map.

More specifically for SotN, I also gotta get the Crissaegrim + Medusa Shield otherwise am I even playing the game properly?

Some of the others I try to get all the doodads: cards, souls, glyphs, whatever. Some are a bit more annoying than others, so sometimes I’ll skip out on the really annoying ones if I don’t get it done before filling in the map.

I’m essentially re-listening to the campaigns during my lunch break so if they all start getting annoying ads going forward I’ll just go back to getting audio books from OverDrive I suppose.

The first campaign is still on their old Nerdist/Geek and Sundry listing (the newer ones look to be from stitcher.com), so I’m wondering if once I get through the ones there the newer stuff won’t all be like that going forward.

I tried AntennaPod because folks on lemmy/kbin/beehaw/wherever have been recommended it, but it was being a bit weird with the only ‘podcast’ I listen to: Critical Role campaigns.

With Google Podcasts, they’d load in with a “Welcome to the Critical Role podcast” intro by one of the players, then go into the fanfare and then into the game. With AntennaPod, it would load (from the same subscription) with at least one ad right off the bat for some reason. I tried it a few times (granted, with just one episode (campaign 1, session 115)) and even uninstalled and reinstalled, and still had ad(s) at the front… I didn’t bother to scrub through to see if it had more ads in the middle bits, because one ad was too many, ya know?

I then tried out Pocket Casts (another recommendation) and the podcast behaves exactly like the Google Podcasts one does… no ads.

Not sure why, but that is how it worked when I tried it at least so other folks may run into a similar situation based on the podcast(s) in question.

While I do understand where you’re coming from, someone being better at something shouldn’t stop a person from doing what they love.

There are millions of people who draw better, sing better, dance better, write better, play video games better, design websites better or just do anything I can do better than I can… and that’s fine.

The main problem is that its not enough to be competitive with Steam at this point… you need to put out something so good that it give people enough of a reason to leave the comfort of Steam… you need Steam and then another layer of goodness on top of Steam.

This is the same issue that a lot of MMOs had when trying to become a WoW killer. You not only needed to have pretty much everything Blizzard put into the game, but more on top because otherwise why would anyone bother to leave the comforts of Azeroth to play something that is maybe marginally better, or a possibly worse experience?

Microtransactions are ‘small’ purchases made in a game (or via some kind of store that allows you to buy stuff to be used inside of a game).

DLC is any additional downloadable content that is not included with the game (so something like a day 1 patch wouldn’t be considered DLC, I’d say).

All microtransations are DLC, but not all DLC are microtransactions, generally (before someone comes along with some kind of physical microtransaction or something I guess)

I personally just view microtransations as anything that isn’t ‘playable content’. So buying a mount from an in-game store would be a microtransaction, while buying an expansion wouldn’t be. Map packs kind of blur the line in this instance, because one could argue that they’re essentially ‘world cosmetics’, but its a hard and fast rule and not something I’d try to enforce as a law, ya know?

I see this take a lot, and while I don’t disagree… I think it downplays the number of people who DO make ‘sensible’ purchases in a lot of these games.

I personally don’t bother with in-game purchases (I also rarely buy DLC… but I also sub to FFXIV regularly, and have all the content for Destiny 2, so sometimes I can be got) for cosmetics or especially boosts. I’d rather earn the items in game, or a step down, earn in-game currency to purchase those items instead because I’m, at the end of the day, paying for a game to play it and while I want to look good in game while doing so, I’m not gonna drop $15 on digital t-shirts.

But there are plenty of people who don’t mind tossing down $60 additionally a year into a game like Destiny 2 for sparkly new transmog outfits from the Eververse store, and they’ll see it as any sort of reason to do so (‘because I have the money’, ‘because I want to support the developer’, ‘because I have to collect everything’, ‘because because because’), and we can’t just pretend like its a handful of dudes dropping thousands of dollars while everyone else nobly boycotts the practice.

The big problem is that a company will look at something like World of Warcraft/Destiny at the height of their popularity and think “We want that!”

Then they’ll put out a (we’re being optimistic here) serviceable, good game with a respectable amount of content… but it won’t be able to hold a candle to something that: already has that much content + more AND players who are already ‘stuck’ with the game (sunk cost, friends/family/community, etc).

So you put out a game, get a brief spurt of attention from people who are a bit bored of the same ol’ same ol’, but then once they breakneck through all the content you have in less than a month they turn around and head back to their comfort food game and never look back. Congratulations, you can now put out a master class on how to waste millions of dollars.

In order to make a game as a service now you need either an extremely good hook, or you need to not only be comparable to an existing game but also EXCEED what that game offers and continue to provide content at a staggering speed until you’ve coerced people to have invested enough in the game to then be their comfort food/sunk cost game of choice.