Witness for me is one of the best puzzle games ever. If you are into that genre it is very hard to dislike it by any measure. But of course, puzzles might not be your cup of tea.
In modern game development practice you will have to download patches anyway, so whatever there's on disk is irrelevant. Hardware has nothing to do with that.
Exactly that was my point. Consoles used to have a seamless "put in disc and lets go" experience, but they lost it and now are on par with PCs on that UX.
It's a defence mechanism against account hijacking if someone has access to your phone number, linked to your account. Went through the same procedure to recover an account I haven't been using for a few years.
Most likely stolen cards. Stolen credit cards are used to purchase gift cards which are then resold to unsuspecting buyers. Think of it as stolen money laundering.
Youtube is full of scam baiting videos – of people who waste scammer's time for entertainment.
A very usual scenario is that the scammer pretends to be a technician doing some remote support and for example pretends to provide some refund. Then they pretend that they've mistakenly sent out e.g. 10x the amount and they ask for the difference back, claiming that their job is on the line.
Crypto would work, but since they target old and tech-illiterate people, the easiest way is usually to ask the victim to go to a store, buy gift cards and read out the codes.
Google kitboga (a known scam baiter) for the videos.
They’re great entertainment pieces, and almost a commentary on the state of the world through the lens of microeconomics, with both sides behaving in a way they think is best for them.
For the baiters, they get engagement and, sometimes, the feeling of revenge for a scam visited upon an elderly relative; for the scammer, maybe it’s worse, as we know some people are trafficked into places then forced to scam people (or maybe they just want money). Still, kinda paints the world in a sad light.
I guess the days of the scammer grunts are numbered. It is eventually going to be cheaper and more efficient to use a language model. Only the scammer architects who come up with the schemes will be able to extract value.
When that happens, there won't be much entertainment nor that much ethical value in scam-baiting. We need to enjoy it while we can.
The one very visible trend in the last 30 years of game development was about reducing input complexity. It has nothing to do with complexity of games themselves. Now instead of fighting clunky controls like in good old times you fight game challenges, where the input tries hard to be as transparent as possible
With the 2 options you have left because those are all the buttons :)
And autoaim because those sticks aren't precise enough.
But it's not first person shooters I worry about, because those have devolved into competitive multiplayer IAP fests that create toxic communities.
I worry about strategy games and anything with a whiff of complexity. Reduce options because going through menus with a controller is slow and clunky. Reduce options because when playing at TV distance you can't read a serious list of properties like wargames have.
I genuinely think you're hallucinating this threat to keyboard/mouse gaming input for anything other than AAA console-first releases and for specific genres like action/fighting games. Keyboard/mouse is still by far the dominant input scheme for PC gaming and PC gamers are broadly quite firmly set on this choice.
Depends entirely on the genre of the game, the resources available to the developer, and the pressures they're facing from management. Most of the games in my library either have controller support as an afterthought or not at all. Controllers have been the minority choice in PC gaming since about forever and I haven't noticed that changing. What has changed is the gaming industry has created de facto standards and idioms for how PC games should handle. Play early shooters with their default setting and you'll get to experience all kinds of key mapping that send modern gamers looking for mods to fix it or another game to play. These days you can pretty much count on WASD for movement, the mouse for looking. Nobody ships a game with movement bound to the arrow keys or modal mouse look. Game developers now meet gamers where they are, and for PC games that is almost always mouse and keyboard, except in those genres where gamers expect controllers.
I'm not sure what you are referring to, but I remember way less cross-platform software than we have now, and way worse working WINE. No, there was never time when we could run whatever software we want on a machine of our choice.
> I remember way less cross-platform software than we have now
Really? Outside Electron apps and PWAs, I'm seeing fewer apps than ever support macOS as a native target. Additionally, cross-platform packaging feels much more fragile than it used to, especially if you're using Brew over Nix. And cross-platform games... just forget about it.
Modern macOS simply feels abandoned by cross-platform efforts. Upstream Wine runs worse than it did in 2010, depreciated 32-bit libraries annihilated my Mac-native Steam catalog and AU plugins, Vulkan is ignored and CUDA compute drivers work but Apple refuses to sign them. The professional experience that I attributed to macOS is gone in the new releases. All Apple can innovate in is petty politicking.
For contrast, you can imagine how this debate between a private OS developer and the government would go in a non-democratic country. Or, you don't even have to imagine, because examples are not hard to find.
But really, the point GP was trying to make (IMO) is that all western democracies are very obviously sliding towards authoritarianism. They are building tools which, even _if_ they don't abuse them now, will be available to any future government and with time, the probability of one of them being non-democratic is 1.
