It’s been a while, but here is another “Let’s discuss” post! I hope everybody is doing fine and these posts are still appreciated :).

I haven’t played this myself, but I know so many people who are extremely passionate about it that it felt like a good candidate! Looking forward to all of your musings!

I think the issue is not wether it’s sentient or not, it’s how much agency you give it to control stuff.

Even before the AI craze this was an issue. Imagine if you were to create an automatic turret that kills living beings on sight, you would have to make sure you add a kill switch or you yourself wouldn’t be able to turn it off anymore without getting shot.

The scary part is that the more complex and adaptive these systems become, the more difficult it can be to stop them once they are in autonomous mode. I think large language models are just another step in that complexity.

An atomic bomb doesn’t pass a Turing test, but it’s a fucking scary thing nonetheless.

I think they were joking. As in actually submitting bugs (adding bugs to the code).

I thoroughly enjoyed that! I’d read your blog!

That is beautiful!

Fantastic video!

This might be my first PC gaming experience. My niece had this game and when I came to visit we would play it together and build houses and stuff. I have really fond memories of the first game and some of its expansions (vacation and night-life, also pets if I remember correctly?).

I somehow completely skipped The Sims 2, but by the time The Sims 3 released, I was extremely hyped. It is the only time in my life I bought a collector’s edition. It had a USB key chain in the shape of the green diamond! I remember really enjoying it and especially loving the music and the vibes it brought.

I also had a Sims game on Game Boy Advance (with cats and dogs) and one on Nintendo DS (on a lost island). Both were really fun!

I can’t really pinpoint why, but I barfed a little after seeing that video.

Damn. I tried getting into it as a child but it was too difficult for me. The constant clicking and micromanaging gave me stress :P.

Is it Age of Empires 2?

I adore this series. I especially have very fond memories of the original. I did not play it on release (I was still a toddler then), but I got it through the Valve Bundle on Steam and played it through at least 5 times. I’ve had multiple times in my life were I didn’t have access to a powerful computer, but similar to DOOM, Half-Life will run on about anything. I remember one of my playtroughs being on a horrible windows 8 tablet, and still it looked and played amazingly :).

Half-Life 2 then just perfected an already strong original. There is something just so satisfying about the environmental design and linearity of the levels. You just push through and know that you will find enough in your surroundings to make it. I find it strange that there haven’t been that many clones since (first person exploration action games). Most games either are to linear (COD) or completely open world or become a full-on immersive sim.

If you have any recommendations, please share them. Dishonored gave me similar vibes, but I miss the simplicity of Half-Life.

I agreed with you up until your last paragraph: that is some serious exaggerating. Never did the original commenter say that the solution was to kill all Palestinians.

I don’t agree with their view that eradicating Hamas followed by a temporary occupation by Israël will magically help the Palestinian people, but reducing an opposing viewpoint to a literal Nazi isn’t going to help or convince anyone.

Maybe give it a go if you haven’t yet? I’m also not a fan of web apps and prefer native applications, but it runs really well and is super impressive!

This looks insanely cool!

Portable: my black Gameboy Advance SP, playing my original Gameboy games on it (Donkey Kong Country and pokemon Blue)

TV: this is gonna sound weird, but I absolutely love my PS5, it’s just so sleek and I love the controller haptics and finally having most games running at 60 fps. Again I mostly play older games on it, but a lot of them got PS5 updates like Death Stranding, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon, Spider Man, Days Gone…

I think they are in their right to give their opinion on something no? Telling someone that their kid is ugly is such a wrong comparison to make. You’re directly offending them as it is their child, plus talking about something that neither parent nor child can do anything about (their looks).

I love talking to people who despise stuff I adore, this can give very interesting conversations. It also broadens my perspective on things. I love Mass Effect and still found the original comment very interesting.

You’re not saying the other person is wrong to love it, you’re just saying that you yourself hate it. I think this is an important distinction to make? Especially on a discussion thread, it would be rather boring to only hear the same voice?

Please correct me if I’m wrong, we’re all learning.

Even though I agree with you and feel that you did nothing wrong with your original comment, I believe that there are less combative ways to point this out.

Did you buy the original games or the legendary edition? I played ME1 vanilla and enjoyed it a lot!

I’ve only played mass effect 1. I completed it around five years ago and absolutely loved it. I always have difficulty completing games, but for this one I read all the codex entries, completed all the quests I could find and really absorbed it all.

The opening is so memorable, it immediately gave me this epic sense of scale and importance and this lasted throughout the game.

I’m thinking of maybe playing it again as femshep and then continuing on with 2 and 3, although I’m not sure if it will match my original experience.

I really hope that this works out. I loved the original but I read the recent stories that the new Telltale isn’t doing very well and had a bunch of layoffs already. Still, fingers crossed, the original is one of my favorite games ever!