Castle Magus

Pat is correct in that the concept of "tachyon" was not invented by Star Trek. However, to be fair to Woolie (and Woolie's English/Drama teacher), 99.9% of the times I've ever heard the word "tachyon" used has been during Star Trek. The other 0.1% was during non-Star Trek related sci-fi books and movies and video games that had faster than light travel. I'm not sure I've ever heard the word "tachyon" mentioned in a non-science fiction context.

And if you want to know what any of that has to do with horse girl anime, I guess you'll just have to watch the above clip.

I'm in the "hearing the music from outside the room" set for the whole Umamusume thing. I'm not yet inclined to actually enter the room, but I'm also not yet moving away from the room in disinterest, either. I'm pretty sure what very little I know about it at all has come exclusively from the Castle Super Beast podcast, anyway. I have not (yet) watched Woolie's two-shot Let's Play of the game, though. Maybe I'll actually do that at some point relatively soon, possibly.

That said, regardless of any other considerations, I tend to avoid gotchagacha games like the plague, no matter how "good" they may be. I mean, outside of that one Hololive fan game that Steam says I played for 35.7 hours as of September 8, 2023, I suppose. I played that knowing jack shit about Hololive (and I still know jack shit about Hololive, to this day), simply because it was one of the earliest Vampire Survivors clones, so I dunno. Maybe this horse girl game is at least worth a shot, too, even though I know jack shit about these horse girls, since it's apparently free (minus any in-game purchases, which I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, even if I did ever break down and give it a try).

Wait...

"Uses Kernel Level Anti-Cheat
CrackProof®"

Oof. Never fucking mind, then. *weary sigh*

I suppose I can still watch Woolie play it later, perhaps. And I guess you don't have to install kernel level DRM in order to potentially watch an anime movie, either. *shrug*

This is some next level asininity as far as DRM goes. The gist, at least of the first few minutes of the video: two different shitty games have two different shitty kernel level DRM/anti-cheat schemes, and they apparently detect each other as malware and apparently neither will let you have the other game installed on your system.

No, Pat, the player solution is not "play on console and turn off crossplay with PC." The player solution is to simply not buy or play games that do/have this shit at all to being with.

Or, at the very least, that's my solution, anyway. I know my solution is also "unfortunately not viable for a large percentage of players," as Woolie said of Pat's solution, but I also know that that "large percentage of players" is part of the problem of why this shit exists in the first place. If that "large percentage of players" didn't buy games that did this shit, then the large percentage of game devs and publishers who currently do this shit would stop doing this shit.

Pat: "From the industry perspective, it's our good friend Capital who have fucked us on this one." Full stop, video could have ended right there. That said, his reasons for why "Capital" has "fucked us on this one" are absolutely legit. And what Woolie describes after that is one of the biggest reasons I do not play multiplayer games that involve the general public: randos on the Internet almost invariably suck the stinky shit straight from Satan's sulfurous sphincter through a silly swirly straw.

Also, that bit where Pat is talking about some Destiny bullshit where your reward for winning some online tournament thing or whatever the fuck is merely the right to spend real world money to buy the actual reward (i.e. some dumbfuck cosmetic thing), while Woolie is just going "ugh... uuuurrrrgggghhh..." and making puke faces on his side of the video is just the toxic plastic cherry on top of the shit sundae that is all of this abject idiocy.

Woolie: "It is my single most hated thing. Just the fact that you can have a full conversation about a game that has nothing to do with how it actually plays or getting to its content, because it's just the entire fucking economy around it. Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah, that's ridiculous man."

And the tangent that Pat goes into at the end about that academic anti-ChatGPT stuff sounds draconian, and it kind of is, but at the same time, what better solutions are there now? Hell if I know. *shrug*

Pat: "By the way, this is totally off-topic, barely tangential... if you're part of the audience that's using ChatGPT to do your exams or cheat in schoolwork, I want you to stop doing that, not because it's wrong. It is wrong. But you are actively damaging your brain and giving yourself the equivalent of a large-grade concussion. You are hurting your brain. For real. I'm not joking. You are working on giving yourself early onset dementia. I'm so serious about that."

"Video Games Europe, an industry lobby group, is now lobbying against the Stop Killing Games movement. I think we're stirring up the hive."

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I (usually) watch these things, but I don't usually post them here, but this time, I just wanted to make a comment in response to something he showed in the video. He's talking, here, about all the "complexities" of making an online-only game that simply are not needed anymore once the game has reached the end of its life and has been (in an ideal world) simply released into the wild, rather than removed and destroyed forever, and there's a big list of "Examples of microservices NOT NEEDED for an end-of-life copy of a game." I'm just going to transcribe that list here. (pre-post EDIT) And boy did that take far longer than I was anticipating going into it, whew. (/pre-post EDIT)

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( Massive bullet point list behind cut (seriously, you don't really need to look at this shit if you don't want to) )

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That's probably not even close to everything on the full list. That's just what was scrolled on the screen in this video. (Also, my only real concern was making sure I didn't fuck up the formatting/nesting/look of the list [which I did a couple times and had to fix during the creation of this post], so if there were any typos made during the process of transcribing the actual list items that weren't in the list as shown in the Youtube video, then that is my fault, and I'll fix it if I notice it, but I don't really give much of a fuck anymore, either way.)

My comment is simply this: I don't need any of that shit at all, ever in any video game I play (or if that shit is in games I play or have played in the past [e.g. No Man's Sky, Minecraft, Star Trek Online, The Secret World, etc.], it doesn't directly affect me, because I ignore/don't use any of it as best as I am able, and if I must use/interact with such shit, I do so only extremely grudgingly). I don't care if the game is at "end-of-life" or if it's a newly bought game that only just released today (not that I buy games on release day anymore, of course). That is a big, huge, colossal part of why I don't play online-only games at all, to begin with. I simply don't play games that have that shit in them and avoid like the plague games that do have that shit in them (and I know about it). That is all. Simple as that.

So if, as Video Games Europe claims, "[the proposals put forward by Stop Killing Games] would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create" by, presumably, not having all that stupid, worthless horseshit in them (or by having to turn off/remove all that stupid, worthless horseshit when such a game reaches "end-of-life"), even if that was true, which it almost assuredly is not (as Ross himself states), then my only response is this:

FUCKING GOOD. KILL THAT SHIT FOREVER, AS FAR AS I'M CONCERNED.

I was initially going to just put "the best Pat quote" here, as I have in some of the previous CSB clip posts I've made, but then Pat just kept on saying things that could have easily been "the best Pat quote." Basically, this entire video is maybe 70-80% "the best Pat quote." Even Woolie got some good hits in, too.

I've been saying for probably a decade now that I wish for the modern video game industry to crash, and yeah, given everything that's been going on in the modern video game industry for the past year or two, maybe my wish has come true, or at least it has started to, maybe. At least for the way-too-expensive AAAAAAAAAAAAAA video game industry, anyway. And, really, it's not just or even mostly the prices that bother me to the point of wanting it all to burn to the ground, it's all the other modern video game industry bullshit that accompanies the price increases that makes me want the whole thing to implode. And that's not (necessarily) including all the company-specific bullshit that makes me hate them, too, though too much of the company-specific shit that I was complaining about back then has since become industry-wide, to be sure.

...went to check it out... and it's locked to fucking Kobo.

Even if I do already have a Kobo app on my phone, from where I bought that Seanan McGuire stuff last year (though I have not bothered to try to read any of that at all yet), I still have no interest whatsoever in buying any thing else from Humble if it requires this shit.

Oh well. Humble just saved me from spending $18, I guess. It would have been a really good deal, otherwise. *shrug*

Also, if you don't live in the United States, then fuck you, apparently.

Yeah... watching this video was the first time I became aware that, apparently, the Kingdom Hearts[1] games are coming out on PCSteam in a month or so. Also, watching this video was the first time I became aware that, apparently, the Kingdom Hearts games had been """""available""""" on Epic Gangrene Shit since 2021. And, yeah, like what they talk about here, I don't consider any game to be properly "released on PC" until they are available anywhere other than Epic Gunk Stool.

Anyway, yeah, I'll keep an eye on those Kingdom Hearts things, and if they turn out to not be infested with Denuvo, then maybe I'll throw them on my wishlist for a possible 75%-plus sale in the nebulous future, but this news doesn't light my world on fire or anything. If it turns out they will be infected with Denuvo, though, then they can just fuck right off and die, for all I care. Apparently, they are not contaminated with that badware on EGS, but that's only because they're using Epic's own proprietary badware instead (as Pat mentions with his sarcastic "oh, the Epic Games Store version of Kingdom Hearts isn't playable offline, oh that's just awesome" comment).

Also, I love how most of this 16 minute video is about dunking on Epic Grotesque Stupidity and how much of a non-entity it has become for most gamers than it is about Kingdom Hearts finally coming to the personal computer.

[1] - I.e. the unfinished LP of which was effectively the final nail in the coffin for Super Best Friends Play as a whole.

Full headline, because headline too big: "Switch emulator Yuzu is dead: abruptly settles lawsuit with Nintendo for $2.4 million in an enormous blow to console emulation"

*weary sigh*

So, basically, there goes Nintendon't yet again, trying to close the weak-hinged, broken-latched barn door, when all the horses are already long gone and never coming back, and Nintendon't didn't even realize that the wall of the barn opposite the door has been completely missing for the past half decade. Oh, well, at least they got $2.4 million this time. *eye roll*

This won't kill Switch emulation. It just means whoever takes up the Yuzu source code (because it is already out there and will forever continue to be already out there) will just rename it and be more clandestine about it (like, say, maybe not running a fucking Patreon). Besides, Yuzu isn't even the only Switch emulator that already exists.

Also, as has been proven time and time again, emulation is legal. Now, granted both Bleem and Connetix were essentially bludgeoned into nonexistence anyway via Sony's usage of the legal system as a battering ram, even though they won their cases. So even if the Yuzu guys could have won this, I get why they decided to just settle and be done with it, as it would have cost them more than that to "win" against Nintendon't. It sucks, but as we all know, the legal system favors those with more money, and Nintendon't certainly has more money than the Yuzu guys had.

But then Nintendon't didn't really sue Yuzu over the whole emulation thing, at least not directly. They sued them because Yuzu bypassed the DRM on the Switch. So... who the fuck knows if Yuzu would have actually won if they'd fought back, given the broken state of copyright law these days (not to mention the broken state of the courts in general these days). Another reason why they settled, I guess.

(Disclaimer: I don't really have a horse in this race because I never used Yuzu and don't have any interest in Switch emulation in general. I just think that copyright laws as they exist now are fundamentally broken, especially with regard to computer software, and that I'm sick of giant fucking companies being allowed to swing around the legal system like it's a baseball bat with nails driven through it.)

"Resident Evil: Revelations update on Steam is part of a pushback on piracy and mods"

Hey, Capcom, I really appreciate your efforts to help me save money by giving me reasons to never buy your shit.

(EDIT) Or anywhere else, for that matter, since I'm not buying a console just for Dragon's Dogma 2. Not that being on a console would stop it from potentially being infested with Denuvo, anyway. (/EDIT)

Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: Denuvo Anti-tamper
5 different PC within a day machine activation limit

Fuck off, forever, Capcom. Or, at least, remove this shitty taint from your game, and then, maybe, I'll consider buying it at some point several years from now, if I ever see it on sale for 75% off or something.

Apparently, the current trend for idiots/fanbois/rep management drones is to try to claim that it isn't Denuvo itself that is bad, it's any given dev's implementation of Denuvo that can be bad. Like "It's not the Denuvo that's causing the game to run like shit, the devs of the game just implemented Denuvo poorly, that's all. Games with Denvuo run great if the devs implement it properly."

To that I say, if any given dev implements Denuvo in any way, shape, or form, regardless of whether it causes the game to have performances issues or not, it's still bad, and I still won't be buying that dev's game because of it. Even if a game infected with Denuvo runs perfectly flawlessly, Denuvo is still an oozing pustule on the genitals of the modern video game industry, so fuck off and die with your "Denuvo isn't bad, it's just..." horseshit.