Castle Magus

*WEARY FUCKING GODDAMN SIGH*
Weary sigh is not directed at Pat and Woolie, of course, but at the egregious, asinine dogshit they're talking about.

A putrid, diarrhetic shower, directly into the mouths of those in the modern video game industry, now and forever, until and unless they stop doing this heinous dumbfuckery.

It's about an hour and twenty minutes long, split into three roughly equal length parts.

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( Youtube embeds behind cut )

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Honestly, with the bit at the end, this almost feels like it could be a series finale, if Mr. Rolfe wanted to stop making these. I wouldn't blame him if he did want to move on from the Nerd, but I hope he makes more.

If I leave "Early Access Products" selected in my settings for the Steam discovery queue, then most of the games that show up in my discovery queue are Early Access games (I refuse to refer to "Early Access games" as "EA games" for what should be obvious reasons), which sucks because I've long ago stopped buying Early Access games. At most, I might Wishlist an Early Access game if it looks interesting, but only when/if it actually releases "properly"[1] will I consider buying it, because about half the time when I've bought Early Access shit in the past, it ended up just being utterly abandoned[2] without ever becoming anything resembling a full, complete game. (EDIT 2) I turned the "Early Access Products" option back on and ran through another queue, just for the hell of it, and literally every game in the queue was an Early Access game. (/EDIT 2)

On the other hand, if I deselect "Early Access Products" in the settings for the discovery queue, then the overall average quality of the games that show up in my discovery queue takes a noticeable nosedive. That said, I know there are games out there that have been completed and aren't total shit, because I see them when I'm just browsing regular-ass Steam. It's just that so very few of them are showing up in my discovery queue, in favor of asset flip shit and "meme games" and porn/hentai shit and the like.

Oh, and also, I'm still getting porn/hentai games in my queue, even though I have "Adult Only Sexual Content" deselected in my overall Steam Store settings (as there's no option for it specifically in the discovery queue settings). I think that has more to do with some such games not being properly put into the AO category, though, despite being porn/hentai. Not sure if that's a "publisher/developer being scuzzy" issue or a "Steam being negligent" issue or both of those issues combined. (EDIT) I think the biggest culprits are the porn/hentai games that have been "cleaned up" for Steam release so that they're technically not porn/hentai games, despite obviously being porn/hentai games, but which then have easily accessible "restoration" patches (usually available in posts by the developers themselves right there in the Steam forum for the game) that allow them to circumvent being labeled as an AO game by Steam, and, thus, show up in my discovery queue, despite my having turned that option the fuck off. (/EDIT)

[1] - Not that the arbitrary "released" distinction actually means anything, anymore, because far too many "released" games are still being actively developed (too often to the detriment of the game in question), even after leaving "Early Access."

[2] - Conversely, even if a "properly released" game stops being actively developed (after it has reached a state that I, personally, would consider to be a complete, fully functional game), far too many morons on the Steam forums or in Steam reviews for the game will stupidly bleat about how the game was "abandoned," so in this case, I guess it's a matter of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

"Intellivision Amico discussion has been removed from the AtariAge forums -- we discuss what happened as well as comments from Tommy Tallarico and the site's owner."

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I have no dog in this race, as I'm not an AtariAge member nor am I even remotely a potential customer for the Amico, but I still find this whole shitshow morbidly fascinating, mainly because Pat and Ian keep talking about it (as otherwise I wouldn't be hearing about it at all). What little I know of Tommy Tallarico is that his music is okay, I guess, but aside from that, he's been kind of a douchebag for at least a decade or three now.

Link to the comic.

Link to the blog associated with the comic. I totally agree, though I wouldn't just stop at Kotick, as I've said before. Launching Bobby Kotick into the sun is what I would consider to be a good start.

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"Producers that somehow nepotism their way into this shit without knowing a single goddamn thing about anything are literally the curse of every entertainment industry. They're the absolute goddamn worst. If you could point to a single reason why everything sucks shit, it's this type of person that happens to always be around."

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This was a pretty interesting clip from their podcast (outside of maybe the middle third or so, when they started talking for a bit explicitly about Arcane [about which I have roughly zero interest, mainly because I have less than zero interest in its source material, League of Legends] and how good it supposedly is or whatever).

That said, I've talked about this topic at length in the past, and as such, I don't really have much new to say here, other than that I am still highly ambivalent in my stance on it.

Also, Pat at 34:31: "Should all of the studios that EA bought suffer because EA owns them now?"

Well, I mean, the studios that EA bought are already suffering (or else already long-since have been put out of their misery, like an old, sick dog dragged behind the woodshed), and this is intrinsically a direct result of the fact that they are owned by EA now, due to EA's explicit, highly visible, well known, and terrible business practices. This is completely irrespective of any other tangentially related evil, disgusting shit that EA may or may not potentially be doing behind the scenes that the general public hasn't heard about yet.

It finally happened. I finally, without realizing it until now, have installed and have been playing a game that has Denuvo in it.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole. I'd played through this game in the past, a few years ago, and was completely unaware it contained Denuvo, as this was back before I really started paying attention to this shit.

The other day, I finished a second playthrough of South Park: The Stick of Truth (which does not have that shitware in it, by the way [or if it does, it's another of the cases where Steam and/or the publisher, Ubisoft in this case, are being less than forthcoming]), so I was like, hey, I'll play the sequel again, too, why not.

Well, as I've been playing it, I've been noticing random instances where the controls will just horribly lag, as in like, I'll be playing normally, without a problem, but then my character will just stop responding to inputs for like a second or two. I.e. if I wasn't moving, I wouldn't start moving until a second or two after I pressed the movement buttons. Or if I was already moving, and I released the button, my character would continue to move for a second or two before stopping. Nothing completely game-breaking (yet), as it only happens occasionally, but it's incredibly annoying when it does happen.

I was looking online for potential fixes for this, and I saw people mentioning "the DRM" as the likely culprit behind this. And I was like, oh no.... oh no. I went to the Steam store page and, sure the fuck enough, it is infected with the malware.

So, yeah, again, god the fuck damn it.

Oh, and on top of all that, this is also a game that requires Uplay (or "Ubisoft Connection" or whatever the fuck they call it now) in addition to being infested with the Denuvo dumbfuckery, so that's doubly loathsome. Everything about all of this fucking sucks because the game is otherwise pretty good. (Stick of Truth does not require this asshattery, mind you.)

All that said, I'm not going to stop playing it now, unless this lag issue becomes more troublesome than it already is, but I'm still extremely pissed off about this. This obviously doesn't mean that I'm suddenly feeling all hunky-dory about Denuvo, or that I'm going to start buying Denuvo-contaminated games willy-nilly or whatever, because fuck that shit all the way to hell and back and then to hell again, where it came from in the first place.

The only potential silver lining is that the next South Park game will apparently be created without the Ubisoft middleman this time, so maybe, just maybe, it actually won't be polluted with the shitstain on the underwear of the video game industry that is Denuvo. We'll see, I guess. If it is, though, I most assuredly won't be buying it. And, well, if it's not an open-world RPG like the previous two games were (regardless of whether it continues the same story from the previous two games or not), that will also dampen my interest in it, but that's neither here nor there. Also not sure why they're apparently going 3D with it, because I liked the 2D graphics just fine, especially since it's similar to (what little I've seen of) the show.

(To go off on a tangent, is it weird that I've played and [otherwise] enjoyed these South Park games even though I can count on one hand with fingers left over the number of full episodes I've seen of the South Park TV show? I have to admit, to end on a semi-positive note, that it kind of makes me want to watch the show at some point.)

So, apparently, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider on PC were patched to remove Denuvo (even though the Steam pages for both still currently have the Denuvo label right there)... only for the Denuvo to be replaced with "Epic Online Services," whatever the fuck that is, which apparently requires you to create an account with Epic (even if you bought it through Steam) if you want to play them now. In other words, Square Enix simply traded one flavor of rancid diarrhea for another.

Both Rise and Shadow pretty much would have been almost no-brainer purchases for me, honestly, had Square Enix just not opted to infest them with all this worse-than-useless third party DRM horseshit.

Worse than that, though, they apparently tried/are trying to shoehorn that same Epic Online Services dumbfuckery into the original (remake) Tomb Raider game as well, after the fact. I.e. the only one of the games that I actually own on Steam myself, due to having not bought the two sequels because of the Denuvo malware.

Seriously, Square Enix can eat a truckload of shit at this point, for all I care about them anymore. And Denuvo and Epic can eat truckloads of shit simply for existing, to boot.

(Not going to bother providing links for any of that, but it's easy enough to Google.)