There are valid uses for AI. It is much better at pattern recognition than people. Apply that to healthcare and it could be a paradigm shift in early diagnosis of conditions that doctors wouldn’t think to look for until more noticeable symptoms occur.

Until they change the name and voice and have a whole fleet of elderly AI chatbots.

Depends on how one frames it. It’s not the Stallman-defined “GNU+Linux” pureblood OS, but it nevertheless is built from a modified version of the Linux kernel.

And like any OS it can be made private and secure with the right components…or it can be cracked open like a data-farming egg without them.

I guess I can just take the low-hanging fruit and invoke Ubuntu as an alternative example, which was once something of a Linux entry point but has become more than fine collecting user data.

Ironically a Linux-derived OS.

It’s always good practice to be careful who you trust with your data. Open =/= private. More choices helps, though.

TSMC hates this one easy trick!

I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.

Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.

Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.

And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.

And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.

But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.

Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.

When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.

But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.

And don’t forget to do your dailies!

If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.

Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.

But then those sorts of countries usually have law enforcement that likes taking large amounts of “financial incentives” to do whatever a company like Nintendo wants them to do.

Well…you’re not wrong.

It’s the specialized tools you’ll also need to do all of that that’ll get you, though.

Just build one, cheaper to boot.

In a world that is controlled almost entirely by heteronormativity, policing straight representation in a queer-friendly game made by a queer developer does not seem like an equivalent situation at all.

Filed before, updated and approved after.

I’ve seen a few valid criticisms, which I get. It’s hard to make a choice-driven narrative in the post-BG3 market and not get held to a higher standard. “Written by committee” is one such descriptor I’ve heard.

For me, as a fan of Dragon Age: Origins, I also can’t say I prefer the dip into the actiony, grindy sort of combat mechanics the game appears to have now.

There’s probably a reason why people apparently like her. Or two, actually.

I bought a PS4 pro back in the day but am giving this one a pass.

I’m all for incremental mid-gen upgrades, but not at that price point. If it can’t be priced competitively with the prices people have been paying, then it should not be made until the hardware they want meets that price point.

Should have made it $499 and drop the base price of the PS5 to $399.

Surprised it’s not higher. I would have thought more than 2% of people on Steam were using Steam Deck.

A lot of trans people would disagree. Just because someone was forced to conform to their biological sex for years doesn’t mean they felt that way on the inside.

Every trans person I know, without exception, prefers to refer to their pre-transition selves by their current pronouns and would take issue with the suggestion that they were still a boy/girl before becoming a girl/boy.

isles excited to write a comment about Kotaku being excited to write a story about Ubisoft being excited to let you know Prince of Persia Remake is Still Years Away.

Finally Apple is ready to use all that training data they say they don’t collect.

It’s definitely easier to have that degree of support when you’ve got a common architecture now. There has never been a console generation before this where you had literal years of overlap with games releasing on previous and current gen, because it didn’t require much extra work to maintain additional versions. They were already doing that with the “Pro” consoles before anyways.

Hell, PS4 players are even still going to get the highly anticipated Shadow of the Erdtree DLC for Elden Ring in a few weeks.