For a second, I was wondering if it's Dominant Species. But I don't think it had anything resembling human houses or cool UI.

14 layers is insane, but 3 to 5 is on the real low side for a $300B corp with lots of massive studios too. The vision presented is gonna be real awkward for companies working on more than 1 game at a time, or with huge 200+ employee teams. Activision-Blizzard-King in particular, World of Warcraft has a handful of sub-teams that have to coordinate stuff and Call of Duty runs on coordinated yearly releases.

I can easily imagine 7 layers for WoW or 8 layers for CoD. That's not bloat, just the inevitable end-result of Satya Nadella being ultimately responsible for approving the salary of whoever's writing the latest Call of Duty, the main project of a wholly owned subsidiary (the four studios making CoD on rotation) of an acquired company (Activision) of Microsoft's side project gaming division (XBOX).

Another choice quote from the original IGN interview that this is from:

Sweeney: [...] The only way that we can hope for new games coming into the market to be able to succeed when there's so much Metcalfe's Law at play and so many captive audiences in the really big games – you know, Fortnite, Roblox, PUBG Mobile, and a few other really huge ones – it's got to be that those games get momentum by connecting to the economies in other games. I think that can really reinvigorate the market if people are constantly looking to new games and sources of new items that they can earn everywhere and be able to really easily move together with their friends.

Guy got talked into the whole blockchain NFT crap so hard that he's still trying to make it happen, as if it was ever a desirable thing that the best way to get some kind of gear or cool cosmetics in game A involves playing game B instead.

My favorite demo this time around has been Sting & Swing. Bee golf is a cursed concept somehow turned into an Animal Well esque game.

To add to that, even the original paper written with 1999-2007 era SDRAM/DDR/DDR2 is not optimistic about the scenario of a machine that was already powered down at regular operating temperatures:

with the fastest exhibiting complete data loss in approximately 2.5 seconds and the slowest taking an average of 35 seconds

And that only got worse with more advanced RAM, not to mention that they lost almost all of the data far quicker than that with only a couple % of bits surviving that long. For all practical intents and purposes, cold boot against an already-powered-down machine is a myth, the cooling has to be applied while it's on.

One example: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=oracle-bin&id=eceeb808ef933a66285ea68cefd72c1b5f4374c9 . It seems the AUR team forcepushed the malicious commits out of the repo branches, likely to prevent being accidentally reused by git-bisect in the future, but the URLs still seem to work until they run garbage collection. The author/committer information on each affected commit impersonated a previous maintainer of that particular repository and isn't real.

The whole thing essentially just boils down to adding a cd /tmp; npm install [random crap] post-install hook to every abandoned repository they easily got access to, which itself had a post-install hook to set up malware things. npm has nulled the affected packages, though it took them somewhere around 24 hours to do so. atomic-lockfile was one of them.

Dev post on the forum:

Just be aware that choosing works only in places where there is ambiguity due to belt being perpendicular. Those cases were the cause of problems for blueprint flip reliability.

So there's limits to it.

A different FAQ item mentions Winward NL Limited is in the Cayman Islands, which is a really nice place if you would want to hide such links. But yeah, could also be a bunch of individuals just looking for some extra yachts (bonus irony if they buy them from Gaben's yacht company).

Being a fan of the SNES/GBA Mario Kart games as well as a fan of games with playable lizards, I'm actually kinda excited for it... but even then, Playtonic utterly confuses me. They're making a very specific game that will be enjoyed by dozens of people, and in the process of doing so they kinda ignored the fanbase's long-standing demand for a Diddy Kong Racing spiritual successor. Doesn't seem like a wise decision to me.

I didn't play the demo, so I was a bit surprised to find it has less in common with Link's Awakening and Castlevania than you might think

To me, the demo felt like it was setting up something resembling more of a Zelda game, even though the demo itself wasn't very Zelda due to its length. Which kinda made it worse to me, I thought I would get Legend of Mouse: Oracle of Slightly Souls and unexpectedly got Mouse Souls for the Gameboy Color.

That is a game I could ultimately find enjoyment in, but at 5-ish hours into the game, I was incredibly frustrated by the difference in expectations vs what I just played. The Zelda influence does show up a bit more later in the game as dungeon/world design improves a bit, but it remains thinner than I would've preferred. The "Souls mechanics" can mostly be turned off via the modifiers menu, but that doesn't really turn the game into what I would've preferred either.

For the right person, this is going to be a GotY candidate. I'm glad I did play it through to the end, but it's too soulsy for me to truly appreciate it. I will say that the soundtrack very well might be my soundtrack of the year though; easily Jake Kaufman's finest work (and the OST is pay-what-you-want on Bandcamp!).

The default is that Valve does moderation, and if you don't opt-out of it, they consider those kinds of topics to be completely on-topic and valid, removing the reports. All of the relevant Steamworks pages aimed at publishers (eg Steam Community) are publicly available and are really enough to blame Valve for the whole state of things.

Even if a publisher opts-out of Valve moderation, they don't have the tools to deal with sockpuppets or organized attacks, and being banned from one game forum just means those same accounts move elsewhere. Valve could absolutely deal with it by doing community-wide bans, but they don't.

There's strong indications that there is going to be some minor but technically base-breaking rebalancing. Getting rid of "space casinos" (quality asteroid upcycling) and platform thruster stacking was mentioned as being ready over a year ago, but they didn't want to break existing bases at that time. This is their last good moment for it.