About the trash police - is there anything stopping a neighbour planting plastic in the garbage and then calling the authorities? Or just saying that the plastic isn't theirs, and perhaps the neighbour planted it? It just seems hard to prove either way.
I enjoyed The Incredible Machine as a kid, the modern equivalent (though still 10 years old) is 'Contraption Maker' - https://store.steampowered.com/app/241240/Contraption_Maker/ - which was designed by the same person. Glad to see he's still going all these years later!
This is not 'Incredible Machine' related, but while I'm here, I'm working on an engineering-adjacent game where you build and automate a zoo full of spooky monsters. Might be of interest to some! https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke...
I very much enjoyed RPS in the days of the original four writers, and also when Quinns was contributing, though I haven't kept up so much in the last eight years or so.
Eurogamer seems to cover the games news and reviews in the way I like best right now, and Digital Foundary's writing and videos that lean on the more technical side of games are just excellent. (I believe DF also have an arrangement to do some content for RPS, so it's probably being shared around as it should.)
Exactly, and it's not just about reading but also (perhaps even more so) about writing. If Nintendo control the manufacture of their proprietary disk, well, it's unlikely that a pirate outfit will be able to build a disk manufacturing factory that produces something compatible with retail Wii U's they can then sell their own non-Nintendo licensed games on. Or burn Nintendo's own games onto. The cartridge era of games were much easier to reproduce the physical medium onto, and this was super-widespread.
This did break down for Sony later on in a way it hasn't for the Nintendo Switch, a widely shared opinion on why the PS Vita flopped was because it was incompatible with standard SD cards _and_ that their own flash game cart and memory card offerings were so incredibly expensive. (And there were cheap SD-to-PSVita adapters that were released anyway. [0])
I'm having problems with Discord, Spotify and Gitlab right now. I wonder which cloud service that's running a third of the internet is struggling right now!
There's lots of reasons people 'cheat' in games. In this case it might be:
• You enjoy playing Pokemon but you don't want to or cannot find the time to grind out the few hours of leveling up you need to progress, or to find your specific favourite handful of Pokemon, so you use a device like this to save yourself some time.
• You want to succeed in the competitive space (yes, competitive Pokemon is a thing[0] and is ongoing right now in fact[1]) and you don't want to grind for Pokemon with specific Effort Values, which are the randomly generated numbers that effect how strong your Pokemon attacks are. So you use a device like this, though probably altering a save file would be just as easy and not detectable by Game Freak/The Pokemon Company.
• You don't really care about Pokemon, but you know you can sell Pokemon on eBay[2], so you automate it with a device like this.
I... guess, if you're only looking at the outcome (boxes of caught Pokemon) it is similar?
But the linked post describes a Raspberry Pi + Capture Card + OpenCV solution that is scanning the screen to detect when Shiny Pokemon are found, which is much more involved.
The $30 'Switch Up' device I linked to seems to operate only on emulating button inputs. Like, you can record and playback a macro.
There is also a physical USB cheat/hack/mod[0] that you can plug into your Switch that lets you automatically farm eggs, move you about automatically to hatch eggs, and then release entire boxes of Pokemon you don't need[1]. It's like factory farming Pokemon! There's support for other games and even other game console controllers too, it's an interesting device.
For Pokemon I think it's more interesting than simply memory hacking your save file and altering the Effort Values of the Pokemon, which is the simple way to go about this, though a bit boring and as I understand it very widespread if you battle online.
I make games for a living, I deeply enjoy the creative freedom of working on projects independently. After university I got my start with a SaaS accounting business, backend Python stuff - I liked it, I learned a lot and worked with some very talented and experienced programmers. Still, I love that with games I get to do deep systems work, animation work, I get to paint and design, write silly jokes, and make something a bit strange that no one else is going to make.
Now, I work independently, there's no publisher or licensing partner, perhaps if I were working for Ubisoft or Activision Blizzard or Rockstar Games I might not enjoy it so much? But I found lots of things to like working on an accounting SaaS project, so if I ever did try it, perhaps it would be just fine.
Related - has anyone listened to the new audiobooks with Bill Nighy, Peter Serafinowicz, and so on? I'm interested because they're unabridged and look like they have very high production values, but they're also quite pricey (understandably so) if you want to buy them and download them permanently.
Yes, the Factorio devs had an approach where they optimised everything happening in the game in the original singlethreaded environment, before moving onto multithreaded support. That's where the game is now, and as far as I understand it the multithreading occurs on each independent set of conveyor belts or belt lanes, and there's some info on that in this blog post[0] for anyone interested.
You've misundertood the list, Lightyear ranks one place below Cars, so (on this list at least) it's viewed as worse than Cars. But better than Cars 3 and Cars 2.
Heh, it's like all those YouTube videos where someone uploads a song and the uploader puts "No copyright infringement intended" in the text description, sometimes with five or six exclamation marks just to really make sure they avoid the takedown.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesliga#List_of_champions