Yeah, Forza Horizon is literally all I can think of with this announcement. The thing is, Forza has far more mass appeal due to the breadth of options it has. I am struggling to see how the hell Crazy Taxi could even come close to Forza’s variety.

The only thing I can think of, is they plan to make it like Twisted Metal meets Crazy Taxi, and by massively multiplayer they’re referring to server instances of 100+ players in a city area. You’ll have objectives to pick people up, but I would bet they’ll end up making it so you can also pick up illicit deliveries or even being a driver for bank robbers or something, similar to GTA Online. Sort of a PvPvE type system as well. If they combine all of those elements, I could see it being maybe fun. But I doubt it will end up fun.

Anyway, agreed with others that they should’ve just stuck to a smaller scale arcade style game. The previous games were all that way and they were successful and fun. I have no idea why they’d think changing that basic formula is a great idea for a game like this.

I think the majority of developers have thrown in the towel on their crypto/NFT aspirations, thankfully.

Not to mention using touch controls for it is brutal. At least, for me it is. Might be decent if using a controller with your phone.

For some offices, tech like Teams/Outlook would certainly help, sure. But the majority of offices aren’t using that. But even still, people would do it regardless. Say you’re going on vacation and want to know when daylight hours are, you’d still be doing the same thing. Timezones may be annoying, but they ultimately make sense. We have a universal time for the planet powering the system, there’s really no reason to change it, in my opinion.

But… We have UTC already, so calculating the difference is a non-issue. If you got rid of timezones, you’d still end up creating it in all but name since the vast majority of business will be occurring during daytime hours around the world. For example, an office in Tokyo sending emails to their NYC office at 0800 UTC (currently 0400 EDT in NYC) wouldn’t end up getting answered for at least 3-4 hours when those employees started logging in. In other words, people would still be doing calculations in their heads to know when business hours are in that region, essentially recreating timezones.

As for your second paragraph, I agree, and I did have it backwards, thanks for the correction. In the summertime where I live, the sun has risen by roughly 0530 and sets around 2100. In the wintertime, the sun is rising around 0700-0730 and setting around 1630-1700 at its shortest daylight hours. Like you said, staying at standard would mean in the summertime we’d have brighter mornings, but curtains and shutters exist for a reason. Personally, I think having it still be bright out at 2030 is kind of annoying.

Yeah, timezones are absolutely helpful from a logistics and coordination standpoint. Daylight savings time, though… That nonsense needs to be eliminated. So what if it will be dark well into morning wake hours in the winter, I’d take it over dealing with the time change twice a year.

That’s an interesting thought. They flee here seeking safety and a better life, only to find a large portion of the country very hostile towards you and your fellow immigrants. Finding decent paying work is very difficult, but at least construction is typically in high demand in many larger metros. You hate the job and would rather be a teacher, IT professional, nurse, or whatever but can’t due to being an undocumented worker. I can easily see that causing a strong sense of feeling trapped and hopeless.

Narrator: It didn’t.

Legitimate question, is Russia still able to get all the materials required to make nuclear ICBMs?

Hahah, AI images are so absurd sometimes, I love it

That was pretty damn funny, thanks for sharing

Dams aren’t typically environmentally friendly almost at all. In fact, they tend to cause far more harm than good: https://earth.org/dams-economic-assets-or-ecological-liabilities/

https://www.science.org/content/article/hundreds-new-dams-could-mean-trouble-our-climate

https://news.wsu.edu/press-release/2016/09/28/reservoirs-play-substantial-role-global-warming/

So yes, this is a pretty clear black and white case of the US once again fucking over indigenous tribes.

Without a doubt! I played DS1 after DS3 (was always intimidated by the series until a visiting friend forced me to sit down and actually play it, thankfully), so I had that, “whoa!” moment numerous times whenever I’d somehow end up either right inside the hub area or quite close to it after spending hours traversing dungeons and ruins that felt miles away from the hub.

Truly wish FS would make another game designed like it.

Haha, I actually don’t hate DS2, it’s just pretty badly balanced (PvE wise, of course; I can’t speak on PvP). The levels are the bosses in that game (with a few exceptions), which makes going through them quite tedious after a failed run. If they dialed down the density of enemies and possibly buffed some of them in compensation, it could possibly almost tie almost evenly with the other 2 games for me. Oh, and got rid of the obnoxious Soul Memory system, god what a terrible idea that mechanic was/is.

What I do really enjoy about the game are the interesting and somewhat diverse locales, with some levels having some great design going on. I love the item and gear variety. I also really liked being able to reinforce my armor along with weapons. It made light armor a lot more competitive in the late game and I am a little sad they got rid of that feature in DS3 (among other things DS3 abandoned). I also enjoyed the sheer number of secrets in the game (Side note: One thing that saddens me in Elden Ring, is how little fake walls and secret passages there are). But it’s not just walls/passages; for example, in No-man’s Wharf, accidentally discovering that those freaky spider things fear fire/light and seeing them retract into the shadows was an awesome detail.

Anyway, I’d love for them to someday truly remaster DS2 and bring the enemy placements more in line with the original DS2 (SotFS is the current “remaster” and there are way more enemies/gank squads in it than vanilla DS2). If they did that and got rid of soul memory, replacing it with the same MP system as DS1R and DS3, I’d love to play through it again.

Sorry for the tangent, I’m just in full on Souls/ER mode this week.

I like DS1, but it really just depends on my mood. If I want faster paced combat, I go for DS3. If I want slower paced combat, I go for DS1. Also, the first half of DS1’s world design is unmatched in how it’s all interconnected, so I really enjoy the beginning of that game over DS3’s. That being said, fuck Bed of Chaos and that whole lava level. It’s just so bad (even Miyazaki agrees, as they unfortunately ran out of budget and time).

Regardless, I’m beyond hyped for Shadow of the Erdtree this week! Haven’t taken a day off work for a game launch in ages, but I sure as hell did this time.

Who cares? The community will have player made expansions in a year that will likely be free and of higher quality.

Regardless, BGS is a shell of its former self. Whenever I see people clamoring for TES 6 I just scratch my head and ask why?

Starfield was the final straw for me, I will never get excited for another Bethesda game again. They’ve shown that they refuse to truly shake up their game design. When people asked if Starfield would have the same magic as FO3 or older TES games, they said, “it’ll have the same DNA.” I assumed that meant it’d have fun exploration and interesting quests. While it has some decent quests, the exploration is utterly tedious and just unfun. I truly wish they’d had just focused on fleshing out 2 or 3 planets in one solar system, maybe some instanced, hand-crafted dungeons/whatever outside of it. I have zero interest in exploring proc gen worlds, it’s not that fun in No Man’s Sky and it’s not fun here. At least with NMS, it’s all relatively seamless.

I don’t know how our Cyber and workstation teams are doing it, I work on the server team. I just know they pushed out something a few months ago about it and a few people were caught. They really don’t care that people are using jigglers, they just don’t want people plugging in unauthorized devices to the USB ports. And like you say, it may not actually be catching everything.

Don’t you know, you can just go live off the grid and become completely self sustaining… Wait, how do you pay for your property taxes… Hm…

If you’re using a work computer, I strongly advise not putting that on there, especially if it requires installation. At my work, we regularly scan for apps like these, as well as the physical jigglers that connect via USB. We do this for security reasons primarily. There are several built-in ways in Windows to simulate activity, I really don’t see the point in downloading random apps from potentially sketchy sources.

One example off the top of my head: If you have multiple monitors, go into presentation mode with PowerPoint on one of them. This way, you can still have one monitor available to see your email and whatever chat app your org uses. If you have just one monitor, pretty sure you can still push it to the back or minimize it and it’ll still work. Also, watching videos within SharePoint is another way of preventing Windows from detecting inactivity. If you use Teams, you can start a meeting with yourself (though, some orgs monitor activity on Teams, so use this at your own risk). If PowerShell isn’t disabled, there’s also options there.

Ohh haha, that sounds like some shit I’d come up with when I used to take Ambien to fall asleep.