I feel like “not paying artists” makes as much for a better world as “not tipping waitstaff”.

This has been my concern, as well. Games rarely ship as a finished product anymore. All the disc is really good for is acting as a token for ownership. But even that is limited, as the disc often doesn’t even have enough space to fully install a playable version of the game, and you still need to be able to download the rest of the game from official servers.

For what it’s worth, ChatGPT has gotten better at citing its sources, so it’s easier to fact-check it.

I get what you’re going for, but by using a slur, you’re throwing the LGBT community under the bus with Charlie. There are so many more horrible, yet accurate things we can call him; you should pick one that doesn’t denigrate an unrelated group of people at the same time.

Thank you, I was trying to understand what a partially-melted, dusty candlestick was supposed to represent.

In the age of $70+ AAA games with additional costs, not everyone celebrated the consumer friendly price. Some independent game developers have expressed concern that their games may not sell as well compared to Silksong and cannot afford to charge less.

Where did this line come from? I see no mention of that quote in any of the links from the /. post, and it doesn’t help that the quote doesn’t cite a specific developer, either.

Shut the fuck up, Elon. We’ll be celebrating your death, as well.

we should never make jokes at the expense of the dead

Charlie Kirk made a career at the expense of the dead. Fuck him, I’m glad he’s dead, I’m glad it was at the hands of another and not natural causes, I’m glad that it happened right in front of hundreds of other like-minded Nazis as a reminder of what awaits them, and I can’t wait to see who the next dead Nazi is going to be.

Not everybody here is American, dude.

There was some Michael Jackson rhythm game for the DS that would, when it detected it was a pirated copy, replace all the normal midi instruments with vuvuzelas.

Arkham Asylum would disable Batman’s glider ability, making pirates plummet to their deaths unexpectedly. Somebody reported this “bug” on the developer’s forums, and a dev replied back “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code” before explaining that it was an intentional anti-piracy hook.

One of the ARMA games (2 or 3, I think) would start playing bugles at random intervals and would make your guns’ accuracy slowly get worse over time.

Some developers are pretty damn clever at it lmao

Why do metal keyboardists always look exactly like a metal keyboardist? Like… you all know exactly which one in this photo I’m talking about, too, right? Tell me I’m wrong.

I don’t even know what band this is, or if they even have a keyboardist. But that one’s definitely the keyboardist.

I can hear this picture.

There was no special chip on the cartridge either, not sure where you heard that from.

Hmm, I may be conflating or misremembering some details, possibly involving the Earthbound Zero prototype cartridges that were floating around for a while. It’s been a long time, but I do distinctly remember that very early in SNES emulation on PC, that there was a bit of a struggle getting Earthbound (Mother 3) to pass the piracy checks, though every emulator for the last ~20 years handles it just fine now.

It may have been a different Nintendo console that did a voltage check. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t just make that up out of nowhere. Now it’s gonna drive me crazy figuring out what I’m trying to remember. :(

Earthbound is notoriously difficult to emulate accurately, partly because the cartridge had a unique chip on it used to detect if the code was running on an authentic cart, for piracy detection. The game will run a check on this chip to read its voltage; if it’s not at the correct reading or if it returns a null value, the game would know it was running on a bootleg cartridge.

What it did then was kinda sinister. It didn’t stop you from playing the game. But it GREATLY increased the spawn rate of enemies, making the game significantly harder. Then, if you managed to make it through the antipiracy hard mode and get all the way to the final boss, the game would intentionally crash itself as soon as the battle begins, and it deleted your save file. You couldn’t finish the game. It let you get 99.99% of the way there, uphill, and then says “get bent” and wipes all your progress.

Personally, I’m glad there’s no door. I prefer to shoot from the 3-point line.

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Bruh, fry an egg in that right now.

Elon tried to get CDPR to add him as a character in Cyberpunk 2077, not realizing that he’s literally Saburo Arasaka.

It seems to have at least inspired a few.

And 100% of the referrer-hijacking. 🤣

I get that it’s a neat browser, but I don’t understand how people can continue supporting it after such blatant disregard for user agency.