Good to see another instance defederate from ML. Now if only more of the non-tankie communities moved off ML (it’s slowly happening).

What’s are you on about? There is no centralised censorship. Every instance can make their own decision around whether they want to federate with ML.

I have some experience with both retro gaming video upscaling and general upscaling (older content from the 2000s and earlier).

The reason why it’s “fragmenting so hard” is that the author decided to go with 4K. I am guessing the resolution of the source video is at or below 640 x 480. With such a low resolution, you don’t want to go beyond x2 upscale (1280 x 960). But the author went with what seems like 3840 x 2880 which is not viable for a source resolution below 640 x 480.

Here is an upscale of the Caesar 3 intro that work pretty well (its relatively low resolution because the source resolution is very modest as Caesar 3 was released in 1998).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwJVHbryKO0

/End nerdy rant

The weird discount application and the sales taxes.

The sales tax always drove me nuts (and in total I loved in North America for a decade), I could never get it over it.

Where I live we just get an item list (with true cost per item) and a subtotal.

That’s a fucking wild bill if you are not from the US. One would almost think you are being scammed (I am talking about the deceptive structure of the bill, not the values).

I have yet to try the demo, but I believe with Entitled, it’s actually not the story. You have the standard “save the world/princess” narrative (their page describes this in an ironic way) which you can complete, but you also have a management/tycoon x lifesim hybrid:

The world of Entitled is a quirky mix of fantasy and real life. Modern economic themes blend with a medieval fantasy setting. One moment you’re delivering swords for the blacksmith, hoping someday you will own a sword of your own and become a proper hero. Shortly after, you pay taxes and attend lectures on supply and demand on the job market. All that to figure out what to actually do with your mediocre life.

I tried the demo (this was over a year ago, so much could have changed). Seemed solid, but a little bit average. The world was compelling and I was curious to learn more. Some unique mechanics were included.

In principle I agree with you, but it’s also a “chicken and egg” type problem. Many people aren’t going to switch to Lemmy if there isn’t a modicum of coverage for more specialized topics.

I think getting to somewhere beyond 100K MAU will have a transformative effective on activity in some more specialized communities.

I think the bigger deal is Lemmy/Threadiverse getting 100K MAU and seeing steady growth beyond that. We are currently at around ~50-55K MAU.

Subs are a deceptive metric, MAUs are far more important.

Those castle and pond shots are beautiful.

With the price of GPUs what they are, who risks messing around with new GPUs like that?

I sort of felt that story was also an allegory for well our current (and historical) food consumption patterns. I say this as someone who loves steaks. :)

First few hours of both FO1 and FO2 are pretty rough. Lots of almost comical kiting and a bunch of tiring save scumming seem mandatory.

Combat in the mid to late game is fun though. You have hard encounters, but you also have the opportunity to be prepared.

Thanks for the write up.

I mostly agree. The combat is indeed terrible with both real-time and turn based. Turn based just feels off and pure real time is not viable. I play with real-time with pause.

I had the misfortune of playing as a technologist on my first playthrough in the early 2000s. It was really rough. Over time you can figure out strategies/approaches to make it easier, but I would argue many of them almost break the game.

I agree you need a measure of tolerance for retro gameplay/jankyness and honestly combat was subpar even for its time (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).

What was your experience like? Interesting to hear from someone who tried it now as opposed to when it was released. I will add that it’s not merely a matter of nostalgia, but you also have a better grasp of the core gameplay and the general storyline beats if you’ve played it several times since release.

Did you get the HD patch?

I thought this was unique enough to share in [email protected]. 😆

They are on my “to play” list. :)

That’s a fair point. We did have Arcanum in 2001 and while it’s arguably legendary in CRPG circles, I don’t think it did all that well commercially.