And it’s not like servers have gotten harder to run! Pirates serve terabytes of data that’s straight-up illegal! Your fuckin’ commercial connection should be plenty for any damn thing you want.

I don’t give a shit what children see.

They’ll live.

Stop spying on adults.

Reporting live from Weinerville.

Good taste?

Who could possibly give a shit?

Art belongs to its audience.

People have a right to culture.

Like calling all e-mail “spam.”

In undue fairness, there is a difference between turning text files into a chatbot, and exfiltrating that chatbot. One is transformative, and the other is making a megaphone out of some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone.

But if I don’t give a shit about companies doing math on Disney DVDs I’m not about to give a shit about them hoarding their big pile of numbers. I’m jazzed when source code leaks for things written by people.

But if you asked, gun to my head, ‘what was the best console?’ - it’s the PS2. It’s not even a contest. The video chip had such a disgusting fillrate that Xbox 360 remakes had to tone down the overdraw. Licensing remained dirt cheap, so weird shit could get on shelves at like two dollars per copy. The controllers were practically the platonic ideal. Just an incredible environment where innovation could look and feel complete.

What little was missing from that machine is abundant in its competitors. The Gamecube is a party toy with four controller ports and the wildest shader pipeline that’s not technically programmable. The Xbox showed the full potential of hard drives and online connectivity. PCs could increasingly take internet access for granted, where Flash games offered instant access with negligible oversight.

Through this period, cross-platform engines started abstracting away any hardware differences. “Ports” stopped being from-scratch recreations or high jank at low framerates. It was the inflection point for all hardware becoming a generic compiler target. The fact the PSP was supposed to get an Oblivion port, and it wasn’t just the PC game, already felt kinda weird.

I could call this a golden era for software - for developers making a game once-ish, and selling to nearly anyone with nearly any platform. Yet at the same time, the RTS genre was dying, EA killed a lot of important companies, and Bethesda had this silly little idea to sell you armor for your horse. It’s never just one thing.

Deep respect to Microsoft for the Xbox 360 Arcade. That SKU forced damn near every game to work without a hard drive. I think even GTA V could run off a USB stick.

But hoo boy did they fuck that up with the Xbox One launch. And Sony capitalized.

It’s never just one. They’re localized. They tend to occur when the industry finds a groove and leans into it, so the focus is more on quality and iteration under criticism, and less about rough experimentation. The early PS1 era was a Cambrian explosion of weird 3D nonsense… and I don’t think anyone nowadays would put that above late SNES releases. The defining titles of the PSX didn’t come around until the very late 90s, and several of them sold like crap. Nobody wanted Symphony Of The Night until their friend would not shut up about it.

But over on PC, the 90s were a smooth ramp of increasing power and relevance. The 3D accelerator era laid the groundwork for the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race mindset, with visual quality and variety unmatched until the late PS2 era. (By which point Crysis had advanced PC graphics ten years into the future.)

And in 90s handheld gaming, there was the Game Boy, and nothing else mattered. Sega kept the Game Gear limping along until 1997, but nobody noticed, because everyone and their mother already chose the monochrome brick that sipped batteries. Several companies eventually gave up and released greyscale machines just in time for Nintendo to fuck them with the Game Boy Color. All the while, the platform went from twee single-sitting high-score fare, to bespoke long-form RPGs and major franchise sequels, to essentially-complete demakes of Super Nintendo games. Nothing changed except ROM size. It was the last 8-bit console, and it took developers a decade to recognize they could go hog wild on it.

Right after that, the Game Boy Advance’s brief lifespan was essentially all golden era. Doom was practically a launch title. Homebrew devs kept teasing Quake, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, etc., alongside whole-ass GTA3 clones. Commercial releases were awash in good-to-great RPGs and metroidvanias. But then - the PSP scared Nintendo into creating the DS, and that platform went through some awkward years struggling to use better hardware. That wasn’t the end of “the” golden era. For the PSP it was briefly fantastic, especially if you count its use for emulators. But it fell as the DS found its legs, while some completely unrelated trends happened to consoles and computers.

All we can say for certain is, nothing inside a video game should cost real money, and DRM is delayed theft.

I don’t think that’s an accurate use of the format. They’re more like the big flat layer right above that: fairly small, behind almost everything, and completely unnecessary.

Didn’t help Bleem.

which is how they killed Ryujinx.

Plus sending goons to his house.

Allegedly.

Advertising shits in your brain.

Let’s get rid of it.

Your business model is not my problem.

Especially when plenty of profitable services add this shit anyway.

Read: Discord is de-anonymizing all users.

Leeeave.

Frankly it should be illegal.

Not just “never required.” Explicitly disallowed.

On the plus side, Strigiphilus garylarsoni.

Having erased the game everybody loved for a janked-up and shamelessly greedy do-over, they’re now trying to erase even its memory.

Like how specifying “Halo CE” requires further disambiguation.

If - if - they release another Xbox, they’re gonna name the fucker “The Original Xbox.”