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The first weekly What Are You Playing? thread!
  • I've been trapped in a Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time addiction ever since that came out. I'm a huge fan of the original 3DS game, but it was kinda forgotten by gaming history. And now we have a much bigger and more polished game for more platforms! For those who haven't heard of it: it's a bastard child of singleplayer Final Fantasy XIV and Animal Crossing. Very cute and cozy, mercilessly addicting, simulates the experience of having ADHD incredibly well.

    This is how it typically goes: you want new furniture for your house. You're out of a specific kind of wood that's needed, so you go to a place that has it. On the way there you see an NPC with a quest - some poor farmer is besieged by overgrown carrots, and wants you to kill 10 of them. Might as well, it's only a slight detour. You kill the carrots, and then help yourself to some more crops on the farm, and get a rare carrot that you need to cook a dish to advance your Chef Life! Better get to that immediately, before you forget. You go back to town and cook the dish. You still don't have that new furniture you set out to get.

    About the only thing I don't like is that the story quests are less weird than the original game, everything else is a straight upgrade.

  • The audacity!
  • It's not isometric though, the camera can be controlled, zoomed in/out/rotated, and it has a full 3d world. And it's huuuuge. Don't get me wrong, I don't think any game should be that large, but BG3 has at least some justification for it.

  • Nvidia unveils its flagship RTX 5090 card — with AI-juiced frame rates
  • Ah damn, I have it and enjoyed it a lot - it's fun! The card assets have always been obviously generic, store-bought assets... but at least they were still made by humans. I remember the first AI controversy in that game, I think it was centered around the main menu's background image, where the castle turrets and towers kinda didn't line up.

    I don't know how I feel about this, on one hand this is such an incredibly niche product that I can understand wanting to save every scrap of money, but it sets a bad precedent going forward.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd December 2024
  • Musk got banned in Path of Exile 2 for cheating. I'm not sure what angle to take here, but you gotta admit that it's a bit funny/satisfying. (how does such a busy [assume I'm making air quotes with my fingers] guy have time to play video games? why is he so obsessed with status that he'd try to cheat his way up the leaderboards, and not for the first time either?)

  • Radio Kraków fires announcers, replaces them with AI bot voices
  • A seemingly small detail that really bothers me about this story is that those glorified chatbots were given backstories like they are actual humans - in their bios they have things like "an acoustics engineering student at AGH [local university]" or "passionate about queer issues". And... can a chatbot have a student id? I somehow doubt that AGH has ever issued an id for a bot. Can a chatbot be "passionate" about real issues that real queer people face (especially in a country like Poland which, while it's been getting better on LGBT+ rights, is still one of the worse places in the EU to be queer) and should it pretend like it has faced these things too? That seems like a horrible idea.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 27 October 2024
  • A publically funded radiostation in my city has fired all of its hosts and replaced them with 3 AI "hosts" (non-English link).

    They're trying to defend this by saying that all of the hosts were just independent contractors and AI is not the main reason they're firing them, and that the AI thing is just going to be "an experiment to appeal to Gen Z". Fortunately, most people's response seems to be "fuck off with this crap".

    I just... can't with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run "experiments" with AI media. Heads should roll for this.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)RI
    Rinn @awful.systems
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