BadlyDrawnRhino

The original Duke was much closer to what you described, funnily enough. Go back and play Duke Nukem 1 and 2, before the 3D era when they made the misogyny of the character much more overt.

That’s fair. I was thinking more about the overall aesthetic, as it’s a bit more stylised rather than leaning towards realism like in 1 and 3.

They are remaking the first game, but I don’t know if there are enough details about it yet to know how extensive the overhaul will be. The second game doesn’t need one.

There’s also the fact that hardware costs keep going up, but there’s not really a big technological leap between generations anymore. There’s little reason to buy into the next generation when the selling point boils down to “Play the same games, but slightly smoother*!”

*If there’s enough development time to implement the option to do so

Part of my enjoyment is not necessarily knowing what is coming next so that I can experience it for myself. Spoilers won’t completely ruin something for me, but it is taking something away from the experience.

Also, to everyone out there, just tag the spoilers so people can make up their own mind what they read. It takes a bare minimum of effort to do so. It’s akin to holding the door open for someone behind you, it’s not going to be the end of the world if you don’t, but it can make someone’s day a fraction better if you do.

Whoops

One of Naughty Dog’s two unannounced single-player games has not yet been announced.

Breaking news right there.

This one has a female protagonist, so I look forward to not being able to differentiate between legitimate criticism about the game, and reviews from man-children that are mad that women exist.

And then if the single player experience bombs, I also look forward to Rockstar pointing to the female protagonist as the reason, and not because they’re pouring all their resources into micro transactions.

There’s an important bit of context for this that you probably aren’t aware of, being from America, and that is that Australia doesn’t currently have any nuclear power capabilities whatsoever. We have zero reactors currently, and zero expertise.

While I can’t be sure because I’m not from the CSIRO, I imagine their projections take the significant cost of introducing brand new technology into account.

Another bit of context, our conservative party is currently pushing for nuclear as the only option, claiming that it’ll be the cheapest. They want to gut spending on renewables because a lot of their funding comes from the mining sector. That’s why the CSIRO has done a report on the projected costs on the various options, because that’s how the conservative party is framing things. Is nuclear better than gas from an environmental perspective? Yes. But that’s irrelevant to the conversation that is happening over here.

Girls or woodlice?

Not a surprise that all of Labor voted yes, given their party policy around caucus solidarity. I’d be interested to see a list of people opposed to this bill behind closed doors.

I’ve really come to despise Labor’s policy of not crossing the floor. I get their desire to show a united front, but it really makes it hard for regular folk to track how the party is shifting if we don’t ever see who supports what on an individual level.

The thing about the corporation paying less taxes is a myth. The extra contribution you make counts as revenue in their books, and that revenue is then offset as a donation, making no overall difference to their tax benefits.

That said, it does help them in other ways, mostly around marketing. They can then say they’ve made a massive amount of charitable contributions, when really it was their customers that did so.

As others have said, by making that donation at the checkout, you haven’t really made an informed decision about whether the charity is one you would donate to otherwise, so if that’s important to you you should stop doing so.

The way I look at it, if you are going to make a conscious decision to donate to charities you support, there’s no real reason to round up at the checkout. But if you aren’t really going to be donating otherwise and you’re not struggling financially, you may as well make that small contribution at the checkout.

I use Heroic Games Launcher to run GOG and Epic games on Linux. It’d be great to get some official support, but it’s the next best thing.

New Zealand recently had a political shakeup and the conservative party got voted in after many years of a progressive government running the show, so this is hardly a surprise.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that Australia is focusing more on the environment, we already don’t do enough. And we’re heading into an election year, so expect everything to stall as everything gets put on hold to be used as “election promises”. And if the conservative coalition wins next year, all environmental policies will be in jeopardy, particularly rollout of renewables, as the conservatives are pushing hard to divert everything to nuclear over wind or solar.

Oh, absolutely. I was only commenting on the weird timing, the game was released 2 years after an adult rating for video games was implemented.

We definitely have an odd and often archaic view on things here in Aus. Personally I think the classifications should be a purely informative system rather than something that decides whether or not something should be banned. Films are given much more artistic leeway than video games, and I could rant for hours on the government’s stance on gambling, which is much more harmful than most things you’d find portrayed in any artistic medium.

We’ve had an R18+ rating for video games since 2013, so not sure why Hotline Miami 2 wouldn’t have been able to receive classification.

Funnily enough, I own the game on Steam, so at some point Valve also made the same mistake. But at least they won’t pull the game from my library.

This is useful for countries where the Steam Deck is unavailable but other handhelds aren’t. Here in Australia, Steam Decks are only available as grey imports, and that makes warranty issues a potential headache, but you can walk into most electronic retailers and buy a ROG Ally off the shelf.

That said, I personally wouldn’t buy a handheld that didn’t have touchpads, so I bought a grey import and have had no issues.

I don’t think that’s their goal at all. Otherwise we wouldn’t see any sequels released on PC, that would be a much better strategy for converting players to console. The only reason publishers require their own logins in games, at least for single-player titles, is data collection. Data is very valuable.

They’re referring to Sony’s stance that all their PC releases should require you to have and sign-in to a PSN account. That’s separate to PS+, you don’t need to pay a sub.

A lot of publishers include this requirement on their PC releases, regardless of whether they’re single-player or multiplayer, and I think a lot of people are fed up with having to have so many different accounts.

That probably would be a better solution. Particularly since the rating system is pretty easy to ignore. And if they do start slapping the R18+ rating on games that don’t really warrant it like Mario Party, people will be more likely to simply dismiss the entire system.

I would hope that the government and ratings board wouldn’t be that stupid, but look at how long it took to give us an R rating for video games in the first place.