TwinIon

I'm perfectly capable of enjoying games where the gameplay isn't great because I'm enjoying the story. I would personally make the argument that, as an inherently interactive medium that gameplay is rather core to the experience, but that doesn't preclude games with "poor" or simple gameplay from being worthwhile. I also think that, like with all other artistic mediums, my personal lack of interest doesn't have imply any broader implications for the medium or even for the specific title. Just because I generally don't like horror movies and don't want to see a specific one doesn't mean that particular film isn't great, that there aren't great horror films, or that films as a whole aren't art. I've seen experimental theater shows that I've loved, and I've seen experimental theater that I thought were terrible, but I think it's exciting to see challenging art. It's rare to see something with such a big budget try something so different, and I applaud Kojima for doing something so unique at this scale. I imagine that some people will get a lot out of the experience, and I'm happy for everyone willing to give it a shot. I hope people enjoy it. If you just told me that there was a crazy unique game that was really dividing opinion, I'd often be happy to give it a try. However, when you also tell me that it's 50 hours long and that it's a story by Kojima, I can't help but lose interest. I think he's a terrible storyteller who values oddity and intricacy over character and story. I've never enjoyed the stories in his games, and nothing I've read about DS makes me think this will be the one to change my mind.

D2 was delayed a year, D3 took 4 years to release after it's announcement. I sure hope that D4 doesn't follow suit. Still, I hope they take the time to get it right.

Maybe if you thought he could turn Texas blue (which strikes me as rather unlikely), otherwise I feel like there are better candidates. He will not be missed.

I'm slightly confused as to how the PvE content works. As someone who never really got into Overwatch that's the part that interested me the most.

Here's the text for anyone who doesn't want to watch. It does seem like a slightly odd thing to make a big deal about this by opening up Blizzcon with an apology and not actually do anything about it. It's great that they've promised to do better, but they could do better now by changing the bans. Rehire the casters, keep Blitzchung in GM, make a clear policy about what people can say on official broadcasts and what the punishments are instead leaving it under the vague blanket policy. It's not like they haven't had time to figure this out.

Blitzchung got picked up by a team and intends to playing professionally after his ban is over.

Blizzcon started off with the official announcement of Diablo IV. There's a cinematic trailer and a gameplay trailer as well. Not a lot of info yet, but it is coming to the PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

Yeah, a real surround sound system helps. I also boost the center channel a bit for dialog.

I am the absolute opposite. I hate subtitles because I can't help but read them when I'd rather be watching what is on screen. I feel like a few lost words are a small price to pay for not missing anything on screen.

It sounds like he constructed a game entirely out of my least favorite parts of various games. Tedious travel, terrible combat, inventory management, Metal Gear style melodrama. I think I'll be skipping this one.

I liked my original Moto 360, but it's been almost shocking to me how poorly Google has improved Wear OS and how little progress has been made on the hardware front, especially compared to Apple. I don't really see how Fitbit solves either of those problems. They need better processors, and they need better software. Maybe this at least means that Google is going to be serious about wearables.

It's certainly better. Not sure why they've been so resistant to updates for so long.

I was unaware of his Chinese investors, so maybe someone was expecting to make money, so I guess I'll just say that anyone expecting significant Chinese box office revenue for OUTIH was pretty foolish. Tarantino is his own very particular flavor, and expecting a new market to take to him without any evidence seems like a bad idea. His only film to ever open in China was Django (which was released only after severe edits), and it made all of $2M.

Was this a joke or is there some reason to think this will actually come to Gamepass?

One of my friends said they wished they'd seen it with subtitles because it was so often hard to hear or understand. I didn't want subtitles, but I do think that muddiness was purposeful, if not necessarily effective.

I think the problems with China are far larger and have really already taken their toll, it's just been largely silent. Tarantino is in a largely unique position in Hollywood in that he gets to make whatever movie he wants and that's that. China has never been a real market for him and I doubt they were expecting it to be this time even if it got past the censors. It's the rest of Hollywood that has long been self censoring for China at every stage of development that is a bigger issue. I imagine that basically every Disney movie (which seems to be most of them now), has some formal process for China; evaluating if it will get a release there, and if so if any adjustments need to be made early on to ensure it doesn't hit any red flags.

Looking at the source map for the article, it's easy to see why this doesn't get much attention in the US: there is very little impact on major US cities. San Diego and LA have essentially no impact. The bay area gets it worse, but not in any population centers. The East Coast doesn't get affected much. Hell, even Miami isn't underwater with those projections. New Orleans is the one big exception that I noticed on a casual glance around the country. The link that @b_m_b_m_b_m provided to a different map shows things being far worse.

We're just over 24 hours until we find out for sure. For all of Blizzard's recent problems, I'm personally interested in Diablo IV. I just hope they find some way to spice up the formula a bit. I loved D2 back in the day, but I don't want to play the same game with modern graphics.

I played a good bit of Halo in the early days, but haven't really touched the multiplayer in the last few iterations. Battlefield is really the only one that's been consistently my jam. The large maps, slightly slower pace, and ability to be constructive in multiple ways (healing, capturing control points, etc.) makes it a better fit for my play style and limited talents.

How so? News organizations can still advertise. I think he's doing it out of pure self interest, as a way to avoid potential regulation. That doesn't mean that the outcome is necessarily bad.

I'm not sure what you mean. Lie about it being political? They'll use some machine learning to figure out if something is political or not, and if you get caught you probably get kicked off. It certainly stops the major advertisers. As far as distribution is concerned, your regular accounts will still get the same reach they always would, you just can't pay to boost it. This isn't kicking political content off the platform, just advertisements.

Google's DeepMind AI team has put out a new paper in Nature detailing AlphaStar, their Starcraft II AI. While they've been playing against high level players for almost a year, those previous experiences were considered unfair because AlphaStar was given superhuman speed and vision. The new builds are far more limited. AlphaStar now sees the world through a camera and is only allowed 22 actions every 5 seconds of play. It can also play as any of the three races. Also, training is now fully automated and starts only with agents trained by supervised learning, rather than from previously trained agents from past experiments. The final version relied on 44 days of training and placed within the top 0.15% of the European player base. While that makes it a "Grandmaster" it also means it can't consistently beat the best players in the world. It's particularly vulnerable to strategies it hasn't seen before. You can see replays of it's games here. I think it still has a way to go, but I see this as a far more interesting and generally applicable kind of problem than Chess or Go. In particular not having perfect information and having such a huge number of possible moves (1026 actions to choose from at any moment!) means it's facing a lot of unpredictability. It certainly seems like it's only a matter of time before it's the best in the world. Maybe a show match at the next Blizzcon.

I finished the game last night and had the same bug, I'm assuming. After looking it up I was able to go in through the back, but it's a pretty terrible bug. For that final mission I didn't really have to shoot anything up to that point thanks to the holo disguise thing. So it was pretty fast for me to run back. If I'd taken the hard way there I'd have been pretty pissed.

I agree. It seems like almost any other strategy would have made more sense. They could have made a different brand altogether and offered a bundle a-la Disney. They have Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+, and you can buy them all or as a bundle. If you took all the non-HBO stuff from HBO Max and put it in a WB streaming service, it would be clearly a new thing in addition to this other thing. Then you can bundle them or whatever. They also could have just put everything into HBO and just charged more for it. Get it the same way you already do, pay for it the same way, just more money for more content. Instead they made a new thing that also encompasses the old thing that partially uses the old things name, but doesn't replace the old thing. Its phone company / ISP logic at it's finest.