If you want something with a small footprint I would personally go for Rust, but anything that compiles to a static binary is going to be better than something that needs a dedicated runtime.

Python is what I use for small one-time scripts and utility stuff that doesn’t need to run long, but it may be worse than Java…

Great article! Ubisoft seem to be really good at making worlds that are immense and magnificent and yet utterly boring to be in.

That’s a very astute observation and it made me wonder if piracy was partly to blame for the death of the B-tier game (at least on PC). In my younger pre-Steam days me and my friends would pirate 9/10 of the games we played (if not more). Games like CoD/Fifa/Sims would get enough sales from regular folks, but who the heck was going to take a chance on something like Will Rock or Scrapland? I would often check out games at my local store and then go home to torrent them, meaning they lost out on sales from the kinds of weirdos who the games were made for.

I watch a stupid amount of YouTube so I pay for YouTube Premium. I wish that meant I could have premium features like disabling shorts, disabling those annoying themed sections that keep popping up (right now it’s the olympic games), a search function that actually searches for what I want instead of shoving more suggested videos in my face, and changing every “not now” button into “don’t ever ask again”.

Despite the fact that I’m a voracious consumer of YoutTube videos and a long-time paying customer, I have to accept that I am not the target audience. They want passive users who endlessly watch whatever gets put in front of them so that they never leave the app. If there was a respectful alternative that worked well with iOS and AppleTV I’d gladly pay for that instead.

I use this rule: accounts.google.com/gsi/* Is yours similar?

I’ve been a fan of Dragon Age since Origins and this game looks like another step towards the kind of simplified gameplay that every game has made. It’s disappointing that the series has gone from an RPG to a generic 3rd person action adventure game, but given the gradual evolution of the other games it’s not really surprising.

kind of game Bioware has forgotten how to make.

Such a nice way to sum it up. You would think that the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 would show publishers that there is a (large) market for actual RPGs, but that’s maybe too much to hope for.

Even single-player games aren’t single-player anymore with all the online-requiring bullshit publishers have shoved into their games. The game most likely comes with a fuckton of telemetry and user-behaviour tracking which is a lot more valuable to Sony if it can be attached to a specific user.

I remember feeling liberated when streaming became big. Dealing with potential fake files, low quality, or having something stuck on 95% with no seeders was something I wasn’t going to miss when I ditched piracy for Netflix… then the streaming wars began and here I come crawling back.