100% agree; the whole Touch Screen Everything UI like those found in Teslas are the absolute worst.

Having to take your eyes off the road to do literally anything to do with the climate system should be made illegal. Bring back tactile switches, FFS!

Those will die off soon enough, through forced obsolescence and an inability to compete with ad-subsidised junk that spies on you.

I think that was the one that started in an ice zone, if I remember correctly? I literally couldn’t get past it because I find that aesthetic quite boring…

“Look at me, Morty burp I’m Clickle Rick!”

I played the hell out of the first Borderlands (including New Game+ across all expansions), but promptly bounced off 2 & Pre-Sequel because it literally just felt like more of the same and I was already sated.

BL3 and now BL4 are literally just more of the same, but with ever increasingly more egregious monetisation.

Riskiest click of my career!

That’s definitely another workaround, for sure! I think our supermarkets here carry Steam gift cards - for example.

Though I imagine that those same payment processors could threaten to pull out of stores that carry Steam gift cards, and we’d be back to square one.

Additionally, it puts more burden on the end users to have to physically shop somewhere ahead of time - lowering convenience. Ultimately, as Valve themselves put it - piracy is a service problem. Any additional hurdles will deter some potential customers.

So in order for people to be able to spend their own money how they see fit, we need a new player in the field - either fiat (eg. via the EU) or reliable, low/no fee stable coin(s).

100% in agreement; those are the factors that I was alluding to when I said it would be too much for end users to deal with…

…and that’s all before we even begin to take into consideration regional pricing!

True, the best bet currently would be to stick to a ‘stable coin’ to avoid the drastic price fluctuations - but even having to deal with that will largely be a bridge too far for most would-be customers, I fear.

Not the Yoshi’s Island 2 we deserved, but the Yoshi’s Island 2 we needed.

Still won’t give Nintendo a cent of my money, so I look forward to emulating this at some point in the not too distant future.

All good, I’m currently lodging a patent on lodging patents for a system for summoning a character.

See you in court, Nintendo!

P.S.: I’m also lodging a patent for a system of pirating every single game on a Nintendo platform (past, present and future), however I will be opening that one up to the public once granted.

From my experience, a whole lot.

Think about how hard it is to join a new company and learn to maintain their codebase - at least in that situation you are likely going to have someone more familiar with it walk you through it.

Now understand that no such resource exists for vibe code - you’re on your own from the get go.

Quite the opposite; these are probably the most savvy opportunists making themselves available for headhunting by clueless recruiters chasing The Next Big Thing.

They will end up getting phat contract offers to tidy up the poorly implemented AI-generated code put in by some C-suite desk jockey after they fired their engine engineering team.

I’m ok with there being a conversation on this topic, even if the arguments devolve to ‘waaah’ vs. ‘git gud’.

Ultimately though, I agree that a small dev team shouldn’t have to focus on a game-mode outside their vision - and any such demand for an easy-mode or other additions can and should be left up to mod makers.

It’s a single-player game, so in the end how the individual user wants to play is how they should be able to play.

Activision/Blizzard have frequently had game launches where their servers were unavailable due to demand.

But that’s probably more due to terrible network infrastructure, than overwhelming demand!

Can’t; you are objectively correct.

Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund is currently valued at. ~$1.9 trillion USD.

They have a population of ~5.6m people.

They works out to be ~$340K USD for every man, woman and child in the nation. That’s a lot, but not anywhere generational levels of wealth.

Mind you, the above numbers aren’t perfect as it doesn’t take into consideration non-citizens living in Norway (who may not be eligible), as well as ex-pats living abroad (who would).

Pepsi? Partial credit!

It’ll be one of these, where you’ll also have to chase it around your house to turn it off - but not before successfully solving a multi-stage CAPCHA, yelling out the name of the company that is currently advertising, and successfully answering 3 questions about the product being advertised.

Get anything wrong, and you’ll be locked out for 2 minutes while another set of ads plays.

Oh, and it will only be available via a monthly subscription service.