I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and don’t use Mastodon at all. The main reason I think is because the « onboarding » is painful. I never succeeded to find interesting people to follow. I faced many ghost accounts from people posting once a month or stopped a few years ago.

If you don’t find people by yourself, no one is going to see your posts and so, you won’t be able to find new people to follow by posting.

I don’t like what Twitter became, but the base principle of the algorithm (before it became X with the paid subscriptions) was working great for me. I was constantly adding new people to the mix, and removing inactive ones every month.

If I struggled this much with Mastodon, I am not surprised many people create an account and leave a few days / weeks later.

I do not disagree about the fact that people are free to say what they want. It’s just that, as a user appreciating Nintendo, I am facing very negative comments on most (if not all) subjects even when Nintendo is not doing anything (like my example above about a romhack). For some people, it seems like it’s not about expressing your opinion about the subject, but your opinion about Nintendo on any subject merely mentioning Nintendo.

And it’s like that for many companies (Nintendo is just one example). As a consequence, I do not participate at all (I am just reading the news, trying to avoid the comment section). It’s not very healthy, and I hardly believe people discovering the fediverse will stay long if most messages they see are hating comments about what they like.

I still remember the first time I played it. I was still living with my parents, and they left for a few days. I started the game in the evening, and couldn’t stop until I reach the end of it … in the morning. It’s very uncommon for me to do so (even at the time), but it was so … captivating. I could not stop and go to sleep 😅.

I think it’s even more common among more general communities. But even niche communities like retrogaming can be like that.

Just to give a concrete example, I have seen a post about a pretty cool mod on Zelda ocarina of time where they integrated Pikmin, it has 50+ ups, and a single comment saying they can’t wait for Nintendo to shut it down. What’s the point ? And I see this more and more. It’s not the minority but the majority of the replies I see on such posts. It’s not healthy at all.

Not so serious subjects (I prefer to relax while being on the fediverse :) ). Anything related to Facebook / Apple / Nintendo / Disney is almost always filled with comments full of hate. It is much easier to find good communities for that on Discord for example.

See, in the past, I used a lot Twitter to keep up with news about my interests. It was easy to filter out bad users by banning them, and following more « positive » people. I left when it became « X » because I had less interactions and much more ads (probably a consequence of letting users pay to gain visibility). I hoped the fediverse would replace it.

In a sense it worked, because I get a lot of news. But now, I am worried to read the comments or even comment myself because people are most of the time not kind at all. More specific communities have not this issue, but the fediverse is so small that you are forced to be part of more general communities and face the general harsh talk of most people.

Probably not the same kind of « enshitification », but I think the fediverse creates small communities, and sometimes, it’s difficult / impossible to find non-aggressive communities for some subjects.

It’s not really solving the issues caused by the users themselves, especially when communities are not big enough to justify big moderation teams, and those people have no incentive at all to be « kind » (it’s hit or miss I would say). Instead of 1 big community with good moderation, you can end up with many small communities with little or bad moderation.

I have no solution to propose, it’s probably inherent to the fediverse.

Just to say that the question might not only concern niche games. Any game that you do not buy shortly after its release might have a negative impact on the franchise (because most sales happen in a few weeks, with rare exceptions of course).

Fair point. I am not interested at all, but I can understand ;).

And then, they will blame the studio when the game fails :/. There is no point to force a studio specialized in single-player games to develop a multiplayer one. And using an existing IP for that is not very effective imo (it reminds me a lot when, during PS360 era, all single player games had an uninteresting multiplayer mode solely to justify the online membership, like Fable 2 or Mass Effect 3). It’s exactly like the last Crash game no one cared about.

It feels like they are buying lottery tickets, hoping a winning ticket will cover all their expenses.

It’s sad, but I think the only way to preserve video games is through piracy and emulation. The companies do not care, states do not care, and most people do not care until it’s too late (and the games are seen as consumables by most people, which imo explains why they are « happy » to buy the same games again and again).

It’s called « Run ahead » in Retroarch: https://docs.libretro.com/guides/runahead/

No problem, I found it in my history :) https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/preview/1626343.html

Just to add some information, what’s innovative here is that they are likely using a traditional machine learning model (eg: neural networks) to identify the corners of the screen and infer the position the gun is aiming at from this.

Sinden is aiming to do the same thing, but using older techniques known as compute vision. It adds a white border around the screen and uses those CV algorithms to find this rectangle. It is not AI at all.

The reason Sinden is doing this is because it is much more easier this way (and so it is fast to compute, and very accurate).

Whatever AI they use, it will likely be either less accurate and/or be very slow (imagine situations with low ambient light and the screen turning black). I have seen a review in japanese from journalists who tried it, and the response time was not great (and the team wants to divide it by 2 before release, which will still be worse than Sinden).

Another possibility could be there is no AI at all, and they exploit specificities of Time Crisis. When you shoot, the screen goes white for 1 or 2 frames. You don’t need AI to spot this frame and do something very similar to Sinden without using any border.

At this point, it might be too late to move the « cursor » to the right location, but emulators nowadays are able to apply inputs in the past, and « replay » internally the last frames in the background so that you cancel the native input lag of some games (which can make them more responsive than games running on real hardware). They could use this option and it’s done. You have a system only working on games like Time Crisis with white frames while shooting, with no white borders nor machine learning model.

TLDR; if they use AI (=machine learning) as they claim, there will be no constraint like existing alternatives (sensors / white borders), but it will likely be less accurate / responsive. For Time Crisis specifically, it’s possible to come up with a solution without those constraints nowadays, so it’s possible they have no AI at all and use the term for marketing purposes.

I heard they sue Pocketpair on copyrighted systems, not on the design of the Pals (eg: using an object like a Pokeball to catch the creatures). They certainly have solid legal arguments, which explains why they took their time to find some flaws they could exploit to sue them.

At the beginning of this generation, I planned to buy a used PS5 when the Pro version was coming. I did not know that the PS5 would have almost no games for me (especially because they released the big ones for me on PC), the base PS5 would cost even more, and most people will not upgrade to the Pro because of its absurd pricing (note because it’s not worth it, but because the market for it is likely very niche).

I guess I will just skip Sony’s platform for this generation.

An amazing controller. I had not the chance to play it at the time, but the first impressions of the controller 10 years ago was incredible. I bought a Dreamcast shortly after :). I just ordered a GDEmu yesterday, can’t wait to get it :D.

Switch Pro controller for its asymmetrical layout + gyroscope (it’s so much better for aiming). I’d love to test a PS5 controller but symmetrical layout tend to hurt my hands (it was already the case for the PS3/PS4 controllers, so I have little hope for the PS5 controller).

Always a nightmare for me as well. It can take me 30 minutes just to come up with 2 sentences. I usually try to make a « joke » related to something « important » that happened to the person during the year (or « generic » stuff like « one more year passed bla bla bla »).

It’s a source of a lot of stress, especially when sometimes, someone gives me a pen and a card and forces me to come up with something right now.

Not exactly. It seems it was 30 fps on the map and 60 fps during battle.

Not an excuse, but I believe that’s because they are porting the PS3 version (which already had those limitations if I remember correctly).