Nipah

I mentioned it in my reply to this comment, but Simple Tab Groups is a pretty solid alternative in Firefox.

Its not quite as elegant as the built-in Chrome ones, but it does make it easy to have a bunch of groups sorted out that you can flip between.

Generally, its not that I have too many tabs as much as I have some tabs I leave open all the time and want to condense down a bit.

For example, at work I use Chrome for my main web work, and FF for my… uh… shit like this. So I have a bunch of Chrome tabs open that I know I’ll have to make changes to again in the future, so they stay open. I also have ‘projects’ which contain a bunch of pages that are all related to each other. Being able to group those together and collapse makes it easy to quickly get back into them when someone wants a small, insignificant (sorry, extremely important!) change to them that needs to be done yesterday, and I can eventually just throw the group away once the project is mostly complete and not going to be touched by human hands ever again (until a year later, when it suddenly becomes a critical problem for someone, and thus a problem for me… I’m not complaining, you’re complaining).

At home, I mainly use Firefox. I have an extension that allows me to have tab groups, but its not as nice looking as the built-in Chrome version (Simple Tab Groups, which is actually quite nice, but not as pretty as the Chrome ones). I have a group for my usual fucking around stuff (Discord, YT, Kbin, DIM (Destiny app), wiki for whatever other game I’m playing), a tab for my streaming stuff (which I don’t use often, but as I have a few container tabs for logging in to my brother’s account for a handful. I like to just leave those open so I don’t have to worry about it), and a group for my “working from home” stuff like email/OneDrive and a smaller amount of pages I always keep open because I’m always editing them for work.

So all in all, I don’t have like a hundred tabs open at any given time, and I could make due with just having them all bookmarked and open them as need be… but honestly, that’s a bit of a hassle and would also either leave me with a ton of useless bookmarks after a month or two, or require me to curate my bookmarks every month or two. Versus just having a tab group I can just kill off once I know I’m done with their work.

I said this elsewhere, but essentially it looks like a “Turn your brain off” movie which kind of hits the notes that Borderlands is known for while also having a bit of a fun house mirror / “We’ve got [game] at home” feeling to it.

Overall though, it feels… forced. From the limited bits you can hear, I don’t think Jack Black really works for Claptrap (no reason to not just keep the original VA outside of “Jack Black is so in right now” or some shit); the dialog feels overly filtered, if that makes any sense… Like too many people edited it so that it achieved maximum ‘for the lolz’ (not that the first two games (the ones I actually have experience with) were the peak of writing, mind you); and I don’t have any feelings one way or the other for Kevin Hart, but for this role I think he was also a bad casting choice (but what do I know, I’ve only seen a quick trailer… maybe he nails it).

Action looks decent enough, and I do appreciate that (at least from the looks of things) they’re pushing Cate’s character as the lead.

Assassin’s Creed Origins the gameplay started getting repetitive very quickly. Even though I liked the ancient Egyptian settings and the beautiful graphics, I couldn’t follow the nonsensical plot.

Man, that was the only one of the newer style that I liked… Bayek was pretty cool, and it felt ‘fresh’… it doesn’t hurt that it ticked off two of my preferences: exploration and combat (say what you will about hiding in knee high grass, I love me some stealth). Some of the bits did rub me the wrong way, like no 1-hit kills, but I liked the weapon choices and combat options enough that I had a good time overall.

That being said, I can’t for the life of me remember anything about the story of the game so… I guess I just turned that part of my brain off after a while.

The more recent ones went too far in terms of world size, so it went from “I wonder what’s over that hill?” to “I’ll never complete filling in this map so why even bother?”… which sucks, because Kassandra was pretty cool too (not sure how the viking character was done because I didn’t even bother with that game after bouncing off Odyssey).

Shit, I forgot about GTA games in my reply…

I’m with you on this one. I can see the appeal, but for me it ends up being a cycle of: do a mission or two, get bored of the larger than life characters, do some open world stuff, get my wanted level up too high, die, repeat until I quickly get bored and shut it off.

Which is odd because I do that exact same thing in other games I love (BotW, WoW (long since quit) or Destiny) and its all golden… but in a game like GTA? Yawn.

For games that are in genres that I’d actually play:

Final Fantasy 6 (3): I grew up with the NES, and when we got a SNES I got whatever games I could from the $20 bin at Toys R Us. I had some friends who were a bit better off that loaned me some games, and I eventually managed to get my hands on a copy of Chrono Trigger (as well as other RPGs like Breath of Fire), but when I borrowed FFIII from one of them I was just… underwhelmed. I didn’t really care for the characters, it felt pretty slow initially, and I remember getting to a bit with a bunch of moogles in the party and I just put it down and never went back.

I’ve since tried to play it a few times here and there, but it never really manages to hook me… but people sing the praises of it high and low and I just don’t really get it because I can’t get over the hump.

The Witcher 1/2/3: I just really don’t like the combat, honestly. I’ve tried playing all three, and managed to get enough time into them to appreciate the good bits (voice acting, story, quest lines) but the main meat and potatoes for me in a game are exploration and combat, and only one of those really works for me in those games. I had a better time in the first game, all things considered, because I guess I was willing to allow a bit of jankiness from an older game, but I bounced off Witcher 2 pretty quickly combat-wise, and didn’t manage to get more than many 1/3 to 1/2 way through Witcher 3 before I just admitted that I wasn’t having fun.

Persona 3: I got into the games with P4G on my Vita, so part of this is ‘going backwards is hard’ in terms of QoL improvements and what not. But I also played the PSP port of Persona 2 (whichever one was actually ported in English) and had a good time (not so much with the PS1 version of the one that didn’t get the English PSP port… that one was rough) so I guess its just the game didn’t resonate with me as much as the other ones did… Maybe it was the characters or maybe it was the cuts that were made for the P3P version of the game, but it just didn’t hit the same.

Otherwise, a lot of military-style FPS games (stuff like Halo or Destiny or Timesplitters or even Goldeneye 64 are/were fun), the more recent sports titles (up to the Dreamcast/PS2 I was fine with them, but more realism doesn’t do anything for me), and stuff like MOBA or visual novels or ‘walking sims’ or battle royale or whatever those asynchronous horror games just don’t tick the boxes for me in terms of what I want from a video game.

When I used to work at a video game store, I used to try and dissuade parents from buying their 10 year old GTA 3/VC.

“So you can just walk down the street and shoot a random person, then when the cops show up, you can just shoot all of them as well.”

Oh, well they probably see worse things on TV!

“Uh huh… you can also pick up a hooker, drive to a secluded area, have sex with them, pay them, and then run them over when they leave to get your money back.”

Wait, it also has sex?!

But the thing is, you generally don’t just magically have the ability to seamlessly plop an ad into a part of the game. That kind of thing needs to be purpose built, to either have the option to plop an ad on the main menu + map, or to (more heinously) plop an ad ANYWHERE in the game.

So worst case scenario (well, not WORST because the game doesn’t, like, go back in time to kill your grandfather or something) is that someone higher up said “Hey, what if we could put an ad anywhere in the game? Get the team working on that” and it was done… best case scenario is that I guess their games are coded so well that they can just seamlessly plop in a chunk of code that doesn’t break anything else and just works?

But going off of past experience with Ubisoft games, that best case scenario is kind of laughable (insert a screenshot of the guy’s face texture not loading for AC Unity here).

Even taken at face value, it means that they purposely built the ability to have an ad pop up not just on the main menu screen, but anywhere… or at least (giving them a strong benefit of the doubt) on the map screen.

The “error” was that someone popped it into the “show up on map” area of their code and not the “show up on the main menu” area of their code… but the bigger, more glaring problem is that it is even allowed to be a thing that exists as an option.

So even with all that allowance, the fact that it can be a thing is absolutely terrible and it doesn’t matter that it happened as an accident, but it shouldn’t be an option regardless… is the point of my rambling.

I suppose it depends on how much I can bend the rules…

If I’m allowed to use the console only ‘as-is’, then probably the Nintendo DS. This gives me DS games (which are great), but also GBA games as well (though you’ll miss out on GBC/GB games, which is a bit sad); this also nets you a smattering of NES/SNES ports to boot, so that’s nice. But most importantly, it gets me Chrono Trigger and a bunch of my favorite Castlevania games all in one place (sad that SotN doesn’t get here, but…)

If I’m allowed to use the console with no hold’s barred, then Playstation Vita. Mod that little sucker and you’ve got access to a ton of stuff… PSV games obviously, but emulated PS1, PSP, GBA, GBC, GB, NES, SNES, and Genesis also (and maybe more, I don’t think I’ve tried any others though).

My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?

My initial/gut reaction was “obviously relevant ads based on the content I’m watching”, but I don’t care how relevant the ad is when I’ve seen the same Raid Shadow Legend ad across multiple videos I’m gonna try to skip it (or as I did long, long ago: adblock it).

I don’t even know what actual YT ads are now, only the integrated creator ones that they’re personally sponsored by… the hello fresh and world of tanks and manscape and debrand etc., which I’ve started auto-skipping on a channel by channel basis based on very few criteria: the entertainment value/effort they’ve put into the ad (so Drew Gooden is usually always funny and gets a pass, same for channels like Wulff Den or Th3Jez or Critical Role) but certain ones just get manually skipped regardless (no matter how funny you are, I don’t want to sit here and listen to you talk about Manscape for 3 minutes) and how often I end up seeing them (which in these instances, isn’t often because they’re channel specific usually)

So I guess it mainly boils down to relevant ads that aren’t soulless and that I don’t see 3x every other video?

As someone who played/plays a lot of MMOs and stuff like Destiny/The Division: You’d be amazed at the number of people who don’t get to step two of that simple statement.

People who are just downright angry at a game but still actively playing… “Man, I can’t believe they’re forcing me to go into PvP to get [some arbitrary weapon or cosmetic item]!” they grumble, not realizing that they don’t need to tick that little check box in their collection.

People who say things like “I grinded out this holiday season and bought the event pass and I didn’t even like the stuff it offered!” is perhaps not technically ‘common’, but that kind of situation happens often enough that I’m a bit worried for gamers as a whole.

Its some kind of weird combination of a hoarder’s mentality, a sunk cost fallacy, and probably some FOMO sprinkled on top… all mixed together by some psychologist on a company’s payroll to maximize profits.

Or you need to spend half of the games managing inventory.

On the other hand, I enjoy this (to a certain degree, mind you). Going through all the random crap I’ve picked up off the ground in Skyrim to maximize selling potential, moving things around in Diablo II for the same reason, picking through my vault in Destiny 2 to figure out which guns to keep and which to dismantle, organizing my various bits and bobs in FFXIV:ARR across my retainers so that everything is where it should be… I kind of dig that kind of stuff because its a bit of a management game within the regular game and a nice break from mindlessly murdering everything (and a bit of a “ooh presents on Christmas” kind of feel when you dig through all the stuff you’ve acquired).

On the gripping (third) hand, sometimes it does become more of a second job almost… Destiny 2, as an example again, feels like a chore sometimes keeping on top of all the various currencies and whether this random gun/armor that dropped is an upgrade over one of the multitude of other options I’ve had collecting dust for the past couple of years. “But maybe I’ll use it if they buff [gun type/perk/build]!” I think as I toss it into the pile, only to forever become an icon I ignore in DIM.

I replay the “Metroid-vania” Castlevanias every few years (SotN, GBA/DS games), and one of my goals is always maximum map completion… obviously not required for actually beating the games, but I only consider the game completed if I get all the rooms on my map.

More specifically for SotN, I also gotta get the Crissaegrim + Medusa Shield otherwise am I even playing the game properly?

Some of the others I try to get all the doodads: cards, souls, glyphs, whatever. Some are a bit more annoying than others, so sometimes I’ll skip out on the really annoying ones if I don’t get it done before filling in the map.

Avenging Spirits. When I was younger, a friend and I loaned each other a bunch of our games. Sadly, he ended up moving away before we managed to swap back, and he got the better end of the deal when it came to the games. However, I did get left with a copy of Avenging Spirits… the game is a bit strange but its very fun and the sprite work is just adorable.

The game has you playing as a spirit who can possess enemies. You start off with a few you can possess, and then you gain more choices as you progress. Or so I believe… I wasn’t all that good at the game back in the day, so I don’t remember getting too far in it.

I’m essentially re-listening to the campaigns during my lunch break so if they all start getting annoying ads going forward I’ll just go back to getting audio books from OverDrive I suppose.

The first campaign is still on their old Nerdist/Geek and Sundry listing (the newer ones look to be from stitcher.com), so I’m wondering if once I get through the ones there the newer stuff won’t all be like that going forward.

I tried AntennaPod because folks on lemmy/kbin/beehaw/wherever have been recommended it, but it was being a bit weird with the only ‘podcast’ I listen to: Critical Role campaigns.

With Google Podcasts, they’d load in with a “Welcome to the Critical Role podcast” intro by one of the players, then go into the fanfare and then into the game. With AntennaPod, it would load (from the same subscription) with at least one ad right off the bat for some reason. I tried it a few times (granted, with just one episode (campaign 1, session 115)) and even uninstalled and reinstalled, and still had ad(s) at the front… I didn’t bother to scrub through to see if it had more ads in the middle bits, because one ad was too many, ya know?

I then tried out Pocket Casts (another recommendation) and the podcast behaves exactly like the Google Podcasts one does… no ads.

Not sure why, but that is how it worked when I tried it at least so other folks may run into a similar situation based on the podcast(s) in question.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgrnghg6OkM

A direct link to the YT video.

While I do understand where you’re coming from, someone being better at something shouldn’t stop a person from doing what they love.

There are millions of people who draw better, sing better, dance better, write better, play video games better, design websites better or just do anything I can do better than I can… and that’s fine.

There are third party memory card solutions out there… essentially they hijack the cart slot and allow you to stick in a standard micro SD card to use as storage.

I have two of the standard PSV memory cards (I think a 4gb one that came with my Assassin’s Creed bundle, and another 32gb one that I spent like $100 on when the finally dropped the prices into a realm that was at least within viewing distance of sanity), but being able to stick in a cheap-o micro SD card and have ALL the games I purchased (and some extras…) is pretty great.

And because I feel like I’m legally obligated to say this as a Vita owner, hacking the thing was the best decision I made outside of buying the handheld in the first place, when it comes to the PSV. It’s way easier now than when I initially wanted to try (and was too scared to do so when the handheld was still being supported), and as long as you follow up-to-date instructions you should be golden.