MudMan

It’s been EA since a different millenium. I think it’s time to get over it.

FWIW, the remake itself was made by an external studio including members of the original team and they apparently collaborated closely with some sort of consulting group of modders and preservation-focused community people.

It’s pretty good. Comes with both C&C and Red Alert, plus a bunch of extras. Definitely worth it.

I mean, they published Split Fiction and Tales of Kenzera this year and their Star Wars games were more than decent (let’s hear it for the atrociously underrated X-Wing revival they made with Squadrons). They also published the C&C Remaster that same year, which I feel doesn’t get enough credit despite getting a lot of credit. Probably one of the best examples of one of those in recent memory.

Let’s not be disingenuous, none of that is their bread and butter, but it’s not like they were entirely dormant.

No, for sure, it’s a good thing. I just found the expression funny in the context. The Crew is what it is.

If you like flavored condoms I am struggling to find a reason why not.

I mean, good on people getting this up and running, but “in case you’ve been living under a rock” may overrepresent how much the average person wants to play The Crew.

A sausage is ground meat in an intestinal casing.

If you wrap a whole steak in a sausage casing that’s not a sausage. You need to pound that dick before you can call it sausage. So at the start of the process it may be way less sausage than by the end, depending on how you go about it, I suppose.

I mean… I own both a LCD and an OLED Deck.

I would absolutely not use it as a computer without a dock and I certainly wouldn’t use it as a media player.

Other handhelds maaaaybe. The Legion Go has a stand and detachable controllers, so it could be a thing if it didn’t have the worst speakers ever devised by a human being. The GPD Win 4, the GPD Win Mini, the Ayaneo Slide and the Aya Flip all have some semblance of a keyboard, so you can get away with some stuff you can’t on the Deck or the Ally. I don’t think they make sense as a main computing device for the money, though, as they don’t have even the Deck’s low entry point as an excuse.

FWIW, the optical nub on the Win 4 is the best pointer device in any of these, and even with that and the physical keyboard I still wouldn’t use it to replace a laptop for media consumption if given the option. If I had a single device I could pick up I would sooner look into the ASUS Flow line of convertibles than into any current handheld, although you can certainly get a much cheaper all-rounder laptop than that.

Well, I’m less black and white than you are on this, but I could agree with most of that.

That’s not what’s in the law, though.

The law outright bans any and all loot boxes in games aimed at kids or teenagers (meaning anything with any loot boxes is automatically 18+ rated) and sets an obligation for all stores to verify people’s age on top of having parental controls. I guess you could go to court and find out, but the way I read it, age checks are mandated additionally to parental controls and both are set as obligations.

So it’s great for you that you have this whole mental framework of why porn is cool but loot boxes are not, but that’s not what the law says, so I’m going to guess I can chalk you up as disagreeing with this whole situation.

Also, the idea that NSFW content in general, regardless of where you place the bar for “porn” has “never been marketed at children” is hilarious.

Whose point is that? Because I don’t think it’s the previous guy’s point, and it certainly isn’t mine.

I mean, the law (not a bill, this isn’t the US and it has been approved, as per the text) outright bans loot boxes in games “targeted at children or teenagers”. No qualifiers. Doesn’t even say “paid loot boxes”, so technically all videogames are now illegal if they have a loot table anywhere. I’m going to assume cooler heads will prevail and a categorization will come from courts or specific regulatory development, but it’s certainly not in the law.

So if you don’t like this for doing both at once… well, that’s weird, that’s why laws have multiple articles. If you’re worried that the inclusion is meant to stall the bill that’s irrelevant, this has been published and comes in force in six months. If you think they’re overreaching by outright banning loot boxes… well, I agree, but I don’t think that’s the point as the rest of the thread is defining it.

EDIT: Someone in a different thread pointed out that despite referencing slightly differently there IS a definition of lootbox in the law and it does include a requirement for them to be paid, so I’m correcting the record here:

IV – caixa de recompensa: funcionalidade disponível em certos jogos eletrônicos que permite a aquisição, mediante pagamento, pelo jogador, de itens virtuais consumíveis ou de vantagens aleatórias, resgatáveis pelo jogador ou usuário, sem conhecimento prévio de seu conteúdo ou garantia de sua efetiva utilidade;

I still have a Redhat install CD from the early to mid 2000s somewhere in the attic. I think it came with a PC magazine.

Arguably they still can’t.

But yeah, I’m less surprised that they already existed and more suprised that I had already heard about them.

The thing is in my memory it wasn’t that special because at the time computers came in a lot more flavors than now. There were a ton of semi-recent computers that used just some variant of Basic, others some variant of DOS, DOS and Windows were different things and both in use, Apple-IIs were a thing, but also Macs…

I remember the first time I gave it a shot it was a bit of a teenage nerd challenge, because the documentation was so bad and you had to do the raw Arch thing with Debian and set up things step by step to get to a semblance of an X server, let alone a DE. And then after spending a couple nights messing with that I didn’t think about it much until a few years later when Ubuntu sort of figured out making things easy.

By the mid 2000s I remember people my age laughing at older normies for not having heard of Linux already, so it all moved relatively fast. It was maybe less than a decade between it coming into being and then it being something you probably don’t use but you’ve heard of, which is faster than I would have said if you asked me.

No, see, there is no logical mistake because at no point was there an argument about universal truths anywhere. There was a note that, despite the headline and article not flagging it, the same regulation covers porn and has some of the issues that anti-porn age verification has had in the past.

You’re just doing the thing where you read something on the Internet and it made you angry by not immediately reinforcing your preferences so you nitpicked a random bit you thought didn’t check out regardless of whether it was part of the argument or not.

I would much prefer to talk like adults, instead.

I guess that contributes to it. I guess when someone gave me install media (I believe for Debian, if you’re gonna be pedantic about it) their approach may have been “there’s now free Unix you can just get” and that’s why it didn’t feel new.

Once again, you don’t get a say.

They are the same in the law. They will be treated the same way.

Also, what is your point anyway? That porn should be accessible to children but loot boxes shouldn’t? Are you not OK with porn being for adults? The question here isn’t whether the content is adults-only, we probably should all agree that’s the case. The question is how that’s enforced.

I mean, if you want to tell me what you actually think about that I’m happy to listen, but going “these two things feel different to me” doesn’t bring anything to this conversation.

How are they different? They’re both activities we allow for adults but not for children. For, arguably, good reasons.

I mean, you can be into one more than into another, and you can argue whether or not loot boxes should qualify as gambling, but for practical purposes when it comes to regulation they are fairly interchangeable.

Not that it matters, because regardless of what you and I think, they are listed together in the law. I’m not mixing diffferent issues, the law is specifically, explicitly applying the exact same regulation to porn and loot boxes. Doesn’t matter how you feel about it, the Brazilian regulators think they’re the same here.

Also porn.

And it’s written in pretty much the same way as the UK anti-porn thing, where age ratings alone won’t cut it, so if you want to make smut games in Brazil you need to have some sort of “effective” age gating on top of parental controls to allow parents to close it off to their kids.

Art. 12. Os provedores de lojas de aplicações de internet e de sistemas operacionais de terminais deverão:

I – tomar medidas proporcionais, auditáveis e tecnicamente seguras para aferir a idade ou a faixa etária dos usuários, observados os princípios previstos no art. 6º da Lei nº 13.709, de 14 de agosto de 2018 (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais);

II – permitir que os pais ou responsáveis legais configurem mecanismos de supervisão parental voluntários e supervisionem, de forma ativa, o acesso de crianças e de adolescentes a aplicativos e conteúdos; e

III – possibilitar, por meio de Interface de Programação de Aplicações (Application Programming Interface – API) segura e pautada pela proteção da privacidade desde o padrão, o fornecimento de sinal de idade aos provedores de aplicações de internet, exclusivamente para o cumprimento das finalidades desta Lei e com salvaguardas técnicas adequadas.

So where are we on this one? We gonna be the “fuck free speech, I hate loot boxes” or “fuck thinking of the children, we like our smutty stuff”?

On the plus side, I keep forgetting that this game exists and they keep reminding me, so… yay, free marketing?

Man, Linux is one of those things where it’s less old than I think.

I don’t see myself as an early adopter at all, but I remember trying to get some version of Debian running on the same Pentium PC I had gotten to play stuff like Duke 3D, and I don’t remember at the time thinking “oh, this is some new thing”, so I had assumed the concept existed for decades, rather than being just a handful of years old.