Patents are (at their core) a good thing. It protects little Jimmy Inventor from putting hours and his blood, sweat and tears into coming up with a novel invention, only for some big corpo to see it, steal the idea and bully Jimmy out of the market.

Jimmy has legal recourse to sue the big corpo if he has a patent, whereas without one he has nothing.

Just because the system’s been gamed (especially in the US) doesn’t mean it’s impossible to reform, and is currently still better than nothing.

This is useful for updates so you’re not bottlenecked as much (if you don’t have automatic background updates set up).

That article hurt a little to read - it’s not a T-Rex, it’s so obviously a Utahraptor I’m a bit flabbergasted that made it to print. But I guess not everyone had my obsession with dinosaurs as a child…

I thought you were poking fun since it’s David Tennant, not Tenet… I feel like I’ve been whooshed now.

You’ve got to give Microsoft credit for their dedication to backwards compatibility.

I highly doubt the economists in Treasury were advocating for this. It’s 100% a political decision.

Arkham Knight is decent except for the batmobile sections - as others have already mentioned.

I’d still argue it’s better than Origins though. From memory, memorising all the different toolbelt skills isn’t really necessary - you can definitely get through the game by just abusing jumps, cloak and counters - some special enemies might need a specific ability to make vulnerable, but the game normally warns you the first time you fight them, so I don’t think it ever feels too overwhelming - it just feels like a lot if you run through it very quickly.

To be honest, I still rate Youtube Premium - the bundle that includes Music and ad-free Youtube is just too good a deal, even with the price hike. Some of the alternatives may be a bit cheaper, but you end up paying more if you still want to hang onto ad-free YT.

Given you said budget isn’t an issue, I’d personally still stick with YTM, but I haven’t personally had any issues with its radio function, and while I don’t listen to much Aussie stuff, I do have pretty esoteric tastes and it’s generally pretty decent.

This is why I absolutely refuse to install Valorant (and now LoL) - I could somewhat understand if an anticheat refused to boot up the game in question if something triggered it, but it going massively outside of its scope and wantonly disabling or killing other processes is just nuts to me.

If I really hate front end, but still want a lot of the responsiveness of a SPA, I’d have to give ASP.NET Blazor a serious thought.

It’s largely all back end driven, with the dynamic elements driven via webassembly that pretty much works like black magic.

Have to disagree with you on echoes - I loved the game, but IMO it was much easier than Prime 1 - the most difficult boss was the probably the boost guardian midway through rather than any of the endgame bosses. The ammo system made the standard power beam too centralising which was boring, and the dark world damage just served to slow the player down, since the light fields regenerated your health.

No one’s suggested it yet, so I’ll say Fire Emblem: Three Houses - lots of gameplay hours, especially if you want to go through each of the four storylines, albeit can be a bit repetitive getting to that point.

What’s more interesting about the shutdown is how this might affect IoT devices that rely on 3G - e.g. Canberra’s public transit system uses the Optus 3G network to enable its MyWay card system - once it goes down, what will that mean for commuters (especially given that Transport Canberra doesn’t accept cash on buses since COVID).

Here’s another example where trying to chase the live-service money train has just ended up with a subpar product that people abandon or avoid almost instantly.

Unfortunately I suspect the wrong lessons will be taken away from this as well - e.g. the console/PC gaming market is too fickle, etc.

Yeah I don’t understand the premise of the headline either - unless it’s supposed to be some slight on ‘inner-city lefties’, being the only ones who could possibly want an EV…

With GOG, you could theoretically download the offline installer, give that to someone else and then ask GOG support to remove BG3 from your account, and be fully abiding with the EULA conditions.

Lazy Web devs who took the ‘mobile first’ mantra to mean ‘mobile only’ 🙄

Holy shit, it’s actually impressive to tank that hard - not cresting more than 1000 concurrent players in over a month, and hasn’t been able to beat 5000 since November… I know people love throwing the ‘dead game’ meme around prematurely, but if this isn’t dead yet, it’s definitely got one foot in the grave.

Good luck getting any reform done within America’s FPTP by going 3rd-party.

Politics is a battle of inches, and you need to walk before you can run, or else 3rd-parties are doomed to irrelevance forever.

But if it gets to the point where Ubisoft goes and every studio starts making their own, I don’t think that will work if they don’t have the game catalogue to support it, that would mean Ubisoft could just start churning out horrible games to build their stupid catalogue.

I feel like we’re starting to see a rerun of the streaming service wars - if this takes off across the industry I can definitely see people going back to piracy. I don’t want game pass, ubisoft+, Blizzard Prime, Nintendo Online Super Premium Expansion Pass or whatever stupid names these companies come up with just to play a few games that I’m interested in, just because they’re spread across different publishers.