HeyListenWatchOut

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • America is stupid and selfish.

    The U.S. has been propagandized by the rich via corporate media consolidation (AKA Manufactured Consent) since at least the 1980s when the Fairness Doctrine was repealed by Reagan… earlier if you consider folks like JFK - who (as a member of a dynastically wealthy family) did things like drop the marginal tax rate from ~90% for the insanely richest people in the country to ~60% to start the tumble of budget shortfalls ultimately leading to the ease in which dishonest grifters are more easily able to convince the desperate and unheard to put their faith in demagogues offering them scapegoats in place of the actual culprits for their socioeconomic plight.

    That is to say, that :

    1. IF America is stupid, it is the fault of the ultra-rich once again - as they did in the 1860s with railroad barons, and 80 years later in the 1920s with the industrial age robber barons, and again as they’ve done now with tech-bro barons - need to be reminded that peace is only achievable on a level playing field, wherein they pay their goddamn fair share of taxes to provide a stable, safe, clean, healthy society where our bountiful resources are not made artificially scarce for all but the very top of the wealthiest classes.

    2. IF America is selfish, it appears so only because those at the bottom are shown - by example of those at the top - that if they are selfish, they can “get ahead…” or at least “get by.”













  • It DID outdo Nintendo’s equivalent - the previous mainline Mario entry - Super Mario Odyssey - in every way except maybe 4 :

    1. Quantity - Mario had more moons than Astro had Bots to rescue… so more collectibles.
    2. replayability - with the Luigi balloon challenges, they extended the game’s longevity with this feature and it is better than Astro Bot’s simpler “speed run challenges” because of Mario’s unique game mechanic of allowing players to create and compete by crafting one-of-a-kind challenges for each other.
    3. Nostalgia - Mario’s New Donk City party was absolute peak love letter to the origins of Super Mario and the sequence with the song sung by Mayor Pauline honestly brought me to tears…
    Tap for spoiler

    the Bowser hat body takeover sequence

    …But everything else - the scale of and pure ingenuity of the boss mechanics, the visuals - from both a stylistic and technical standpoint, the Dual-Sense’s controller gimmicks, the complete lack of load times… it brought into stark contrast how far Nintendo has fallen behind - not so much from a game design perspective necessarily - but certainly at least from a hardware power standpoint.




  • Wanted to better illustrate my point about asset modernization, here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

    This is a 7.45MB animated GIF embedded among several others on the page for Helldivers 2 store page on Steam :

    Here’s that same animation converted into an animated WEBP around 800KB… (I did an AVIF at 215KB with default settings from some random online conversion tool, but apparently Lemmy won’t allow those to be embedded / shown directly) :

    It is literally ~10% the size, looks nearly identical (could make 1:1 with less compression for just a few KB more), loads faster, and will play back in everything except e-machines from the late 1990s.

    Additionally, modern formats support things like wider color gamut - which means you can create HDR assets.


  • It’s not flat out “bad,” but it IS visually inconsistent when it comes to their overall design system element library… but their visual hierarchy, their arrangement of said elements, and layout - is overall pretty well done.

    My personal biggest gripe is less about element appearance, but more on how inconsistent their tab layout ends up being from page to page.

    When browsing, I always struggle to find a couple of elements - usually something from the specific set of tabs I want to navigate to like the “community” home, my wishlist items, or the shopping cart.

    …But really my very biggest gripe is on my Steam Deck. I have the mod for allowing customized animated grid images… and when I go to the Collections section, the loading of those images grinds browsing to a nearly unusable halt.

    I would LOVE it if they did overhaul their element library to unify things, and did away with older more bloated raster formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF and H.264+MP3 in MP4s… and instead switch to something like highly optimized HEIC / AVIF / WEBP and SVG, custom fonts with embedded symbols, and VP9+opus WEBMs to modernize and shrink their asset libraries. They could even have fall-back compatibility when they detect an ancient device that can’t decode them for some reason.

    Not that anyone cares, but I am a Sr. UX designer who used to work in games but switched to general software like 12 yrs ago… so if anyone from Valve browses Lemmy… PM me. 😅