I just finished Pragmata (had to speedrun the last few levels to fit in Control: Resonant, which I feel bad about - but I’d had C:R preordeted for ages and love anything from Remedy… Anyway, I digress.)

Pragmata I thought was good, and Capcom deserve some credit. An actual new IP, a genuinely fun and different game mechanic, visually looks good - and is bright and striking rather than regulation brown - and was just good fun to play. My only criticism would be that the dialogue/plotting felt like it was kinda rushed - like they skipped a couple of chapters and you go from “just met” to “devoted partners” in one scene and missed the plot/character development needed to get from A to B. I feel bad saying it though, because it’s a decent and topical plot and has some genuinely affecting moments.

Credit where due; I hope it does OK because God knows it’s hard enough to find games doing anything new these days.

Well, all credit to you!

Sometimes Lemmy can be surprising in a good way :^).

The patent is not on haptic feedback. The patent is on a very specific means of implementing haptic feedback using ferrofluids and electromagnetic actuators that it is claimed (and Apple deemed it good enough to copy, so presumably truly) allows for both a smaller implementation than typical mechanical haptic feedback (i.e. the off-balance-flywheel approach of phones of old), while also allowing for low- or zero- noise compared to “speaker or piezo” based haptic feedback.

There are a lot of shit patents in the world, but on a surface reading at least this seems sufficiently novel that I don’t see why it should be invalid. One also presumes that if Apple had any grounds to invalidate it on prior-art they would have done so.

Euro Truck Simulator is a great shout. My team bought me a steering wheel/pedals/gearshift as my leaving gift from my last job, and I can happily lose a whole afternoon trundling to and from some Greek island in my pimped-up Volvo…

• Wizball on the C64. I cannot even begin to explain how much fun I had with that game.
• Wing Commander III on the Amiga. Ginger Lynn Allen in all her pixellated glory? AND Tim Curry? What more can you ask?
• Ratchet & Clank (all of them) on the PS2. Shout-out for Jak & Daxter though.
• Silent Hill III on the PS2. Not necessarily the best SH game, but the first one I played, and that amusement park was the first time I was ever genuinely scared by a video game.
• Half Life 2 on PC. I mean, nuff said.

I love loads of games, old and new - I feel really bad that Uncharted, MGS, Alan Wake, Control, Death Stranding, and a load of other brilliant games aren’t on that list, but I feel like those 5 are the ones that were most epoch-defining for me for the kind of games I love.

I have literally no idea what you’re trying to say. But I’m happy for you, though. Or sorry that happened.

Well, now I feel old.

I do feel like anyone who hasn’t had to write multiple-hundred-page technical documents in Framemaker on an HP-UX C100 workstation with a couple of hundred MB of RAM shouldn’t be allowed to complain about any modern office software.

And don’t get me started on “automating the secretarial pool for fun and profit with WordPerfect DOS macros.”

Kids today…

If your job was writing code, and not designing solutions to solve problems, for which code was just the final expression - then I’m sorry, you do need to find a new career. Best of luck.

The job you studied for and got a masters degree in (congratulations, sincerely) was hollowed-out and deskilled years ago; it has been profoundly depressing watching the industry taken over by people who think a 6 month vocational course in Typescript and 6 months of not getting fired qualifies them as a senior engineer, with absolutely zero understanding of basics like information theory or concurrency mechanisms or, well, any basic engineering. These are the fuckers who have been producing spaghetti applications built on a MySQL (God burn its soul in hell) database with no relational integrity (“foreign keys make it slow!”) and no thought to scalability or resilience that someone else then gets to fix when the shit hits the fan.

That those people are going to be replaced with AI shouldn’t give anyone pause to weep. The arrival of AI to do their jobs is an opportunity to reverse the deskilling the industry has spent the last three decades working on - one really genuinely good engineer with an AI can now replace one really good engineer tearing her hair out at the half dozen absolute idiots she is asked to work with to deliver anything today.

Writing code was never “the job”, that is just the trivial typing part you do when the thinking and designing ends. The job is solving problems (which I enjoy very much thanks.)

This is like people who refuse to program in another language because they are “a .NET programmer”. That just tells me you’re a coder not an engineer. In my career I’ve been paid good money to write C51 assembler, C, C++, Tcl, Limbo, Java, C# and Rust (roughly in order) - LLMs are just what’s next.