You’d probably enjoy his normal content then! He makes great stuff.

If you’re not sure what StopKillingGames is about, the creator of the campaign, Ross Scott (of Freeman’s Mind fame) made this short video to give the rundown.

Tim Hunkin’s Secret Life of Components did an episode on Relays, which goes over the different types and the ways he uses them. A great series even for a complete novice!

A while back I put together a pretty big list of free Linux games, along with their license info. A good amount of them are FPS games, hopefully one of them interests you 🙂

I guess for tactical shooters, Urban Terror might qualify?

That was a fun review, I like the style you went for with it!

I played this back in the day on the 360, which didn’t seem to have the bugs you encountered. I recall having a pretty good time with it, and it was short enough not to overstay its welcome. The jumping mechanics and training for it were unique at the time, and I thought it was a nice twist on the WWII formula.

The lacking narrative (or at least, I don’t remember one, or any characters) hurt it, as it felt sort of like I was playing a multiplayer game alone at times.

I also thought it was neat how the sniper rifles were more accurate/less wobbly if you slowly squuezed the analog trigger, I’m not sure I’ve seen that elsewhere.

But yeah, good review, I’d honestly enjoy reading more from you.

Rock’n’roll racing got a pretty solid GBA port, it’s a fantastic little isometric battle racer from the 90’s

It’s extremely difficult for me to enjoy most 8-bit games, as there’s very little there to intrigue my tastes. However, there are a few standouts that I still play to this day on an emulator handheld, like H.E.R.O. or Mr. Do!

The good ones generally have a really solid little gameplay loop that’s quick to get into, with tight controls that let you get into a flow-state easily, and a difficulty curve that isn’t infuriating (something far too common from that era). The story heavy games from that era usually had mediocre or terrible writing paired with repetitive grinding gameplay, so the classics like Final Fantasy are sadly off limits for me.

H.E.R.O. is one of my favorites since it has somewhat uncommon gameplay where you control a man with a helicopter pack in a mine, avoiding various hazards to rescue a trapped miner at the end of each level. It rewards memorization, which is a knock against it, but even though I’ve played it heavily, I keep coming back to it as I never can quite remember the layouts of the later levels, and once control of the backpack is mastered, it just feels good to zip around all of these creatures and caverns of instant death without nicking yourself. I’m not sure how someone who has never played it before would feel about it, since it can take a while to get the hang of the controls, but I think it holds up pretty well from that era.

It also received a pretty massive number of ports to various consoles and home computers. The original Atari 2600 version is good, but personally I found the MSX port to be the most polished, and it adds some nice additional graphics as well.

The remake has much better gunplay and graphics, and overall has been ‘smoothed out’, but personally I think the new casting choices were unbelievably bad, and take all of the soul out of the game.

If you can get past the jank of the original (and get the community patch to add the old music back in), I personally think the original is the better game by far, but I was a huge fan of the original, so I’m biased.

I was surprised he gave that any amount of credence as well, I would’ve put that in the ‘doesn’t work’ pile for sure.

Are there really that many companies screwing over consumers? I’d appreciate if Stop Killing Games actually kept a running list of which companies and which games are anti-consumer.

Before Ross started this campaign, he’d been steadily creating a video series dedicated to cataloging games that are killed for the past 8 years, called Dead Game News. Here’s a link to a playlist of the series, and you can see the titles of the games that have been killed in the title of the episodes. The Crew is certainly not alone, it was chosen to be a centerpiece of the campaign because it had so many people who owned it, having a fairly high profile shutdown, and being a super clear-cut example of a publisher actively disabling a game that clearly didn’t need to be.

I’m also not sold on the idea that a ban is the only way to protect consumers.

Instead of banning it completely,

I want to point out that outright banning live service games has never been suggested or wanted in this campaign. The proposed solution is to make it a legal requirement to have an end-of-life plan for live service games that are not subscription based. This would effectively mean the publisher/developer would need to account for the need to make the game playable after they decide to end support from the beginning of development, and make choices that would make that possible (choosing software and licenses that won’t conflict with an End-of-Life). Alternatively, they could either make it not require a central server at all, or make it subscription based.

While the game is supported, they would still be able to run it however they please, their profit model would not be banned, the only thing that changes is what happens when the game is no longer profitable enough to support.

I’m in favour of the Buddhist idea of impermanence. Everything is temporary and trying to make a game exist forever is as silly as trying to live forever.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but many people have the philosophy of preserving our history, so as to learn from it, and for future generations to experience. I personally am very grateful that I can read the thoughts of someone who lived a thousand years before me in a book, thanks to fanatical archivists who preserved it. It’s the closest any of us can come to experiencing a time machine, the very concept can fill one with awe. Nothing will last forever, but I and many others derive meaning and value from keeping history alive for future generations to learn from, to enjoy, to ponder. Us preserving things in our corner does not disturb someone else from living with impermanence, it is only there for those who wish to partake.

Boycotts are fickle things, sometimes gathering a following big enough to make a corporation cave, but many other times, not getting any steam at all.

And even if a boycott is successful against one company, it doesn’t mean they won’t try the same thing again, or try their usual ‘do something extreme, then walk it back to where you originally wanted it’ two-step, which is generally very effective at getting what they want. They know how to manipulate the public to their desires, they have whole divisions dedicated to that (though sometimes even they get caught unawares). If we went this route, the issue is that this tactic is done frequently enough that people would likely get boycott fatigue. “Ugh, another campaign? Another publisher screwing us? I just can’t anymore.”

At least against corporations, actual consumer protection law is a much more reliable long-term solution to an enemy that will try every tactic to avoid real, effective change in favor of the consumer.

No worries! :D

Ah! quite right, thanks for the correction :)

JPEG is getting old long in the tooth, which prompted the creation of JPEG XL, which is a fairly future-proof new compression standard that can compress images to the same file size or smaller than regular JPEG while having massively higher quality.

However, JPEG XL support was removed from Google Chrome based browsers in favor of AVIF, a standalone image compression derived from the AV1 video compression codec that is decidedly not future-proof, having some hard-coded limitations, as well as missing some very nice to have features that JPEG XL offers such as progressive image loading and lower hardware requirements. The result of this is that JPEG XL adoption will be severely hamstrung by Google’s decision, which is ultimately pretty lame.

The question on the FAQ is asking if it’s possible, which it is. But in his big video on this topic, he says that subscription based MMOs really don’t count (even if he’d like it to).

Yes, legally an mmo sold as a service would not be targeted.

If you sell someone a game that relies on a server you own, and did not advertise clearly that you were selling a service, not a good (something you own), and then break that product for the customer without any possibility of them repairing their good, and you delete the code that could’ve fixed it, you’d be sorta commiting fraud.

If you abandon a product that was sold as a good, and it became inoperable due to forces unrelated to you, you’d be in the clear.

The difference between a home server and a larger business server is simply the scale of how many players it can host at once.

WoW’s server binary was reverse engineered by fans, and a large ecosystem of privately run WoW servers that players can connect to exist at this very moment.

Private servers running older vanilla versions of wow became so popular, blizzard then created their own vanilla wow server to get in on the action.

He’s showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn’t make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.

Ross wrote a response to Thor’s in the comments of this video, but it’s a bit buried. I’ll include Thor’s for context as well:

Thor:

I’m aware of the process for an initiative to be turned into legislature much farther down the road after many edits. If people want me to back it then the technical and monetary hurdles of applying the request need to be included in the conversation. As written this initiative would put a massive undue burden on developers both in AAA and Indie to the extent of killing off Live Service games. It’s entirely too vague on what the problem is and currently opens a conversation that causes more problems instead of fixing the one it wants to.

If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just “videogames” as stated in the initiative. Specifically call out the practice we want to shut down. It’s a much more correct conversation to have, defeats the actual issue, and stops all this splash damage that I can’t agree with.

Ross’s response:

@PirateSoftware I actually wasn’t planning to write to you further since you said you didn’t want to talk about it with me and I’ll still respect that if you’d like. But since you brought up what I said again I’ll at least give my side of that then leave you alone:

• I’m 100% cynical, I can’t turn it off. I wasn’t trying to appeal to legislators when I said that, I doubt they’ll even watch my videos. I was trying to appeal to people who are are kind of doomer and think this is hopeless from the get-go. I wanted to lay out the landscape as I view it that this could actually work where many initiatives have failed. Did it backfire more than it inspired people? I have no idea. I’ve said before I don’t think I’m the ideal person to lead this, stuff like this is part of why I say that; I can’t just go Polyanna on people and pretend like there aren’t huge obstacles and these are normally rough odds, so that was meant as inspirational. You clearly weren’t the target audience, but you’re in complete opposition to the movement also.

• I’m literally not a part of the initiative in any official capacity. I won’t be the one talking to officials in Brussels if this passes. The ECI could completely distance itself from me if that was necessary.

• In my eyes, what I was doing there was the equivalent of forecasting the weather. You think it’s manipulation, but I don’t control the weather. I can choose when I fly a kite based on my forecast however.

• It was also kind of half-joke on the absurdity of the system we’re in that I consider these critical factors that determine our success or not. So yes, I meant what I said, but I also acknowledge it’s kind of ludicrous that these are perhaps highly relevant factors towards getting anything done in a democracy.

Anyway, I got the impression this whole issue was kind of thrust upon you by your fans, you clearly hate the initiative, so as far as I’m concerned people should stop bothering you about it since you don’t like it.

I’ll be interested to see the responses here. I once did research into the best teas, but there are so many brands, the info did not stick around in my head.