For anyone going “Atari still exists?” - it’s complicated. And stupid. It is equal parts complicated and stupid.

Atari was purchased by Warner in 1976 when they were still “that Pong company.” The home-gizmo division was sold to Jack Tramiel shortly after the crash of '83.

The remaining arcade division took a journey. Tramiel had bought the name Atari, and also most of the staff and facilities and licensing rights, so Warner was left with a generic video-game husk which they spun off as AT Games, AKA Tengen. For some reason Namco owned most of it. Uuuntil Time Warner bought them back, and renamed them Time Warner Interactive, and then very shortly sold them to Midway, under Bally. Under Williams. That pinball conglomerate situation restored the proper Atari Games name, and then very shortly rebranded everything as Midway. This Atari did pretty well as Midway West until arcades stopped existing and they went bankrupt. And then Warner bought them again. They still own them, even though all Warner wanted was the Mortal Kombat IP.

Meanwhile.

The home division released a fascinating variety of consoles and microcomputers that do not matter in the slightest. Everything after the 2600 was a complete footnote. Their final lineup of the Lynx, the Falcon, and the Jaguar are only interesting to engineering ultranerds. Obviously they went bankrupt. Hasbro bought their remains, then spun them off into Mattel Interactive, which also went bankrupt. Hard drive manufacturer JTS bought their remains (for some reason?) and did the smartest thing anyone has ever done with Atari: nothing.

Infogrames screwed that up by buying JTS simply the acquire the Atari brand, which they proceeded to wear like a dead skin mask. They made a few admirable titles like Gauntlet Legends before entering a death spiral of hocking classic IP to stay solvent. It didn’t work. They went bankrupt. Some oil-adjacent venture-capital robot bought their remains, spent a decade hawking vaporware, released a weird PC nobody bought, and then also went bankrupt. A different clique of venture capitalists gave them more money, for some reason, and started reacquiring old franchises from all eras. They’re the Atari that re-released the 2600 last year, as if it’d be a big deal instead of a curiosity. I have obvious predictions for where this all goes, and yet, I cannot imagine that’s where it ends.

That logo is like a cursed artifact in a horror movie. Sensible companies see it laying there, and talk themselves into putting it on, and oh no everything went wrong somehow.

This game will be less preserved than the one on Ngage.

Wider appeal.

Yeesh on both counts.

Half-Life as a live-action film, in continuous first-person.

The game is deliberately cinematic to begin with. You’d cut down a brisk run-through to maybe an hour of set-pieces and combat, then build out the “dialog.” In quotations because I would make Gordon canonically mute. It’d become thematic.

Gordon took the hazard course qualifications that secretly exist to staff the extraterrestial excursion team, but they’re not quite desperate enough to risk having an astronaut who can’t use the radio, so he’s stuck on Earth pushing rocks. Without a helmet, because the excursion team keeps losing equipment, what with getting attacked by aliens. The aliens think the guys in orange suits are a distinct subspecies… which keeps kidnapping their kind.

Vortigaunts in particular would be seen maybe trying communicate with scientists in labcoats (a subspecies marked by their ridiculous ties) only to spot Gordon and freak out. They all hate the POV character on-sight. If they’re on-camera, they’re gonna start waving their hands to cast deadly lightning. They’d even try to communicate with the bug-eyed subspecies in splotchy green outfits, only to get shredded by submachinegun fire. The military wears those dehumanizing masks (and speaks over radio comms you can hear) because all they were told is “secret experiments, actual zombies, existential threat.” They saw one distended human with a jaw for his ribcage and the strength to slap a dude in half, and they didn’t ask any further questions.

This all comes together in Interloper. Gordon sees the biological factory where these creatures are enslaved to manufacture more of themselves. The ones inside know nothing about Earth. They prance up, curious and burbling incoherently, pawing all over Gordon’s bright orange carapace. He sticks a gun in their faces and they consider the object fascinating. But when he puts it away and tries communicating in sign language, they scatter, and a few start waving their hands to zap him. Gordon Freeman was chosen for this event because he is physically incapable of any outcome but one.

At that point, use AI as a filter. It’d be the perfect setting for some mild gloop.

If you forget the second step, well, that’s what sweet potatoes are.

These polls tend to fumble their own methods, by trusting people to read definitions. They should be asking directly: how many people in your country were born in another country? The word “immigrant” literally means that… but that’s not the only meaning people envision, when they hear that word. To some extent you are always measuring that disconnect.

On the other hand, what fucking lunatics think 22% of America is Muslim?

“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” is a fucking crime.

‘Andromeda who?’

I can recommend a big stupid project where it’s not a big deal if you fail.

Until recently, for me that would’ve meant “run Windows programs on Android,” mashing together Wine and e.g. Unicorn Engine… but now there’s like six different “userland emulators” vying for preference. FEX-emu, Box86, others with even sillier names.

I did manage a bespoke 8-bit FPS. That only took about two months. And then I’ve been idly tweaking it over the last two years. Splitscreen multiplayer, as a joke, was maybe not the best idea.

What’d take both time and space is some extremely low-end VR. I am convinced that Quest-ish headsets could cost, like, fifty bucks. The big players keep iterating clever hacks from a decade ago. Solving those problem, instead of avoiding those problems. Light should be collimated by default, which means a point source, which is any single LED. Rendering has to be detached from software performance, which means projecting the nearby world to e.g. floating dots instead of directly making a flat image. Inside-out tracking is at least the right idea, but it doesn’t have to be especially good in order to ground an inertial estimate.

Obligatory Mike Montiero talk: Fuck You, Pay Me.

Yeah, that guy’s not joking.

It’s not some kayfabe act. He is sincere in all of that posturing assholery.

Block and move on.

If you’re using Twitter, fuck you.

I don’t care why you’re still on some fascist manchild’s propaganda box. Leave. You’re already here - you know alternatives exist. Stop visiting the Nazi bar.

His liver is enjoying a renaissance the likes of which it has never known.

That’s over now. Hopefully with outcomes.

At the end of the day, all value is made-up, especially with digital licenses. I may value a cosmetic skin a lot more highly than you do, but that doesn’t mean I was defrauded, it just means I find more value in it than you.

Flashbacks to god-botherers insisting atheists must have faith in something.

I am explicitly distinguishing incompatible meanings of the word value. So are you, by the way, if you even hold an internally consistent view of what scams are. Otherwise, nooo, selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge is legit, because isn’t all value made-up?

The kind of value money represents cannot be the kind of value you see in scoring a goal in soccer, or you could fucking buy them.

But you also have to understand that the value in paying for a ton of MTX in those games is often less about those incremental dopamine hits and more about showing off to friends/randoms online

That’s the same thing. Peacocking for other pl-- I already fucking said this! Do you read things before responding?

Right, these are casual games, where you can pay to appear successful.

Yep, no ranked competitive games have this, stop fucking lying to me. Don’t make up excuses you cannot possibly believe.

Ignoring how thousands of brand-new games pull this shit from day one.

The existence of good options means nothing. This abuse should be criminal. The fact companies don’t have to commit this intolerable exploitation against their users, does not lessen the problem when some companies do it anyway. If you just mean to nitpick the word “nothing,” sure, congratulations. Someone somewhere will dodge this bullet. But I’m on about all the people getting taken by this systemic problem that’s already half the industry by revenue.

Any real money spent in games was defrauded, because all apparent value was made-up. As surely as someone selling you the deed to scrap the Brooklyn Bridge. The paper is real! You get the paper! But the paper is not why you handed someone a suitcase full of cash. There was a story you were told, and it’s not real. That’s what games are.

Games make you value worthless things. That is what makes them games. There is no real-world value to points or shards or rare drops. They’re arbitrary goals with arbitrary obstacles. They’re achievable so that your brain will squirt the happy juice. But treating them as valuable, the way money is valuable, is a category error.

The small charges are more insidious. Like the naked greed of paying instead of watching a counter tick down - a transaction that is neither a good nor a service. Or the lootboxes that everyone now agrees are intolerable, once the industry has moved on to calling them keys. Or anything consumable, proving your money went to something so worthless, the game will just hands them out in unbounded quantities. Even peacocking for other players makes people go, oh, it’s just a dollar. It’s just cosmetic. It’s just the only reason the game exists in the first place, to grind you against that constant nagging temptation.

These games are no longer optimized to make you feel good when you’re good at them.

They’re optimized to make you feel good when you open your wallet and look away.

And until you do, they’re as addictive and frustrating as we can manage.

This business model is built on exploitation of innate human shortcomings. Your brain is not very good at distinguishing sources of happy juice. It can easily be tricked, and literally the entire games industry exists to trick it. Again: that’s what games are. Their enjoyability comes from that fiction. That’s why pretending any of it can have real monetary value is a scam.

This specific business model is a scam, regardless of which numbers we twiddle.

Choice does not excuse systemic abuse for profit. People choose scams all the time. That’s how they work!

As previously mentioned, fuck them kids. This is about abuses committed against adults. This is about the central nature of games, and how they invent value, of a sort completely incompatible with cash money. The exchange rate between enchanted scimitars and hamburgers is nonexistent.

There’s no technical reason to connect remote auctioneering to this… horse. Blizzard does it so they can gouge people you’ve given a derisive label. Every player is affected. Every player knows this is possible, and the overwhelming majority of them are denied. The game was made objectively worse for them, through their engineered dissatisfaction, specifically to bilk some tiny fraction for unreasonable quantities of money. Enough money, per person in that tiny group, to make kneejerk excuses like ‘just boycott!’ utterly useless.

Being vocal doesn’t matter - the money talks louder.

Only legislation will fix this.

I don’t think you disagree with that. You don’t want the problem fixed. You’re denying the problem is a problem, even as you describe “whales” like you’d describe “problem gamblers” or “scam victims.” So what if they made bad choices? You didn’t. It was easy, apparently. Good choices abound! Therefore, rampant exploitation of human frailty doesn’t count.