• 14 Posts
  • 135 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • We all could see that Unity’s layoff was coming, that pricing backlash not only drove away many developers, also probably was driven by troubling financial within the organization.

    Twitch is sort of unexpected, but when I see the number of impromptu rules they rolled out and rolled back last year, whether from restricting multi-streaming, to limiting showing brands logo on stream, to restricting / unrestricting female streamers from showing too much skin, etc. I assume that means that even with all those intrusive ads, Twitch is still losing money.

    I guess from now on, when a tech company starts to arbitrarily change their T&C / rules to either protect their revenue / market share, and maybe rolling back from backlashes, then it’s a sign that there’s trouble brewing (if you work at those companies, beware)




  • I’ve seen quality drops of Duolingo, ever since their … IPO, sadly.

    Anyway, here’s some ways you can milk the rest of the Duolingo before completely abandoning it.

    • Use the web version, and type in all the answers if it’s possible. Selecting words are good for introducing new words (and reminder in case you forgot), but by typing it on your own, it’s faster to commit into memory.
    • Use classroom mode to get unlimited hearts, create your own classroom and invite yourself in. I assume that Duolnigo will probably eventually stop this loophole
    • Use search engine to search for the sentences you’re unsure of. No, don’t use machine translation, but search on the internet, and see if the sentence ever being used by the sites (news, academic, or personal homepage) using the target language.

    I sadly still don’t know what other comparable free alternatives to Duolingo. Anki is great, but it’s largely flashcard for words, not sentences (unless you want to create your own deck). The others require subscription fee.

    Other methods? Search for pdf of language grammar files, there are a lot out there. Some are godawful to read, especially those ‘Comprehensive Grammar Guide’ books. Some are amazing, e.g. Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese.










  • I finished (again) God of War 2018. I thought it was going to sour on me, just like how my 2nd playthrough of Horizon Zero Dawn did (and subsequently my 1st playthrough of Forbidden West). But no, it’s still a very good game. Combat is simple but still satisfying, side quests aren’t excessive like Forbidden West, story is still good but less intense than TLoU. My only complaint is that the fast travel is just way too slow. I’m looking forward to Ragnarök now.

    Here are some games that I really enjoyed playing/replaying last year
    • FINAL FANTASY XVI
    • Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
    • Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion
    • Live A Live
    • PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo
    • Tactics Ogre: Reborn
    • The Case of the Golden Idol
    • Voodoo Detective
    • Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising
    • Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge
    • Shin Megami Tensei: Persona
    • Sword of the Vagrant
    • Tail Concerto
    • The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble
    • Wild Arms
    • Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana
    • Ys: Memories of Celceta
    • Zero Escape Trilogy
    • God of War

    My top is probably FF16, I have soft spot for this type of siblings story, also loving the Asura’s Wrath section.


  • No, there’s a mac version of retroarch. OpenEmu is a bit better in term of user interface.

    And RetroArch has a history of harassing emulator devs, e.g. Stenzek who made Duckstation, were harassed by them until Stenzek went hiatus. IIRC, they might have harassed Near (developer of Snes9x), Near eventually killed themself.

    I try to minimize the use of RetroArch




    • I finished the first Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney from the remake trilogy

      • The game is really frustrating, because at times it feels more like you’re supposed to guess what’s the developer want you to do, instead of presenting things based on logic / evidence to the witness’ statement
      • The writing can be very awful, some characters are just straight up annoying in order to pad the game. People veer off conversations all the time, trying to be funny, but they are not. And the melodrama that’s supposed to convey the character’s feeling, can be repeated on every new scene that it’s very tiring to play thru it.
    • I’ve also finished Curse of the Monkey Island

      • It’s still a such a hilarious delightful game. Many people stopped by my stream to tell me that they love this game. I was expecting to the game to be not clicking with me since Ron Gilbert departed after Monkey Island 2, but apparently it’s still a very good game.
      • My main complaint is the clicking mechanic, where you need to click and hold to bring up the talk / observe / use option.
    • I’m currently replaying God of War (2008)

      • Apparently I forgot to upload my save to the cloud, so I can’t do NG+
      • It’s still a very good game. I’m at the Alfheim region now, and unlike Horizon Zero Dawn, I have yet to feel fatigue replaying this game. Maybe it’d happen later in game





  • Games wise, very likely. There are way too many 2023 games that I bought (that’s on sale) that I haven’t even touched yet, and still more heavy hitters that I’m waiting for a bigger discount (e.g. Alan Wake 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Yakuza Gaiden, Spider-Man 2, etc). It’s not only newer IPs, there are many games based on older IPs that are well received, e.g. Dead Space, FF16, RE4, Armored Core 6, etc.

    Game devs wise, it’s probably one of the worse. There’a already more than 9000 layoffs, with many studios shuttered. Half of them probably came from Embracer Group. We are probably gonna be seeing a rapidly shrinking number of mid-size games within the next 5 years.