Diecast #305: Bad News
So we’re having a bad week in an already-bad year. That seems completely unnecessary. The one silver lining is that this means next week will be FANTASTIC!
That’s how luck works, right?
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Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast305
Link (YouTube)
Show notes:
00:00 Moving day is here
Like I said, I’ll try to keep this place from falling apart this week, but things will be hectic. Between the move and my ongoing efforts to NOT DIE AT 48 YEARS OLD[1], I’ve got a lot on my plate this week.
04:00 Cyberpunk DELAYED
Oh, Watchdogs: Legion was delayed an indefinite amount of time? That sucks, but at least I still have Cyberpunk 2077 in September.
Shit. Kerbal Space Program 2 has been delayed an indefinite amount of time. That sucks, but at least I still have Cyberpunk 2077 in September.
Dangit, Bloodlines 2 has been delayed an indefinite amount of time. That sucks, but at least I still have Cyberpunk 2077 in September.
Aw. Doom Eternal was a bit of a disappointment. It’s not horrible, but it doesn’t have the magic of Doom 2016. That sucks, but at least I still have Cyberpunk 2077 in September.
Microsoft Flight Simulator seems to be stuck in beta-test limbo and we still don’t have a release date. That sucks, but at least I still have Cyberpunk 2077 in September.
ARRRRG! Cyberpunk 2077 Has been delayed until November.
So now we have the EA Play Event and the Playstation 5 reveal. They’re trying to get us excited for the games of 2021 and 2022, when WE’RE STILL WAITING FOR THE GAMES OF 2020 TO COME OUT. We don’t even have a release date for most of these!
I imagine all of these idiots are going to fight over the Christmas season. Joke’s on you, publishers. I’m going to play Cyberpunk 2077 the whole time. Maybe you should have released your games ANYWHERE in the first three quarters of the year, when people had time for them.
Of course, a lot of this was caused by Covid-19. It’s really hard to get physical copies printed and shipped, and half the retail outlets were closed anyway. Still, if I was in charge of the release date for these games, I’d rather take my chances going all-digital than go head-to-head with Cyberpunk 2077 during the all-or-nothing Christmas rush.
09:29 Paul was laid off.
Good luck Paul! Hope you land a job soon.
11:30 Shamus health emergency
For those of you who don’t listen to the show, here is the short version: I saw the doctor back in March-ish. At the time, he said my blood pressure was borderline and I was at risk for developing hypertension. I figured it was time to get in shape.
But then the COVID-19 quarantine happened and I forgot all about it. I stopped taking walks and hid in the house for 3 months while pigging out on salty starches. I put on a ton of weight and got really out-of-shape.
So last week I got around to taking my blood pressure and it was 185/125. I didn’t know what that meant, so I looked it up and discovered that these numbers are REALLY BAD and I’m at greatly-elevated risk for heart attack, stroke, and eyesight damage[2]. Those are all extraordinarily bad things, so now we’re in panic mode trying to fix this.
19:04 Opus Magnum
Finally, some non-bad news! I really, really LOVE this game. I can’t stop playing / thinking about it. Also, it has this cool feature where you can save a puzzle solution as a gif…
I automatically hear the sound of a rotary telephone when I watch this animation.
25:18 Noita
Paul is still playing this game. I might come back to it in a few months and see what’s changed. (It’s still in early access.)
26:29 Mailbag: Lazy Cliffhanger Endings
Dear Diecast,
I recently finished a game that had a very deliberately “shocking” twist/cliffhanger.
The big bad evil antagonist showed up, using a teleportation spell that the Royal Guard spent five years perfecting despite only four days having passed since the beginning of the game; they immediately recognized the new party member was a robot, despite robots not existing in the place they all came from (which was a major plot point in the game); the usually kind and cheerful protagonist told the best friend character to chop the antagonists limbs off;…
In short, it was a complete mess clearly designed to spur players to buy the sequel, and it left me completely cold.
Have you guys been turned off of a game by a very badly telegraphed, BLAM cliffhanger? If not in an earlier installment, maybe in promotional material? And if so, did you eventually give in and check the game out anyway, or did you stick to your guns and leave it alone?
Vale,
-S?e?n?e?c?a? Tim
31:43 Mailbag: Absurd Body Counts
Dear Diecast,
When are absurd video game body counts actually a problem? Back when I began getting more into games and started playing through self-aware titles like Spec Ops: The Line and Undertale, I very much had the mindset of “Ah yes, Nathan Drake kills a 1000 people, therefore ludonarrative dissonance, therefore game bad.” I think what shifted my perspective was Uncharted 4. You still kill a crazy amount of people, but the ratio between gunfights and nonviolent activities has shifted dramatically. I suppose you could say they injected way more “quiet time” into the game. For me personally, it went a long ways to making me feel more like a scrappy adventurer and less like a mass murderer. The real issue was never body count, but instead pacing. So that was a really long-winded saying its more complicated than I realized and I’m curious when this particular bit of “video-gameyness” becomes bothersome to you guys if at all.
38:26 Mailbag: Shapes.io
Dear Diecast,
since you guys like Factorio, I was wondering if you’ve seen the game shapez.io, and if so, what your opinions are on it.
The game has a GitHub and an Itch.io page.
Vale,
-Tim
(Also on Steam)
40:42 Mailbag: Standing Stone Games
Dear Diecast,
Standing Stone Games is at it again . . . they put out a coupon to make all of their current non-expansion content in LOTRO and DDO free forever for anyone who makes an account before August 31. Pretty cool.
https://lotro.com/en/friendsforever
https://www.ddo.com/en/news/free-questing-coupon-and-vip-update-%E2%80%93-thank-you-standing-stone-games
Jennifer Snow
43:25 Mailbag: Microsoft Sucks
Dear Diecast,
Hi! Hope you two are doing well! I’m an old*, whiney, and stubborn curmudgeon, who’s always stuck in his ways. As such, I’m still using Windows 7, and dread the day I’ll be forced to upgrade to 10 (which I’ve used, and thoroughly hate).
But to my surprise, Windows 7 keeps getting security updates, even though they said they’ve stopped supporting it. One day, I turned on my PC, started working, and saw I had another Windows update. “Neat!” I thought, clicked “OK”, and carried on working. About 10 minutes later I was deep into looking at the remote client to my office computer. Suddenly, my machine froze, giving me a nonsense error to the effect of “Can’t create a file that already exists” (I don’t remember the exact wording)!
After about 20 seconds, my PC it rectified itself, and Windows Update told me “To apply the changes, save everything, and RESTART NOW!!!”. Needless to say, I had to stop working, and restart. This was obviously a very important update!
But after I logged back into my profile, ready to reopen the programs I need for work, I was greeted by a white screen with blue text asking me to “Save my preferences” and “Get Started”. I received a mini heart attack, thinking I had to spend the entire day (probably week!) fussing with reinstalling Windows.
To my relief, I quickly saw that this wasn’t a request for reinstalling Windows. “Phew!”, I thought. Yet my relief was quickly replaced with outrage. Because this white “screen with blue text” was actually a new program – Microsoft Edge. Turns out, the only purpose of this update was to install their obnoxious Win 10 browser that I never asked for!
Now, I’m sure all of this comes as a surprise to both of you – as you know, Microsoft is a company who value their users’ preferences and freedom, and it’s very uncharacteristic of them to interrupt our work, just so they can impose their decisions on our machines without even asking.
But just on the off-chance that you aren’t at all surprised – what is the worst way a Windows update (or decision) has made you angry?
Keep Being Awesome,
Lino
The anecdote I referred to during this segment can be found here: This Dumb Industry: The Windows 10 Store
49:25 Shamus is going to build a file server?
For you non-listeners who still read the show notes, here is a reverse-mailbag situation where I ask the question and hopefully some of you answer.
Issac and I need to share a lot of large files to produce the Diecast / This Dumb Industry videos. Currently, I upload to Dropbox and then he downloads them. This means that the files need to go out to the internet and back, eating up bandwidth, wasting our time, and lowering video quality for anyone watching Netflix. I could share a drive with him, but I want the files to be available even if my computer is off / sleeping.
So I figured It might be a good idea to set up a dedicated machine to hold the files. We even have a really old 64 bit computer that’s unfit for gaming. I’m thinking I could set that up in a closet or wherever and share a drive with both of us.
The problem is that I know sharing over a local network is always about 10x more difficult than it needs to be. Okay, the last time I tried this was in the Windows XP days. MAYBE everything is magically turnkey these days, but this is Microsoft we’re talking about.
It might be easier to set up a Linux box, but the odds of it being able to seamlessly share files with Windows are pretty low[ref|I’m willing to bet that if such a feature existed in Linux, it would be one of those things that mysteriously breaks every time Windows updates. I could also set up an FTP server, but for the sake of workflow we’d prefer to have access to this drive and be able to browse it using File Explorer.
Usually, there’s one right way to do something like this and a dozen wrong ways, and I’d love it if I could skip some of the trial-and-error. Microsoft removed the HomeGroup stuff and replaced it with thing new. (The HomeGroup stuff is still available via workarounds.) I could just follow the directions on the linked page, but this ain’t my first Microsoft rodeo.
So my questions:
- Any advice? There’s nothing more frustrating than setting something up and then having someone ask you, “Why didn’t you do Obvious Thing X? It would have been way better!”
- What’s the preferred way to set this up these days?
- What security concerns do I need to worry about? Is it possible for the external internet to exploit this system?