BadlyDrawnRhino

This one has a female protagonist, so I look forward to not being able to differentiate between legitimate criticism about the game, and reviews from man-children that are mad that women exist.

And then if the single player experience bombs, I also look forward to Rockstar pointing to the female protagonist as the reason, and not because they’re pouring all their resources into micro transactions.

There’s an important bit of context for this that you probably aren’t aware of, being from America, and that is that Australia doesn’t currently have any nuclear power capabilities whatsoever. We have zero reactors currently, and zero expertise.

While I can’t be sure because I’m not from the CSIRO, I imagine their projections take the significant cost of introducing brand new technology into account.

Another bit of context, our conservative party is currently pushing for nuclear as the only option, claiming that it’ll be the cheapest. They want to gut spending on renewables because a lot of their funding comes from the mining sector. That’s why the CSIRO has done a report on the projected costs on the various options, because that’s how the conservative party is framing things. Is nuclear better than gas from an environmental perspective? Yes. But that’s irrelevant to the conversation that is happening over here.

“these so-called spontaneous community movements, by apparently complete coincidence, appeared in a range of Liberal seats and made no appearance in Labor seats”.

Well, yeah, they were originally Liberal members, of course they’d be campaigning in Liberal seats.

“The intention was to get people to think, ‘That nice teal candidate could almost be a Liberal, I’ll vote for her.’”

Almost like the Teals are Liberals that differ on one or two key policies.

The fact that he’s blaming preferential voting is worrying, I expect the Libs will start adopting that stance across the board soon. Our system isn’t perfect, but it’s much better than the absolute shitshow that is first past the post.

Girls or woodlice?

Not a surprise that all of Labor voted yes, given their party policy around caucus solidarity. I’d be interested to see a list of people opposed to this bill behind closed doors.

I’ve really come to despise Labor’s policy of not crossing the floor. I get their desire to show a united front, but it really makes it hard for regular folk to track how the party is shifting if we don’t ever see who supports what on an individual level.

Looks more like Oddworld than Lemmings. In fact, apart from the art style, there’s not much in the trailer that really resembles Lemmings to me.

The game’s already available on Steam and has a demo for anyone who wants to try it out.

The thing about the corporation paying less taxes is a myth. The extra contribution you make counts as revenue in their books, and that revenue is then offset as a donation, making no overall difference to their tax benefits.

That said, it does help them in other ways, mostly around marketing. They can then say they’ve made a massive amount of charitable contributions, when really it was their customers that did so.

As others have said, by making that donation at the checkout, you haven’t really made an informed decision about whether the charity is one you would donate to otherwise, so if that’s important to you you should stop doing so.

The way I look at it, if you are going to make a conscious decision to donate to charities you support, there’s no real reason to round up at the checkout. But if you aren’t really going to be donating otherwise and you’re not struggling financially, you may as well make that small contribution at the checkout.

I use Heroic Games Launcher to run GOG and Epic games on Linux. It’d be great to get some official support, but it’s the next best thing.

New Zealand recently had a political shakeup and the conservative party got voted in after many years of a progressive government running the show, so this is hardly a surprise.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that Australia is focusing more on the environment, we already don’t do enough. And we’re heading into an election year, so expect everything to stall as everything gets put on hold to be used as “election promises”. And if the conservative coalition wins next year, all environmental policies will be in jeopardy, particularly rollout of renewables, as the conservatives are pushing hard to divert everything to nuclear over wind or solar.

Oh, absolutely. I was only commenting on the weird timing, the game was released 2 years after an adult rating for video games was implemented.

We definitely have an odd and often archaic view on things here in Aus. Personally I think the classifications should be a purely informative system rather than something that decides whether or not something should be banned. Films are given much more artistic leeway than video games, and I could rant for hours on the government’s stance on gambling, which is much more harmful than most things you’d find portrayed in any artistic medium.

Much cheaper than I was expecting! I bought my 64GB LCD model as a grey import a year ago for just over $700, and that was a pretty competitive price at the time, so the fact you can get a 256GB model for less is great.

We’ve had an R18+ rating for video games since 2013, so not sure why Hotline Miami 2 wouldn’t have been able to receive classification.

Funnily enough, I own the game on Steam, so at some point Valve also made the same mistake. But at least they won’t pull the game from my library.

I’ve recently been dabbling with Linux for the first time, so here’s a few things I’ve found along the way.

First, look at whether you can disable secure boot. Most computers can, but as I’ve recently discovered on my laptop, the option just isn’t there for some motherboards. If you can’t or don’t want to for whatever reason, it’s not the end of the world, you’ll just need to pick a distro that supports secure boot, I know Ubuntu does, and I believe a few of the other more popular ones do too.

Next, grab a few distros to try out. You may want to look into recommendations if there’s anything specific you want to do. For example, I wanted to make sure gaming setup was as straightforward as possible, so I looked at distros that were tailored towards that. Create some bootable USBs and spend a few minutes just looking at each to get a feel. You’ll pretty quickly decide whether or not you like a distro, there’s really no point spending more time with one if there’s something that puts you off from the get-go.

Dual boot is the way to go until you feel like dropping Windows entirely, if you can. And if there’s something that just isn’t going to work on Linux, it’s good to be able to just jump across to Windows for that purpose. The only annoying thing I’ve found is that Windows updates can break the dual-boot partition, so just be aware of that. If it happens, it’s not that difficult a process to repair it.

Other than that, Linux isn’t that different from other OSes in how you’ll probably use it. There are a few different ways you can install programs due to the different distros, so you’ll want to look at things like how to install a flatpak. For Windows programs, you can look at whether you can get it running in Bottles or a VM if you don’t want to bother rebooting.

This is useful for countries where the Steam Deck is unavailable but other handhelds aren’t. Here in Australia, Steam Decks are only available as grey imports, and that makes warranty issues a potential headache, but you can walk into most electronic retailers and buy a ROG Ally off the shelf.

That said, I personally wouldn’t buy a handheld that didn’t have touchpads, so I bought a grey import and have had no issues.

To save everyone a click, the game is Freedom Wars.

I don’t think that’s their goal at all. Otherwise we wouldn’t see any sequels released on PC, that would be a much better strategy for converting players to console. The only reason publishers require their own logins in games, at least for single-player titles, is data collection. Data is very valuable.

They’re referring to Sony’s stance that all their PC releases should require you to have and sign-in to a PSN account. That’s separate to PS+, you don’t need to pay a sub.

A lot of publishers include this requirement on their PC releases, regardless of whether they’re single-player or multiplayer, and I think a lot of people are fed up with having to have so many different accounts.

That probably would be a better solution. Particularly since the rating system is pretty easy to ignore. And if they do start slapping the R18+ rating on games that don’t really warrant it like Mario Party, people will be more likely to simply dismiss the entire system.

I would hope that the government and ratings board wouldn’t be that stupid, but look at how long it took to give us an R rating for video games in the first place.

I think the government could definitely be doing more, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to force companies to clearly disclose the nature of their products so consumers can make informed choices.

I think the major difference between the two is that in video games, the cost of the loot boxes is deliberately obfuscated through the use of whatever single-use currency the publisher has dreamed up, and made worse by the fact that the currency is only purchasable in select denominations, meaning you’re always spending more than you’re going to use.

You’re not wrong that there are plenty of examples of physical “loot boxes” marketed at children, but at least with those you know exactly how much it costs straight up.

I wish our government would look into the actual predatory practices that these publishers are using in these games, but this is a good first step. At least the EU is looking into it.