It's much older than that. We'd call low-effort licensed games from no-name companies that were primarily designed to trick Grandma at Christmas "shovelware" as far back as the GC/PS2/XBX era, and that's just as far as I can remember seeing it in print.
Even older than that, they are the root cause of 1983 games crash on the US market, and why Nintendo's approach to a walled garden was welcomed with open arms.
> Why introduce a membership now? Is GOG in financial trouble?
Glad they put this into the FAQ, because that was certainly my first thought, although I'm not sure the answer really assuages my concerns.
You have to admit that the combination of "Original founder buys back GOG from CD Projekt" and then "GOG introduces patron tier" soon thereafter does suggest a company in some financial hardship.
Yes, agreed. I’m still wondering where the co-founder got the 25M dollars. Also if he just had separated GOG (and buy his shares) before CDPR going public in 2009, it would have been much cheaper. At that time GOG only was a plattform for good old games.
> Who is this for?
> ...
> Anyone who enjoys the challenge of severe constraints
Remembering what a powerhouse the Dreamcast was when it came out, and how amazing games like Soul Caliber and Shenmue looked, it's hard to think of the Dreamcast hardware as "severely contained".
I find it a bit weird that I find it intuitive how things like the Super Nintendo did their work, and how modern games and systems work, but comparing the hardware specs of the Dreamcast/PS2/XBox/Gamecube era to the best of their output is where my intuition struggles the most. Not that the games of the era stand up to modern stuff, even when upscaled and texture-packed etc. in an emulator, but how they did it with so little oomph still amazes me.
yeah, been there, nostalgia hits hard. Dreamcast was a beast of its era, it even had Ethernet! Even the VMU was something extraordinary! Too bad SEGA had to cancel it :(
> I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy.
A more modern example might be that recently discovered Babylonian Lamb Stew [0]. Most of the scholarly reconstructions of the stew follow the recipe very literally, and the result is, frankly, awful, because ancient readers would probably have made cultural assumptions about certain steps in the recipe. Meanwhile, some internet cooks who take a stab at the same recipe come up with something arguably much better, because they're applying their knowledge as cooks to guess what might have been stated or unstated by the recipe. [1]
Makes you wonder why no one thought to just take a copy of one of the statues to a modern artist and say, "Hey! How would you paint this?" I'm willing to bet that, even now, it would be reasonably close to how an artist 2000 years ago might have approached it.
I have been reading cookbook from 1767. And mostly you get ingredients and probably not all of them. And sometimes you get amounts. And useful instructions like boil so many times... I have understood that with those really old recipes, the person recording them might at best have been in the same room. But probably was not a chef.
Old recipes are more memory cues for experienced cooks than the modern step-by-step guide for amateurs we are used to. They're scanty in detail because they assume quite a lot of existing knowledge.
It's the difference between "a chicken stew flavoured with turmeric and cumin, then rice enough to cook in and fully absorb the broth" and "first, take 500g of boneless skinless chicken thighs..."
> I have understood that with those really old recipes, the person recording them might at best have been in the same room. But probably was not a chef.
That's going too far. The person recording them might be the same person who is used to making the food, or might be taking literal dictation from that person.
Knowing how to make food isn't the same skill as knowing how to explain the process in a way that someone who isn't already trained to make the food can follow.
>When reached by TechCrunch on December 5, Home Depot spokesperson George Lane acknowledged receipt of our email but did not respond to follow-up emails asking for comment. The exposed token is no longer online, and the researcher said the token’s access was revoked soon after our outreach.
>
>We also asked Lane if Home Depot has the technical means, such as logs, to determine if anyone else used the token during the months it was left online to access any of Home Depot’s internal systems. We did not hear back.
As soon as they realized that the researcher had contacted "the media", they probably escalated internally to their legal team before anyone else, who told them to shut up.
The response, if one ever comes, will be a communication dense in lawyer-speak that admits no fault whatsoever.
This is why I go straight to legal for some things. By letter (the kind with a stamp).
As it could be service or real legal stuff, it tends to get read by someone literate and able to take action.
Had to do that with a bank that refused to talk to me (I hit some kind of identify verification quagmire), but they quickly got someone able to call me and close it on the spot.
Obviously we would all like a full post mortem from the home dept side, but in today's litigious shareholder-value-driven world their response is the correct one.
I worked backwards from Starcraft, and to my mind WC2 still feels a bit archaic, insofar as the two races feel nearly identical. WC3 did a better job of differentiating the Human and Orc units, and then of course added Dark Elves and the Undead to the mix, too.
But I will say that WC2 is the last major RTS I can think of with naval combat. After Starcraft streamlined it to be land and air only, it seems the entire industry followed suit. Even WC3 didn't bother bringing ships back, to my memory.
C&C RA (1996) and RA2 (2000) both had significant naval units. RA3 (2008) went.. maybe a little overboard with naval units as well. That said, all other C&C games (Tiberium and Generals) both avoided naval units.
I remember being bummed when I played WC3 and there was no oil resource. Lots of sky and ground units, but I guess a navy just wasn't useful enough? Which I suppose I could see. A big benefit in militaries is the ability to quickly project power (from a carrier) or provide tons of logistics - supplies, blockades, etc.
These just aren't considerations in RTS games - they move too fast and the maps are too small. There really isn't a benefit to having a ship with all your planes just outside of the enemy's range - they could sneak attack you, and sending units from your own base really just isn't that much farther.
It's a shame to me that this isn't a more popular genre these days. It's easily my favorite.
