Pic relevant. I've tried playing the new Civ games several times, and quickly end up quitting because I find them too overwhelming and find it hard to want to deal with the learning curve.

It occurred to me that part of the problem might be that I was jumping into a very old franchise that has been getting increasingly complicated over the years. Had a hunch I would have better luck with the original, so I went onto one of those play-dos-in-your-browser sites, dove in, and sure enough I am hooked!

Do I know what I'm doing? Not really, but stuff is happening and my civilization is growing, and it's a good time.

Hey everyone!

I just got laid off a few weeks ago, applying for jobs and doing a little Linux/networking personal development in my spare time. My wife is leaving today for a week for work, so I’m trying to pick a game out of my backlog while I’ve got some alone time!

Not really feeling a genre or setting, open to almost anything right now, but it needs to be a game I own that will consume me for a week!

Options:

• NieR:Automata (Steam Deck)
• ANIMAL WELL (Steam Deck)
• LUNAR Remastered Collection (Steam Deck) * specifically Lunar 1, I did start it on a flight recently
• Cyberpunk 2077 (PS5)
• DRAGON BALL Z KAKAROT (PS5)
• Ni No Kuni (1 & 2) (PS4)
• Armored Core 6 (PS5) * I got about half way and need to go back to it

I’ll probably play some Battlefield 6 (MP/RedSec) for mindless gaming. Jump back into some Arc Raiders which I fell off recently. Also learning to play Dwarf Fortress, but that might be on the back burner. Might also give Project Zomboid another try.

Games I’m going to avoid, No Man’s Sky, RimWorld and Civilization V… fun games, but they’ll consume me more than I’d like lol

What are everyone’s thoughts?

Today’s game is some more Minecraft Legacy Console edition. It updated today which makes me thankful because it seems to have stopped the crashing bug I had been having. Now my friends are crashing, which is bad, but not as bad as me crashing because they can just rejoin me without any progress lost.

My friends have been building this pyramid base in the jungle. We’ve started messing with eachother though and I’ve been specifically just hiding for another friend living with him to find. For some reason it drives the guy crazy that I’m in his walls. I’ve had a few good hiding spots. I hid: Under the water in a door In their walls Against a tree using a skin really well camouflaged In their walls again And under their bed

It’s all in good fun, but I’ve been having a good time just messing with this friend. No destructive griefing. Just hiding and watching him.

I also built a sky bridge connecting our bases. I need to build a path connecting to our other friend that just joined too, but for now it’s a start.

I ended off tonight by building one less obnoxious but harmless prank on my friends. I built what I call my “sky pillar”. A giant egregious pillar in the sky just out of their “space” but within eyesight. I built a cozy little home up there.

It took a while to get the supplies because it was a lot of wood. The bridge made it easy though. Just hop onto the tree, chop it down from the top down. Start over from a new one. Super easy. I meant to get a screenshot of the pillar but got side tracked once I heard them look over and go “what the fuck is that”. It’s wood. So if they really want it gone it can be burned down but it looks like it’s here to stay for a while as they’ve grown fond of the sky pillar.

Niantic's AI spinout is training a new world model using 30 billion images of urban landmarks crowdsourced from players.

. . .

“Five hundred million people installed that app in 60 days,” says Brian McClendon, CTO at Niantic Spatial, an AI company that Niantic spun out in May last year. According to the video-game firm Scopely, which bought Pokémon Go from Niantic at the same time, the game still drew more than 100 million players in 2024, eight years after it launched.

. . .

Now Niantic Spatial is using that vast and unparalleled trove of crowdsourced data—images of urban landmarks tagged with super-accurate location markers taken from the phones of hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players around the world—to build a kind of world model, a buzzy new technology that grounds the smarts of LLMs in real-world environments.

The company’s latest product is a model that it says can pinpoint your location on a map to within a few centimeters, based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in view. The firm wants to use it to help robots navigate with greater precision in places where GPS is unreliable. . .

Hopefully with 100% fewer zombies than a game that it looks like.

A user asked on the official Lutris GitHub two weeks ago "is lutris slop now" and noted an increasing amount of "LLM generated commits". To which the Lutris creator replied:

It's only slop if you don't know what you're doing and/or are using low quality tools. But I have over 30 years of programming experience and use the best tool currently available. It was tremendously helpful in helping me catch up with everything I wasn't able to do last year because of health issues / depression.

There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. In many ways, it couldn't have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn't AI that laid off thousands of employees, it's deluded executives who don't understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.

I'm not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don't like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I'm not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.

Anyway, I was suspecting that this "issue" might come up so I've removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what's generated and what is not. Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society, this requires changes at a deeper level, and we all know that nothing is going to improve with the current US administration.

They were going to get £55 from me but now they're getting nothing!

Computer Worlds is a showcase for indie computer games whose distinctiveness would make it hard for them to reach their audience. In the words of Gil Lawson, the brain behind the showcase:

There's something happening that I want to tell you about.
For the last few years, game studios across the world have been getting downsized and demolished. Massive, expensive AAA games are being met with disinterest and dispassion on release, and the culture around games has been choked by algorithm driven feeds and collapsing forum for public conversation. The mood has been a little grim.
In spite of that, though, there is a growing movement of developers often often working alone around very small teams, making beautiful, fun, strange, distinctive games that find large, enthusiastic audiences on release.
In a moment where both independent developers and massive teams are trying to hedge their bets and play it safe, these developers are swinging for the fences and finding that's what people want to play.
Those people and those games don't always have the easiest time finding one another though. The games press has been gutted, there's almost no infrastructure left for curation and criticism, and even publishers don't know how to publicize a game today.
If you want play a game in a specific genre, there's probably a steam tag for that, but if you're looking to play a game that is specifically distinctive and unique and unlike anything else, it can be hard to know where to start.
I don't think it should be that hard. So I reached out to a number of other developers working in this vein, and we did something about it ourselves. I'm very excited to show it to you. It's called Computer Worlds.

Please, take a peek for yourself! There is a treasure trove of cool games in here, including something that will probably become your personal GOTY for the coming year.

COMPUTER WORLDS - A New Showcase Celebrating Strange & Distinctive Games

Today’s game is Minecraft Legacy Console Edition. You might be thinking “You mean Xbox 360/PS3/Wii U/etc.?” But nope. Someone has made a port of it to PC. I will admit I only scanned the source code, and while it looked clean it’s not an endorsement of this being clean. Either morally or malware wise.

Besides that though it’s nice. The game includes multiple mashup packs. I tested it by playing the Halo one which was fun. I just flew around looking at what I recognized.

The game does have a major bug though, and this might just be because of Proton, but it crashes randomly (and very cleanly). The app just decides “nope. We’re done” and closes like that.

Multiplayer works too. It’s only local though so you need a way to share it over the internet like hamachi or Tailscale. Once that works thought you’re set. Me and my friends were playing a world and built this little cabin.

We ended up getting off though after we kept crashing at a specific point. It just seems we couldn’t escape this night like some weird Groundhog Day (or night).

I’m hoping the developers are able to clean this up as it’s mostly functional but has a few major flaws such as the crashing. I saw people online saying their saves don’t work either but besides that worked really well. It even has a Render Distance slider unlike the original.

Official statement from Valve.

We shared with the NYAG that these types of boxes in our games are widely used, not just in video games but in the tangible world as well, where generations have grown up opening baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags, and then trading and selling the items they receive.

You're right! We should stop that too!

The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot

Today’s game is some more Metal Gear Solid 3. Today is gonna be quick because I basically had to backtrack after getting forward a bit because of some save issues. But despite that I realized this game has a lot of cool ass secrets that actually affect the game.

Like I went off the beaten path and found a sniper rifle. Completely out of the way. No message pointing me there. Just a completely random sniper hidden.

I also wanted to bring up the stealth. It’s really grown on me. Having to use the camo and slink around feels really good. I do feel like I lack any good ranged stealth weapons (suppressor broke fast) but it does make it satisfying to to a CQC Takedown. Just crouch up behind them and take them down.

Anyways, after discovering that secret today I had to share it. I love when games have secrets like that and this is no exception