Biodegradable

Oh cool, now I have an excuse to talk about this. A few months ago I had been growing a little nostalgic for Raptor. It was one of the first games I played a lot back in the MS-DOS days after Doom and wanted to revisit it. I found that the two current ports of the game on Steam aren't terribly well received, but learned from one review that the developer Scott Host had crowd-funded his pursuit to put out a new remaster of the game. I quickly followed him on Twitter where I found out about him also remastering DemonStar to help create some buzz about the Raptor remaster. I also watched Host stream some last-minute dev stuff over on YouTube and got to interact with him a little. While I'd been waiting for DemonStar to come out, I've been trying out other SHMUPs over on Steam and really acquaint myself with the genre. I'm pretty bad at them, honestly but still find them pretty fun. I wish Host all the best with finishing up DemonStar and highly anticipate the return of Raptor!

They were even too lazy to edit out the little floating crypto-coins on the homepage. :^P

Are they though? I don't recall any other studio that they've done this to so far. This is the first I've heard of them doing literally anything beyond acquiring studios. Hell, we only just really learnt of Embracer's existence a year or so ago.

I can't think of a single hypothetical scenario where someone would get those two things confused with one another, Rudy. Incidentally, "ML" in this context are initials, not an acronym.

Sounds like 3DR's future is pretty grim. It'd be a sizeable blow to the indie scene if they folded entirely as losing them would mean losing Realms Deep, which was a really great publicity thing for upcoming games. If the worst comes to pass, I can only hope someone picks up that torch and carries it onward in some similar fashion.

You do have a point there, Dash. Fortunately, that shit will likely die off in a similar fashion to Cryptocurrency and NFTs. The memery that is, I'm sure there's some actual useful benefits to the generative AI in some capacity or another. All the techbro con-artists will just quickly jump onto the next stupid "THIS IS THE FUTURE!" trend.

Between the two terms, I guess "machine learning" is more passable. I think I'm just getting increasingly annoyed at people who are taking the whole AI thing a little too literally and think Skynet is going to kill us all next week.

For the same reason "artificial intelligence" is a misnomer: A machine doesn't have a brain. It's not intelligent and doesn't learn anything. It merely performs a task you told it to do.

Eh, that one feels just as much of a misnomer in my opinion.

I wish we'd come up with a better short-hand term for this kind of programming, rather than just slapping the misleading "AI" onto everything. As much as the "A" stands for "artificial", most people can't seem to stop associating it with stupid, evil self-aware computers we started writing about in 1950s pulp science fiction stories.

Ubisoft's presentation at E3 2011 is always the first thing that comes to my mind, featuring Mr Caffeine. It is such a painfully awkward moment with this charismatic blackhole plodding his way through a terrible "humourous" presentation that feels like it was written by a primordial version of ChatGPT. Doodily Doodily Doodily Doo!

Pour one out for the irrefutable King of Annual Corporate Cringefests, folks. We'll always have the funny/awkward moment compilation videos to remember it by.

Hah, adorable.

Glad to hear it because I just finished! Sorry in advance, I neglected to record MAP03 and MAP04, but I assure you they were awesome. The penultimate map was quite a doozy, nailed my arse to the wall and gave me the shits a couple of times, but managed in the end. I'm going to blame it on rust as I hadn't played much Doom in the past week lmao. This is a terrific WAD, mate. I really like it a lot.