The Vorrh by Brian Catling. Very strange, dark historical fantasy set in colonial Africa. Exquisite, poetic prose and powerful imagery, one of my favourite books in recent memory.

This review has real “only ever seen 1 movie about sheep detectives” vibes.

Ah true, I forgot about the console.

I don’t think they give a shit about people emulating their old classic games, they have modern games.

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I watched the video you linked. Can you describe what you are trying to do with your films? Like, what do you expect for viewers to experience from watching them?

For me, the video was like watching a child play with some toys. The characters were like stiff action figures with no personality, I didn’t care at all about them or even recognise them as living characters with emotions. The story was basically non-existant. And there was no appealing aesthetic to anything, the AI visuals are just incredibly bland and generic, like stock photos.

If you want people to engage with your work, you have to ask yourself why would someone engage with it? What are they supposed to get out of it?

Kinda my own arse?

Correct.

this feels like something so obvious I’d think studies likely show this

Surprisingly unscientific attitude from a scifi author.

Sources?

Oh wow I remember doing this too, now that you’ve mentioned it.

Implementation seems fine to me, I’m not sure what people think is dubious?

It’s obviously a different take on the “survival” data horde. Its obviously not intended as a wasteland survival kit, it seems intended for a scenario where the power is still on but universal internet access isn’t a given.

As long as you understand the limitations, AI is just a vastly more efficient way to find information in large knowledge bases. For a topic that you know nothing about a chatbot gives you the ability to work through the information in a conversational manner, honing in on the specific bits you’re trying to understand and filling in the “things that I don’t know I don’t know” holes, and then you can go to the source material and verify the details.

While there are a lot of parallels to conflicts in the middle east, Dune was largely inspired by the Russian empire’s war against the people of the Caucuses that were united by Imam Shamyl in the 1800s. The book The Sabres of Paradise details Shamyl’s life and the conflict and much of the Fremen culture is basically lifted wholesale from it.

I rate it “Goes hard”.

You’re incoherent.

Don’t feed the trolls.

I once told someone I was raised by The Muppets and video games and they told me I had a very Muppets sense of humour and it is one of my happiest memories.

Maybe there’s even a bit of us vs. them, because market saturation has made the fight for an active playerbase so cutthroat, people don’t want to see a competing title risk siphoning players away from their preferred game.

This is a really good point, I’ve definitely felt this way over the years.

You’re not wrong about the state of live service games, but this definitely isn’t why they are getting review bombed. That’s happening because the gamer mob are a pack of fickle mush-heads that will randomly get outraged by total non-issues with no regard for the facts.

I mean, the mechanics of Highguard are unique, as far as I’m aware. They’re a mashup of a lot of other games but done in an interesting and new way.

Like, I have no idea whether it’s good or not, but they are trying to do something different.