Mama told me not to come.
She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.
Fair. I just generally don’t want to goof off in a game, I want a bit of substance. When I wanted a GTA-like game and Rockstar hadn’t made one for a while, I played through the Saints Row series. Yeah, it’s kind of fun to go cause mayhem, but I get tired of that after ~15 min or so.
If that’s what you’re looking for, GTA V is pretty decent.
Yeah, the goal of “pull off the biggest heist” isn’t particularly exciting for me, especially since money is never an issue in the game.
GTA III and IV are about immigrants who are looking for an honest restart to their life and get pulled into a life of crime. They rise through the ranks so they can get enough power and influence to knock out their masters and truly be free. GTA SA is about trying to do what’s best for your neighborhood (friends and family), then you get betrayed and seek vengeance, again to do the best for your family. Those are good reasons to keep playing, since the player has an emotional attachment to the goal.
V’s goal of getting rich by pulling off a massive heist isn’t particularly interesting, especially when there are only a handful of non-replayable heists in the game. I honestly don’t want Michael to succeed because he’s such a dick, I just want him to go away so Trevor and Franklin’s more interesting stories can play out. But the game ends right after the big heist, and that’s just lame. Neither Trevor or Franklin went into the game wanting to pull off a big heist, so their story arcs seemed woefully incomplete.
So yeah, V is the most disappointing from a character and story perspective. I’ll probably replay the earlier ones, I’m not going to bother w/ GTA V.
Yeah, but at least it was a relatively new concept for a game, and the protagonist was at least likeable.
Then again, I think I like it largely because of nostalgia.
There will always be indies, which is why I mostly buy indies these days. At least they’re doing something interesting, unlike stupid online-only nonsense.
Really? I thought the story was incredibly bland, and I had to force myself to finish it just to stop the nagging feeling that I’m missing something.
For plot, it’s basically the same as other GTAs:
There are lots of opportunities to make the story truly interesting, but they didn’t do it. For example:
But no, the story left me disappointed.
IDK, GTA V bordered on “bad” for me and ended up just being “meh.” It got a lot of praise, so I kept going back to it thinking I missed something, and ended up forcing myself to finish it. It was pretty bland story- and character-wise start to finish, side content was mediocre, and the gameplay was fun but not particularly unique (felt like SA gameplay with better graphics).
If GTA VI is just GTA V with better graphics and not much else, I’ll probably pass. It’ll probably be successful regardless though for the same reason people keep buying Bethesda games. I want an interesting story where I care about the protagonists (def the case in IV and SA), interesting twists and turns, and something new gameplay-wise (e.g. I loved the gang warfare in SA and more realistic driving in IV). Switching between characters isn’t “new gameplay” imo, especially if I don’t care much about any of them.
I only finished it to stop that nagging feeling that I’m missing something. I wasn’t, but at least I rolled the credits so I could finally uninstall it.
I reinstalled it a few times before finishing it, never felt tempted once I did. It’s just… not that interesting. I love GTA IV, SA, and III (III is mostly nostalgia), and I’ll probably play each again. I’m not going to bother with V. I hate the characters, especially since I think at least Franklin and Trevor could be interesting, the plot is boring, the side content is lacking, and the world isn’t that fun to explore. It’s pretty, but bland.
You should also include Democrats who hold libertarian values, and there are plenty of those as well. Here are some issues where libertarians and Democrats aline and disagree with Republicans:
He nearly started a war with Iran and bombed Syria and Yemen
Sure, and that’s to appease the hawks. War hawks have been wanting war with Iran since at least McCain, if not longer. They’re a substantial part of Congress, and he needs their support.
I don’t think he particularly cares about what’s going on in Syria, he only cares about Yemen for access to cheap Saudi oil, and Iran is only relevant because of Israel (and all of those who support them).
What be cares about is himself, so he’ll do whatever he needs to in other to get his name in the media more often. If he didn’t need to appease the hawks, he’d probably be dove-ish because that’s better for business, and a booming economy gets his name in the news and dollars in his pocket.
You’re absolutely right that he’s not libertarian, he’s also not particularly conservative, he just wants power and his name in the news, and being president does that. So he’ll say whatever he needs to in order to get what he wants.
Look at how he tried to court the Libertarian Party, he basically said, “vote for me if you’re tired of losing.” He doesn’t care about policy (if he did, he would’ve talked about issues libertarians care about like RFK did), he cares about “winning,” and can’t fathom that people could care more about policy than “winning.” That’s Trump in a nutshell, and also why he’s so dangerous. He’s absolutely not a libertarian by any stretch, but he will try to appeal to libertarian-leaning people if he thinks it’ll help him win an election.
:::spoiler
Need a space here.
Trump’s foreign policy equivocation, and his “America First” slogan allows him to appeal to both the Idealist Doves (libertarians)
Did you watch the Libertarian Party convention? He spoke and was booed… loudly. The only time he got cheers was when he promised to do libertarian things: free Ross Ulbricht and put a libertarian in his cabinet. But I don’t think Trump would know a libertarian if it hit him in the face.
So either your definition of “libertarian” is different from mine, or you’re not being judicious about using the term.
Libertarians believe people would be better off with a more libertarian system of government, but more importantly, they’re unwilling to use force to achieve that for others. So what a libertarian thinks a foreign country should do is pretty irrelevant since they’d never authorize initiation of force against another country unless it was an imminent, credible threat to the country. They may allow mercenaries to offer services to other countries, but not actually use government resources without an actual, credible military threat.
he is a Realist Hawk
Idk, he seems closer to a realist dove trying to appeal to hawks. He wants to invest in business, not democracy, so anything he does militarily is largely saber rattling to try to get more favorable trade deals. That’s it.
libertarians are easily duped
I don’t think that’s true.
I think libertarians fall into two camps:
The first group are your core group of libertarians, and they don’t change much. Yeah, maybe they’ll have an issue or two where they’re less libertarian, but they’ll have an explanation for it that uses the NAP. The second group gets all the media attention because they’re close enough to a major party to make direct comparisons, and these are the ones that get swayed by populists from whatever party they come from.
As a libertarian, there is no way Trump is getting my vote. I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020 (whom I strongly dislike), and I’m probably voting for Chase Oliver this year. But one thing is certain, Trump has never and will never get my vote. Ever.
If you’re antiwar, there’s really only one candidate to support: Chase Oliver. Stein and RFK are weak on foreign policy IMO, but voting for them sends a similar message that neither major candidate party is acceptable, so go ahead if that’s what you want. But don’t vote for Trump, he’s not genuine on any issue, he just wants power and prestige.
I would’ve bought that too, and it would’ve improved my opinion of the base game. I thought Trevor and Franklin were potentially really interesting, but they needed more story time to get there.
As it stands, GTA V is my least favorite GTA because there just isn’t enough character development.
Someone who is apparently into ankles, given the domain name.
Exactly. A “supply-chain attack” is a very real thing in software, and it doesn’t really matter whether you consider yourself a supplier, the fact remains that something a product relies on had a security vulnerability that resulted in the product getting pwned. Nobody should be claiming that the unpaid developer maintaining that library that resulted in the vulnerability is somehow at fault in any legal sense because the license specifically states there is no warranty etc, but it is useful to point to that library as having that vulnerability to let other organizations know where the problem originated so they can either fix or replace it.
Playing a few indies, such as:
Will probably start Yakuza 3 soon as well. I might finally set up an emulator on my Steam Deck to play some Nintendo games as well.
Be careful, I have a or lot of those I haven’t played yet. Add up enough of those and you could’ve gotten a game you actually will play.
Maybe. Or maybe we’d have less selection but more approaches to solve the same problem. That’s not great because it means games would be less approachable since they can’t borrow what works well.
I think software patents in general are stupid. The implementation is often obvious when looking at the end product, so the whole point of a patent (socialize information) isn’t relevant. The work to build it initially also isn’t particularly large for most things, certainly not to the level of pharmaceuticals. So the only purpose of a software patent is to block competition, there’s little if any social benefit to granting the patent.
Seems like a video game version of playing H-O-R-S-E in basketball: you need to make it from behind the hoop, with your eyes closed, and while hopping on one foot…
Isn’t this just user-created achievements?
As a teen, I was into law and computers, so I wanted to be a software patent attorney. Partway through my CS program, I did some FOSS work and realized just how awful software patents can be.
I don’t understand how anyone can actually make software patents. What kind of person can get far enough into a software career and not realize how utterly evil they are?
Yup, our webapp has a bunch of security advisories in our NPM packages, but we only use node.js for the build step, so most are completely irrelevant since they only matter in a server context. It’s valuable to keep the alerts to a minimum so we don’t miss something important (e.g. an XSS vulnerability), but it’s not critical.