There Is Light At The End
kiwifarms.net
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- Jan 28, 2021
Three more until under 750k
Jim Sterling / James "Stephanie" Sterling / James Stanton/Sexton & in memoriam TotalBiscuit (John Bain) - One Gaming Lolcow Thread
- Thread starter José Mourinho
- Start date
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2021
I've perused the comments on his reviews before and they seem to be nothing but sycophants applauding Jim for his Correct Opinions. If the devs really did turn up Jimmy boy must be salivating at the thought he could have another Digital Homicide to thrust him back into relevance, since the feuds with Gilson B Pontes and Scott Cawthon never panned out.
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2018
I frequently forget they exist. Especially because there's barely anything down there. This is a notably active comment section for Jim. It's only around a dozen comments, but that's pretty good for him.
The really depressing thing about doing the review reviews is I know Jim can do better. It's really just a way to shore up Jim's otherwise lacking content output as he barely says anything of note on Xitter and his videos are merely weekly, but every time I do one I find myself wondering why I used to make a point to read his reviews back in highschool. I'll pull up an old one at time and be reminded that I'm not crazy, he can do better. He's choosing to be this lazy.
Another Crab's Treasure, however, was a review that I knew I was going to be mad at, because the moment I saw people here talking about the accessibility shit I could sniff the stench of LKD's influence. I really associate a lot of Jim's downfall to that troon. LKD is absolutely the reason Jim got gender weird, skin walks now, moved back to the UK, sticks to the SJW talking points, and went full antigamer.
If you don't follow LKD then you might not realize that his personal little talking point is accessibility. I've had the displeasure of having to push back against that twat in my professional life as they tried to actually advocate that for dyslexia accessibility that there should be a toggle to reverse all the text in the game since apparently the bastard believes that fucking myth. Spreading myths about a disability when you are viewed as a accessibility advocate and authority can do real harm to measures taken to try and improve things. LKD does not have the clout that Jim does however, because as much of a has been as Jim is he still is a much more influential individual then LKD is. I won't sperg too much on the issue anymore, but if Jim starts advocating for the genuinely harmful stuff that LKD does then we might see some actual harmful bullshit get repeated. Once bad or harmful accessibility measures get into games it makes it twice as hard to get good ones implemented as now you need to fight the disinformation of what those options need to be.
Overpriced Gaming Chair
kiwifarms.net
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- Dec 23, 2022
While not a video game example, gold standard for an accessibility feature: when crosswalks were changed to have 45 degree curbs for wheelchair users - cyclists, skaters, people with strollers, etc. also went "cool, this is handy."
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
what the fuck as someone who reads very well, I occasionally have to read boustrophedon(L2R then R2L then L2R etc.) for my job and lemme tell you nothing fucks up my reading quite like reading in reverse I can't imagine how that would fuck someone over who can't read very well in the first place:
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- Joined
- Oct 1, 2021
God I was hoping I would never see that lunatic's name again. I was first introduced to him on the cooptional podcast when I thought it was just some incredibly ugly woman. And he would go on and on about being a lesbian, a 'lady licker', getting married to a woman and it being a gay marriage, etc etc etc. And totalbiscuit yelled at the audience for not liking lkd's 'humor'.
I don't think he ever was on tb's show again anyway.
And then on Jim's podcast with their absolute retarded takes on pretty much everything.
Then I found out he was a gross tranny and he ran a GoFundMe getting idiots to give him like 10k to have his junk chopped off.
It was a rollercoaster of disgusting.
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2017
And yet, his patreon is as high as ever. Seems he is propped up by a few sycophants, not unlike DSP.
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- Nov 5, 2018
It's weirdly easy to read if you shut down the part of your brain responsible for keeping you sane.
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
You do get used to it but it takes time and its a pain in the ass especially if you're reading it in a 1k year+ dead language.
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2018
Here is a video game example of what actual accessibility features that help dyslexics and would help everyone else too look like:
Dyslexia isn't that complicated. It is just a processing disorder that makes it hard to recognize discreet letters at times and can make it difficult to process visual information in the order it is actually in. The latter part is hard to deal with, the former is actually pretty easy to hand though.
So the first thing that people need to learn when implementing dyslexia friendly accessibility is there is no universal dyslexia friendly font. Some people are helped by serifs (such as myself) and so something like Times New Roman is great for me. For other people the exact opposite is true and they need sans serif fonts, so those people tend to like Arial, Helvetica, and Comic Sans if they are a monster. This means that for dyslexia accessibility you literally just need to provide several fonts that the player can choose from to find the one that is easiest for them to read, or on PC just let me import any font I have installed into the game without needing a mod. The next thing is dyslexia really doesn't like trying to read without strong contrast, so for subtitles and text boxes you should ensure that there is at least the option to toggle on a background that can have the colour and transparency adjusted to provide strong contrast with the text, ideally with colour adjustment for the text itself as well. Less anime style subtitles and more close captioning style blocks thank you very much. Funnily enough this means that a lot of much older games are actually more accessible than newer games on average as the dedicated text boxes and less concerns about the text impeding people's ability to see the pretty graphics meant we had better contrast for reading. While you're at it allow text resizing as sometimes larger font sizes can just make it far easier to read for dyslexia.
Oh wow, oopsy we accidentally made things easier on people with vision impairments, made something that normies might appreciate out of simple personal preference, and helped account for a wider variety of screen and seating set ups. This is the type of shit that an engine could actually have built into it too as a module the same way many commonly used engines have most of their graphical and audio options built into the engine directly. This isn't a difficult standard to have implemented. In fact, I have seen all of these show up in various modern games, though never all at once. Usually the one missing is being able to swap the font without a mod.
If you want something cursed, a huge part of my job is playing video games that are popular and taking notes so I can reverse engineer them for other developers to learn from why certain gameplay systems were popular as well as why other gameplay systems weren't. A lot of "Why did(n't) this work?" type question asking. My written notes are written in boustrophedon style as I find it surprisingly comfortable to just continue the flow back and forth when writing as well as when quickly reading over my own notes to transcribe them to digital. Though I reset to right to left with each new paragraph or point in my notes. I am a fucking weirdo though, and often read and write 50+ pages of notes a day for work and then 100 page essays for fun. I am definitely on the more mild side of dyslexia and am in that camp of people who have "beat" their disability so I am probably a bad metric. That said, I can't read left to right from start, because that shit completely fucks with my flow.
You guys can turn that thing back on?
My tism is making me very interested in why you are reading such a language for work. My desire to not totally derail the thread is stopping me from getting into it.
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2018
I don't know but I've always been a fast reader. My brain just interprets what's written very easily, almost in an exactly opposite manner to how you describe dyslexia.
That being said, I don't know if that part of my brain was ever turned on to begin with.
Cap-tan
kiwifarms.net
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- Sep 10, 2021
Maybe I'm an autistic artist faggot, but shouldn't you make games for your own sake and not to please some hypothetical, non-functional king of all cripples? If you aren't a total mongoloid and make something you like, chances are others will like it too.
And if you have some disability, if the game is good enough wouldn't you persevere because it is good? Even if it isn't tailor-made for you? Maybe even find some way that works for you that didn't necessitate the developer crunching countless nights adding color-coded jumpscares and cockring controllers.
And if you have some disability, if the game is good enough wouldn't you persevere because it is good? Even if it isn't tailor-made for you? Maybe even find some way that works for you that didn't necessitate the developer crunching countless nights adding color-coded jumpscares and cockring controllers.
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Dr J
kiwifarms.net
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- Nov 13, 2020
Sterling is connected. I've always been convinced his high Patreon is due to patronage from fellow game journo scum
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- Oct 8, 2018
That's an ideal that exists independent of business. The reality is that even indie games made on a budget of nothing but late nights still had man hours dedicated to them equivalent to thousands of dollars and you probably had to burn through a lot of savings or give up a lot of extra hours at work to be able to work on your game. The time investment equivalent of most silly little game jam games made in a weekend is around $100-300 dollars for example, so imagine what actual games take. So there is always a certain consideration for money when we are discussing game development. The ideal of making a game for yourself is also an ideal that can only exist in the small indie game space, who personally I exempt from the accessibility discussion as it is impractical to expect such from them. If they do anything more than them to just get their game operational and out the door they are already going above and beyond what anyone sane would expect of them. When we're discussing accessibility options we're already moving into the domain of a product and not a mere art piece.
If you plan to sell a game simple things like subtitles are part of expanding your potential audience and revenue to fund your ability to make more games. Not to mention most accessibility options double up as quality of life for normies when implemented properly, and a lot of the weirdest stuff for neurological disorders is actually covered by most graphic options so you need to just start allowing people to lower and disable certain options on consoles for those ones. Even then, as a person who works in the industry, I generally rule anything that'd take more than 3 hours for the developer to implement isn't worth the time fighting to see implemented as standard.
That said, most my time in the industry that I do spend pushing for accessibility options isn't directed at developers. I push for them to be engine side implementations that require minimal development time to then enable in a particular game on that engine. Stuff like I mentioned earlier in the thread could be built into Unreal and Unity or as a module you can quickly enable. I actually seem to remember seeing Unreal now has prebuilt modules so you can set certain UI elements to have customizable colours for colour blindness. You could make an entire game's UI colourblind friendly in 15 minutes, 10 of which would be trying to make sense of what you had to turn on and the last 5 actually doing it. Almost no one makes their own engines these days after all. That's a big part of why the Indie scene could grow. The subtitle systems in most games are also mostly engine provided, so what I'm mostly asking for is an expansion of those standardized modules. Another standard thing that is handled by the engine is key rebinding, while considered just a QoL customization for most, is also a critical feature for certain disabilities to be able to play your game since they need to be able to reposition certain keys (and is why studios like Bethesda need to stop force binding WASD, seriously being left handed is a common disability! Joking, but sometimes WASD is a physically impossible layout to use properly for some people so you shouldn't force bind it). For a lot of the stuff that is probably going to be what covers 99.9% of all disabilities is going to be stuff that can be implemented on the engine side and then enabled during that space where you want to be productive, but you can't figure out why that fucking turtle keeps moonwalking when you hit them with a slow effect (speed is going negative BTW) so while you ponder the issue you work on some of the busywork portions of the task of making a game. Making an options menu, determining default keybinds, double checking item icons, setting up the main menu, making sure all your audio files are connected to a text file for subtitles, etc. The types of things that are just part of making it functional, but not necessarily are fun to think about.
When it comes to hardware, none of that should ever be on a game developer to specifically support. Funnily enough when it comes to making sure that disability hardware will work with your game you just need to implement xinput controls, which is the control input standard for Xbox controllers to work with your game. You can basically sort all accessibility hardware as either pretending to be a mouse and keyboard or pretending to be a controller, and most mild physical disabilities are more likely to restrict people to needing to play on a normal stock controller than they are to need to play on most in keyboard or need some kind of special hardware. This is a place where that's just good for business to implement anyways because a lot of people like to play on controller and you should really have controller support in the modern day so that your stuff can be nicely released on the steam deck.
Good accessibility options aren't about making a game for everyone, but removing certain barriers for the people the game is for from being able to play them. No game should be for everyone, but everyone should be able to at least try to play your game, because of it is for them it doesn't matter what is wrong with them they'll put in the work once you get them past the initial hurdle of getting through the door. You don't want someone to have to pass up on your brilliant story because they are deaf, or need to pass up on your incredible boss fights because he couldn't move his character with his deformed hands. You typically want people to enjoy your art, so implement those subtitles and allow key rebinding. Likewise for dyslexics toss in extra fonts so I can better read your thousands of lines of lore books in the world. For colour blind people let them set their HUD colours to something they can see. We'll literally handle the rest once you do the basics.
I've seen a guy who we call "Thumbs", because that's all he has on his hands, beat Dark Souls 2 NG+7 simply because he had the right hardware to be able to play because the game used xinput. I'm dyslexic, but the novel reading simulator that is Morrowind is one of my favourite games and all it took to be accessible for me to be able to put in the long hours in was a single font mod to make the text a bit crisper and bolder. I know someone with full achromatic vision (literally no colour vision) whose favourite game is fucking Recore, a mediocre and mostly forgotten game about using colour coded bullets on colour coded enemies that just happened to show which dpad direction the colour needed to damage your targeted enemy was in on the HUD. BG3 is a game that went from unplayable for more than an hour for a severe dyslexic person I know to perfectly fine just by enabling text background and they got several hundred hours in it already. We're not asking for a lot. Just the basics. We'll take over from there.
Sadly though, there's a limit to how much perseverance can overcome a disability so you can enjoy an amazing game though. And there are disabilities that we do have to just completely write off as just not ever worth trying to make accessibility options or accessories for. One example is total blindness. Another is paralysis that starts at the neck down. Yet, for most people we don't need to give them a lot, and the common stuff is worth putting time into. The standards most sane people are asking for are frankly lower than you're legally required for TV broadcasting in the US for time investment needed. The people who are demanding really crazy stuff though can just go fuck themselves.
Oh also can we stop adding colour blindness simulator shaders as a colour blindness option? You are actually putting in extra work to do something that doesn't even do what you think it does. It only makes things worse and it takes a lot more work to do. It's just not an efficient use of your time. You could have used that time fixing that one graphical bug that kept getting ignored instead. They are both the same type of work typically done by the same people.
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2018
Double post because there's new Jim news. Nothing too important. He just released a bunch of old screenshots from when he was doing his Lords of the Fallen Review. So I'll just link it here [a] and call this shit the filler it is. I only know about this because I have an RSS feed plugin for my browser and Jim is followed in it. Why doesn't he just have a gallery for this stuff? Why is he putting this out as an article? Or dumping these onto Twitter? This isn't the first time one of these happened, but for now I am treating anything I get in his RSS feed as content that we might as well mention as unlike a Tweet, he needs to make slightly more conscious decisions to post to his website.
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2021
Do it, its not like Jim creates content worth talking about half the time.
He probably still has some friends but long gone are the days when he was truly connected, back in his golden era when he was still considered among the leading figures for consumer advocacy. He's admitted that he burned his bridges with the games industry back when all the SA allegations came out in 2018(?)
Overpriced Gaming Chair
kiwifarms.net
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- Dec 23, 2022
I randomly remember how Jim made a big deal of using a photoshopped image of Booby Kotick, because he had publicly complained that he has trouble dating people - because when his name is googled, a picture of him with devil horns comes up. Then in a later video he explains he stopped doing that because someone pointed out that it was antisemitic.
Apparently Bobby's religion overrides his wealth and makes him the poor oppressed victim instead.
The guy was already a billionaire and he was paid an amount of money that would've kept two shuttered studios running for 17 years.
Apparently Bobby's religion overrides his wealth and makes him the poor oppressed victim instead.
The guy was already a billionaire and he was paid an amount of money that would've kept two shuttered studios running for 17 years.
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2023
That’s not true and anyone who thinks that’s how business and finance works is a retard who has a breadtube level intellect.
Overpriced Gaming Chair
kiwifarms.net
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- Dec 23, 2022
Admittedly it does have that breadtube energy of "if corporation make money, why fire people?" As if corporation has a sacred duty to keep people employed.
Also Microsoft paid Bobby Kotick not because they wanted to but because it was literally the only way to get rid of him - he had stuffed the Activision board with his cronies or something to to make him the most overpaid CEO in America (the shareholders even tried to unsuccessfully sue the board ort something, IIRC) and give him ludicrous golden parachute for any scenario where he is removed from the CEO position.
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2023
It’s also share options, so they didn’t take it out of a Scrooge McDuck style money pit with a sign outside saying “future devs wages.”
It’s sad these people have lost their jobs but these are strangers who probably think all kiwi farmers should die in a fire and have been active and wiling contributors to the enshitification of the near entirety of gaming. My sympathy is very low for these people.