a lot of games these days have higher graphic "fidelity" but it's at the point where they're exaggerating them just to show off. light and reflection systems in particular have kind of an uncanny valley feel to them now at least to me, and it makes the games much less pleasant to look at
_NetNomad
windows 8 is a strong candidate, because that was their huge push into trying to remodel the OS in the image of mobile OSes. you had to perform quite the exorcism to get it functional. i skipped Vista so I'm not the best source on this but my understanding is that the issue with Vista is less that it was loaded with dark patterns and trying to be a walled garden and more just an unfortunate time to be an OS with the technology and security landscapes changing.
of course, while the base OS wasn't necessarily always the problem, Microsoft has anti-competitive practices going back even further and you could argue Windows stopped being good when MS started bundling Internet Explorer with it, so it all depends where you draw the line. might be safest to say their last truly good OS was MSX-DOS just because they abandoned it before they could do anything scummy
This pattern is driven by an increase in unhappiness among young people both in absolute terms and relative to older people.
also look at the graph in the article, the yellow line representing 2024 is signifigantly lower before 35 than any point on the blue line representing 2005-2018
as someone approaching my 30s in america this sounds consistent with both my experience and many of my peers. our education system is more or less a trauma machine, and couple that with the demise of "third places" (places that aren't school or home for kids to hang out in without having to spend money) and the general state of the world being hard for even adult minds fo wrap around... our world is a difficult and unpleasant place to be a kid. it ain't a cakewalk being an adult either but it is relatively better with a relative increase in agency and more experience dealing with everything
actually either i would probably have to switch seats with O'Brien halfway through because Mariner keeps poking the back of his head and then turning away when he turns around
3 feels like the "right" answer but 7 would absolutely be the most fun
i see comparisons of switch games on hardware and in emulators all the time and can never tell the difference, and same for all these recent 4k remasters. i am glad that there are options for people who can tell and do care but it's nowhere near as noticable to your average joe compared to the jump from snes to n64 or n64 to gamecube. or perhaps i am just a spectacularly below average joe haha
i know conventional gamer wisdom says otherwise but i think this just goes to show how more horsepower just leads to diminishing returns at this point. people call the switch underpowered but it's best selling game is a wii u port! gone are the days of each generation looking infinitely better than the last
i love both shows but i don't think they're really comparable. LD is a very very very good spinoff but it can't be the tentpole Trek series, whereas SNW was more or less engineered to be that for this generation
"No, you should totally go on this one, captain. Take the XO too. We'll be fine. We're all far too busy, uh, reversing the polarity of the deflector dish, and we definitely deleted the template for Romulan ale from the replicators for good this time. Also the transporter is on the fritz so you should probably take a shuttle, and then stay down there and see the sights to make it worth it."
i think a lot of great points have been made in this thread, but it's also worth saying- you can't be wrong about what you do and don't dig!
i could stand maybe ten seconds tops of a DRD sadly singing 1812 Overture as it died of radiation damage until I'd have to climb into the fuckin condiut myself to save it