I thought our eyes worked by projecting some kind of energy beam that scanned objects, like how Superman’s X-ray vision is sometimes drawn.

The patent isn’t about the balls, it’s about the summoning controls, and it seems broad enough to cover any controls that use a control stick together with buttons to aim a device for summoning a character. It is ridiculously over-broad, and part of a grand tradition of software patents being granted that are more akin to patenting “the idea of doors” than “a specific design for a doorknob.”

That’s why the new control is “press button to summon next to you,” it doesn’t use the stick and thereby avoids the patent. It’s also ass because it doesn’t let you aim the summon, but it is hard to envision a control system for aiming summons that doesn’t use a stick and buttons and also doesn’t suck.

This change is actually really annoying. Being able to summon Pals far from you was great in fights so that you wouldn’t both be in range of the same AoE, and some Pals like Croajiro have have skills that benefit from being able to decide where you place them (Croajiro can act as a launch pad to help you gain height in the early game before you have a flying Pal saddle).

I was cautiously optimistic for Pokémon Legends Z-A but I’m definitely skipping it now, fuck off Nintendo.

I think the patent is about controls more than about the balls, the mechanic would have to work very differently in order to not fall afoul of it. Like maybe if you had to go to the spot and place a mark there, or something, instead of aiming with the control stick, but that would be too clunky to use most of the time.

“Original” as in it has original ideas, or “original” as in it’s not part of an established franchise? If it’s the latter, I saw The Wild Robot in theaters. It was okay. A bit by-the-numbers, and I’m not sure everything made total sense, but it’s a kid’s movie so that was to be expected.

If the former, then, uh… Problemista? Also in theaters. I really liked that one.

Just scroll past it? I just assume it’s going to be wrong anyway.

I think it’s the use of color. The snakes really stand out because they’re green and the rest of the colors are very muted.

If it’s to avoid clipping, then something is badly wrong in the older game, where the person walks inside a bunk bed, lies down, then sinks all the way through the bed before rising up to slightly levitate above it!

Although in that case the idea of a margin might make sense, since at the end they’re only barely above the bed. In the new game they’re in the right place at first, and then rise up like a foot and a half above the bed once the player approaches them…

Sonic Roboblast 2 Kart and its successor Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers are open source, and pretty fun! The exact degree to which they’re free-as-in-libre depends somewhat on Sega’s policy of turning a blind eye to fan games, so although GPL-2.0 permits commercial use I wouldn’t recommend testing it.

There is a lively modding scene (or there was for SRB2K last time I was playing it; I haven’t played RR yet). Ring Racers has single-player content if that’s what you’re looking for, I hear it’s quite challenging.

Apparently the Narcan is “in case fentanyl is deployed as a chemical weapon.” How often does this happen? I can find one instance of Russia using aerosolized fentanyl against Chechen separatists during a hostage situation in 2002.

This doesn’t strike me as an especially efficient way to increase security.

My college workflow was to copy the prompt and then “paste without formatting” in Word and leave that copy of the prompt at the top while I worked, I would absolutely have fallen for this. :P

So fuck Alex Jones, but I really don’t think it’s a good idea to force people to sell their accounts so that other people can impersonate them. It’s just inviting social engineering attacks.

• Do what thou wilt
• This shall be the whole of the Law
• This space intentionally left blank

https://youtu.be/4nyHPIcbn88 (nsfw lyrics)

Was that this studio, or their other studio that’s been running since 2017? This one, “Team Blue,” was supposed to be working on some unannounced AAA game.

I think you’re right, it must have been the sequel!

Is this the one where I kept trying to go visit my mom (as part of my belligerent insistence on looking for stuff to do in the open world after every mission), but the game wouldn’t let me go into any building that wasn’t the next story mission, and then later the main character got chewed out by his mom for never visiting her? I did find that annoying.

I don’t want to look at my disgusting flesh-body and I’d rather nobody else saw it either. Rebuild me shiny and chrome, then we’ll talk about showing off.

They won’t, because there’s no other company that can credibly meet the Artemis objectives for a lunar lander in a reasonable time frame. Boeing is the main competitor but they’re already struggling to satisfy all of their current contracts: Starliner was supposed to be operational in 2017, but it had its first crewed test flight this year and it malfunctioned seriously enough that they decided it wasn’t safe to bring the astronauts home on it. NASA pulling SpaceX off of the Artemis project would functionally be the end of it.