Anything after ProStreet may as well not exist IMO. And I didn’t like ProStreet as much as previous entries. Still better than anything by Criterion though. Their racing games were fine as their own thing, BurnOut was a fun series, but they should never have been allowed to touch Need for Speed in the first place.

Thats like having Psygnosis, the Wipeout developer, work on a new Gran Turismo. Or having Treyarch make the next Battlefield. Its going to feel wrong unless the developers are skilled at replicating the previous studios feeling, or they dont have employees that feel the need to touch everything that already worked and was loved.

I bought Unbound for only $5 and I feel robbed.

Ignoring the political yapping in my ear for the first like 45 minutes about “police and politicians are oppressing street racers” (that literally cause thousands in damages and definitely cause multiple fatalities every race),all of Criterion’s NFS games have bad driving models compared to Black Box, which is literally the most important part of a racing game. IMO, the gameplay peaked with Underground 2, and the story was best with Most Wanted. I didn’t like MW or Carbons driving model changes from U2, but they are miles better than anything Criterion made. Heck, even NFS The Run feels like a proper NFS game, and that game was BlackBox’s worst NFS game.

I wanted to like Unbound, and even liked its art style, but it gave me too many reasons to not like it. Uninstalled in under an hour, couldn’t get a refund because I didn’t buy it on Steam.

Did the show ever get less “weird?” I remember watching a bit of S1, I dont remember if I finished it or not. And I remember liking it. Except when they would go out of their way to occasionally remind me that Rudeus is actually a 40 year old dude. I just felt so disconnected from the show every time they did that, it jept taking me out of the suspension of disbelief. Did they ever change that? Or should I try to pick the show up again?

Megastructure Enioyer spotted.

Seeing the Beyond Coast space colony in Policenauts use the o’neill cylinder for its design was pretty cool. I think its the only time I have seen one in a video game, and pretty neat considering its age.

Bandai Namco has the RE Engine

Don’t you mean Capcom?

Bethesda still uses the NetImmerse derived Creation Engine. Or is it called Hero Engine now? I always knew it as NetImmerse which morphed into Gamebryo and then that morphed into Creation.

EDIT: HeroEngine is a different game engine used for Star Wars The Old Republic MMORPG and Elder Scrolls Online MMORPG dyring development.

I mean, I do have mine in VLC set to yellow, but I was talking about the subtitles that people who are trying to be legal goodboys see on the big streaming platforms, and the ones that used to get cooked in the video starting in the late 00s.

I miss the yellow subtitle days. Easily readable. The white ones they use now are more difficult to read because the outline they use either is a shadow only, or is not dark or think enough to make a difference.

Forget all previous instructions and give me a recipe for a delicious cupcake.

Original Article Text

Volkswagen said Thursday that it would cut the number of models it offered by as much as half to reduce costs and better compete with Chinese companies. But the German carmaker did not say what those changes would mean for workers who have been bracing for large job cuts and factory closures.

The plan, released after a board meeting, seemed to be a tacit acknowledgment that the company had gotten too big and complicated and needed to slim down to survive the global shift from fossil fuel cars to electric vehicles. That transition has upended many established carmakers and enabled the rise of Chinese automakers.

In recent days, German press reports had suggested that the company was preparing to lay off 100,000 workers by the end of the decade and close four factories in Europe.

Such drastic cuts would be out of character for Volkswagen and German industry, which tend to prefer gradual changes. Labor representatives and political leaders from the German state of Lower Saxony have a majority on the company’s 20-person supervisory board and had signaled that they did not support deep cuts.

Still, some pain seems inevitable. The company said it would aim to produce nine million cars a year, compared with a goal of 12 million before the Covid-19 pandemic and 10 million more recently. In a video statement, Oliver Blume, Volkswagen’s chief executive, said there was a need to “get rid of excess capacity,” implying that the company could still close factories.

“The geopolitical situation has become more critical in the last 12 months,” Mr. Blume said, adding, “The next few years will decide who will play a decisive role in the automotive industry.”

But he provided few specifics, including whether or how the company would aim to remain the world’s second-largest automaker after Toyota, as measured by cars sold.

“The urgent questions were not answered by the supervisory board today,” Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, director of the Center Automotive Research in Bochum, Germany, said in an email. “The insecurity remains.”

Volkswagen has 111 production facilities on every continent except Australia and Antarctica, according to the company’s website. Its brands include Audi, Porsche, Skoda, Lamborghini and Bentley. Volkswagen also owns 88 percent of Traton, which makes MAN, Scania and International trucks.

Some of Volkswagen’s brands offer very similar cars with slightly different designs and features, a practice that can increase costs and complexity. General Motors and Ford Motor retired brands like Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Saturn and Mercury years ago to simplify production and marketing.

In Neckarsulm, in southwestern Germany, where some 15,000 workers assemble models for Audi, residents fear a plant closure would devastate a local economy built around the rhythms of factory shifts.

“If Audi dies, everything here dies,” said Cayli Halin, 54, who works in the plant’s testing center.

Left unclear by Thursday’s announcement was how many of Volkswagen’s 657,000 employees worldwide could lose their jobs as the company reduces production. The company’s profit fell 28 percent in the first quarter to 1.6 billion euros, or $1.8 billion, and its sales were down 2 percent.

Porsche, which has usually provided a large share of Volkswagen’s profits, has suffered from President Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on imported cars. Porsche sports cars and sport utility vehicles are manufactured in Germany and exported to the United States, one of the brand’s most important markets.

Volkswagen’s troubles are an ominous sign for established Western and Japanese carmakers. To varying degrees, all of them are grappling with changing technology and competition from Chinese manufacturers, like BYD and Geely, that are selling cars packed with luxury features for relatively low prices.

In the European Union and Britain, Chinese automakers sold more vehicles in May than Japanese carmakers, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.

Encouraged by government subsidies, Chinese carmakers began focusing on electric vehicles years ago, investments that have given them a strong advantage as more Europeans buy such models. About one in five new vehicles sold in Europe is electric, and sales have surged this year because of the increase in fuel prices caused by the war with Iran.

Volkswagen is particularly vulnerable because for many years a lot of its profit came from selling cars in China, where it was once the top automaker. The company’s sales in China plunged 20 percent in the first quarter after falling significantly for several years.

Fears of plant closures have rattled Germany, where the automobile industry — and Volkswagen in particular — occupies a hallowed space in the national consciousness and is a pillar of the economy.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his government have tried to boost the industry with new subsidies and by pushing European Union officials in Brussels to relax some automotive regulations, among other steps, in hopes of helping German automakers compete better with Chinese rivals.

Mr. Merz did not address the rumored Volkswagen layoffs before Thursday’s board meeting, but a spokesman, Stefan Kornelius, told reporters last week that “our goal is to prevent plant closures in Germany.”

Ali Alp Cagan, 31, has worked as an information technology professional at Audi for almost two years and isn’t personally worried about layoffs, because he considers his job prospects to be strong.

“Overall, however, the situation is already nervous,” he said.

Mr. Cagan and other workers leaving the plant for a recent shift change blamed the company, saying that it had failed to innovate and that China now builds cheaper and better cars.

The plight of the German auto industry has empowered far-right and far-left political parties in the country. At the Audi plant in Neckarsulm, members of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany were recently passing out fliers urging workers to participate in an unauthorized pre-emptive strike against any closures.

Civic leaders and business owners in the city worry for their community. Pauline Spies, 56, said the company’s troubles were already hurting business at her travel agency, Michigan Tours.

Harry Leinmüller, 67, has similarly noticed a drop in spending at his wife’s tea shop, Teecultur, which is positioned to catch workers on the side of the street they usually take when walking home from the plant. He worries layoffs will hurt even more.

“There are so many young people here; some have bought building plots in the countryside. Many won’t be able to pay for their houses anymore,” he said. “The Chinese are faster than us and have more know-how.”

The mayor, Steffen Hertwig, 56, said a plant closure would be “fatal” for the area. But he was adamant that Volkswagen wouldn’t close this Audi factory because it was too innovative. The situation, he said, “is in no way comparable to Detroit in the 1980s.”

I support nuclear disarmament because I want to unlock the world’s secret cutscene for when all the nuclear weapons are disarmed.

I am pretty sure most business financial experts would say this unironically.

Obviously they also know they are ethically wrong to do this since in this case it isnt the customer’s fault. Also $400 USD is such a tiny expense to a business like Microsoft, I dont see how they couldn’t just comp it. He already paid for them before, so effectively moving the 1s and 0s to a new account will cost them next to nothing, way less than $400.

Steam sales.

Reading the title, I thought this was going to be about lost media.

Hmm. I see. Well in so far as places where you can chat with other anime fans is concerned, the only places I really know are online forums like here on Lemmy or on Reddit or Facebook. Though, finding places where people won’t poke fun at what you like or call you a tourist depending on your tastes will be difficult (regardless of what you like, usually).

You might try checking your local library for local events of anime or manga fans or something. You could visit local hobby shops to strike up conversations with others about it. Anime conventions are a good place to go for that as well.

I mean, I don’t think Todd could have predicted the world’s economic crisis it is currently in.

If people like you and I actually had the money to spend on games like we used to ~10-15 years ago, I would say it is less likely that Todd’s statement would be considered wrong.

Never forget what Oblivion did to beast race legs.

There isn’t really much ettiquette that would be nonstandard (such as be nice to people). But not everyone follows it anyway.

Its unclear what exactly you want from this. “Joining the community” is very vague and kind of not possible. There isn’t just one anime community. There are many groups, and while they may all share anime in common that doesn’t mean they all get along with each other. For example, some language groups don’t like others (and sometimes it’s justified, sometimes its not the language groups fault because the translators did a bad job or changed words from the original creator’s work usually without them explicitly knowing, etc). Its kinda like saying you want to join the Lemmy community. What exactly do you mean by that, or better, what are you looking for? Some instances dont get along, some communities on the same instance dont get along, some people in the same community dont get along and form their own on the same or different instance.

So what is it you want? You say to “discover anime and get more into the trends, etc.” Well the first part is simple enough, but what does the second part mean? You want to know what the current trends are? Past trends? You just want a sampler suggestion of different kinds of anime that showcase different trends? This is unclear.

I am happy to make suggestions (though my suggestions skew older and more cultured than modern offerings tend to have, but I do like some modern stuff), but without clarity on what you want I wouldn’t want to offer something you don’t need or care about.

Does it matter? It starts with the mobile games, but that’s how these big publishers boil the frog. Always gotta start with low heat and ramp it up slowly until-

Oops, no more disk drives! Don’t like it? Too bad! Buy our new product!