MudMan

My Windows machines seem to be just fine with the couple of NFS shares I use for easier cross-platform mounting on boot. It comes at the cost of some security, though, so I use it to share unimportant stuff I want to mount very freely, like some media libraries. I use SMB for the rest.

I’m curious, what’s the issue with NFS on Windows for you?

Ah. That’s more of an accessibility issue than an advertising issue, then. I imagine even without ads a bunch of modern websites expecting higher resolutions and smaller scaling factors will look cramped.

I was not kidding before, if you have vision problems that don’t play well with desktop views, mobile versions of websites tend to be a LOT friendlier to large text sizes. Have you tried setting your browser to a vertical window and calling up the phone version? On Firefox at least you can set the resolution of the phone you’re emulating and zoom it all the way up. The setting is buried in the developer tools, but there are tons of tutorials out there (TLDR, press F12, look for the button that looks like a tablet/phone). I’ll try to add an image of what it looks like on my device for the site you shared.

What resolution are you browsing at? I have a hard time showing that ad at all in my setup, but I’m not even at 4K and I get a HUGE picture of the rocket in question and still see more text than you show in the screenshot. That’s what? 720p?

I man, don’t get me wrong, ads are annoying, there’s a reason why I have so many layers of blocking I couldn’t even shut them all off to test this, but you seem to be browsing at what I’d call… legacy resolutions. You’d almost be better off twisting that screen 90 degrees and asking for the mobile version. Or, you know, you could lower the UI scaling in your display settings.

I don’t have much to disagree with there, frankly. I mean, I like GoW 3 less than you do. I’d genuinely play the Ninja Theory DMC, if I’m honest, but at that point we’re splitting hairs.

To be clear, I don’t hate these games, I just don’t like them much and generally don’t play them on purpose. We’re coming at it from different angles but meeting pretty much halfway.

They definitely moved towards… I’m gonna say better references later in the franchise.

Still, there’s also a reason they moved to a whole different genre.

GoW’s core combat premise is that you have absurd range and can deal damage in a wide arc. It was REALLY hard to tighten that all the way via iteration while keeping the way the game plays.

GoW 3 was a huge step above its predecessors in setting up big standout setpieces, and it played… I’m gonna say “better”, but it was still limited by the core framework of the series so far, and my argument is that framework was fundamentally flawed.

I don’t particularly love the floaty, sloppy “just put some damage in this 180 degree arc” basis of the combat system much. I am also not at all on board with most of the early teenage edgelord narrative stuff in there. Maybe I was a bit too old by the time these came out.

The Harryhausen references are neat and some of the boss fights are cool set pieces that did set some of the groundwork for later AAA action games, but I would much rather spend time in the more expressive, free-flowing Devil May Cry side of things if I’m going for snappy, precise combat… or all the way into Musou slop, I suppose, although I’m not much into that, either.

Frankly, I don’t think any of the originals are particularly good, and I was done with the new one just before the first one was over. They aren’t terrible, but I’ve always found the praise and hype for the series entirely disproportionate to the content.

Yeah, I’m gonna say this person doesn’t hate to keep knocking on Veilguard, because that seems to be the one example they can bring up. I mean, there’s a cursory name check of Dawntrail, but otherwise… yeah, not sure what games this is talking about other than Dragon Age.

Clair Obscur didn’t do that. It went to absolute pains to not do that, in fact, to the point where I find the deceptive twist-building a bit over the top, in retrospect. I wouldn’t accuse the CDPR games of going that route. Baldur’s Gate does overexplain often, but in their defense the game has a million characters, plot points you go through out of order and a runtime in the hundreds of hours, so I wouldn’t change that.

What else is even doing this? I feel like we’re back in “AAA sucks” territory where AAA stands in for “this one game I didn’t like”. Writing in games runs the gamut. I would struggle to find a single defining thing to praise or criticise across the board.

I’m struggling with this question, because these days I almost do that backwards. I will get a game and ask “what’s the device I’d like to use for this”?

I mean, I’ve been playing a fair amount of Monster Train 2. I have no interest in sitting at a desk for that, or to put it up on a massive screen. Been playing a bunch of Tetris the Grand Master, which is not a great fit for a heavy handheld. Donkey Kong Bananza? Mostly TV, felt off on the handheld screen.

I think when you go back to emulation there’s a bunch of games that are deceptively better on the go. That was the Switch’s original party tirck, right? Hey, turns out Mario 64’s short star runs are a great fit for sitting on the toilet. Who knew? Random JRPG being played one-handed on a tiny Android device? Surprisingly decent.

But at this point software is just this weird blob, I just pick a controller/device combo that fits for each game.

You’re going pretty deep into a rant to say the same thing I’m saying.

Read the previous post again. The point I’m making is that reselling a cartridge is not detectable in itself, but that the same cart being simultaneously found more than once is.

So that’d be the exact same thing you’re saying.

As far as anybody can tell, this was a false positive in that process and once the guy provided proof of purchase, even for a used game purchase, his account was reinstated, but you do run the risk of finding yourself in this position if you end up accidentally buying a cart that has been dumped and shared on the Internet.

People keep saying this. Being able to identify carts is not the same as being able to identify resold carts.

There is no tool to identify resold carts. People can and do travel and move to different countries with their consoles. There can be multiple accounts per console. People can feasibly have two consoles right next to each other connected to different networks and swap carts between them. People can change consoles because they upgraded or because they have multiple consoles in the household. And people can and do resell carts all the time.

And there is no way to differentiate those scenarios even if you can/could track each cart individually.

There could be a record of which consoles have played which carts, but that gives you exactly zero information about how many owners the cart has had.

Switch accounts aren’t associated to consoles and physical game entitlements aren’t associated to accounts. Any account can be in any console at any time and instantly show in in multiple places and while you could account for travel times it’s a pretty pointless thing to do that, to my knowledge, Nintendo is not doing.

What is more likely is that a cart showing up many times at the same time could flag it. Which is what everybody, including the guy who had the problem, is hypothesizing. This has nothing to do with reselling or transfering ownership of the physical game, beyond the fact that buying a used, dumped cart is the only way to end up with a dumped cart without knowing there are potentially thousands of copies of it floating around.

Well, no, the dude telling the truth is the first bunch of letters. The point is how the thing that he’s telling the truth about actually happened to him.

Yeah, that seems to be what the user is saying happened after talking to Nintendo, the quote just isn’t on this linked report.

They’re also saying they didn’t get much pushback, which may suggest Nintendo do see this from time to time, I guess. Banning accounts/consoles isn’t exclusive to the Switch 2, just more impactful there. They would have been seeing these scenarios for a while.

Huh. Guess I misremembered that. It’s been a while since I looked into it.

In any case, the point stands. The carts are identifiable but not tied to an account. They clearly keep some record of who (optionally) registered each cart for these purposes, but carts can still be used across multiple unrelated accounts and consoles simultaneously and Nintendo still has no way to differentiate a first purchaser using a cart across consoles/accounts versus someone having re-sold a cart.

Given that there are no good sources of Nintendo storage out there I don’t know how profitable it’d be to make a bootleg single-game cart when you could instead sell the same hardware as a flashcart. Used Switch games aren’t that expensive anyway. I guess it’s technically possible, though.

A false positive is almost weirder, because what does a false positive look like? A false positive on what test? Admittedly I have no idea of how they’re ID’ing flashcarts to ban them. What they have clearly works, but without knowing what the technique is I can’t tell if a false positive is even possible. The “bought a cart that had been used to make a known dump” theory is… possible, but I’d need more proof than just sounding more plausible than anything else.

Either of those hypotheses shows that their EULA overreach has practical implications that they should have considered, but it’s fundamentally different from what the article is putting forward.

They used a code-in-box for that on physical releases, IIRC. The carts are identifiable, but they´re not tied to an account, that I know of.

Eh… I am going to be on the Doubt column on this one until someone gets more information and other cases.

From my understanding of the way Switch carts are made there is no difference at all between a cart used on a console and the same cart resold for a different console. Nothing is stored to tie carts to hardware or accounts. Carts are meant to work with the multiple accounts on the Switch and with multiple Switch consoles at once, given that Nintendo very much expects to upsell you on a Mini/OLED/Switch 2 whatever.

This guy either a) did something else to trigger the ban, b) bought a bootleg cart somehow, although that doesn’t seem like it’d be particularly profitable to sell on Switch, or c) hit a seriously weird bug.

Or, I guess d) is lying about it?

Nintendo is definitely not looking to ban used Switch 1 carts. They literally have no way to do so. There is no tool in the toolset to distinguish a cart someone else bought at the store from your own carts you bought at the store and then moved from a Switch 1 to a Switch 2.

At the absolute most I could entertain that the used cart had been used to make a backup and then the backup got flagged in a different jailbroken console or something, but I don’t even know that Nintendo would be able to tell or that it would trip up their banhammer.

That doesn’t mean I’m on board with their remote bricking policy, and if this turns out to be a bug or weird edge case it’s just another thing to show that their overreach is not gonna play the way they thought it would.

But it is almost definitely not an attempt to ban users for buying used games.

EDIT: Looking at other reporting, it seems the user in question themselves hypothesized that the cart must have been dumped and said Nintendo requested proof of purchase to un-ban them, so I guess that’s the most likely scenario?

Some are full games, some are an empty cartridge with a key to download the game (which you can resell but not download if the servers go down). Some are a box with a code inside printed on a piece of paper (which gets associated to your account and you can’t resell or download without servers).

There is a warning on the box for the two that don’t include the playable game, but the fact that you need to know that or read the warning is a bit of a problem. And I don’t particularly like the idea that Nintendo is deliberately confusing the issue to make people believe that buying the game in a box has no advantages.

I like the Switch 2 overall, but some of the weirdness they’ve done to make game licenses and physical games more complicated kinda sucks for reasons both intended and unintended.

What’s “plenty”? 50%? 40%? 10%?

I know 100% of GOG games are DRM-free, on Steam not so much.

I think people believe that if a specific third party DRM vendor is not listed on the Steam store page then the game has no DRM, but that’s not the case.

I wouldn’t consider pretty much any Steam game DRM-free or yours-to-own at all by default in that they do not provide an offline installer. You can remove the need to have Steam running after the first download in some games through relatively trivial ways of bypassing Steam checks, but if you want to keep them independently of Steam you still have to store a loose files install of the game, which may or may not like to be portable. Utimately having easy to remove DRM and having no DRM aren’t the same thing.

Also, no, definitely not a longer ETA than Switch 2 physical games. A longer ETA than Switch 2 physical cart keys, but you can also resell those, so I guess different pros and cons. I really don’t like people jumping onto the idea that all Switch 2 physical releases aren’t full physical releases. It plays Nintendo’s game of blurring the lines between physical and digital releases. Full cart releases, including Nintendo first party releases, are full physical games and will work indefinitely with what you get in the box.

I think from the game development side there are pros and cons. There are games that struggle to demand a high enough sticker price that do better under a subscription service.

The problem is that, much like subscriptions elsewhere, these are deliberately underpriced and used as a loss leader to sink competitors and the direct purchase market, so they aren’t priced reasonably and it’s unclear what the money flow towards creators is supposed to be.

And it’d be one thing if the money was flowing at all, but in the current industry, with Microsoft shedding people left and right while holding a ridiculous amount of IP, both active and inactive… well, it’s not a great look for the industry as a whole to be dumping content below cost for the sake of a speculative move. And to make matters worse, I don’t think that many people know just exactly how much of a money pit Game Pass is.

And that’s before the more fundamental issues with ownership and preservation. Which I have strong feelings about, it’s just that they happen to be so strong that I’m typically the one to remind people you don’t own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.