I created a reverse Space Invaders a few months ago, but I struggled to get it to be a fun game as you just move left and right avoiding the players bullets. (I'd post a gif, but it looks exactly like Space Invaders to watch).
Sim City was already a "you are the bad guys" game!
The creator of Sim City was working on a game called Raid on Bungeling Bay" [1] where your job was to bomb a fully functional civilization into the stone age. He had so much fun developing the civilization that he decided to make a game of it.
So maybe we just need a "Raid on Bungling Bay Redux: Massacre of The Sims".
> Creative Computing in 1984 said that the game "push[es] the animation capabilities of the Commodore 64 to their very limits". The magazine concluded that it would become "one of the all-time great computer games".
Gaming journalism didn't only recently become ridiculous, it turns out.
Smooth full-screen scrolling on the c64 was hard. In the years since 1984 people discovered ways to use unintended behavior in the c64's video chips to move a lot more of the screen around seamlessly, but ROBB's fast omnidirectional scrolling was pretty slick for a game from the same year the c64 came out.
Raid Over Bungelling Bay grew into Sim City, which had remakes over two decades and spawned an entire genre of "city builders", I think there is indeed an argument that it became an "all-time great".
Nintendo and Namco made a multiplayer Pac-Man for GameCube where three players play as ghosts on Game Boy Advances and can see the whole map, while one player plays as Pac-Man with a limited view.
I second (from another comment) the suggestion for CARRION. Think of it like those 80’s movies where an amorphous creature is captured/created and stuck in a lab. You play as the creature, trying to get out.
Also, not exactly playing as the bad guy but Enemy Mind is a fun tangential concept where instead of having your own ammo and life, you’re constantly possessing enemy ships and using their resources, before discarding them for the next one.
Coincidentally it’s now with 60% discount and it’s worth it at that price. If I recall (it’s been many years since I played it) the game was short and didn’t have a lot going for it outside the gimmick.
Yeah, I pay for youtube so I don't have to watch ads, but then youtube creators at some point all decided to jump on the bandwagon of interleaving ads into their content. Many are kind enough to make it easy to jump ahead to when the ad is over, but man, I would much prefer they set up a patreon or just let me pay them through youtube's own UI. Incredibly annoying.
I'm surprised YouTube allows it. I'd expect them to want "their" share of the ad money, since creators in a way are side stepping the "normal" ad flow.
That is the task they are constructed to perform, but that's just an output, not the inner workings of what's happening to arrive at that next token. You can give a human the same constrained task, but the output alone doesn't a human mind make.
Star Trek is a plausible future I'd like to live in. It depends entirely on education, cultural values, and ethics. It's a future worth striving for, real or not.
Star Trek isn't plausible. Free energy isn't possible. Matter replication isn't possible. Teleportation and faster than light travel aren't possible. You can't simply out-think and out-pluck the laws of physics.
edit: not even with AI. Because I know there are people here who believe that AI will turn into a superintelligence so advanced that it will literally rewrite the laws of reality like the Eschaton from Charles Stross' Singularity Sky but that also isn't possible.
Moreover the pure egalitarian and voluntarist society of Star Trek isn't plausible. Humans aren't simply going to "evolve beyond our base desires," as Picard once put it. Even if we did have Star Trek style replicators, free energy, teleportation and FTL, and everyone had everything they could possibly want freely provided to them without cost or obligation, people would still want to have more than their neighbor to dominate and control, to be king of the mountain. They would still hate and kill.
You can't educate people out of human nature, and every manner of abomination can and will be justified by someone's ethics or cultural values.
I should clarify that when I wrote plausible I meant the societal aspects you touched on in your second point. As long as we are human, we will continue to experience our imperfection and continue to be prone to giving in to our base desires. And of course one group's culture shapes their ethics differently than another group's. Ethics is, after all, arbitrary. But one could still look at Star Trek and imagine a society where people's needs are met better than they are now, where we have systems in place to prevent a complete erosion of society better than we have now, where the basic principle of not exploiting others for personal gain is taught better than we teach it now, where we don't tolerate those that violate that principle.
You will still have hate. People will still kill. But one could look at Star Trek and imagine it's plausible to live in a society that doesn't tolerate school shootings or the systemic breakdowns that led to that.
>But one could look at Star Trek and imagine it's plausible to live in a society that doesn't tolerate school shootings or the systemic breakdowns that led to that.
We already have that at least, it's basically anywhere but the United States.
Unfortunately if Columbine and Sandy Hook didn't change things for the better I think the US is a lost cause in that regard.
I share your enthusiasm for this. Creating a map of the most influential research across all the fields to identify the highest priority work, any work replicating that work or validating that work by building from it would be a good start. Ideally funded by governments, but institutions, companies, and individuals could put up bounties for replicating particular research.
Or better still, develop a traveling salesman solution for visiting each star just once.
> Bowerick Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was a being who became immortal after an accident with a few rubber bands, a liquid lunch, and a particle accelerator. After a period of total boredom, especially on Sunday afternoons, he decided to insult everyone in the entire universe in alphabetical order. [1]
I think the odds of a character are very high, the odds of a short word are very high, the odds of a meaningful sentence are quite low, and the odds of anything more than that vanishingly small. It probably also depends on whether you're ok with viewing your assembly from an arbitrary position or if it must be from earth.
Presumably because even if galaxies are just big things, there are probably things in them that do philosophy, play pianos (roughly speaking) and shit post.
fun stuff
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