The Starcraft site is clearly doing some sort of intentional glitch out ARG, and the rumour going around is that they are doing some sort of singleplayer shooter set in that universe.
I'm not so sure. You could literally see configuration options start disappearing from the Mac Mini ordering flow over time as demand increased and supply dried up.
The hospital toilets in Melbourne definitely have that setup. It was weird seeing basically every surface as just a shade of blue and nothing else.
I do wonder - now that most people have a phone with a flashlight - would not the druggies illuminate their own arms with white light and not be too bothered?
I think the most interesting thing I've seen from these leaks are the Portal 2 beta content videos. The temporary time-slow mechanic and the beta voice acting have been really interesting to see. The time slow mechanic in particular could have made the game a lot more accessible to gamers with slow reflexes and refocused the game on the puzzle elements.
What "fast reflexes" is will vary by person but keep in mind the average person (not necessarily the average gamer) struggles with moving the character/camera in the way they want when things are stationary with normal physics. Now try taking that to launching a portal while flying midair, maybe even on controller. I mean I got through it fine but it would have helped make 2 player a lot easier with my dad at the time.
My teenage self who was pretty good on the controller would disagree. Some of the puzzles required turning around midair or carefully timed shots. Also, they did use the slow-motion mechanic at the end of the game to prompt you to shoot the "killing portal"
I can't recall exactly which puzzles correspond to which game, but there are absolutely puzzles that require a decent amount of speed and dexterity. To the point where my wife got totally stuck on some because she's slow with a mouse.
Like firing portals while in midair, or catching a cube as you pass it during a jump.
Why does an optional, opt in easy mode take away the satisfaction of its target audience? You are not required to play it. It is like saying having a gluten free option on the menu takes away the enjoyment of a meal's target audience.
> It is like saying having a gluten free option on the menu takes away the enjoyment of a meal's target audience.
Having a gluten-free option takes away resources from other parts of the restaurant. Considering the fact that gluten allergy can be pretty serious, having gluten-free options means shitload of money spent on making sure there's no cross-contamination. Money that could be invested in better croissants for example.
Anyway, easy modes shift and break the game. It's very visible with GTA for example.
Savehouses in GTA III, VC and SA are very memorable because the game forced you to go there pretty much after every mission to save. In GTA IV we got autosave after each mission plus GPS which means we don't remember shit from what Liberty City looked like and especially we have zero emotional connection to savehouses. Technically you could go back to the savehouse just to save, but really, you didn't. You could turn off GPS in options, but really, you didn't.
There was this one fucking mission in GTA VC where you had to fly a toy aircraft but controls were fucked and after every fail you had to go through this over and over again. It was memorable because it was annoying. In GTA SA there was the famous line
> All we had to do, was follow the damn train, CJ!
As a result of a broken voiceline where Smoke told you to get closer while in fact you needed to get further away. The fact that after each fail we had to do the mission again from the start made it frustrating, but also memorable.
In GTA V we have mission checkpoints. All friction has been removed because general audience hates friction.
> Why does an optional, opt in easy mode take away the satisfaction of its target audience?
It just does. Completing a challenge gives a feeling of achievement. That feeling is lessened if others get the reward of completion without the effort. The Mt. Everest comparison sibling is accurate. If a difficult game had a "skip this hard thing" button on the screen you could press whenever you want, that would be a big turnoff to a lot of players. Dark Souls would never have caught on if it had such a button.
That's the toxic part of gaming platforms pushing social aspects. Playing a game doesn't need to be an e-peen competition and when you are comparing your performance against your friends you can make up all the rules you want like "no easy mode" or "don't use that obviously broken mechanic".
Why is every sports body in the world normal for having rules under which achievements may be recognized, but in gaming it is toxic? Are games not allowed to have any pretense of mastery? If the Olympic committee decided to give out indistinguishable gold medals to random subpar athletes, I'm pretty sure a lot of the real medalists would be upset.
Maybe you should base your sense of satisfaction on the overcoming of the challenge itself instead of the social aspect of other people not having it then.
And even if you want to feel superior to others, you can just count them as cheaters and not count their "achievements?" Many games already disable achievements if you turn cheats on already.
Well unfortunately it's not the realm of Vulcan logicians. That's how it is, among most of the target audiences. If you want to see the story I'm sure you can find a playthrough on YouTube?
> Many games already disable achievements if you turn cheats on already.
On steam, achievements are easily cheated with third-party tools. Which is good, the end game of the alternative is kernel-level anti-cheat for Steam itself.
> Maybe you should base your sense of satisfaction on [...]
If senses like satisfaction were fully voluntarily controllable then arguably there would be no need for games in the first place. I feel there's generally more satisfaction from overcoming a well-designed concrete obstacle rather than self-hindering that accomplishes nothing in particular and that could've just been avoided. At the end of the day all challenges in games are artificial and avoidable, but some separation (like having to go into settings, enable cheats, then open dev console to enable godmode, rather than just having a godmode keybind) is good for tricking the brain.
That said, the challenge of the Portal games (outside of challenge modes) is almost entirely in the puzzles rather than fast reflexes, so I don't think a slow-mode would really take away from anything challenge-wise. I'd guess it was just a bit awkward with dialog, and simpler to design puzzles around not requiring fast reactions rather than introduce a new control. In comparison, something like yellow paint giving away the solution definitely would be detrimental, even if you could in theory ignore it.
Imagine if there was a lift to the peak of Mt. Everest. That existing alone would undermine the achievement of having reached said peak.
Also, it's very hard to get multiple difficulty settings right. It's much better to have cheats available to make the experience easier and learn to get better at the game through those.
I would respectfully disagree that playing a video game is equivalent to climbing the world's tallest mountain peak. Sometimes I want to play a game to experience the story.
If they climbed it without a wheelchair, it was easy mode, so not a tru achievement. If there's an easy mode, there can be a hard mode too. I thought higher difficulty modes are interesting because they make an impression of a bigger work and provide a bigger dopamine reward. If the enemy survives longer it also mean a rich gameplay.
There are many, many mountains to climb. Some are harder than others. Each doesn't need to have an escalator so everyone can climb it.
Developers have limited time and all features, including accessibility features, take away from that time. There are many games I never beat because they were difficult.
I don't want to be uncharitable but the Mt. Everest analogy is not that far away from directly justifying not adding accessibility features in order to satisfy the ego of specific gamers.
I agree with you that in some sense it undermines the achievement, but tending to the ego of players that feel undermined by the existence of accessibility features is not high in my hierarchy of values personally.
> Imagine if there was a lift to the peak of Mt. Everest. That existing alone would undermine the achievement of having reached said peak.
It would not undermine the achievement of reaching the peak by foot.
> Also, it's very hard to get multiple difficulty settings right. It's much better to have cheats available to make the experience easier and learn to get better at the game through those.
Somewhat agree there and I especially dislike "harder" difficulties that just bloat HP to the point of wasting your time. But you can also expose some of those cheats in the setting menu which makes them a kind of difficulty option except its up to the player to choose where they need help and they are not forced to choose between e.g. ultra-tight timing or more reasonable timing but your character also tells you all the solution to logic puzzles if you take more than a second to look at them (non-made up example).
> A perfect game isn't a game that casts a wide net, a perfect game is a game that satisfies its target audience.
Maybe, but that's completely tangential to what the GP said.
And aside from that those games with a wide net do have a target audience, that's how they end up in that situation to begin with.
The game has both puzzle and platforming elements. A similar argument could be made "they could make puzzles easier for people who don't like puzzles" which is silly because one of the reasons why the game got so popular is that people liked the synergy of puzzles and platforming.
Either way, I really doubt that Portal 2 suffered from lack of recognition and further improvements were necessary in this area. You'd be way more likely to break something that works.
As someone who is firmly in Portal's "target audience"
I would have enjoyed the game immensely with such an adaptive feature. Just like I appreciate the amount of work that Valve has put into closed captioning for their games.
It really depends. Sometimes it's possible to add optional modes that make things easier for casuals without changing anything from more hardcore players and there is nothing wrong with that. They can always add achievements or some other minor reward for not using those modes so that you can keep showing off your e-peen.
Similar to that idea of trying to derive stuff from an indirect channel, but much more distant. (There is an obvious link between food consumption and building occupancy.)
Stuff like watching the order of names on public lists of attendees for dinner events, etc. If someone disappeared or moved off the top few names, perhaps they're in trouble or have been purged from the party ... or maybe they're just sick this week.
It's a theory that labs in Mexico switched back over to P2P 'biker' meth (instead of the old stuff based on cough/flu meds) and that the new meth is causing progressive brain damage to users.
It's like the old tale about the national park bin with the smartest bear / dumbest tourist crossover, except we're now comparing capabilities of the smartest AI with disabled humans.
I think the difficulty was specifically with CAPTCHA challenges, which had to be quick to generate but still legible - OCR on physical documents has to be robust to a different set of problems
That said, what kind of errors are you getting? I think the main practical difference between Tesseract's LSTM-based OCR and newer VLM-based OCR like PaddleOCR [1] is (hopefully) getting to skip making heuristics for the layout of the document, but errors possibly compounding over multiple tokens - are you getting individual illegible words or having the documents smooshed together because the OCR can't parse the layout?
>> no matter how I scan receipts or documents, the OCR output seems far worse than human
> what kind of errors are you getting?
Just noticeably worse character recognition, particularly where the document is faded, water-stained, or the paper document (not the scan) was low resolution to begin with, as compared to 'normal' human recognition.
I was largely using Tesseract in conjunction with the self-hosted Paperless-NGX, and I wanted to stay free/local without yet investing in AI-focused hardware. But you're right that AI will continue to advance, including in smaller local models, and it looks like Paperless 3.0 released recently (after my testing earlier in 2026), including with AI functionality.
> or having the documents smooshed together because the OCR can't parse the layout
I haven't even been worrying about that yet - I'm just at the point of trying to get the OCR characters right. :-)
Well, I used specialized software specifically for solving CAPTCHA on select few file sharing websites. My later experience with general purpose OCR software was just as awful as yours. But it's a product problem, not technology problem - you really don't need an advanced AI for it, you just need a good implementation of traditional shape-matching OCR that doesn't seem to exist anywhere for some reason.
I imagine Carmack's plan files were monitored because people were starving for as much id Software news as they could get, and going straight to the source rather than waiting on gaming news sites for digests would be the smart thing to do.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/113435/blizzards-next-starcra...
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