These reviews are a triumphant return to form for gaming journalism

Will have the “mature tone of the original trilogy”.

Did we play a completely different original trilogy? Eg. framing Miranda’s ass in every shot was super duper mature, y’all

My main nit is that Rogue Incursion is hamstrung by how well one can tolerate existing in a tense VR setting for extended periods of time. (For me, I felt insane after taking my headset off, like I hadn’t blinked once in 30 minutes.)

Yyyyeeeaaaahhh, I probably couldn’t go 3 minutes 😅 I’m a big 'ol wuss and I just can’t do horror games, even though I absolutely love horror movies and the Alien franchise – I get so immersed in games that survival horror stuff is just a nope for me

Yeah, some real “DEBATE ME” energy here

Shutting it does shut you out though, at least until you unshut it.

Oh don’t worry, we’re working on fixing that. There may be life on Earth, but no intelligent life.

Oh I wish it was. Eg. here in Finland sharing movies etc. among friends or downloading them off the internet used to be legal as long as you weren’t doing it for profit or distributing stuff to a huge audience, but that changed in 2006 because the new EU Copyright Directive required it, and that directive was hugely influenced by the likes of WIPO.

Governments rarely realize anything related to IP that the copyright mafia doesn’t spoon-feed them, unfortunately.

They’re “depressed and despondent” because they judge comic movie fans? This is some prime Dr. Phil level psychology right here.

Far as Swift’s syntax goes, I really like argument labels too, but it’s just that there’s SO. MUCH. SYNTAX. Lots of sugar, yes, but sometimes that’s part of the problem in my opinion, because it often adds to the syntactic and semantic “noise.” Also, there’s 98 keywords (more if you count eg. try, try! and try? as different keywords, and this count is missing eg. sending and other new keywords) – compare this to say Rust’s or or Python’s 35. Java’s got 68, while C++ also has 98 and it’s notorious for having way too many of them. And then there’s all the symbols – some of which have different meanings in different contexts.

It’s true that ARC only applies to reference types, but even with value types you can often get some fairly surprising performance problems due to implicit copies, for example in getters and setters – and the _read and _modify accessors that can sometimes help with that due to returning (well, yielding) a borrowed value instead of a copy aren’t meant for “public” use (which doesn’t mean many libraries etc. don’t use them, much to the consternation of core devs).

capiTALiSm bREeDS INnOvATIon

Swift is… not a great language. It’s got some promise but goddamn does it have a “designed by committee” feel to it; they just keep throwing on features like they’re going out of fashion and it’s getting ridiculously complex. Just the syntax alone is a bit of a nightmare – soooo many keywords and symbols. It’s also extremely hard to predict how well Swift code will perform, in large part due to ARC (automatic reference counting) memory management, which is a huge downside for game development. And don’t even get me started on the new concurrency stuff…

Just as a side note, it’s not purely an Apple project nowadays. They’re still the “project lead” but it’s not exclusively theirs anymore. Still, regardless of that, at least personally I really couldn’t recommend it especially to someone looking to get into game development.

– Comrade Stalin, is it true that you collect political jokes?
– Yes
– How many have you collected?
– Four labor camps’ worth

That’s known as a ligature and they’re pretty common in many programming-oriented fonts, which usually have stylistic sets with different ligatures for different programming languages that you can optionally enable in your editor’s configuration. For example, here’s the stylistic sets the Monaspace font offers:

Personally I’m not too fond of ligatures so I never enable any, but many folks do like them.

Edit: and just as a side note, ligatures are super common in many fonts, you just might not notice them. Here’s some classic examples from the DejaVu Serif font, with and without a ligature:

"A".reverse() == "∀"

Where is your god now?!

More of a tragicomedy, really

Where’s your sense of adventure?!

Calling reverse() on a function should return its inverse

You’re no fun

Use a dynamically typed language and you won’t have to: just override the default reverse() method on strings like a Real Programmer!

Unintended consequences you say? Nonsense! What could possibly go wrong?