That is one of the worst names I’ve seen…

And I say this as someone who played the US version of RollerCoaster Tycoon and saw the localization team at MicroProse renamed the Launched Freefall ride the “Whoa Belly.”

If Cyberleek isn’t shitposting out of his ass and actually has a deadman’s switch which could leak the build in its entirety online, then this could be a very dumb move on Take Two’s end. The authorities would need to go full Ross Ulbricht on his ass and hope they can control the switch.

What’s even sadder is that T2I and Rockstar have been such greedy litigious fucks over the years that I’m genuinely rooting for a crypto scammer who has used this entire leak to promote his shitcoin over them.

Just the fact that the GTA6 Extended Look will be a timed Netflix exclusive gives me the ick. That’s one step removed from releasing game trailers as exclusive PPV events.

If we’re gonna start treating game reveals like UFC and WrestleMania then I’m out.

Do what they did with Killer Instinct 2013 and Battletoads 2020. Bring in another studio but keep the main company associated with the IP in an advisory/support role. Rare clearly shouldn’t be trusted with solo developing another game and neither should Bungie.

Or, do what Activision did with Neversoft when they effectively merged them with Infinity Ward and became one of the three core CoD developers. Merging Arkane with Bungie could make one hell of a team.

Bungie holds serious brand recognition with Halo fans.

I think it was a consequence of them fleshing out the Halo lore after the first game became a surprise hit. To me Halo 2 Cortana will always be the best design.

Each technological advancement has created new jobs in some capacity. What new jobs has AI created? And don’t tell me “prompt engineer” like every AI bro likes to hype up. That is not an actual position and the fact that I cannot find any jobs advertised where typing out very specific and accurate prompts are one of the skills required is proof of this.

AI isn’t perfect. It hallucinates and sometimes gives bad answers. But I think that we are one incredibly good model away from being able to reliably automate white collar work.

I’m talking about a scenario where entire industries of workers end up getting displaced by AI and robotics, and I don’t think we’re far off from this becoming a reality. If Tesla’s Optimus 3 robots are anywhere near as advanced as they are rumoured to be, they could easily replace warehouse and logistics workers.

We already have Waymo disrupting the taxi industry further by removing the driver from the equation, and Miso Robotics automating kitchens in restaurant chains like Jersey Mike’s Subs and White Castle.

Also, doesn’t means-testing UBI kinda defeat its intended purpose?

Apart from Master Chief Collection and Campaign Evolved, I haven’t touched a post-Bungie Halo game, so I can’t really comment on the quality of 4, 5 or Infinite. From what I’ve heard, 4 had a divisive campaign and horrible multiplayer, Halo 5 had decent multiplayer and a terrible story, and Infinite was heavily flawed.

What I can say is that 343 Industries fucked up hard with remastering the old games. Not even Rare (a development studio with a similarly bad reputation for pumping out shit game after shit game under Microsoft) have managed the feat of fucking up a remaster. Halo 1 Anniversary genuinely has updated graphics that do not align at all with the level geometry, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the Truth & Reconciliation mission where you had to sneak past Covenant forces, and if you were playing on the updated graphics, they could see and shoot you through boulders.

The studio rebrand and switch to Unreal 5 was a huge gamble that clearly didn’t pay off, because Campaign Evolved had terrible gunplay, glaring bugs, prequel missions with bad design and more exposition than a Shounen anime, and a redesign of Cortana where she has an incredibly masculine jawline and genuinely looks like Jerma985 wearing a wig.

I once saw a comment on Facebook about how the Halo Studios logo looks like an ODST being pounded in the ass with a giant dildo and I genuinely cannot unsee that image. It’s also a very fitting metaphor for what they did to the Halo franchise.

Disbanding Halo Studios, waiting for Marathon to inevitably fail and then buying Bungie from Sony for chump change is probably the best thing Asha Sharma can do with the franchise right now.

UBI to me is a leftist pipe dream of how a post-scarcity society could work. When you actually look at the financials and how greedy humanity is, it all falls apart and will either bankrupt entire nations or pay an absolute pittance.

The UK’s voluntary living wage is £13.45 an hour, which translates to £26,227.50 for someone working full time 37.5 hours a week. If we replaced our entire welfare system (state pensions, Universal Credit, child benefit, Personal Independence Payments, Disability Living Allowance, etc) and paid our approx 58.1 million population of working age people and retirees the living wage, it would cost us over £1.5 trillion, or roughly half our annual GDP. Our current welfare expenditure by comparison is at an estimated £333.7 billion.

I am using the Living Wage as a comparison since it’s an agreed metric calculated by a non-profit organisation for how much a worker would need to earn to live on their wage in the UK. To pay a living wage to every adult in the country we would need to spend nearly three times as much as what the USA spends on its military.

The question then becomes “How the fuck will we pay for it?” We can’t even get the rich to pay their fair share of tax as things stand. They are going to flat-out refuse to foot the bill once AI leads to mass unemployment.

What I think is a more likely scenario is societal collapse. People starve, leading to widespread civil unrest and then a brutal and violent crackdown, made easier than ever by armed drones and humanoid robots that have no sense of morals. This is exactly the kind of doomsday scenario that a lot of billionaires are prepping for.

The only way I can see humanity not ripping itself apart is if automation somehow makes the cost of living so cheap that UBI could viably exist.