ByteOnBikes

Daylighting, which involves removing parked cars from around crosswalks in order to improve visibility and just wiped out about 14,000 street parking spaces, has proved especially controversial.

“If someone doesn’t die because of it, we will never know, while the living have to suffer,” Nina Geneson Otis wrote in an email to The Standard. The real estate broker said daylighting is the kind of policy that makes Democrats lose elections.

Others say the city’s actions remove responsibility from pedestrians to look out for their own safety. “A pedestrian can do anything, and be irresponsible, and no harm will come to them?” Brandi said, describing the policies as “idiot-proof.”

Much has been made of the difficulty of these games—­it has been criticized as exclusionary, lauded as a return to gaming’s roots, used as a selling point. (prepare to die, declared the slogan of the first Dark Souls.) But “difficulty” is an elusive concept, one word standing in for a number of ways in which a game can resist its players.

Another way to put it is that the games can be, for the wrong person, or someone in the wrong mood, simply unpleasant. It is not always clear why one would want to spend one’s leisure time swearing at a screen, lost, stuck, dying over and over in the dark. More often, though, they provide something much more complicated: a paradoxical mix of joy and outrage, relief and despair. The repetitive drumbeat of failure, occasionally punctuated by success or disaster or revelation, batters you into a kind of gleeful serenity. Failure becomes funny, even soothing. The games are full of jokes at the player’s expense—­traps and dead ends and carefully orchestrated aggravations. Game after game runs variations on the comedic setup of an enormous stone ball rolling at you down a slope, for instance. It’s there in the opening level of Dark Souls, to teach you about dodging, and about the game designers’ malevolence; then it appears again and again in more complicated arrangements. By Elden Ring such traps have become familiar, even comforting—­until the moment when a boulder rolls past you, stops, and then rolls back, seemingly of its own free will, to crush you from behind. The only possible response is to laugh or give up.

Treat Part 1 as a very beefydemo. Even by itself, it's a great 10-20 hour game. If you love it, get the Standard Edition.

Fandom Pulse is reporting (paywall), according to a "Ubisoft insider", that the beleaguered video game company is pushing back on Steam to try and get certain data points removed from public view. This would include data points like peak and concurrent users. The insider continues by saying that Star Wars Outlaws has still failed to surpass the 2 million units sold point having been released for almost 3 months. That's a far cry (get it?) from the 5 million in the first month some investors were hoping for at launch.

The report also alleges that Ubisoft isn't alone. Other companies would also like Valve to stop reporting numbers that they'd rather paint their own way on investor calls, or just dodge entirely like Ubisoft has done on recent calls where the lackluster performance of Star Wars Outlaws has come up.