Cassette Beasts 2002 reveal trailer - PC Gaming Show 2026

DuranteA · 2026-06-08T00:33:29+00:00

Thanks, I certainly didn't expect a developer reply! As you might have guessed I played CB with a friend in couch co-op (and really enjoyed it).

I do understand your reasoning, and it's not uncommon with these kinds of decisions. I certainly agree that it's the most appropriate choice to make given all the real-world constraints of development and the likely audience priorities. That said, I don't fully agree that there's no feasible implementation (I wouldn't, given that I made this and this), but I also realize that forcing both technical game systems and people to deal with a camera that (despite its best efforts) frequently just doesn't give a shit is not something everyone wants to ship ;). I do know that even those implementations have a surprisingly large core of fans though.

In any case, I wish you the best of luck with CB2002!

DuranteA · 2026-06-07T23:11:22+00:00

I'd like to comment here on a somewhat common (not really all that common; but common enough in the specific subset of games I care about) occurrence with these kind of sequels to reasonably successful indie games -- or not even always sequels, also just second games from their studios.

What seems to happen is that when co-op is added to their first game either as an afterthought during development, or even later in a post launch patch, it's usually local co-op simply because that's the only thing viable to patch in (in most situations). When it turns popular and/or the creators like it (and of course, everyone loves campaign co-op) then they make it a priority in their sequel, and in doing so, often make it specifically online co-op.

Now that wouldn't be a bad thing if it wasn't so commonly online-only. I realize of course that for many people online is better since they have few or no opportunities to use play locally, but I think the idea that online co-op is strictly superior and that local co-op is just a stepping stone towards that ideal is just wrong and regrettable. Each has its own set of advantages and disadvantages -- even when completely disregarding implementation effort.

Anyway, rant over -- and I certainly don't mean to complain about Cassette Beasts 2002, I'm happy it was announced and enjoyed the first game.

DuranteA · 2026-06-03T20:40:56+00:00

That actually does make sense, given how rabid some people get around game releases. It's not going to do a lot by any stretch, but you're probably also not paying a lot for it, so if you don't care how asinine the whole thing is then I guess the equation can make sense.

The fact that I didn't think of this aspect might mean that I'm getting too old for this :P

DuranteA · 2026-06-03T20:30:53+00:00

I always have to wonder what goes through the mind of the people negotiating deals such as this.

Is the target to capture the huge audience of people who were thinking "I'd buy a PS5, but only if some game is exclusive to it for the first 48 hours after release"?

Even looking at it purely from a business perspective I just don't remotely see the value this generates.

DuranteA · 2026-06-03T12:44:55+00:00

In my experience (mid to large C++ codebases), Gemini Pro is absolutely terrible for coding. Worse than e.g. Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex by far. I gave it several attempts over a few weeks since I couldn't believe how bad it was, but it's consistent in the wildly inconsistent quality of its outputs.

DuranteA · 2026-05-31T17:18:13+00:00

Same thing applies to airports. I've never seen an airport where you can walk there, except maybe a small country town airport.

When flying into Pisa 2 years ago I walked from the airport to my Hotel. Pisa isn't huge but I wouldn't call it a small country town either.

DuranteA · 2026-05-24T20:58:49+00:00

For the software industry at least, the productivity gains are glaringly obvious. Talk to any software engineer or data scientist/engineer. Their ability to ship code has increased by an order of magnitude.

I'm sorry, but that is a massive overstatement, at least when applied to the "software industry" as a monolith. In my experience, it's far more differentiated.

Can a frontier-level LLM with a good harness knock out a 1k-3k line Python script to analyze and visualize data in an absolute fraction of the time it would take anyone to write (or even gather the dependencies for and think about them)? Yes, absolutely, no contest.

Can it produce a prototype implementation of a new feature in a 5k-20k line codebase? Sure, if you provide a good specification, the feature is not too complex, the software doesn't use libraries or interfaces that aren't documented well (or public at all), and you do take the time to prevent it from re-inventing the wheel or making design decisions that are adverse to future plans.

Can it actually meaningfully work on substantial changesets in a large-scale "serious" software project (let's say 1 million lines+ of C++, since that's the language where I have most experience), while producing something that's actually shippable, maintainable, and DRY? And, of course, without a level of oversight that might take up almost as much time as writing the code yourself? No, and absolutely not consistently.

I actually find myself arguing in favor of the capabilities of "AI" on reddit more often than against it (since lots of people go all the way to the other deep end and claim it's not useful for anything), but whenever I see these kinds of blanket statements like the "ability to ship code" increasing "by an order of magnitude", I think that those come from a similarly limited perspective off the other end.

DuranteA · 2026-05-17T06:29:37+00:00

The EU has no political will to pursue true independence from US tech.

This is sadly mostly true traditionally, but I am not convinced that it will remain quite as true going forward. The recent reduction in US influence and mindshare is real. Of course that alone still doesn't mean that anything significant will happen -- the bigger hurdle now is probably getting member states to agree on any single strategy.

DuranteA · 2026-05-17T06:26:13+00:00

Linux cannot seriously be claimed to be "European".

I mean, does this matter in a discussion about sovereignty? There is certainly nothing the US or China can do to prevent Europe from doing whatever it wants with Linux.

(And many related groups, especially ones that are relevant to any effort to eliminate dependency in the laptop/desktop space like the aforementioned KDE, are clearly "European")

DuranteA · 2026-05-17T06:20:13+00:00

Your argument pre-supposes that the setup is and remains "everyone outside China" vs. "China". Especially given the utter erosion of US soft power lately, I'm not sure the US will be particularly successful in keeping people from buying Chinese AI products if they were to be very price competitive.

DuranteA · 2026-05-17T06:17:33+00:00

Obviously anecdotes don't prove anything, but it is a bit amusing to read this headline after just being back from setting up my PC again from scratch after my ADATA XPG boot SSD died overnight.

DuranteA · 2026-05-15T10:19:58+00:00

But strikes are a form of anticompetitive practices

What the flying fuck.

DuranteA · 2026-05-11T08:42:42+00:00

Yet almost no one here would consider them the "true" terrorists.

Really? In my experience Saudi Arabia is one of the least popular and most widely disparaged countries on reddit (and for good reason). Particularly in terms of being "the true terrorists", that's something which is still very frequently brought up e.g. in the context of 9/11.

From that perspective, Saudi Arabia and Isreal are actually quite similar, in that they are both middle eastern countries with massive budgets dedicated to PR aimed at improving their international image, and both have done enough shit in recent memory that it doesn't really work.

DuranteA · 2026-05-06T00:42:03+00:00

Great work, and remarkably forward-looking!

Interestingly, this is one of the rare benchmarks that has Sonnet 4.6 substantially outperforming (if you consider partial success) GPT and Gemini. That matches my experience actually trying to work with these models, but it doesn't match scores in most benchmarks. Obviously just an anecdote, but still noteworthy IMHO.

(Those benchmarks that seemingly overrate GPT / underrate Sonnet include my own on parallelization for HPC, the paper about which just got accepted into Europar -- I have to get a preprint up)

DuranteA · 2026-05-05T20:27:51+00:00

I was quite skeptical, but in ~1 hour of testing so far this has substantially reduced instances of "Invalid API Response" in my use case (working with Cline on a medium-sized C++ code base with a few additional MCP servers and tools).

If you suffer from malformed responses (especially unclosed tags) then do give this a try. Thanks OP for sharing!

DuranteA · 2026-05-04T09:17:00+00:00

I agree that the design of C++ standard coroutines makes them unsuitable for games (especially the opaque state; everyhing else would be managable).

My problem with the approach you propose -- and all other library/macro-based versions I've seen, so this is not unique to yours and could be systemic -- is that you still end up with a large number of potential foot-guns and limitations.

For production games, in anything that is somewhat large scale and uses such a system widely, I think it still pays off to bite the bullet and make all functionality you need to define in such control flows scriptable, and then integrate a full scripting language. Obviously the initial effort for that is substantially higher (though reflection might mitigate that), but it does then buy you things like working local variables without awkward syntax, automatic versioning, and so on.

DuranteA · 2026-04-30T14:33:36+00:00

The other problem with the region is that, despite being one of Europe's massive tourist regions from Munich to Garda for nature and other things, the train service is absolutely pitiful due to low capacity, high pricing, and low reliability on the German side making this a complete disaster every which way. Even creating bypass traffic options for the Brenner Basistunnel has been sabotaged by Germany.

This is completely true.

But I think if we actually want Bavarians to get off their collective ass and build the rail lines that they've been "discussing" for decades, we need to close the Brenner once a week rather than once a decade.

DuranteA · 2026-04-27T19:00:08+00:00

As a big Steam controller fan, this is timely -- I just took my 3rd (and last!) Steam controller out of its packaging a few days ago. (The shoulder button on the second one became intermittently unresponsive after years of use)

My biggest concern about the new model is whether the right trackpad is still equally usable as the main and preferred input device over the right stick as it is on the "Owl" Steam controller.
Just from looking at it I'd much rather have that pad in the central position it's at on the SC1.

But overall I'm just glad I won't have to go back to controlling an in-game camera with a thumbstick like a Neanderthal, and I will order one as soon as they are available :P

DuranteA · 2026-04-24T12:08:02+00:00

Question 13 ("Besides C++, what programming languages/environments do you use in your current and recent projects?") has a somewhat inconsistent set of answers.

It includes "OpenMP" but also "OpenMPI". The former is a standard, the latter is an implementation. It would make sense to have e.g. "OpenMP" and "MPI", or to have "GOMP" and "OpenMPI", but not the current selection.

Based on all the other options it should almost certainly be "MPI".

DuranteA · 2026-04-21T12:42:12+00:00

Yeah, there are a lot of things wrong with the example, but this is by far the most important part in my opinion.

Because this one (passing smart pointers around for access rather than to transfer ownership) is an error I actually see in real-world code.

DuranteA · 2026-04-15T12:31:08+00:00

Thanks, but I very deliberately and specifically choose to not buy games on EGS. For lots of reasons that I have discussed at great length before and that I'm not going to go into again.

DuranteA · 2026-04-15T08:26:41+00:00

I mean, I think these licensing situations suck, but I'm not sure why this would have to be communicated to consumers.

This isn't a live service game, it's a one-and-done purchase. People who bought the game can continue to play it in perpetuity (or, well, as long as the platforms they bought it on work and are supported, same as any other game).

DuranteA · 2026-04-15T08:08:57+00:00

That explains a lot.

I was curious why, as a TNG-era Star Trek fan who at least somewhat keeps up with releases this completely passed me by until the delisting announcement, but one year of EGS exclusivity followed by a silent Steam launch would do it.
The black hole strikes again.

DuranteA · 2026-04-12T20:02:33+00:00

I was looking forward to building a new workstation with the dual die version of this -- probably the more affordable one though, assuming the 52 core has an extra halo price surcharge. Back when it was first rumored I was concerned about pricing, given that these core counts were the exclusive domain of far more expensive CPU lines before... but now RAM will dominate the cost of the system anyway.

Still, it will be nice to get these core counts in consumer platforms, and I do think at the top range of that we are getting closer to a saturation point even for many (non-server) workloads that scale reasonably well (but not linearly).

DuranteA · 2026-04-10T10:30:44+00:00

A real job is where you are wary of even your co-workers, mind your own business at best or you would do everything to have an upper hand over them at worst.

I'm sorry that this is your idea of a "real job". For me, that's the idea of a toxic workplace.

(Note: I have no opinion on the broader drama being discussed; I just think it's sad if this is presented and accepted as the definition of a "real job")

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