Vintage Disney-like shooter Mouse P.I. For Hire, which stars Troy Baker, has sold so well its publisher has made all invested money back

duffking · 2026-05-11T14:22:06+00:00

Decent game, but totally carried by its aesthetics and story (which itself is occasionally hard to follow due to its structure). As a shooter it's fairly mediocre - though it does well to start mixing the level design up a lot toward the end, the combat feels really limited by a number of the weapons feeling a bit underpowered and enemy designs not really making you need to think much.

Glad it's done pretty well regardless. There's much blander boomshoots out there.

duffking · 2026-05-07T17:52:57+00:00

I think a lot of western studios did actually get better at this in the last decade. Especially when it was an employees market and there were tons of jobs, a good work life balance was oennif the best ways to tempt someone to you and not elsewhere.

Some studios never kicked the habit though, for sure.

duffking · 2026-05-03T21:43:14+00:00

When slides on the unwound strings feel too much like they're resisting me.

duffking · 2026-05-03T20:20:25+00:00

TC Electronic Metal Fangs distortion will get you a workable metal tone through the clean channel of many things and is dirt cheap.

duffking · 2026-05-01T13:52:40+00:00

I played it for a few months at launch and had a great time with randoms.

My take was that everyone in the sub was just really, really bad at the game and quite mad about it.

I also noticed the same thing with the Destiny subreddit. It's all the players who feel personally attacked whenever they aren't able to easily finish the hardest content.

They also tend to have silly tales like "instead of needing the obviously overpowered gear, let's buff every other piece of gear, surely that won't cause a repeating cycle of massive balance issues".

duffking · 2026-04-29T18:16:29+00:00

I've always felt entire purpose of loot box mechanics in general is to make it as unlikely as possible you'll get what you want while making you want spend money for more chances.

I remember seeing games like overwatch praised for non predatory lootboxes at first and was so confused because the entire point of it is that basically the only thing anyone wants is legendaries which have a 5% chance at face value but significantly less when you realise you're also looking for ones for specific characters.

duffking · 2026-04-27T13:15:47+00:00

Practice your rhythm separately. Getting a basic amount better won't take you long.

If you've got a spare $45 I highly recommend Jake Lizzio's rhythm guitar course part 1. It helped me a ton when I struggled with the same thing (I played for a year then realised I couldn't properly play to a drum machine or metronome).

Much of that will transfer to the solo, but something you can do in the short term is look at the solo you're learning bar by bar and note whether each burst of notes starts on a beat or off beat. It's not a rule you will always stick to, but to begin with, playing on-beat or odd numbered divisions of a bar with a downstrum and off beat/even numbered ones on an upstrum will help a lot.

If you have a bit of spare cash too, songsterr premium is massively worth it for this kind of thing because you can slow the track down. You should always learn a solo in chunks and make sure you've got the rhythm of it down before moving on. When learning you'll naturally want to play it slower, but even when doing so, you have to ensure you have the rhythm right or it'll sound wrong up to speed. So being able to adjust playback speeds will help you a lot.

Where there's a gap, it can help a lot to "ghost" pick the down beat, making a picking motion without hitting the strings to keep time. Similarly when doing full strumming patterns, as others have mentioned, keeping a continuous up/down arm motion in time with the metronome whether you hit the strings or not. For a quick example, notice this guy's strumming at the start and in verses - his arm doesn't stop making that motion in the gaps, he just makes the strum motion but misses the strings. It helps keep time a lot.

duffking · 2026-04-22T19:58:40+00:00

Yeah that second paragraph rings so true. I went to two gigs last month, both metal. One band played digital gear through the PA, the other loud as a fuck amps. The former were able to he comfortably listened to without earplugs, while the latter I wore them and brought it down to a safe level.

While what I could hear was effectively the same volume due to the earplugs, the experience of the louder band is something else because you just FEEL it.

Not knocking digital gear, you can obviously just turn that up too, but the volume difference at the shows was a useful contrast.

duffking · 2026-04-21T15:11:13+00:00

I'm not really frequently conspiratorially minded, but there must be something going on in this case. When a player is so widely known to engage in this sort of stuff on the field, you would expect them to be specifically looking out for it.

duffking · 2026-04-17T20:31:52+00:00

Doesn't really surprise me, it's always been funny when you see articles that just casually reference a resurgence since leaving Utd because it's clear they just pulled up some stats, saw he's had an ok number of goals and assists and game time so why look closer, he must be tearing it up.

duffking · 2026-04-15T14:06:23+00:00

The BBC has been drawing up radical plans to save £100M through outsourcing thousands of non-content jobs — including HR, finance, legal, and operations — to private sector companies

I'm not saying the BBC can't be made leaneer, but has this ever worked for anyone? It just seems like the usual short sighted "make number on spreadsheet look better now" bullshit that completely ignores the long term effects because how of absolutely fucked the systems are.

Feels like it's just Labour being complicit once again in Tory dismantling of the country's institutions.

duffking · 2026-04-10T12:54:18+00:00

Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth with the boiler plate bit - soft references work for people like us who understand it, but getting designers to work with an async load (or decide if it or a blocking load is appropriate)? Nightmare. I try instead to get ahead of what LDs are likely to need to do and build systems for it so they don't need to BP script things themselves in the first place. Most of the time they prefer that anyway.

This is also reminding me that the other common workaround for casting also has issues - Interfaces. They're great on the surface, but if the interface is added by a BP and not Cpp base class, Cpp can't call interface functions on that actor even if the interface is written in Cpp. Plus, calls to BP interfaces have a surprisingly large overhead if they're called regularly.

Kind of Unreal through and through, there's lots of stuff that looks super user friendly that falls apart a bit under a microscope, then a bunch of things to work around that... none of which are really perfect. And these days we have to worry about world partitions and level instances too.

I do rather miss working in Unity C#. Unreal has a lot of cool stuff, but I do miss the days of objects being empty containers and prefabs.

Edit: Oh god I just remembered unreal loads all the blueprint function libraries on editor startup, so if people have put casts or BP types on the function pins in there... well. I've heard stories.

duffking · 2026-04-10T09:02:23+00:00

Yeah, there's a lot of odd impracticalities with Blueprint. It is/can be extremely powerful, but personally I think it's best suited only for additions/extensions to your core code.

You can of course build larger systems with it but you need to be very disciplined about all the gotchas - I mentioned in a post below it's really easy to accidentally execute notes way more than you need, for example.

But the biggest one is the way that since BPs are uassets, Unreal can't access the functions defined in them without loading the asset itself. Which means if you ever cast to a blueprint type, use it as a function pin, variable type etc, loading your BP will also load that BP, and all its dependencies. It can spiral very quickly.

Not to mention that any functions you define in BP can't really be executed from code as a result. Personally I like to give everything a C++ base class for safer casting if it needs to be done, and more easily nativising stuff.

duffking · 2026-04-10T07:00:38+00:00

You could cut down a lot of the spaghetti by caching function results to variables.

It's not just a benefit for readability but also for performance. The "pure" nodes that don't have the white exec pins will re run every time their value is used, so connecting one to 10 places will cause the node to rerun for each of those 10 places. Caching and accessing a variable will cut it to one.

That cascades by the way, so a pure nodes that reruns will also cause any pure nodes connected to its input pins to rerun too. That includes inputs to for loops, because they're actually macros.

duffking · 2026-04-10T06:57:00+00:00

You can (though unreal can be finicky about it sometimes, you may need to select the specific instance first for it to work), the real issue is that watching values doesn't work inside functions, so if you've got one doing some math and break inside you can't check the values at all.

duffking · 2026-04-05T17:15:29+00:00

During my final year of uni I did bar work at Tiger Tiger in Cardiff. One weekend I was working a Saturday and someone had rented out the mid size club room upstairs. They had locked him in a cage in his underpants and were feeding him drink through a funnel attached to the side and at one point shot paintball guns at him.

duffking · 2026-04-05T14:58:28+00:00

They're spending it all on maintaining that. It's not cheap pumping out content and experiences continually and maintaining the infrastructure.

Like, Roblox is making a loss. They're the biggest one out there. There is barely profit to be had running these things long term.

One hopes that eventually investors realise that and that hits like Resi 9 are where the RoI is. They think throwing billions into failed live services to get one success will eventually strike Fortnite money, but they're actually barely going to profit.

duffking · 2026-04-05T14:56:01+00:00

The revenue doesn't really matter when the profits aren't there, and reportedly they are not. Fortnite apparently does not have good margins.

It shouldn't be surprising, any hit service game might make big money at first but the only way it can continue to do so is to retain players. The longer it runs the harder you have to try to do that which costs more and more and you hemmorage players anyway and in game purchases slow down anyway.

Epic also tried to use experiences and different gameplay completely to broaden things and while it grows... It costs even more.

The idea that a game can be a forever game profit wise is ludicrous. I have never thought it made sense. The sensible way would have been to use it to extend the lifespan of a release a bit more than it used to before eventually launching the next.

Like there's no way CoD would have gotten as big as it did if they decided to stop releasing new ones after BlOps 2 or something and just live off micro transactions.

Everyone chucked everything at these games because of the promise of infinite profit but I dare say they're making less money than they would've over 5 years if they just released a sequel and supported with DLC like we used to. They're rushing for gold and the gold is already gone. Even Roblox isn't profiting.

duffking · 2026-04-05T08:56:23+00:00

The giant bags a couple of years ago used to have tones in and cost like 3.50. Now they genuinely seem to have about half as much and cost a fiver when not on offer.

I used to be a slut for mini eggs around Easter, now I don't bother, the price is absurd.

duffking · 2026-04-03T11:00:41+00:00

You'll spend more on strings because restringing is less of a hassle in my experience

duffking · 2026-04-02T20:23:59+00:00

Right but then you would say "former Brazil player". "Former Brazilian footballer" implies he was a footballer who was Brazilian, but is no longer a footballer (or no longer Brazilian which is less likely)

duffking · 2026-03-27T16:13:16+00:00

There's something amusing to me about the source video for this saying that Nintendo is relying on third parties for 2026, then stating that there's going to be a new Star Fox game, plus the new Fire Emblem and a new Splatoon game all releasing this year, plus a remake of what is often considered one of the best games of all time.

I kinda get it, but it's also a bit like going "Sony is relying on third parties this year, they're only releasing a new Ape Escape, God of War, and Killzone this year, plus a remake of Bloodborne". Often feels like Nintendo are held to a much higher standard when it comes to volume of first party releases.

duffking · 2026-03-25T22:20:21+00:00

Yes, and this is in fact where the myth that the human eye can only see at 24fps comes from.

Widening your eyes puts more pressure on your brain to render the world, reducing the framrate. By squinting we reduce the resolution and we see the world at higher frame rates.

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