Home Artists Posts Import Register

Content

For your viewing pleasure.

Files

In the Black and the White, a Technicolorful Life | Sacred Symbols, Episode 290

As we wade through the mundanity of the turn-of-the-year -- when very few new games come to market and we work through our respective backlogs -- hope sits on the horizon. After all, the drab is about to turn into the delightful with the release or near-release of the likes of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, The Last of Us: Part II Remastered, Granblue Fantasy Relink, Persona 3 Remake, and Helldivers 2, among others. And as we look forward to all of that, we have news galore to cover, too. Square Enix's Splatoon-like Foamstars is coming to PlayStation+ day-and-date, but is its mild use of AI art egregious? (And what about its strange proximity to Helldivers 2?) Ubisoft+ is being reformed as a more value-rich proposition for consumers, so why did so many outlets blatantly take one of their executives out of context following a recent interview? PlayStation Productions is pursuing an Until Dawn film based on the cult-hit PS4-exclusive horror game, but are we starting to beat a dead horse? Plus: Listener inquiries! Are we getting too fast and loose with the term 'live service'? Why do some developers and publishers choose to hire diversity consultants? Should we expect an exorbitant number of Steamboat Willie games in the near-to-mid future? Will Chris continue to be bullied over his love of Julia Louis-Dreyfus? Follow the hosts on Twitter! Colin: https://twitter.com/longislandviper Chris: https://twitter.com/ChrisRGun Dustin: https://twitter.com/DustinCanFly A new episode of Sacred Symbols: A PlayStation Podcast launches each Friday morning. To receive instant access, as well as other perks, please support the show on Patreon at http://patreon.com/LastStandMedia 0:00:00 - Introduction 0:12:18 - The Bradley Ellis Effect 0:16:26 - Sacred 300 Info 0:28:21 - What's the issue with fan montages? 0:46:02 - How does Colin survive? 0:48:06 - Colin's NFL predictions 0:49:33 - Julia Louis-Dreyfus thirst 0:55:07 - Sacred Symbols drinking game? 0:57:04 - LSM Newsletter? 1:01:47 - Tracking what the listeners play 1:03:18 - Ubisoft on subscriptions 1:18:11 - Larian CEO's take on subscriptions 1:42:46 - Helldivers 2 goes gold! 1:50:32 - Street Fighter 6 has sold 3 million copies 1:51:36 - Will Final Fantasy XVII go to a younger dev team? 1:56:48 - Remedy Rockstar lawsuit 1:59:25 - Tomb Raider I-III looks great! 2:06:19 - UK's Game no longer does physical game trade-ins 2:09:17 - SandLand has a release date 2:11:32 - Top Spin is coming back 2:11:58 - The Transylvania Adventure of Simon Quest 2:12:41 - What Are We Playing? 2:38:47 - Foamstars has a release date and is coming to PS+ 3:08:35 - Until Dawn movie is coming 3:22:51 - Circana sales data for 2023 3:28:46 - Should we redefine "live service"? 3:33:16 - How are we spending our time with all these JRPGS? 3:37:02 - What is Sweet Baby Inc? 3:55:11 - How do our dogs behave while we record? 4:00:01 - Will Steamboat Willie games be the new trend? 4:04:06 - 60% of PlayStation games play offline single-player games

Comments

Anonymous

To me, the use of AI developer tools is analogous to the comparison between using Spellcheck when writing a story in MS Word (a tool that uses ML and AI to make a probabilistic assumption about what you are typing vs what you are trying to type when making a mistake) and asking ChatGPT to write you a story. Using these tools, you do not provide any creative license or leeway to the AI model, it is simply a tool that follows explicit instructions.

Anonymous

Correction : Aspyr did NOT make the original PC ports of Tomb Raider 1/2/3. They made the Mac ports of these games. Am pretty certain that Core Design made the PC versions.

AngelOfCake

Hello, just a comment on the amount of content you're doing. You're already teetering on too much. If you add more, something will have to give and that's probably quality. Rolling back some content to make room for Summon Sign so that you could go deep on something else was a great move. Otherwise, you're just creating a treadmill or a content farm. You might like this but on a previous gaming break, I was brought back to Sacred Symbols because someone on another podcast was talking about Colin. "His Twitter handle is notaxation and that's all you need to know about him" is only paraphrasing slightly. That podcast is now dead and I'm a pateron here. Make of that what you will. Keep up the good work!

AngelOfCake

Sorry, another comment. This time on AI! A better question to ask: Why use AI when you can hand it off to a junior team member? Dustin's example is a bit different. You might not be able to afford/want to add another junior team member but a lot of crud work like that is done by juniors so that they can build up their 10,000 hours. Dustin has done his 10,000 hours so if the tool barfs he knows how to fix the issue. I complain about juniors needing to be toilet-trained sometimes at work but handing off crud work builds them up and acts as a filter to get rid of the terrible ones. Apologies for the double post. I'll listen to the whole podcast before commenting next time. Keep up the good work!

Dan P

I fully support Dustin using the generative fill and you need not justify to me. You distinguish the thumbnail workflow from the Foamstars one, however, you have no knowledge of how the Foamstars album covers were made or how much input the artists had. For all we know, they could have the exact same workflow as the Sacred thumbnails. They could have made a rough sketch and used generative fill to finish the icons. Although I do also suspect it was more heavy handed than that. There is a very blurry line that distinguishes what you think is OK and what is not. In this sense I almost respect the staunch position of Colin and Chris more, even though I disagree. It's like eating meat. If you're vegan and don't participate at all then I can respect that. But if you eat supermarket meat but judge hunting as "too far", it doesn't hold water for me. You're either in or you're out. Although on second thought, I do find wasteful trophy hunting egregious, so perhaps there is an equally icky AI art equivalent for me. Either way I'm glad this ongoing conversation seems to be moving forward and am hanging on the edge of my seat for the Plus episode about AI!

Breno Bezerra Bluhm

Foamstars looks terrible and the way they are releasing it out of nowhere directly to PS Plus is even weirder. With that being said I will absolutely try this shit out lmao.