I'm so glad I saw the writing on the wall and felt satisfied in ending my friendship with the Assassin's Creed franchise after Black Flag. After all, the people who could give me interesting gameplay and compelling storytelling have not existed inside Ubisoft for at least a decade now.
But hey, if you don't care about what I do, having it running on Steam Deck would certainly be a boom. I wish I could have played the originals on-the-go.

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Also, Rogue: Genesia is at £8.44 during the sale, good roguelike with a native build. It has been released on the march 7th, so it's out of early-access hell.

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Never got into Lego as a franchise, but I'm told the games are usually great, so this is great news.

As far as I understand, game preservation for Linux is mostly maintaining Proton as native games tends to not preserve well due to the rapid evolution of dependencies on Linux.

I can't play Sorcerian Original anymore since graphic drivers dropped support for whatever it needed for rendering correctly, so I'm quite aware we need actual emulation on our side as well if we want to make it work.

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Sadly, AI content disclaiming doesn't actually tell you how good or bad the game in question is, just that someone used tools to create a game, one of those that happen to be Gen AI.
Then again, technophobia is real, so more power for being able to customize your searches.

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Using AI today is ethically bankrupt. No two ways about it.

I wish the world worked in binary terms like this suggest. Would make everyone's lives much easier. But it doesn't. A carefully-worded questionaire need to be answered until we can argue ethics in any sector, and Gen AI isn't an exception. Context is kind of a big thing.

Internet-scraping generative "AI" came on the scene rather quickly, before anyone had had time to do that kind of deliberation and lawmaking around it, and companies are taking advantage of that to say "Well, there's no existing law that really covers this not-previously-existing thing, so we can do it!" Well, maybe they can get away with it, but it's still a bankrupt position ethically to say it's OK because no law.

Correct. Bad actors are 100% making use of this Wild West period to "become the law" themselves, and I hope they ultimately get kicked in the balls, each one of them, physically.
Still, I'd still argue that using a model born that way isn't the problem, the problem having a user hitting all his problems with a Gen AI model, making no effort to iterate through the results in any meaningful manner, then call it a done deal while selling it for money. And that still would be a problem with the user, not the tool.
If you have the money and is developing a game you are going to sell for profit, you should get an artist, musician, etc, on your team if you don't have the skills, no questions asked. We all agree on this point.
But what about the 3rd-worlder who just want to make a freeware game on his free time and doesn't have the money to pay for a single picture from an artist without that forcing to skip his next meal? Is this guy ethically bankrupt because he decided to use Gen AI to get some illustrations into his free game, hoping that a nice picture or two would catch more attention than white-text-black-background, or god-forbid, black-text-white-background?

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I can see it all, a future where No true Scotsman arguments around this seal pop out once it turns out that devs forgot current machine translation uses Gen AI, or that their spellchecker and grammar correction comes from, again, AI.
Generative AI isn't the devil, the corporate-minded "people" who started stealing left and right to create it are. It's a tool without sin, and the good or evil it can cause is solely based on the people who use it. It's also not going away, even once the bubble burst, and even when it does burst, it's because it's become cheap enough to run smarter models cheaply on consumer hardware, which is already happening.

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I am generally pro-AI, but with a huge asterisk beside it: AI-Everything is not the way, but AI is still a powerful tool in the right hands, and shouldn't be ignored just because greedy companies want to make it another AIE "solution".
Generative AI could become another alternative under our current efforts of game preservation, but never the sole way to achieve it. Otherwise, it's not even emulation anymore, and prone to errors and delusions like our current models are.
It looks much more promissing as an iteration tool during game development instead of an attempt at game preservation, as it gives you examples and fast feedback of an idea you might have for your current build, when used responsibly in addition to other tools and dev paradigms leading everything.

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I'm here to wish for everyone's holidays to be joyful.

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We had a good run together... Right, From?
Don't worry, I'll forever remember you in your best light...

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I hope it's not too late to learn psychic powers powerful enough that would allow one to strangle an entity like a gaming corporation out of existence, focusing the anger and sadness of millions of gamers as fuel.

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