NMS is ok. I play it from time-to-time, and probably have 10s of hours in it. In survival mode, it feels similar to subnautica; or I guess most survival games (I personally haven’t played many). The breadth of mechanics is huge, but they all lack depth. Combat on ground and in space is very simplistic, for instance. Space combat is just pressing a button to have your ship auto-lock on a target, pressing another button to switch between anti-shield and anti-hull weapons, then pressing the shoot button. I really don’t like the cartoonish aesthetics of the other sentient alien races, or my character.

I used to really like the Freespace and Wing Commander games when I was a kid; and haven’t really played anything comparable (i.e. high production value with good stories and voice actors).

I’ve played X4, just for maybe an hour or so, and it seems like it’s another sandbox-like game.

CK2 - 400h

Fallout NV (guessing most of this has been TTW) - 190h

Stellaris - 180h

Xcom 2 - 140h

GTA 5 - 99h

Cities Skylines - 95h

Skyrim - 90h

Civ5 - 85h

Xcom - 83h

The other games I’ve played are pretty much the standard play-through times. (< 70h)

Layden says releasing PC versions of PlayStation games years after they first arrive on the console causes plenty of anger among Sony fans, so Xbox releases from PlayStation Studios would result in even more outcry, potentially harming Sony’s brand reputation. “I don’t know if the juice is worth the squeeze,” he said.

Waiting years to release on PC causes anger among Sony fans?

I remember liking Opposing Force and Blue Shift too.

Meh, some of my favorite shows and movies have a lot sex scenes. Sometimes, they just add realism or contribute to aesthetics. Other times they show personality, relationship dynamics, are symbolic of other things, or are important to the plot.

I don’t see sex scenes as any different than other potentially “unnecessary” scenes, like a long shot of a dripping faucet, for instance.

But, yeah, most sex scenes in games make me cringe.

I would if the hardware was powerful enough to do interesting or useful things, and there was software that did interesting or useful things. Like, I’d rather run an AI model to remove backgrounds from images or upscale locally, than to send images to Adobe servers (this is just an example, I don’t use Adobe products and don’t know if this is what Adobe does). I’d also rather do OCR locally and quickly than send it to a server. Same with translations. There are a lot of use-cases for “AI” models.

Lol, good catch.

Wary of the bill. Seems like every bill involving stuff like this is either designed to erode privacy or for regulatory capture.

Edit: spelling

CK2 was a complete game at launch IIRC. They just kept releasing new DLC for it for many years, much of which was outside the scope of the original game (playing as Arabic rulers, vikings, Indians, etc). I think that’s fine. Them selling music, portraits, and new models separately was kinda shitty though.