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Yeah, when I was replying you had 2 upvotes and 3 down. I gave you an upvote for a valid question to bring it to 3 and 3 lol.
I read reviews and many players said SnowRunner didn’t have quite the same level of soft physics as mudrunners, almost like devs simplified it. So kind of like a hit movie gets a sequel and sequel is watered down. So if its on sale one day I may grab it, but I might regret it if they dropped part of the magic of the original.
Not sure why you got downvoted, it’s a legit question. C64 was double tape deck, and then QuikCopy on the diskette drive…so many games, that I spent too much time gaming.
But a few examples of now: WRC there are enough stages and cars and can try for better stage times / try to beat your ghost car etc.
MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries, which has a story arc but once you finish the story you can just keep traveling to look for new contracts, some with difficulty so high you lose a lot of equipment and almost become bankrupt / stranded, so there is always an element of risk. Also some generated worlds/scemery are just gorgeous for exploring. I have hit some game awards only 4% of players worldwide have.
But last few years my time is on MudRunners. (Shit sorry this got way to long)… If you havent tried it: Once you complete the tutorial tasks and a few main maps the game opens up into more freedom, and the tasks and terrain can be challenging. If you burn through that there is a mod community that has built so many more maps, vehicles and challenges.
If you have never played, the initial game is drab Russian vehicles and limited colour pallette scenes, where the goal is finding logs or picking up logs from key areas and delivering them to the saw mill across swampy and muddy maps. The physics are amazing for the terrain, as you drive over areas you are morphing the soft terrains and changing traction. Drive in same area too much or without 4wd engaged and you can easily bury your truck up to the axles, so you then have to hope there is a tree nearby that you can attach your winch to and try to pull yourself out. Sometimes you can’t so you have to drive out another vehicle and do a tow out.
The American truckers DLC adds more maps and vehicles and brightens up the scenery. Same game play, different challenges. More variety.
The time in game is sped up for day night cycle, but if you are able to load the logs into your truck or trailer you have to now drive them to the log station, either over hilly fireroads roads, or through forested areas, and cross rivers. There is no timewarp. Its precarious, with janky bridges, and deep water. Wheel placement, 4WD and posi traction locks on/off are needed to navigate out of areas. Managing a load down a grade where hillside camber wants to flip your truck means attaching the winch to side of truck on up hill tree to stop you rolling as you look for a down hilltree to lean truck body against to look for next anchor tree up hill. So it can take you hours to drive 1 mile. A tree breaks or you steer to hard and your truck is on its side and stalled, so you have to drive a rescue vehicle out to try to flip it back on its wheels.
You also have to manage fuel, 4wd and spinning in mud burns through it so fast, so getting a fuel tanker truck setup in a strategic spot so you make less long runs back to a fuel station is key.
Wow, I typed a lot. But seriously I can launch this at 11pm Friday night when wife has gone to bed, and get so engrossed that the sun will start rising Saturday.
And crossing a slanted plank bridge with a huge tank of a specialized russian logging vehicle can have my palms sweating on the controller and holding my breath. One wrong tire placement or miscalculation of how much the truck will slide and you are down in the river watching your logs float away and in fast water watching the truck be dragged down the river.
Damage and abuse will degrade the truck, bringing a utility or garage trailer is often required to fix the truck in field. So the game has elements of planning, resource management, goals, understanding wheel placement of off roaring.
But sometimes its just the beauty of driving out of the forest and the mist clears and sun is coming up over the hill, because some mod ad one are gorgeous.
The grappler arm log loader is also fun to operate. And sometimes its marvelling at the effort the devs went to to get soft physics right. You can swap views and see front of truck or Jeeps wheels smushing the mud as you plow forward (and accumulating mud on tires which affects grip), not too much wheel spin or you sink too much, and find out the reason you did get stuck is there is a large rock buried under the mud and its not until you get in the right position that your tire catches the rock and actually rolls it slightly to clear the underbody that you can move on.
So if you have patience for it and free time this game can fill a lot of it. LOL
Well if Is seagate reacts by locking down firmware, and deleting the resellers that knew they were getting non factory shipped equipment then this is fine. Part of the issue is the scale was so large some resellers didn’t know, because they purchase from another larger stock company and rightly assume everything is factory original when ordering.
Not sure, someone went to great lengths to pull off a large scam. A smaller scale one was an amazon purchased Xbox drive that did the bait and switch. They put a newer controller board on an ancient drive, wiped SMART in some way, and put it into the Xbox drive caddy with a Void if remove sticker across the seam. Curious at some point, I opened the caddy, to find what I thought was a new drive, was on old board but with an ancient drive covered in dirt and oil all over it. Like they didn’t bother to wipe the grime off since it was covered in the plastic caddy. Scammers going to scam.
As VP of Prime Gaming at Amazon, we failed multiple times to disrupt the game platform Steam. We were at least 250x bigger, and we tried everything. But ultimately, Goliath lost. Here’s why:
The 15+ year long attempt to challenge Steam started before I was VP of Prime Gaming, but we never cracked the code. Not under my leadership or anyone else’s.
The first way we tried to enter the online-game-store market was through acquisition. We acquired Reflexive Entertainment (a small PC game store) and tried to scale it. It went nowhere.
Then, after buying Twitch, we created our own PC games store. Our assumption was that gamers would naturally buy from us because they were already using Twitch. Wrong.
Finally, we built “Luna,” a game streaming service that let people play without a high-end PC. Around the same time, Google tried the same thing with their product “Stadia.” Neither gained significant traction. The whole time, Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company (compared to Amazon and Google).
The mistake was that we underestimated what made consumers use Steam.
It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well.
At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers, but we underestimated the power of existing user habits. We never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions. The truth is that gamers already had the solution to their problems, and they weren’t going to switch platforms just because a new one was available.
We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either.
Just because you are big enough to build something doesn’t mean people will use it.
Reflecting on these mistakes, I realize how crucial it is to deeply understand customers before making big moves. That’s why James Birchler’s guest newsletter caught my attention—his piece is a practical guide on obtaining real customer insights and using them to challenge entrenched assumptions that can hurt product success.
James breaks his advice down into three key steps, illustrated with stories from his time as VP of Engineering at IMVU:
- Talk to Real Customers Before Writing Code
- Test Assumptions, Not Just Features
- Build Measurement Into Your Process
After explaining how he learned these lessons the hard way (getting screamed at by customers and board members), James shares action items you can implement within a week to improve how you understand your customers.
I wish Amazon had followed James’ playbook before trying to take on Steam. But since we didn’t, at least you can.
I’m on opensuse, which has a direct download from nvidia repos, it has been great. Almost all my steam games work. One complains it needs some unity c library , prompts to install then it runs. On the next run it says same thing, but since it is installed dialog prompts yo unistall, I say OK and game runs LOL
I got the notice to update to 11 a long time ago, then months later a notice my work laptop did not comply with requirements of TPM, but CPU OK.
For my HP workstation it had TPM 1.x and there was a firmware update that brought chip up to TPM 2.0. After I did that the W11 then said CPU doesn’t pass.
Then recently CPU is fine. LOL
They don’t even know what they want.
For home stuff everything is moved to Linux.
They still happen even on W10, but we support a lot of customers, that have a lot of users, so I probably encounter them more than a person with one or two PCs ( just statistically)
Often it were would be network or monitor connection.
HP workstations laptops I could blue screen consistently by plugging in my phone set to USB network tether. Immediate NDIS bluescreen. I don’t blame windows 100% for that, it just didn’t like seeing a new network device in the Kernel
Just got a W11 laptop new from work, (replacing a dead W10 machine). It is such a mess. It is trying hard to be a modern desktop like KDE Plasma or GNOME, but without a cohesive setup. And bluescreened twice already, had a WebApp failure error, and locked up completely another time at login. This is brand-new Out of the Box.
You sir are deluded. And maybe that is by ignorance, Please go watch any of countless Louis Rossman videos about how apple claims a device irrepairable and he fixes it for 5 dollars. Etc. Soldered RAM, faulty switches , bad display cable, all easy fixes that the geniuses will suggest you buy new because it will cost as much to fix. Apple is an e waste producing company.
As for scanning peoples data, it already proved that it did more harm than good. CSAm people just change behaviors ur, and you have legit people having their accounts frozen and police called when their doctor during covid asked for photos of skin rashes. It is hard for an innocent guy to live down arrest for false child porn. Don’t drink all the koolaid.
The mod vid https://youtu.be/QpFz6U8hQ0c