Their whole gaming business model now is encouraging devs to stick features that have no hope of rendering quickly in order to sell this new frame generation rubbish.

They’re not even pretending to be affordable any more.

Astro Bot.

Perfect for showing off that £2000 gaming PC.

He seems to have done. I think he’s a trainee accountant now and plays crown green bowling.

I watched my cousin get suckered by one of those a few years ago.

£50 Steam voucher in, fuck all out. Hooray for letting 14 year olds gamble their Christmas presents away…

Plus there’s extra protections for credit cards, at least in the UK. Spend a certain amount and if the company goes bust you get your money back. Saved my ass with two different airlines that got into financial trouble once they’d taken my money.

I think fraud is required to be refunded by banks as well as credit issuers, but I’m sure most people would rather have money to spend on food and bills while they investigate, and you’re not going to get that if your account has been drained.

Only around 17,000 or so. The rest are minimum effort Unity asset flips.

I do appreciate that it used to be too much effort to get a game onto Steam, but this situation is hardly better.

It’s was World of Warcraft before I quit.

What other games had in hours, that had in days. Probably around 500 days, mostly standing around waiting for others.

Now I play FFXIV instead.

Much healthier…

Picked up Firewatch and Divinity Original Sin 1&2.

FW is a short and sweet walking sim. Well worth the £1.60 or whatever I paid for it.

No opinion on DOS yet because I doubt I’ll play that before the new year.

It was one of the early games I got for the PS2.

I didn’t really like it tbh. Ammo was way too sparse. Don’t think I ever finished it.

If it wasn’t for regulations, they’d happily let the kids shovel their money into the slots.

Used to do that all the time as a kid, but a slot machine taking 2 pence a time is a far cry from one where you give it your bank card and go ham.

I’d like to see Black Myth Wukong win nothing just because of how salty they get over it.

Might as well go all in on that new rating.

Balatro 1.5 Patch Notes.

• All the Jokers now hang dong.

• Big naturals Queens are worth double.

The only good thing about 6 was the Stranger Things mission.

Yeah I disable those back when I noticed World of Warcraft started performing badly. GFE had helpfully optimised it to run at a resolution 4x higher than my screen and downscaled it…

GFE was terrible because it always forgot my login and fuck if I’m going to remember a password just to update drivers.

At least they’ve done away with that bit.

Because YouTube is a cesspool and anything featuring anyone other than white soldiers is “woke” and “DEI”

They came with the GOTY edition which was pretty much the standard version being sold after a while.

HoS is my favourite of them even though it adds some truly tedious enemies to the map, but BaW is huge and adds like another 50% to the base game.

This trailer is why I can’t really get into the Netflix series version of Ciri. She just doesn’t have this.

I’d be disappointed if they bought Geralt back tbh.

The house you get in Blood and Wine felt like a retirement home. I completed it, quit the game in the house with Yenn. He’s done.

They’ve always been able to revoke steam keys.

Indie devs often don’t because they don’t want the bad press that goes with revoking keys that may have been sold on via 3rd party resellers.

Sounds a bit like a reimagining of the Bloodborne chalice dungeons. Not sure there was anything like that in any of the other Fromsoft games.

Feels like W4 being about Ciri is the worst kept secret in gaming.

I think I actually preferred the second. Less reliance on blowing you up and making you restart puzzles.

You just know that their “AI driven platform” is a call to google for the brand names they’re “protecting” followed by takedown requests issued to the registered email followed by one to the registrar for every domain found.

We need a new internet because this one is fucked.

Unmonitored automated systems can do a lot of damage.

Although maybe register important business domains with an actual large company you’ve heard of and not “iwantmyname”.

Does he come with his own tank?

I really don’t get that. I have had every PlayStation console, and was overjoyed when God of War came to PC so more people could play it. Every Souls fan should have their face mashed by Sigrún.

I mean, major leaps are hard to come by in all hardware, not just console. Everything since about the PS2 has been slow and steady iterations. Major leaps each time seemed to be PS3 era upping the RAM dramatically, and PS4 era forcing games to be installed to HDD. This gen was SSDs with a sprinkling of RT.

SSDs were a major one. The seek time on a traditional spinning HDD is about the same as latency on your internet connection halfway across the country. Boot a laptop on HDD now and it’s so slow you’ll think it’s broken.

Ray Tracing has tried, but needs to be several orders of magnitude more powerful to realistically be able to replace traditional rendering at the quality levels gamers expect. So it’ll be just for a bit of reflections and nicer lighting here and there.

I guess VRR/FreeSync/GSync is nice as well. Moving to that means games can run as fast as they are able on lower end hardware. There’s a world of difference between a 40-50fps VRR display and a 60fps display skipping frames.

Steamdeck actually has a second analogue stick and a D-pad though.

The lack of them on the old controller was painful and just made me swap back to a wired Xbox 360 pad. I can see the idea behind it, it’s just that games weren’t made for it.

Yes, but it’s exponentially expensive compared to cheating.

The loading page was some straight up bullshit though.

1. No. You can with physical. Well, before that just meant a steam key with a disc.

2. That come much later. Try to keep up.

There are apparently 270 million Epic Store accounts made.

Now most of them don’t buy anything and are probably installed on a whim for one free game ad now they’ve forgot their password, while a good chunk of them are probably 12 year olds playing Fortnite who don’t even look at it and hurl all their pocket money into V-bucks so the rest of us get free games, but it’s not an insignificant amount.

When Half Life 2 launched, you had to register your game with Steam before you could play it. You had to give up your physical ownership of the product, and lock it to yourself. You couldn’t sell it to anyone else, or even let them play it.

That’s what you were encouraging by buying from that shitfest of a platform.

I really don’t see how bunging devs money for publishing rights is worse. The devs clearly don’t see it that way.

So it would be better if it was a permanent exclusivity deal, like traditional publishers have?

They’ve been paying out in advance in some cases (Epic Mega Grants, I think) so the devs can finish the game. That’s basically the definition of what publishers do, but when Epic do it it’s somehow “not publishing”?

A guy at work used to use a cloud service called Shadow PC.

They’d basically rent a gaming PC out and he’d just torrent them right on to the cloud machine. Pretty sure mods would have worked there.

It felt a touch laggy with a mouse, but a controller would probably have been just fine. It’s a shame there’s a disconnect between what gamers want (a gaming PC that’s just somewhere else) and what providers want (a walled garden).

Valve kills physical ownership of games: I sleep

Games exclusive to Origin: I sleep

Games exclusive to whatever the fuck Blizzard made: I sleep

Games exclusive to Microsoft Store: I sleep

Games exclusive to Epic: REAL SHIT

I didn’t use it, but I’m still salty that publishers had a fit about that. It’s honestly none of their fucking business where you run your games.

I’m not investing in a cloud only platform like Google’s abandoned attempt, so the only hope is a hybrid like Geforce Now.