I think translations should involve a pair of people where both know both languages but one is fluent in the one while the other is fluent in the other. Or a single person fluent in both, but if you don’t know the other language, it can be hard to verify that fluency and I’m sure it’s not very hard to find people willing to lie about their proficiency to get a job.

Though it’s not really relevant to anyone not speaking that language, even if it’s not review bombing.

Some arcades were actually a bit more manipulative than that in that they’d get harder depending on how long it was since you last put a quarter in.

Mortal Kombat was one. I noticed this pattern on the snes version of MK3 (can’t remember if it was ultimate or not that I had): I’d easily win one fight, then get demolished by the next fighter. Then continue and that same fighter would be easy, only for the next one after that to be much more difficult. I didn’t have to put quarters into my snes but they just used the same tuning from the arcade machines.

Eventually when I played that game, I was spending much more time on the space invaders minigame lol.

I find your pride in your skepticism confusing. Why even bother commenting?

Could you be more specific? I’ve had very few issues gaming on Linux and haven’t felt like I’ve been missing anything. Mind you, I do skip games with kernel anti-cheat, but that’s the only real broad category of games I know have issues.

I believe all that “I worked at blizzard” and “my dad worked at blizzard” turned out to be lies. Even his claims about being a current game dev were based on some vaporware looking shit.

Don’t get me wrong, the original is still one of my candidates for best game ever. But if someone buys it today, who gets paid?

I can say that personally, I do hesitate if I see a game with mixed reviews and will at least check out why people don’t like it. And if steam says a high volume of “irrelevant” (or whatever word they use) reviews are not shown, I’ll click through to see what they are about to decide for myself if they are relevant or just losers whining about “woke” shit.

I’m wondering if the first one needs to go from a game I recommend highly (or upvote recommendations of if I’m too late) to one I no longer acknowledge because the same assholes probably get paid from each of those sales, too.

Yeah but game pass has the massive flaw of requiring windows to run.

I was surprised to see the 9070 xt at about double the 6800 xt performance in benchmarks, once ones with both of those started coming out.

I got it because I also see that if China does follow through with an attack on Taiwan, PC components are going to become very hard to find and very expensive while all of that production capacity is replaced. And depending on how things go after that, this might be the last GPU I ever buy.

I’m so glad that I looked up some cheat codes for Turok 64 back in the day. It had two powerful weapons that were meant to be used sparingly after finding a rare inatance, in one case, or searching the entire game for pieces, after which you only got 3 shots with it. I used those two weapons until I got bored of them.

Then I tried to play the game again without the cheats and realized it was ruined for me. Why would I care to spend time searching for each piece of that weapon, knowing it only has 3 shots, when I was already bored with it?

And then later on, after I had been raiding in WoW, very focused on getting my loot upgrades, I noticed the loop of raiding to get better gear to get better at raiding to get better gear and realized it only had a point if I enjoyed the raiding, otherwise the gear didn’t matter, regardless of what stats or graphics it had.

Those two things together have made it easy to never spend any money on game progression. It’s basically spending money to either get bored of the game quicker by trivializing the powerful things (monetized cheat codes or powerups), or to avoid playing the game in the first place (getting the gear without the raid, when the whole point of the gear is to help with the raid).

And yeah, often the game isn’t worth going through the loop, but they design the early stages to give fast progression to build up an expectation but tune it so that it’s a slog grind if you don’t buy anything, hoping for a few bucks from people as they learn this, or a lot of bucks from those who set strong habits and never do learn.

And when progression is pinned to an exponential curve while upgrades are non-exponential but tuned to be ahead of the curve when you first get them, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend, eventually you’ll always be back at a curve that looks more vertical than anything else and you’ll need to spend money or wait a crazy amount of time.

I hate it when articles have links that look like they might take you to a relevant page about the linked text, like the game’s steam page, but instead take you to another older article about the same thing on the same site.

Don’t forget the other obvious option: we don’t have to play mario. Also, there’s a used game market with a ton of older games and Nintendo doesn’t get a cent from that anymore.

I enjoyed below zero but found the big moments weren’t as big. Like I’d categorize Subnautica as an exploration horror survival crafting game for the first playthrough but then drop the horror for subsequent ones. I didn’t really get the same sense of horror from below zero and don’t think 2 could do it either.

The way the original dripped the information was an experience on its own, you know, the whole reason I’m being vague to not spoil it while being OK with using quotes like “Multiple Leviathan class life forms detected. Are you sure what you’re doing is worth it?”

The second one didn’t have that, even though they really expanded on a lot of things and did a great job at making a successor exploration survival crafting game, it didn’t make me reel or feel like a hopeless situation just entered a whole new level of hopelessness. That experience is what I wish I could go back to but can’t.

In jealous of anyone who hasn’t played Subnautica yet because they can still experience it for the first time.

TAA looks worse than no AA IMO. It can be better than not using it with some other techniques that cause the frames to look grainy in random ways, like real time path traced global illumination that doesn’t have enough time to generate enough rays for a smooth output. But I see it as pretty much a blur effect.

Other AA techniques generate more samples to increase pixel accuracy. TAA uses previous frame data to increase temporal stability, which can reduce aliasing effects but is less accurate because sometimes the new colour isn’t correlated with the previous one.

Maybe the loss of accuracy from TAA is worth the increase you get from a low sample path traced global illumination in some cases (personally a maybe) or extra smoothness from generated frames (personally a no), but TAA artifacts generally annoy me more than aliasing artifacts.

As for specifics of those artifacts, they are things like washed out details, motion blur, and difficult to read text.

TSMC is the only proven fab at this point. Samsung is lagging and current emerging tech isn’t meeting expectations. Intel might be back in the game with their next gen but it’s still to be proven and they aren’t scaled up to production levels yet.

And the differences between the different fabs means that designing a chip to be made at more than one would be almost like designing entirely different chips for each fab. Not only are the gates themselves different dimensions (and require a different layout) but they also have different performance and power profiles, so even if two chips are logically the same and they could trade area efficiency for more consistent higher level layout (like think two buildings with the same footprint but different room layouts), they’d need different setups for things like buffers and repeaters. And even if they do design the same logical chip for both fabs, they’d end up being different products in the end.

And with TSMC leading not just performance but also yields, the lower end chips might not even be cheaper to produce.

Also, each fab requires NDAs and such and it could even be a case where signing one NDA disqualifies you from signing another, so they might require entirely different teams to do the NDA-requiring work rather than being able to have some overlap for similar work.

Not that I disagree with your sentiment overall, it’s just a gamble. Like what if one company goes with Samsung for one SKU and their competition goes with TSMC for the competing SKU and they end up with a whole bunch of inventory that no one wants because the performance gap is bigger than the price gap making waiting for stock the no brainer choice?

But if Intel or Samsung do catch up to TSMC in at least some of the metrics, that could change.

Just in case you are thinking this like I used to, don’t go by “unplayable on steam deck” to determine what games you won’t be able to play on a Linux desktop. While those games include incompatible with Linux games, they also include ones that the deck hardware can’t handle at a decent framerate but otherwise play fine on Linux.

Depends on whether their ambitions concerning Taiwan are more about Taiwan itself or interrupting western chip dominance/production. I think without the second part, invading and occupying Taiwan would be more of a negative than a positive for China.

Maybe it was deliberate and intended to give some self awareness to some people who won’t take no for an answer and keep trying.

All it had going for it was the over-short-sold theory, which was sound but not enough to prevent the billionaires from just adjusting the way they play the game. The idea to become a focal point for gaming (instead of just a place to buy games and other shit) might have worked but I never saw any changes at all in that direction in any gamestops I visited. Just shelves full of products I only kinda want. And a lot of space dedicated to funkopops, which I don’t understand why anyone wants. Does anyone even still want them at this point? I don’t think I’ve every seen someone buying one.

They came out of the gate with anti consumer bullshit in the form of exclusivity deals. Trust was shattered before they even got going.

From my POV, there isn’t a difference, other than a CCG gives you physical objects so wotc can’t just up and decide that they don’t want to run magic anymore and make all of that loot disappear.

But from the gambling perspective, it’s exactly the same. Oh, actually one other difference, electronic gambling can fuck with the odds in real time while physical cards need to be determined when the pack is assembled. But it’s still based on false scarcity.

Yeah, I think this would be a useful feature for games out of early access, too. It’s not as important (because not all games need updates) but it would be a nice plus to show how long it’s been since the last minor and major updates.

Maybe also add a standardized spot for possible features with various levels of confidence and ETAs (along with history so it’s easy to see when a feature has been “promised soon” for years). Devs could address common complaints in reviews this way, rather than replying to a few and hoping those are the ones people see, plus the nightmare of updating those replies if things like timeline change.

Any time some weird thing results in the refresh rate being set incorrectly, it is pretty noticable to me. Though it might be more about the pixel response time being tuned for the max refresh rate and thus the screen looking a bit darker at lower refresh rates (because the pixels get closer to returning to black before the next frame comes in).

Just speculating on the reason but I definitely notice it when it’s wrong.

I had planned on getting a 4k monitor as part of my upgrade path. But then when it came time to get it, I stopped and looked closely at my 1440p monitor and realized that I never thought games didn’t have enough pixels to look good.

I ended up just getting an ultra wide 1440p instead and don’t regret it.

A good portion of my failures in boss fights are due to getting the boss low and thinking, “I can just spam attack until he’s dead now” and then getting caught by attacks I was avoiding prior to that.

And a decent portion of the ones left after eliminating those ones are due to not being used to the attacks enough to avoid them consistently.

Assuming soulslike boss fights.

Oh yeah, 90s and 00s Blizzard was great. I had fallen in love with RTS after playing a demo for Dune 2000 (I think it was) and after mentioning it to a friend, he loaned me his copy of Warcraft II. From there, my top games were Blizzard games for over a decade. WC2, SC, found out that cool Diablo game another friend had shown me was also Blizzard as they were marketing D2, then WC3, then WoW was my peak Blizzard obsession. But they still had some more good ones: SC2, Hearthstone, HotS, then the first Overwatch.

I think all that WoW money ruined them. Line must go up, even if they were on a massive mountain that would naturally eventually wane as people grew bored of the game and the niche it fit in grew more crowded. They started chasing dollars instead of chasing great games and making dollars in the process.

That Diablo phone app game being announced as if their audience gave a fuck about mobile games showed how out of touch they were with what used to make them great. And the follow up “don’t you all have phones?” just cemented how blind they were, not even considering that the people making mobile games so much money didn’t have much overlap with their current fan base, most of whom built a relatively expensive gaming PC to game on despite how much cheaper phones already were.

And there were other questionable things, like that WC3 remaster that no one asked for replacing the more capable original.

The D3 auction house, though to be fair to that one, I liked the idea going in and it was only after experiencing it that I understood it was a bad idea that would make most runs boring because most drops couldn’t compare to items I could get cheap on the AH.

Then the China thing and trying to defraud a tournament winner out of their prize because he said something in support of Hong Kong. Then finding out that it was a workplace dripping with toxic masculinity (which was the case even when they were doing great).

And then they did a WC3 remaster on Overwatch, replacing the game that was originally purchased at AAA price with a free to play one that also wasn’t finished, with features promised to make the replacement easier to swallow just dropped.

By the time Microsoft came to buy them, I didn’t care what happened to them anymore. Activision had already been business major enough, with their only credit being that they didn’t immediately enshitify Blizzard when they acquired them.

Not to mention the selection of games available is pretty paltry.

For game streaming itself, there’s always going to be the latency issue that will keep a bunch of gamers away from ever using it. I never bothered even looking at the streaming options when I had game pass because of that.

GPU drivers have low latency modes for when the timing of a frame update means your current input will come a frame or two later, and a difference of 10ms in frame delivery time can be enough to call something a stuttery mess.

Now add network latency that is an order of magnitude higher. Streaming video and/or audio is fine because it can buffer enough to absorb typical latency jumps, but games can’t buffer more than the upper bound of input latency, so that brief 1 second network hiccup is a horrible stutter where you can’t even move.

Though at least game pass works more like Netflix in that you can just pick a game available and try it out if you have a sub. I don’t get the appeal of the ones where you not only subscribe to the service but also need to buy the games you play at full price.

Plus the Blizzard name has cashed in all of its previous good reputation, at least from my point of view.

Most fond things I see said about them are from people still playing their older games, other than a friend that is still playing wow classic.

Yeah, it’s kinda like asking your mail deliverer when something you pre-ordered will arrive.

My favorite so far has been Enshrouded. Voxel world that doesn’t look like it’s made of cubes, plus souls like combat (though not nearly the same difficulty).

WoW probably holds the most cases of this for me.

World PvP was one front. Early on, just winning fights felt good. Then, as I got better, it felt more normal when it was an advantageous matchup for me. But the peak for me was during TBC, I was leveling my rogue and a hunter jumped me as I was mining. This was pretty much a worse case scenario, especially because the hunter was lvl 70 (max at the time) and I was still something like lvl 65. But even at the same level, a) a hunter is a natural counter for a rogue, and b) I was mining so I didn’t even get the stealth advantage.

So there was a lot of dopamine when I ended up getting to finish mining that node and the hunter had to walk back to his corpse after I beat him anyways.

Also a lot of dopamine from finally beating raid bosses that my guild had been stuck on for a long time. Vael in BWL was the peak for that one IIRC.

Who knows the connection between badgers, mushrooms, and snakes?

Rot is an essential part of our digestive process, assuming rot just means biological processes converting food from one state to a generally less appetizing state.

A better way to handle that would be for “taking screenshots when other apps have focus” to be a special permission that needs to be explicitly granted. Could even make it app specific (ie, “I allow app x to take screenshots or record the display/audio of apps y and z”).

Just like arbitrary apps shouldn’t have access to look at the clipboard or full file system whenever they want.

They meant they wanted a game set during the conjunction of the spheres but didn’t know if witchers were a thing yet at that timeframe in the lore. The wording made it seem like they were talking about your first witcher idea but they were talking about a different alternate timeframe setting they’d like to see.

Exactly. Oh and I also just remembered another angle: their anti-linux stance. They used to make games with native Linux support, but as I understand it, they’ve even removed Linux support from some games that already had it, trying to keep the Microsoft monopoly going. I wonder how much money ms is giving epic for that.

Same reason why a lot of the non-steam handhelds are non-starters for me. And yeah, I can live without games that depend on Windows kernel-level anti-cheat.

My backlog is so full I could keep entertained even if I ignore every single game I don’t currently have in my steam library. Hell, I even ignore some that are there when I realized they have denuvo or something like that after buying and the refund window has already passed when I do notice.