
Oh I think the backlash is warranted. This whole thing is just running on a doom spiral of debt. That never ends well. Wait until the rug pull, where those token costs go from a few thousand a month, to suddenly putting companies in jeopardy because they had to charge what they actually should be to generate revenue, and someone ends up with a million dollar bill at the end of the month. Can’t wait for that part. Also can’t wait for the brainless execs to quit sounding like robots, and foaming at the mouth as they are doing just about the next thing to jacking off while thinking of firing us all. No, the rage is definitely warranted.

There’s a lot of tomfuckery going on with the baskets too. Oh we have 11% inflation but take out fuel and groceries and hey look everyone it’s only 3%!! Yay us we beat inflation!!!
What also makes me absolutely laugh until I cry, is they focus everyone on annual inflation, and conveniently try to make everyone forget the situation. Five year inflation remains to be something absolutely hysterical, it’s something like 24 or 25% I beleive.

I did a 2020 build just as we were all going home, and it was decent enough. After the first wave of GPU craziness, I thought you know what, I’m going to grab one of those 4070ti cards and a 5800x3d, and topped it up to 128gb of Ram (it was on sale for like under $200, so why not, I just wanted to fill the slots). I mean sure it’s AM4, and the 4070 was supposedly the worst card ever and such a waste of money and blah blah blah, but it works. Will work for quite some time. And hey if things keep going the way they are, at least I can put my kids through college by selling some of the Ram in 10 years time lol.

Their free games have been largely pretty ignorable for the past year or two anyways. Most notably at Christmas, where they used to shower AAA titles, this year it was mostly crap. It would be fairly remarkable if they removed games from your library, not sure they’d actually want to move forward with that. It would be the for sure death of an already dying platform.

This game, although I never felt it was all that fun, was the game that blew my mind as a kid. This game showed us that computers were the future. I had an NES controller in one hand, and my jaw hit the ground the first time I saw someone play this game. It’s kind of laughable quality now, but back then it was like holy shit what the heck!!?!
Glad to see it’s getting a remake.

4 hours is pretty cruel.
I mean I beat that game for the first time, in the first way, when I was ten. But it took me a lot more than 4 hours. Now I could probably do it in two. But only for the Bernard involved endings, and where you can make use of the glitches, like the switch character-pause-freeze Edna in her bedroom.

Lifetime of goodwill I believe the quote is. The OP is right on that too. I don’t know how old you are, but there’s a certain generation that allocates Nintendo an exceptional personal worth and views them as an exceptional company, due to the long standing memories that are associated with their products. Mainly the NES/Super NES era, but they had a few waves. It’s not really brainwashing, it’s literally like 20 or so years of memories with products that were key during crucial moments of our lives. So yeah, it’s a bit hard to reconcile that with the way they are acting in our modern age, honestly.

It’s dumb as shit from a business perspective. Get em hooked on it, and it’ll eventually get them buying it through a legit avenue. Emulations hardly perfected in most cases, and a legit product these days isn’t always procured at first point of touch. People would like to know if that $100 purchase you are asking of them is actually worth it, because quite a lot of the time in our modern age, it’s not.

I get what you are saying, I’m not discounting it whatsoever. I mean I’m an accountant, I could talk all day and night about ways to maximize and protect your profits and cash flows.
That said, Nintendo has to be the laziest company from a coding perspective. Their stuff is always the first of the current gens to get jailbroken, and then it’s open season. I think we should have learned by now not to fight piracy like this either, because it’s both inevitable and it’s a terrible look. The smarter companies know how to use it to their advantage. They also don’t always go thermonuclear on their perspective clientele. It’s a rotten look. Make a product that people want to buy and they’ll buy it. If you make shovelware and then price it in the AAAA tiers, I think we all know what’s going to happen…
Pennies on today’s dollar. When I was looking at doing it in 2023, it was still pretty expensive. The ram was about twice the price, plus you’d need a motherboard upgrade. Juice just wasn’t worth the squeeze. I get that stuff like this can be 10 or 20% more efficient or whatever, but then you consider on the other hand that quite a lot of games get released in a trash alpha state where it’s CPU (edit meant to say GPU) bound, or your NVME hard drive isn’t operating at peak state, or something stupid like that. Stuff you never really think about.
If I could rewind, I’d maybe would have done it just to stay ahead of the need to upgrade down the road. I’m hoping to skip the AM5 generation, if I ever build another PC, big if (I’m getting kinda old, don’t game as much anymore).
I probably would have too, but back when I did it AM5 stuff was pretty steep and the value/dollar was still a bit hazy. I’m still not really quite sure what the real AM5 advantage over AM4 for the common person is, especially at the prices today. I mean obviously it’s better and newer and whatever, but is it really that necessary?

I think game designers and studios have to realize that there is a big market they arent serving as much. I’m not a basement dwelling teenager anymore, I’m in my 40s, I’ve got basically no time, I can’t spend 100 hours locked in on something anymore. Take Kingdom Come Deliverance II for instance, like it’s clearly a banger of a game, but I was like 15 hours in and it still hasn’t really started. I just don’t have the attention span for that kind of stuff anymore. I guess I’m desiring more casual like gaming.

Carmageddon Max Damage. I used to live for the original Carmageddon, back when I was in high school. Between me and my old man, we annihilated that game and all the add on packs. This version is a pleasant return to a simpler time, but it’s a nice shake up of the classic too, it’s actually a bit challenging. I’m really enjoying it, about 55% done. I pick away at it here and there, and have been doing that this week. Probably going to replay Modern Warfare 2 (the 2009 version) on the weekend, as I just finished Modern Warfare 1 last weekend.

I just struggle to be…into it anymore.
After the whole COVID thing, after all this other crap, now the ram, like I’m just not into this scarcity thing anymore. A lot of the games suck, everything’s released pre-alpha, all this pre buy hype and then the delays just to build more hype.
I dunno, call me jaded, but I’m just kind of over it, and I’m struggling to enjoy these newer games as much. I mean dont get me wrong, I love games still, I love computers and tech still (obviously), but I’ve as of late have discovered that I’ve missed so much over the past decade or so. I’ve been having a hoot playing older stuff, and it’s so much more enjoyable. Hence I’m not really caught in the hype as much anymore. My last build is about to hit 2 years old, and honestly it’s probably riding the decade out at this point, if not even longer.

I hate GTA online. Actually I have to admit I still don’t understand the appeal of online gaming, it has never scratched the itch for me.
I’ll play GTA 6, but I’m going to keep my expectations in check. I also agree, GTA IV was thus far the pentultimate. I really like RDR2 as well, both are definitely in my top 5.

Well the games for sure haven’t for the most part gotten any better. Maybe with the exception of the Rockstar games, like I totally get all the hate, but their games are also always next level.
And the dial up days lol. My dad wisely and thankfully got a second phone line.
Also I remember those underpowered computer days too lol. We got a 200 Pentium MMX the spring of 97, and that thing was cutting edge at first, but it quickly got pretty dated, like even around 2000 it was starting to struggle with some of the newer stuff. The old man insisted on riding it into the mid aughts. I was long and away at school and afterwards, with my own computers by then, but he rode that thing into the ground, and oh boy was it crawling at the end. We’d come home from school, where we had like wide open broadband, and have to suffer through Christmas break at dial up speeds lol.

8-tracks and 45s. I even remember early day modems where you actually had to pick up a landline, dial the number and then place the receiver in a specially built cradle that used analogue noise to communicate. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 that used cassette tapes to save data.
Best days of life if you ask me. Well actually maybe the mid to later 90s, when the Internet first started coming home for everyone. Watching live concerts and Napster and all of that. Instant messaging people, and being able to download every Nintendo game in existence, on demand. When computer games went from here to THERE, like Carmaggedon and games like that. Those were the magic days. When I discovered Napster I think we legit skipped school for almost the entire week.
Thanks for a trip through the memories!

I’m old enough I can remember operating an 8-track deck in my dad’s truck. Didn’t have GPS accessible until oh geez, probably my later 20s? My kids are very young, so they only know the touchscreen world.
I don’t think there’s any going back. If we had to, like if there was a bad event or whatever, I’d like to think we could all eventually adapt, but it would be rough for sure. A lot of people wouldn’t make it.

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been on a steam forum.
This shits generally everywhere nowadays, there’s no hiding from it. It’s like a worldwide pandemic of brain rot at this point. Everyone is polarized, and that’s never going to lead to anything good. I’m still not sure we should all be this connected to each other.
Social media in moderation and with responsibility and rational thought, there’s nothing wrong with that. But people don’t seem to be able to self police themselves, it’s turned into a massive addiction that’s maybe somehow just as bad as the opioid crisis in some ways. It’s infection has circled the globe, turning a lot of otherwise decent people into mindless meme chodes and racism repeaters.

Can’t speak for you, but I’m still playing both pretty regularly. I still play GTA IV quite a bit too, and return to San Andreas often enough. Vice city is still a classic, but those older ones are just getting a bit janky, which is ok considering they are 20+ years old. All of these games were ahead of their time.
Definitely sets the bar pretty high, maybe impossibly high, for GTA 6
No this one guy certainly isn’t. But it’s shit like this that’s feeding the beast. In a way it’s almost like the AI version of greenwashing.
Also I wouldn’t trust AI with tough time stuff. There’s already several documented cases where it’s led to people committing suicide and whatever else.