Any of the fallout/elder scrolls series. I remember whiling so many hours away in them as a kid and having a great time, and now any time I pick them up it just feels like a second job, looting and managing inventory ad nauseum.

Yeah, most of the time when I get asked for windows help it’s with the subtext that windows is just a piece of shit OS that gets in the way of what they want to do more often than not, and it’s like, Linux at this point will handle 95% of what you want to do. As you said, Gaming, at least with newer and mainstream titles, and web browsing are easy money, word processing/spreadsheets are mostly covered with LibreOffice and the like. The GUI’s a little different but the fact that most distros have one is enough to convince a lot of people to switch.

The professional world might be stuck on Windows for a while just because it’s the norm and most businesses want plug-and-play, but there’s few reasons for personal computing to live in Windows anymore.

My next board and all for the foreseeable future will be AMD. I’m only rocking a 13600K right now and I haven’t had any issues, but the last bios update I did specifically to get the first microcode update wiped my GPU drivers, and the gigabyte update platform installed Norton and some other network monitoring software without my consent.

I think the seven seas be particularly fine this morning, arr.

But can it handle AAAA games?

Fucking ghoulish.

It was slim, but I had hoped that we might get an Arx Fatalis 2 what with the Fatal Fortress easter egg. No more, I guess.

Yep, played the yar har edition, it was a pretty good experience up until a major bug prevented me from picking up a key in late game. It’s a good game notwithstanding that, I’d be happy to pay for it - on my platform of choice, where my library has been since before the Epic Game Store even existed.

I recently picked up Dead Island 2 legally because it released on Steam, and it had some bullshit Epic software trying to install in the background to verify your account. Thankfully you can disable it from config.ini, but it still asks you to log in every time you start the game. That’s some fucking shameful shit, and I would be more concerned about Steam’s near-monopoly status on PC gaming if they tried half the shit Epic did, but until that day comes, I’m happy to give steam my money because their platform puts the least bullshit between me and the game, by far.

I wonder what happens when the last whale has been milked dry. With the number of shitty cash grab games out there with heinous monetization, surely the ecosystem reaches a tipping point where there literally just isn’t enough money to go around, both because the whales themselves run out and the remaining number gets spread too thin among too many Clash of Clans, FIFAs and Diablo Immortals. Do you think we’re going to start seeing real effort in those spaces to appeal to players again, or do they just implode because nobody wants to serve a declining market?

Don’t they mean Bimmy and Jimmy?

You’re only allowed to have fun if we can monetize it

Yeah, like stress casualties due to crunch have been a thing for a long time.

Or a $60 game, or an $80 game, or…

Like seriously, I wish they’d put it in a sidebar somewhere so we can get another game in the list, if I want another deck, I’ll buy another deck.

Randy Pitchford is not unemployed, so he’s working on something

Ehhh, maybe don’t go that far.

Oh, it’s definitely worth a look, of the bunch, Silent Hill 2 and 3 are arguably the best representations of the franchise in terms of gameplay and storytelling. Right now the best way to play SH2 is to look into SH2 Enhanced Edition:

https://enhanced.townofsilenthill.com/SH2/install.htm

You will need a copy of the PC game, but if you already have it or can cough find it, you can use the enhancer patch to fix bugs and restore all the nice pretty post-processing effects.

Very heavy combat focus, with a lot of cinematics that make it look more like a ‘jumpscare horror’ game a la SH:Homecoming than the creeping dread that the traditional Silent Hill games are known for.

I think it’s worth noting that, at least in the original games, combat feels kind of like an afterthought. James Sunderland is not a man of action; Melee weapons are awkward and clunky in his hands, the guns work better, but you’re not really encouraged to kill enemies - most of the time you can just run past. None of the protagonists in these games are particularly heroic, and often they’ve done terrible things that the game only just hints at. It all underscores the idea that these are games about confronting the self, rather than the other, and a combat focus detracts from that idea.

I hope they’re being sincere, but the cynic in me says this is damage control.

I have a hard time believing they spent one year on this game, let alone eight. Half of it, including the game’s engine, the leveling system, and the fucking dragonshouts in space, is pulled from existing sources, the writing sucks, the base building is a pointless perk sink, there’s maybe three dozen unique structures copy-pasted again and again, the enemies are spongy and boring as hell, and despite being Bethesda’s “Least Buggy” work to date, it’s still chock-a-block with bugs.

You know what I think? I think they jerked around exactly like Randy Pitchford did with DNF and they’re trying to pretend they didn’t.

The character art and animation look quite nice, but the environments lack the same aesthetic in places, and the greys kind of blend in with one another. I almost wonder if you could put outlines on the object edges without it getting distracting?

Man, someday you’re gonna have a blast watching the Terminator movies for the first time. Maybe even today!

Steamdeck 2 Episode 2

If you’ve kept it in decent shape, the old model would make a great Christmas gift for somebody special?

Think visual novels but the visuals are maybe something you wouldn’t want your parents to see, unless they’re freak nasty.

Jesus, how can you run a digital storefront in this day and age and not let people post reviews? I read a bunch of those on steam before I buy most of my games.

Don’t need the attitude mods, NEXT!

Am I the only one who thinks that having only a 7% dip in visits and a 16% reduction in time spent on site is really unusual when over 99% of the site was dark for 48 hours? To me, that suggests that something fucky is going on with the count of real users vs bots on the site.