While doing some research on Sega Channel (I was a SNES kid) I found this article which has a lot of cool info.

I just let that mission fail and got on with the rest of the game. I’ll do it next time I play the game though.

When you say peer to peer, does this mean every player communicates with every other player, or does one person act as the “server”?

Don’t forget the mods! You didn’t have to download anything, it was all server side. I forgot which mod I played most but you could set up all sorts of sensors, automated turrets, forcefields, etc using models and textures already in the game but repurposed.

Also, the net code was extremely good, it was very playable even on my 33.6k modem.

HL2 didn’t feel like a it has a technical leap as big as its predecessor

Gotta disagree with you on this one. Half Life was basically the Quake 2 engine with different textures and models. It was applauded for being a good game, it did not really set any technical benchmarks.

Half Life 2 was absolutely mind blowing with the physics, facial animations, and shaders. It’s the first game I can recall with that level of physics realism, and set the stage for many games to come. The Source engine was a massive technical leap from Quake engine.

Seeing the HL2 E3 demo was a peak moment in my gaming life.

Give the Deus Ex series a try, the story in the original is IMO one of the best, and the later games have awesome stealth and cool world building.

It’s updated to 1.0.2 by this point, this post is old news.

Hmm. I haven’t played with the sniper rifles yet due to the extremely short range spawns, but I’ll give it a shot later.

One thing to keep in mind is the game is not realistic in terms of weapon damage. You can fire the same bulllets out of different tiers of weapons and they’ll have drastically different damage due to the penetration values. To me, penetration seems to be the key stat for weapons.

Hooded bandits drop in a single headshot from Skif’s pistol. Guns in all stalker games have pretty severe damage falloff with the lower tier weapons. Gotta close the gap.

I’ve not really had any issues dropping dudes or mutants except the Chimera, on medium difficulty.

I drop people in a single shot often. Skif’s pistol, silenced with AP rounds, is OP as hell and nearly free to repair.

Only recently near SIRCAA have I noticed it being much harder, now that enemies have better gear. It takes 4-5 headshots with mid tier rifles for some of the armored/exoskeleton guys, using AP rounds in one of the unique mid tier 5.45mm guns.

I dunno. Personally it doesn’t feel much different than any other STALKER game in terms of enemy difficulty or how the guns work. Lots of damage falloff over distance with the early game guns.

I desperately miss A-Life though, and some of the bugs in SIRCAA are really bad, it took me quick saving every 10 seconds and many, many reloads after a CTD to get past that area.

I honestly don’t think the mutants are unbalanced or too tanky. One of the first things you have to do in STALKER is know when to GTFO and run away. This is even demonstrated in the first bloodsucker encounter when there’s a ladder only you can climb nearby and escape.

It shouldn’t be easy to take out bloodsuckers early game. They’re trivial once you’re 10 hours in and have a good shotgun. You close distance, mag dump in their face, and that’s that. It’s even easier if you can backtrack into a corridor.

You’re supposed to feel weak and scared of engagements early game. You can run away from many encounters, or lure them into a favorable position. Jump on something. This has been the vanilla stalker experience since I started playing back when SoC came out. If you’re really stuck, just toggle it to easy difficulty for a couple minutes.

IMO all that needs tweaking for balance is the repair costs, those are exorbitant.

It’s not online/offline like the internet, it’s just referring to how the AI is doing open world stuff. A-life has two modes. Online which is a bubble around you where enemies are rendered with models and doing things in the world, and offline where they’re basically just numbers on a spreadsheet. They have simulated activity offline, like walking around, looting things, sleeping, etc. but aren’t actually spawned into the world until your online “bubble” is nearby.

Good news is that disc rot doesn’t happen as quickly for stamped CDs as it does in CD-Rs.

That’s correct. The online spawner is bugged and this also affects offline A-life behavior.

I ran it on default recommended settings (High, 3440x1440) and it’s smoother than any of the originals were, even after they had years of patches. I experience some mild stuttering when I approach a hub area with lots of NPCs but it’s not terrible. I can’t really complain. 3090 and 5800X3D.

Pretty fun for me so far. There’s some weirdness with dudes spawning too close and A-Life AI seems to be missing but I’m enjoying the zone so far after 15 hours or so.

CHEEKI BREEKI

Personally I’ve found it to be way more stable and performant than any of the prior entries, even after they got patches.

It’s way better than any of the prior games were years after release. Granted, I do have a powerful computer (3090/5800X3D) but I haven’t had any significant performance issues nor crashes. A mild bit of jank but nothing that’s totally broken, just some occasional glitching corpses or debris.

Really, really enjoying it so far. Had a classic STALKER experience while exploring, got ambushed, found some really cool mega-anomaly, thought I was safe and got owned. 10/10 would die again

According to Asobo, this issue was caused by a cache that was overloaded and constantly restarting. This was used in part of the authentication process, I believe when they check what content you have. This explains why people had missing content if they were lucky enough to get in. This was my experience - got in after a very long load time and then couldn’t really do anything due to missing content.

This doesn’t seem like it’s a Microsoft cloud issue per se, it seems like Asobo had a single point of failure in the design that didn’t scale well. Today seems like the CDN limits are finally being reached, as it took a while to load up new areas. Getting into the game was no issue, though.

Can you get the unique seasonal cars? They aren’t in the autoshow, you can’t buy them aside from the AH.

Proper spatial audio, ie not the DSP effect that upconverts stereo, but something like Atmos or DTS:X that’s sending object based audio to an arbitrary number of speakers, does sound better to me on headphones in the few games that support it. The only game where use it regularly that I can think of is MSFS, but it does sound better than headphone stereo. You do have to pay Dolby to use it, or buy headphones that come with it, however. Sounds best on my 5.1 home theater, but also does a good job with binaural headphone output.

See also: Chex Quest

I had this on my “to play” list for years and finally did a full play through as the first game on my new OLED monitor. It holds up incredibly well so many years later. The AI, sound design, and lighting really carry the game, and when I went back to watch Alien I realized how true to the source material it was. 9/10 game for me, had my heart racing numerous times but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I could only do an hour or two a day but wow, very glad I pushed myself to finish it. Probably the most fun I’ve had with a game’s AI since STALKER’s A-Life or FEAR’s AI.

This is funny looking.

Still Wakes the Deep. Shit goes wrong on a Scottish oil rig in the 70s, it’s sorta like dead space mixed with alien isolation and a walking simulator. Stealth gameplay with some puzzles and a decent emotional narrative. I had a good time playing it and it’s on gamepass. Short and sweet.

I really doubt they’re listening to your microphone. Constantly uploading your audio would be noticeable in bandwidth and constantly analyzing audio on device would kill your battery - at least currently.

What this demonstrates is how good tracking by other methods is getting. You don’t need to listen to someone’s microphone when you know what they and their friends/coworkers are looking up online and likely bringing up in conversation. It’s trivial to fingerprint someone and track near everything they’re looking up online, and even if you’re privacy conscious, many of those you associate with share their contact list with every app that asks for it. This makes suggesting things your friends are looking up pretty easy. Add a bit of confirmation bias to the mix and you’ve got this “listening to the microphone” theory, because you’re not counting the number of times an ad isn’t something you’ve been recently discussing.

You could say the same thing for any Fallout/Elder Scrolls game, too. ‘Boring ride through the country’ < oblivion and Skyrim. ‘Boring walk to the next area’ <Fallout

Exploration is one of the most enjoyable parts of those games. It’s not boring in ES or FO because of all the things you find along the way. Walking from A to B and getting distracted for 2 hours at random POIs you find is a hallmark of these games.

This aspect was completely absent in Starfield, idk how they fucked up exploration so much.

it’s a literal SPACE exploration game, how can you complain about travelling through space

Traveling != exploration. Eliminating the load screens just leaves you in boring space with no POIs to discover along the route.

The people clamoring for traditional FPS flashlight took a lot away from the horror aspect. Being forced to choose between flashlight or weapon was great, sometimes I’d just be seeing from the muzzle flash. Having the flashlight and gun simultaneously ruined this deliberate disempowerment.

I played the shit out of this when it was released, really enjoyed it. Getting stoned and playing it in the dark on my Viewsonic P95f+ CRT was an absolutely blast.

Glad the article mentions Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay because that was a really dope game of the same era that I rarely see mentioned.

I felt differently, so many of those stars and collectibles are uninspired filler. Trying to 100% it led to me significantly disliking it. They could have cut so much and it’d be a much tighter experience.

I use the app but all my subs are done through the website. It’s nice getting notifications for new podcast episodes.

Is Apple going to try and stop this? How would they even do that short of removing the app from the App Store ? I already don’t pay for anything in any iOS apps if there’s an alternative method.

You can already walk around in the cabin in 2020 by translating the camera.

“Can” in the headline, “are developing” in the first line. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Chokepoint capitalism moreso than enshittification. Both are terms from Cory Doctorow.

The OG Galaxy S had a dope Wolfson DAC in it. I used the Voodoo sound app to get proper drivers on it and it became the best sounding phone I ever had. It drove my 250 ohm Beyerdynamic headphones with ease.

The studios they kept around are making games that are a shadow of their former selves too - Halo Infinite and Forza Motorsport come to mind, as well as Starfield. Microsoft Flight Simulator is the only really good one still as far as I can tell.

Just wanted to comment that the Xbox/MS store games are fine now. They used to be in some shitty encrypted directory but not anymore. I have Gamepass for free from a ton of Microsoft rewards points and primarily play GP games on my Xbox, but I’ve played a few on PC as well and I’ve not found it to be too much different from Steam. You can go to a directory and see all the game files as expected. The always online bit sucks though, the recent Microsoft outage due to Cloudstrike kept a lot of people from playing games. That said, I don’t buy any games there, but my experience with gamepass games has been fine past that initial encrypted directory phase.

I wonder what the energy/environmental impact is vs a traditional search.

$10 to Uber eats, so basically it’s covering fees only.

Reducing the resolution doesn’t make the beam move any less, even at 1px it would still scan and hit all the phosphors on the screen. My Viewsonic uses the entire screen regardless of resolution; if you set it to 1x1 the entire screen would be lit up. It’s not an LCD, there is no native resolution.

Forza Motorsport is a huge disappointment. Even if the graphics are fixed, the single player content is shockingly thin, and increased graphics settings won’t fix the bad models, unrealistic track details, terrible sound, or numerous bugs.

For gamepass imo the best value is from playing smaller titles with limited replayability. I’ve played a ton of games to completion that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Currently I’m playing through Botany Manor, other ones that stand out are Jusant, Scorn, and Art of Rally (gone now unfortunately).