Midnight Wolf
Hello! Some info about me is up on my website: https://wreckedcarzz.com
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Kotaku: “sold to click-farm powerhouse Valnet”
That very same page: click-bair links after paragraph 1, paragraph 2, a top-anchored video link after paragraph 3, and an endless list of links at the bottom of the page. And that’s with DNS ad-blocking and ublock. I’m curious what it looks like without, but I don’t want to get tech-cancer.
Don’t throw shit if you are also covered in it, Kotaku. I never really liked the site but I don’t remember it being in this sad of a state…
Disagree - I’ve done it, it is easy and straightforward, but anyone who hasn’t installed an OS on bare metal and used a certain tool that you can get from Github to activate MS products, isn’t going to explain the process as “super easy”. More like “a mother-fucking pain in the ass” and “why did you suggest this” and “what the fuck is an iso”.
This is definitely “I’ll swing by this month and install it” territory, not “here’s a guide, ez pz” for anyone older than 40 who didn’t major in CS.
Unbound is… an improvement over heat, yeah. I own a copy, only because it’s a birthday gift and it was $10. I also own heat, got it for $1.25, want my $1.25 back. Whatever the one with the upgrade cards system is trash - and I pre-ordered it. NFS 2015 is… Soulless, awkward. Nevertheless, they all pale in comparison to their older brethren. I’ve been on the nfs train since 3, I own almost all of them, across multiple systems. It’s been an honestly depressing downward spiral - and my friends agree, so it’s not just a sole data point. I think I’m the only one who has heat or unbound, even though I poked people when heat was a dollar, even when unbound was five. That’s… not good. These are people who also love racing games, also love the series.
Burnout got a remaster on the EA App. I bought it, because the ultimate box on pc never included big surf island, and I wanted to experience it. But also, EA bought Criterion to shutter the competing series. They belong in that list. EA killed the game, then they gutted and merged the studio, then restarted the studio in name only trying to do damage control. Then, they used it for a quick buck with burnout, with no effort at all. Similar how the re-release of TS1 and 2 is. EA is essentially serving shovelware itself at this point, ruining the last of their goodwill from the ‘good old days’.
I’ve read battlefield (whatever the latest one is) was half-baked on launch, and from friends who play it, told me to get CoD instead (which is a low blow if I’ve ever seen one; that’s a series that needs to be put out to pasture, imo). Older versions apparently have shitty/broken multi-player game browsing now, and the player base is dwindling because of it. I can’t independently verify any of this, just trusted friends and reviews. The last one I played myself was bad company 2, and I thought it was alright, no big problems.
shrug
E: yeah, it was payback with the card bs
Normal is taking a publishers promises up the ass to fund the game. Granted if I see the next Need for Speed up on early access for $60 then yeah, I get what you are saying, but early access was made so small teams (or solo devs) can not starve while working on a passion project.
A couple of games that come to mind are BeamNG, which only released on early access after 3 years in development (and offering the full game at a very low price); it’s still in development, almost 13 years so far, with regular updates. And Motor Town, which afaik is a team of two people, one making the world and the other doing everything else; they have been in development for 3 years now.
An example of a successful game that started in early access and was finished is Wreckfest. It took something like 5 years. If I remember correctly they had to take a publishing deal midway through, which is unfortunate, but the finished project is great.
Early access is an alternative way to stay afloat while making a game. At least, that’s how it should be. Everything in life has risks. Losing $10-20 after a year of playing a game in development just to have the dev croak, lose interest, change career paths… Isn’t that big of a deal. I’d much rather take that frustration and channel it to piece of shit publishers that axe games a few years after release, taking the full amount and running.
I mean, if you want a thick flat rectangular object that digs into your arm, sure yeah.
I went from a Fossil Hybrid HR (and gadgetbridge) with ~28 days of battery life, to the og Pixel Watch that has ~1.5 days (and later the gen 3 for ~2 days), and I hate having to take it off, charge it, throw it back on, all the time… but Qi has never crossed my mind. The contact patch would have to be huge, and basically flat, and my arm gets irritated enough by the hr sensor rubbing my arm all day…
E: I guess it doesn’t have to be square/rectangular but it’s still has to be big as the hr sensor needs to live alongside it, so the patch has to be flat and around the sensor
Exhibit A:
nfs games up to and including MW 2012
These are solid, enjoyable entries in the series. Peaked with Underground 2 and MW 2005, but the takeover/acquisition of Criterion pumped new life into HP 2010 and MW 2012.
Exhibit B:
nfs games released after MW 2012
These are dogshit. Heavy dlc, meh progression, horrible to play on a keyboard, stupid upgrade systems (cards? cards? are you retarded, EA?), always-online, shitty online servers, horrendous physics, so arcadey that they make actual arcade racing games look desirable.
You’ll note that this game is in the second group.
I got it as a gift a couple weeks ago, they paid $10 for it, which I was holding out for >$5 to buy myself; it’s actually better than the last iteration, but not by much. That game - heat - I thrashed on at launch and 6mo later, and when the premium or whatever edition dropped to like $1.25, I finally bought it (10h demo before) and honestly, I want my $1.25 back. Here, $5 for unbound is about right, near the upper limit.
If they hadn’t killed Criterion (the reboot is in name only, the talent jumped ship with the forced merge), nfs might be awesome still. They have to do a metric fuck-load to save this series. I have almost every game, I’m a massive fan of the series… But for the past decade, it’s fucking dogshit.
That’s what I think when I read endurance/mtbf of hard/solid state drives of like 100+ years. Bitch you released this last week and I know for a fact that you didn’t withhold sales for 100 years for validation of your claims. Also funny how I should reasonably expect 100 years out of it, but you will only provide a warranty for the first three…
Well, and because 2 is fucking abysmal as a game. The starter car shouldn’t feel like it’s on rails regardless of speed, mostly - it’s a fucking racing game, get it right. (modern nfs is in the corner giggling but that piece of shit is always trying to force me to drift, again with an un-upgraded starter car with like 150hp, so it’s no better)
I was a closed beta tester for 1 and 2, and was very excited for both, but going from 1 to 2 is a huge step backwards in handling alone. Whereas I pre-ordered 1 and got several others to as well, I told everyone I know to avoid 2, bought it on sale a while after launch, was immediately disappointed they never addressed this, and it sits with… 13 hours on the clock. As a reference, I have 4,048 hours played in Forza Horizon 5.
I have no idea how they fucked up so badly. It’s a travesty.
(I play with keyboard/mouse out of preference but also because of physical disabilities, so while I /could/ use a controller and maybe mitigate this, grab a controller and try playing with one hand, see how great that experience is x_x) .
I stopped in 2007 and haven’t looked back, and advise friends and family to do the same. This is just more ammo for the “but why” rebuttal speech, and baby, “wanting your cpu to not die” is an awfully juicy bullet.
Watching Intel fuck themselves the last decade has been an absolute delight, but this, I could almost fap to this news.
My steam wishlist (I actually use ITAD but) is actually kinda that. Stuff I want but I can wait on, for one reason or another. Unless I’m quite excited about a game (Cities Skylines 2) or have multiple people planning on getting it for multi-player (Forza), it goes on the list and it doesn’t notify me unless 1) it’s 50% or more off, and 2) it’s the lowest price ever offered.
Lets me have stuff that might pop up randomly during a sale and ‘woo’, but also restrains myself from buying everything I’m curious about. Still have the latest hardware itch, though :p
I bought FH5 platinum or whatever, which included ‘early access’, though that wasn’t a factor in my decision. This was so broken I referred to it as ‘alpha, maybe’. It took two months to fix traffic and random error messages with no details (“ALERT” [OK]). It was about 6 months before it was decent, and patches in the last year have caused weird new (seemingly unrelated) regression bugs.
Me and a tight crew who play almost daily, and I myself have 3.3k hours of game time (others have similar times) are worried about 6 being worse in every way. Throw in ‘car packs’ for $5 each when it was assumed that the platinum version got you fucking everything, or the fact that our favorite game mode is now (for the last ~16 months) riddled with bugs, or that 4 has massive issues when playing online for the past few years that they aren’t going to fix (lobby issues), or that 3 on the pc has online that is completely broken, known, never to be fixed.
I am considering picking up a copy of 6 on launch from yarr land and seeing if it is a massive pile of shit before I plonk down any cash. And with the… let’s say “disappointment” that these three games have been, if I do purchase another I am planning on getting the base game, not the money-grabbing bullshit edition (includes cars released weekly for 1y, and 2 expansion locations that are mediocre at best). You fucking played yourself, MS. Great job.
Similarly, Need for Speed whatever the latest is called, offered early access and bla bla. I wanted to trial it, as NFS has been a dumpster fire post-2012. Fuckers want me to pay money for a trial - are you fucking shitting me? Grabbed a copy from the seas, couldn’t get it going, said fuck it and just told anyone who asked me (as I’m a big NFS fan, so I have a bunch of people who ask my opinion on every release) to keep their $70. The cost has been as low as $5.99, but that’s still not low enough. Fuck EA.
Fuck the publishers, fuck the devs for not pushing back when they need more time, fuck abandoning games the second it’s successor is revealed, fuck game-breaking bugs getting green-lit into release patches because the devs are overworked. Just fuck the entire industry. For me, there are only an actual handful of good games that have come out in the last decade+ and not been the equivalent of consuming feces for $50+. I want my 90s and 00s gaming environment back, not this ball-squeezing blood-sucking hell we have now.
…anyway…
Re 2, I was and am angry about how MS handled the Xbox exclusives. They spent the 90s making games for the pc that were great, and then the Xbox drops and the pc market is ignored for years. “just buy the console” makes no sense when I have a far superior machine right here, and when multi-player is behind a subscription. I was gifted an Xbox a few years after launch, along with Midtown Madness 3, the only game I wanted - and never gave MS a cent of my own money. I stayed on Halo 1 for years, then when Halo 2 finally dropped for the pc, I got it and enjoyed my first playthrough on my computer. My first playthrough of H3, ODST, and 4 weren’t until the MCC dropped on steam. I got Forza bundled with the Xbox, but it wasn’t until Horizon 3 released on pc that I got into it.
I fucking despise the 15-year window where MS just abandoned their loyal customers on pc to milk people with their inferior box and subscription bullshit. The smartest move they have made was re-embrace the pc as a customer base. And 8 year-old me could have told those moronic C-suites in 2001. They isolated a core customer base for short-term profits, and they have earned nothing but resentment for it.
The Xbox should have always been a product for “I don’t understand computers, but I want to play games”, while the pc should have remained a “I know what I’m doing, and I don’t need a walled garden”. MS fucked up massively, and lost out on revenue trying to force their hand for a decade+. The fact that they release on both is nothing but positive, as they get customers from both camps, and they finally are undoing a bit of the hate and resentment they caused.