My favorite sci-fi game is probably Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. ME1 was the only game in the series that I enjoyed, but it still felt like a de-StarWars-ified KOTOR game.

I only switched to an AMD GPU this year after 5 years using Nvidia cards. I assure you my situation is more common than yours. Your experience is also why people keep saying “Nvidia is OK now”, meaning quite clearly that it was absolutely not great before.

With Nvidia, once you got it installed and stable (if you were lucky your distro made that happen), it might stay good for many months to even a year. Then BLAM, some update catastrophically breaks your system and you’re stuck booting from a thumb drive trying to un-fuck your system. This was especially rough for me as I used my main system for work and gaming, so it had my Nvidia GPU in it.

My system has been smooth sailing since I switched to AMD. The drivers are in the kernel so it should be about as easy as it gets and shouldn’t be as finicky about which distro or DE you use. Now keep in mind that I am also on a top 7000 card, not a 9000 card, so I can’t speak to them from experience, but I haven’t heard any horror stories.

Nice, thanks. The Steam backlog must grow.

That tracks with what I have seen with my own cards. I suspect some of it is because there were specific driver versions that many distros favored for stability reasons that may have left some performance on the table, but that’s just my personal speculation.

As others have said, Nvidia cards are OK in Linux now, though AMD is better assuming you aren’t doing anything AI adjacent with the card.

The 9000 cards don’t offer much of value other than running a bit cooler IMO. The fact is that the good 7000 cards aren’t really available in retail anymore, so it only matters to people (like me) that already have a good 7000 series card. If I didn’t have one and was looking for a new card I would have no problem picking up a 9000 series card as long as the price wasn’t ridiculous.

Civ 3 was the first game in the series that didn’t feel like a big improvement (graphics aside of course). but you always love your first Civ.

I had that game for the Atari 2600 and unlike E.T, it was a great game.

I still have my copy in my own little museum in my office with some of my favorite (or in this case most notorious) games. Does that count?

Gross.

As far as I know, the PS5 had way more exclusives that the equivalent Xbox console. Sony just started releasing PC versions of many of those exclusives a couple of years after release because they like money, which took away their exclusive status. I see this as a good thing as exclusives aren’t good for anyone other than the console maker.

I have to admit, the GBA SP was pretty hot. I still have mine.

I found that I can’t just start and stop reading and get anything out of it in the same way that I can’t just start and stop a game, but that’s good that you can.

While I definitely have less time for things like that, I still find time to play some games usually by giving up a little sleep and playing after the kids are asleep and tons of chores have been done. I can’t imagine that you still don’t need some downtime, you can’t just be “on” all the time without it heavily affecting your mental health. I hope that you have simply found other pursuits that do that for you.

I just assumed they hired the same person that was previously in charge of naming Street Fighter games from Capcom. I was sure the next Xbox would be named something like Xbox X 360 Series X Alpha Championship Edition with Hyper Fighting

I agree with you fully, sadly. I still buy a portion of my games on gog, especially during their seasonal sales, but more “just in case Steam dies” and to give financial support to gog so that they can stick around and keep doing what they are doing. Hopefully they (or a third party like Lutris or Heroic) will eventually get playing gog games on par with Steam.

It isn’t as seamless as Steam, but using Lutris or Heroic are the way to go if the games doesn’t have a native Linux version available on gog

There are a few specific missions that are indeed stacked against you, but they are important story missions that are like boss fights. You don’t have to play them a specific way to beat them at all, people just get too caught up in playing these games in cookie cutter ways sometimes and now you get site created by AI slop that just regurgitate it.

Disgaea and like are intentionally non-serious and funny. If the humor doesn’t do it for you in the slightest then it’s not for you sadly. I do have to say that once you get hooked on the series, all the other games feel like their mechanics are overly simplistic though.

And no, Tactics Ogre is all serious and very very good.

My favorites are probably the Disgaea series and related games (Makai Kingdom, Phantom Brave) and Tactics Ogre. I also like Tactics Ogres more popular little brother, Final Fantasy Tactics.

I guess this is just a difference in how we look at it. I have for decades now used what I perceive as quality/value to decide whether I should buy a game or whether it may be worth if later if it goes on a steep sale. For example, some AAA game that get polarizing reviews or is known to be very short might be an instance where I’d be not be inclined to pay full price because to me, it wasn’t worth the price. Raising the price of a game to $80 means that I personally will want more value out of it. I just bought a game on Steam yesterday for $20 on sale, which was to me worthwhile. If it had been $80, there is no way I would have bought it.

So, just so I am clear, you think that it is silly to want different amounts of quality or value from products based on how they are priced?

They probably meant that it felt like a game that was stripped down and shallow compared to similar AAA “full price” games and I completely agree. After playing the first one, I wouldn’t only consider buying this new game if it was at least 50% off.

It’s no coincidence that every friend I knew that worked for Amazon as a dev or related job has left. This started a few years ago and has clearly gotten worse.

I guess if they didn’t read the books, watch the show, or play the most popular and most recent game in the series, then it is fairly reasonable for them to be confused as they won’t know shit.

So, basically always then? Yeah, me too :)

I don’t think patents and copyright “need to die”, but they are currently both overly broad and last far too long. Copyright protection especially has no justifiable reason to be even 1/4 as long as it is.

Their https://eshop.thrustmaster.com/en_us/eswap-x2-pro-controller.html model looks good because you can swap out the dpad as well to give it the Playstation layout, but I wish I knew if their dpad was actually good. That is where nearly all third party controllers fail.

I use DS4 pads plugged in, but I’d love a newer model that didn’t have a battery, but had the same layout. So many of the cheaper gamepads come with terrible dpads.

Reminds me of the informal study where people kept choosing pizza that came in more/smaller slices because they thought it was more pizza.

Asus makes a slim 8x external DVD burner that rips CDs very well in Linux, comes with usb-c and usb-a (double connectors.)

Finally a use for the Mr Fusion I got off that old Delorean!

It is no coincidence that the 980 ti was the last top end GPU I purchased from Nvidia. Their greed is out of control and I can’t believe a meaningful number of people have gone along with it.

Fine, let’s go with BotW was a bad Zelda game and I strongly disliked it. I tried to like it and played all the way through because I was stubborn, but in the end I think it sucked as did my friends (they all quit long before I did). I wish I hadn’t bought it or spent time in it.

Also, I disagree that it changed the open world landscape. H:ZD released before BoTW did, did the open world stuff better (IMO), and still doesn’t seem like it was radically novel at the time other than the story/setting. The only truly novel thing about BotW was that it was open world in a Zelda game.

Your list of games would definitely rank higher for me as well (assuming Divinity 2 means Divinity: Original Sin 2). I’m sure there are a ton of games in there I’ve forgotten that would also quality.

I’m shocked that BoTW was considered the top game of the 2010s. I felt BoTW was mediocre over all on top of not feeling like a Zelda game at all. As far as open world games, I felt that Horizon: Zero Dawn was more compelling in both gameplay and story and I’m still not sure I’d rank it as a top game of the decade.

The Dead Cells team definitely has the chop to make a great game, even if I feel it won’t be exactly like an Iga game. That being said, they are likely better off not letting Konami swallow them based on how they have treated their previous star developers. (I’m still pissed about how they treated Kojima).

Also thanks for reminding me about their pachinko obsession. I don’t know why it feel so bizarrely amusing to me, but it does. I just hope they can finally get SOTN ported to PC before they go full pachinko.

It was nice to see the “Dominus Collection” get released on PC at least, but I’m not sure Konami is capable of making a new and actually good -vania game without Iga.

Good luck! I am about the same place in my career and I also wanted to actually release a game (not just make 80% of a game in secret!).

I don’t recall Arena having many patches, but since there wasn’t a great way to distribute patches back then, they probably had no choice but to get their shit at least mostly stable before shipping.