Been in my backlog for a while, and this may have convinced me to check it out soon.

Also I gotta say I love the idea of Mid game reviews. Everyone talks about great games to death. Terrible games get s ton of discussion and have the “so bad it’s good” angle. Mid games are often solid values and rewarding experiences that get forgotten about over time.

That’s been rumored for years. I remember back in the day seeing rumors about Halo coming to PlayStation.

Not entirely without merit. Minecraft has been released on pretty much everything with a CPU, although some of those may have been before Microsoft purchased Mojang. There were a lot of weird scenarios after the Zenimax and Activision-Blizzard where the now-Microsoft-owned studios had pre-existing contracts with Sony they needed to honor. It looks like some of the IP they recently purchased that had traditionally been multiplat might remain that way, like the “Age of ___” series, Doom, and Call of Duty.

I’ve seen rumors that Starfield might come to PS5, but nothing substantial. I don’t think there would have been any chance of that if it had sold well on Xbox and Windows.

I’ve also seen rumors of Halo, Gears of War, and Forza, but I will not start buying those unless there are more signs that Xbox is giving up on hardware entirely. If they could get deals done to get GamePass on Playstation and Switch that might start to look more realistic though.

Most of their games are still exclusive though. Avowed just released last weekend for Xbox and Windows and no hint of a PlayStation release for example.

The reverse is also true. Sony has published MLB games for the Xbox and Switch for example.

Nintendo doesn’t “personally” do anything. They are a corporation.

And they do purchase both IP’s and studios. Just off the top of my head they bought Monolith from Bandai-Namco and Bayonetta has been exclusive ever since the second one.

Microsoft has been way worse than Sony. Zenimax alone was might have been bigger than Sony’s entire portfolio depending on how you measure. Activision-Blizzard was far, far bigger. And at least with Zenimax, it seems like most of their studios have gotten worse since acquisition, with a lot of them being shut down.

I don’t mean to overly defenf Sony, but just paying publishers for 1 year of exclusivity seems pretty mild in comparison. I’d prefer they didn’t buy studios like Bungie, but at the same time the acquisitions of Naughty Dog and Insomniac seem to have worked out pretty well.

Depends on whether you consider Xbox and Windows to count as 2 different platforms or not.

It’s so weird to me how many people seem to just hate Sony for doing milder versions of what Nintendo and Microsoft have been doing for much longer.

Sony didn’t buy Zenimax or Activision-Blizzard. Or heck, you could point to the gigantic graveyard of studios that EA and Microsoft have purchased and shut down over the years.

I have seen similar features on phones. Luckily my LG G4 has replaceable batteries. I can confirm that multiple times I have seen my battery reported as fully healthy, only to open up the phone and find a spicy pillow.

So it may be useful for some things but I would not be too heavily reliant upon this without fully understanding where that % comes from.

I’ve seen some that claim to be low sugar, but still have a lot of carbs. For a keto diet. Protein content would not be relevant, moreso the lack of carbs.

I have not checked recently, but the last time I was keto pea protein was a very expensive option. I forgot to mention in my first comment but I have found a more reasonably priced brand of low-carb whey protein.

Also I’ve found that I generally don’t like substitutions. Trying to find a food that is similar to bread or rice really just makes me want bread or rice more. The most successful part of dieting for me is to change my mentality from “living to eat” to “eating to live” anyways. So ideally I would like eggs for breakfast (tons of different ways to prepare them), chicken breast and vegetables for lunch (tons of options here too as long as you avoid high-carb sauces or vegetables), and a protein smoothie for dinner (low-sugar Orange Juice, vanilla protein powder, peanut butter, and ice).

I have successfully started again, but I’ve had to use pork and beef instead of chicken. Which is less healthy and more expensive. Fish is also an option, though not being near a coast makes that expensive too. I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford an increased grocery bill without too much hardship, but it’s a conscious choice to cut back on saving up for big things like our next car or home improvement projects.

It has certainly been annoying, the shortage perhaps more than the price.

My wife and I were keto before the pandemic. Years of struggling just to be less overweight, and all of a sudden with keto we just dropped pounds easily. She has epilepsy too, so animal protein is a key piece of her nutrition. We were actually able to continue through the pandemic at first, but eventually a combination of outbreaks at meat packing plants, the bird flu, and of course the collusion of the major agricultural corporations, meant that we stopped because it was just too expensive. Even our protein powder went from ~$30 for a 10lb package to now $85 for a 3.4lb package.

So we stopped and gained weight. I tried to get us to start again later, but my wife had a hard time sticking to it and kept on buying more bread and rice. We finally managed to make the switch in December. I entered ketosis, started dropping weight, and was really the best I felt in years… Then we got influenza type A. I tried to stay keto through it but eventually had to stop (could not find any keto cough drops).

Okay so that’s all done and finally we can get back on keto. Go to buy some chicken and eggs and… Out of stock everywhere. And since then when it is in stock it’s even more expensive than before.

At this point we’ve already seen the mega food corporations get slaps on the wrist for colluding on reducing supplies and hiking prices for profit- we usually find out a few years after the fact and the news usually gets buried. If only there were a way to truly hold the CEO’s and board members of those companies accountable.

Dishonored 2 was made by the Lyon studio, Prey was made by the Austin studio

Not as much as Loops probably.

I’ve seen people ask why the Fetaverse has nothing to do with cheese

My experience on the Deck and Switch is the opposite: different games lend themselves to different form factors. And both of those (along with other handhelds like the Logitech G Cloud, PlayStation Portal, AYN Odin series, etc) are not really in the mobile space. I can’t imagine a middle schooler taking their Deck or Switch to school. I can’t imagine breaking one of those out on a 15 minute break while working retail or food service. I would not have lugged those devices around campus to play between college classes. The Switch is an exception because it’s a home console too, but the rest of those devices are incredibly niche products that sell orders of magnitude less than either consoles, gaming PC’s, or phones.

And you said yourself: you pick the right game for the job. I could totally emulate Metal Gear Solid 2 or 3 on the Deck, maybe even 4. But I would inevitably get stuck in a 30 minute long cutscene from Kojima. It may be possible to either use a save states or just hit the power button to suspend, but that’s still a bad experience. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s good. I do keep a selection of games on the Deck for different situations.

My wife and I love Skyrim and have almost every version of it. I probably have 1,000 hours in, she is probably close to 10,000 at this point. We always joke about how one of the worst things you can do for yourself is save and stop playing mid-dungeon. You get in a groove and reserve some of the RAM in your brain for keeping track of the in-game space, and if you stop and come back to it a day, week, month, or year later it takes some work to mentally recover. We always try to go back to a house, or at least a town, to save.

For something like Candy Crush or Sudoku? No problem, I can get right in. For a big AAA action game? I need to remember the controls, the map layout, what’s going on with the plot, what my items or build or whatever is, what the enemies are like and how to deal with them, etc. If I’m sitting down for a 2 hour gaming session it’s no problem if I take 3 minutes to get up to speed again, but for a 15 minute break that’s 20% of my time.

Another factor is how long it takes to get in game. I recently played through Subnautica (streaming with Steam Link to either my Deck or Shield), and while it was a great time I was annoyed at just how long it takes to get into the game. Even on an SSD it simply takes forever to load, sometimes close to 2 whole minutes. And I know of plenty of other games that are even worse with all the splash screens and BS before the start menu- the Crash N Sane Trilogy is a big offender for example. If I’m on a 15 minute break I don’t want to spend 20% of that time waiting for the game to start.

It’s exit points and entry points. Most console or PC games are designed with play sessions of at least 30 minutes, usually more like an hour. If you don’t take the exit points, you’re starting a new dungeon or new quest line or whatever and are locking in for the next 30-60 minutes. (You could argue games like Civ might have intended play sessions more like 8-16 hours). Successful mobile games have much more frequent entry and exit points.

RE2 would certainly work fine on the Deck and Switch, but not in those “mobile” contexts. And I don’t think there is enough demand to add Android and IOS support on top of that.

So I’ll admit that it has been a couple decades since I played RE2, but I think there is some room to evaluate what kind of experience players are looking to get from that game and question how much overlap there is with mobile device usage.

When I think “mobile”, I think about games that I can play in a waiting room, on public transportation, in a break room at work, in a cafe between classes, etc. And I think about the games that work well in those situations. Turn-based puzzle games like Candy Crush or Sudoku. Idle games like Armory and Machine, Adventure Capitalist, Fallout Shelter, and Merchant. Even simple runner games.

These games cannot consume all of your attention- you need to still have some awareness of when your break is over, your name is called, or you have reached your stop. You don’t have a ton of time to catch up on what you did previously. You don’t have 15 minutes to spend getting used to controls. You probably don’t have a controller with you. You can’t afford to get into a long cutscenes. You need to be ready to put the game down at any moment.

So something like Resident Evil needs to be significantly re-designed to work. Horror in general is difficult because the player is probably in a well-lit room, possible with music playing, surrounded by other people having casual conversations. Resident Evil itself is particularly bad for this because it famously limits when and how much you can save. That whole system would need to be scrapped. We would need checkpoints at least every 15 minutes, probably more like 5. Any cutscenes need to be skippable and re-viewable from a menu.

There are certainly other situations where I could see it working. A camping trip, a long plane ride or airport layover, killing a few hours at a hotel, etc. I could install an android version onto my NVIDIA Shield, and it might be possible to do similar with a GoogleTV, Fire stick, or Apple TV hardware, although I would speculate most smart TV hardware would probably be too weak to run (cloud could be an option, but that’s already failed pretty hard). It would be cool to be able to play it in any room or out on my porch instead of being tethered to a living room TV.

The problem is those are incredibly niche use cases in comparison. I don’t think there is enough demand to justify Android and IOS ports. Other games sure- Pokemon would be perfect for mobile but Nintendo needs to keep it exclusive to their hardware to, well, sell their hardware. The Genesis classics are already on Android and a lot of them are great. But cinematic games designed around long play sessions just don’t translate well.

Evidence of significantly rigged elections would certainly be a cause for some significant action and demands for a new election.

But I’m not talking about one-off reports of someone using their dead mother’s info to cast an illegal second vote. Even a rogue election official tossing a couple dozen ballots doesn’t really move the needle. We would need to see evidence of millions, or even tens of millions, of votes being impacted for that.

And I can’t really say for sure whether that did or did not happen. But there’s not enough evidence to action.

Instead, I look around at my neighbors, even in a blue city, and see tons of Trump signs on lawns, stickers slapped on cars, people wearing hats and T-shirts. That’s not enough evidence for me to definitely say there was NOT fraud, or even to confirm that Trump’s win is legitimate. But it does affirm that there are real-life people who have fallen for the propaganda. These aren’t just Russian spies trolling on the Internet or bots running on Musk’s servers to artificially update posts. These are real people who have chosen hatred.

Nearly 78 million people voted for this, and another 90 million stayed home and said they didn’t care.

The whole point of democracy is to allow everyone to express their opinions through votes instead of violence. So either the election was rigged or the country wanted fascism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_'Em_Sock_'Em_Robots_Arena?wprov=sfla1

Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots Arena was pretty good. A robot fighting game where you could focus damage onto specific parts of your opponent to knock them off. Not only would they be unable to use that part in that match, but then you’d have the option of swapping out your own parts between matches in the tournament mode.

I’m not particularly fond of fighting games, but the gimmick really drew me in to this one. I remember a lot of fights where I had to choose whether to prioritize just plain winning vs trying to get a specific part for a build.

I can’t find that Sonos has ever made hearing aides. They make wifi-based “smart” speaker and, more recently, headphones that are part of that ecosystem.

1. They’re way overpriced for what they are, similar to the Apple model. Just charging really high prices and trying to create an aura of “premiumness” to justify it. Not the most egregious offense, but annoying

2. The app launch. The app now takes forever to open and I often have to retry opening it around 4-6 times anytime I want to do anything. Considering these are speakers, and that often means that I want to pause, play, change the track, or change the volume. Those are all usually functions where having to wait 60-300 seconds is an unbearably long time, especially when you need to lower the volume. Worst of all, I have my living room TV going into the Line In on one of the speakers, and the entire section of the app called “Sources” where I can select that just disappears entirely ~80% of the time. So if I go to watch TV or play videogames or whatever and my wife was listening to music earlier now I’ve got to wait several minutes of reloading the app to be able to just use the direct line-in.

They also removed the feature to play audio files that were on the controlling device. Other users have complained of other features like alarms that got removed or broken, though I didn’t use those.

The old version of the app was not particularly great, but the replacement was a clear downgrade and made previously purchased hardware worse.

3. A bit ago they had another controversy where you could “retire” of devices you didn’t want anymore. What did this feature do? Why, it just bricked the device and turned it into e-waste no one can ever use again! What could go wrong?

4. More of my complaint for my specific speakers because I don’t know if they’re whole lineup is like this, but really annoying that only 1 of my 2 speakers even has a line-in, and neither of them have Bluetooth options. I’ve got to just hope everything i want to listen to is on a specific supported service, or find a way to get the audio to play on the TV if that isn’t in use.

They were gifts from my in-laws. I was kind of skeptical about it but they weren’t too bad until the app change. I was even considering maybe getting another speaker to fill out the house before all this. But now I’m looking to get out of the ecosystem- maybe just build my own home theater speaker system for the living room and get a plain old Bluetooth speaker for the bedroom.

Junior year of high school, I was starting to get myself together and start interacting with girls in my class. Ended up becoming good friends with one who ended up being single a couple months before prom.

So I ask her to prom and she says “yes”. I buy the tickets for both of us (a couple hundred bucks- good thing I had a job). She bought a dress and I rented a matching tux. My plan was to ask her to start dating AT prom.

But in the time between me asking her to prom and the actual prom, some underclassman just asked her out on a date. And she said “yes” to that too. And they started dating and were BF and GF. At this point where I’ve dropped a ton of money on this prom, made plans with her friends and all their BF’s, etc.

I stand my ground. Prom happens and we have a decent time- her BF does not go. He joins us at a restaurant afterwards and it’s an incredibly awkward night.

That summer the two of them broke up and I asked her out. We dated through senior year, went to different colleges and broke up halfway through our freshman years. She had tons of guy friends who were clearly trying to date her that she always humored. She claimed they were just friends (a lot of them were ex’s) but she clearly loved the attention they, and I, gave her trying to compete for her. I’m not the jealous type but that was exhausting. In retrospect her dating another guy while in the month leading up to that prom was a huge red flag and I should have ran then.

I guess I’m confused about what you’re proposing then. Why would anyone - consumers, Microsoft, or Nintendo/Sony - want an Xbox operating system on a non-Xbox console?