The whole point of the Sword of Damocles was that the threat was always looming and Damocles didn’t know when it might fall. We know exactly when Microsoft says they are going to drop support. There’s a decent chance that they’ll push that date back due to slow adoption at least once.

This is more about rats not fleeing the sinking ship until the sea has reached the bow.

It’s a far cry from this guy’s situation, but I think I had five or six bitcoin back when I was mining in the early days. I cashed out when they were maybe $40-50 each towards a new GPU.

Sure, I could go nuts thinking about what I would do with the money now, but if I hadn’t sold at that rate, I probably would have sold at $100, or $200, or…

There’s no way in hell I would have had the discipline to “hodl” to this point, so I just get on with my life.

Yeah, it’s crazy to me that people believe we were “intelligently designed” when our food hole and breathing hole are so close that we can only use one at a time, and that our waste dumping grounds are right next to the amusement park.

Nuh uh. Bae’zel wouldn’t apologize. She’d be like, “Hey, you remember that time we beat each other bloody, then fucked like owlbears? That was hot, wasn’t it?”

I see No One Lives Forever in there. I would love love love to see those games listed and maybe even another sequel, but my understanding is the IP ownership is caught in limbo and very unlikely to ever escape.

Good point. I remember needing a pretty beefy PC to run Civ V at launch. Even coming back to it after a hardware upgrade, the game could get pretty chuggy towards the end of a playthrough.

When I buy a game from GOG, it comes with the presumption that I will download the installer in a timely manner and store a copy on my local storage device. Assuming I have good backup practices, that’s really the end of the story. I can build a 100 new computers and install the game I bought on each one. GOG went bankrupt ten years ago? That’s a shame, but my installer works just as well as when they were kicking.

When I “buy a game” on Steam, I technically get an installer, but Steam isn’t going to help me keep it. Those 100 new computers are going to download that installer a 100 times. And if the 51st install comes around and Steam isn’t around anymore? Or Steam decides not enough people play this game anymore and it no longer makes financial sense to host the installer? Well, at that point I guess I’ll just regret not buying the game on GOG.

Hmm. I generally got my fill of JRPGs back in the PSX era and don’t play them anymore, but I would strongly consider making an exception for a new Breath of Fire game. BoF3 was my intro into the genre. Lots of fond memories.

State of Decay is one of my guilty pleasure series. I know it’s got its faults, but I keep going back to it once every couple years or so.

The standard difficulty just nails that dopamine cycle of grinding and reward, until you’ve got a thriving community that can hold off all threats until the resources in the map are totally depleted and it’s time to move on.

I could probably get a bit better at the game and tackle the harder modes, but that would up the stress factor and make me more likely to put it back down faster.

I’m glad Microsoft is dropping their internal releases on competing platforms now, because otherwise I’d probably never play the upcoming third one as a Linux and PS5 player.

I took a train trip from Raleigh to DC earlier this year. It worked okay, but had big delays in both directions, and the seats were only a little bit bigger than economy flight seats, not super comfortable for 6’2" me. The Wifi was also out for most of the trip and that route takes you through a whole lot of cellular dead zones. Still hard to argue with a $105 round trip ticket though.

My understanding of the scheduling issues is that freight rail companies break regulation by overloading their trains and jumping the line over passenger rail… Amtrak has been lobbying for the government to enforce existing laws to prevent it. I doubt that the incoming administration will do much to alleviate those pains though.

Electronics have lifespans. With refurbished parts, it’s hard to tell if you’re buying something that someone else whoopsie-bought and sent right back, or waited until a day before the end of the return period before sending back. And that return period might be long if they had an extended warranty through the manufacturer.

I’m generally pretty comfortable diagnosing hardware failures and isolating components, but so many electronics are a massive headache to break down and service, you often have to toss them as soon as one crucial component fails. For those, I’d rather spend a bit more and improve my chances of getting the most lifespan out of the whole.

For the Steam Deck, if I didn’t already have a good desktop PC and wanted to get into PC gaming, I would be happy to spend the full price on a new OLED. Just having it for travel and light usage around the house, I don’t mind holding out for a better price breakdown.

And this is of course also assuming that the refurbishing process is on the up-and-up. That’s not always the case

Ooh. Normally I stay away from refurbished hardware, but the Steam Deck has really good repairability reviews. The base OLED price is just a bit higher than what I would want to spend, so I’ll really have to consider this.

Zhak vo’n’ash duj. The source of my bruises.

I started playing around 2022, so I don’t have a point of reference for some of your points. They did overhaul space stations visually, but they are mostly the same functionally system to system. I can’t remember if they made multi biome planets because frankly, I rarely land on the same planet twice. Again, they did revamp the appearances of land and water biomes to make them more interesting as well.

To me, No Man’s Sky is more about breadth and discovery rather than depth and simulation. I have come back to the game a number of times because of interesting expeditions or the addition of new mechanics like piracy or organic ships.

It’s not a game for everyone, and it doesn’t do any one thing better than any other game, but it’s a great experience if you want a solo space sandbox experience.

Corrupted Blood taught us that we needed to add the vital “I’m a malicious/selfish asshole” variable to our calculations.

Good catch. I was drunk when I wrote that comment on my phone. Either I misread the release date or I mistyped it.

Meh, the best way to play RDR was back in May 2014 2010 on an Xbox 360.

Remake RDR1 in the sequel’s engine you lazy bastards.

I don’t think he’s complaining about movie trailers. He’s talking about the Coca Cola and 12 year old M&Ms advertisements that run for 10 minutes BEFORE the theater plug and trailers start.

When I went to see Deadpool and Wolverine, I think the projector fucked up and we had to watch the ad loop twice. When the movie finally started 25 minutes late, people cheered just to see the Marvel logo

I think it’s a roundabout attempt to get us to wonder what the fuck Kick is. I’m not that curious.

I think you misunderstand their point. PostIdent would only be useful AFTER someone took the time to rate the game. Steam does not require any official content/maturity rating in their store, just some subjective content descriptors. To do so would pass an additional cost onto developers. The US-based ESRB process, for example, can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to rate a title.

Further to your point, I try to limit the number of times I provide my personal ID online. It’s one thing when you show your ID at a bar and the bartender gives it back to you after a glance. It’s another when I’m sending a photocopy over the internet and trusting a remote, distant party to use the data once and discard it. Even worse if they save it for future use and risk leaking it later.