soli

Oh god, I really hope my phone doesn’t do that when it records. The recording button is on the screen during calls and I accidentally hit it all the time.

I’m surprised at how hard seeing Max again hit me. I don’t have much interest in playing a new LiS game, but I still got unreasonably emotional dredging up memories of the first game.

Remember that other sequel with puppets?

puppets sounds cool actually

I played it a couple of years ago, before a lot of the patches, and still thought it was one of the better games I have never finished.

It might not be the right thing to say publicly, but it’s absolutely something they should be concerned about internally. It’s fucking astonishing how many man hours went into Starfield for such a hollow final product.

Young gamers don’t know the pain of a BSOD and the interminable wait getting back into game on an IDE hard drive. Even a CTD was a nightmare.

This is restricted to a small part of modern gaming, though. In indie games-

Yeah, no, maybe the fact that you had to immediately jump to indie games should have been a hint that it’s not a small part.

The level of quality and number of bugs depends a lot on the era you’re talking about, as well as the platform. As a PC gamer from the 90s, much of my technical literacy came about from trying to coax games to work. My experience with console gaming was usually much more hassle free, though I have far less experience with it and don’t have a modern point of comparison (last console I even used, not even owned, was the PS3).

My real point of “it was better in the old days”, is the industry learning to exploit addiction. It’s everywhere, and it’s not just gambling. The longer you play the more likely you are to pay so even without loot boxes and the like, games are taking as much out of casino playbooks as possible. It’s fucking revolting and should be criminal.

As someone who has had problems with addiction of various kinds in the past, it’s so blatant to me. I can feel it playing into my vulnerabilities and it makes my blood boil. I avoid most gaming these days because I know if I let it become a habit, the next time life knocks me down I’ll fall victim to this.

It Takes Two would be my introduction for a partner who doesn’t game very much. Co-op, easy to play, fun in a really low stakes way with a great story. I had tons of fun with the game playing with an ex.

Raft is another I played with an ex that was a lot of fun. It’s a very chill co-op survival game where you build up your boat.

I disagree with most of this thread. Microsoft must maintain market share at all costs, any additional monetization from tracking or ad revenue is a very distant third to that. It lives based on being the default option. A new launch will bring in new users and help keep existing ones, but it must be seen as successful. So Microsoft needs to port as many of it’s current users over as possible.

Second I think is pruning the nightmare of legacy support. A “new” operating system lets you set a more modern baseline and tell people to buy new hardware in a much more user intelligible way. No having to explain why Windows 7 no longer works on someone’s 2007 laptop that came with it, or come up with a maze of partial support and having to work out what the last usable update was.

I’ve been looking for rentals lately. Every inspection has dozens upon dozens of people show up. Rental vacancies are at a tiny fraction of a percent. No landlord will take someone if the rent will cost more than 30% of their income. To qualify for a studio apartment it takes almost double the median wage.

I hate it so much. I’ve budgeted so that I know I can afford these places on my income, I have a significant pile of savings and a stable job. I have been looking for a place for six months and been rejected from them all.

I’ve given up. Even if I could get a place it’d be cheaper to pay a fucking mortgage.

That’s interesting, when I learned to touch type in school we weren’t taught to use the right shift. Likely an oversight rather than intentional, but I just use my pinky to hit the left shift while using the left hand side of the keyboard.

If you aren’t going to find a new job, document any inappropriate behavior. Talk to the other women and get them onboard. Let them know who he is. It wont take much to have him out on his ass if he does anything. Bring up his conviction when you report misconduct as well.

There are plenty of jobs he can work that aren’t with the best friend of his victim.

I was really hoping for the link to be Let’s Lynch the Landlord tbh

Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) is my favourite pirate game. No, it’s nothing like what you think a licensed tie in game from 2003 would be like.

It’s a real oddity. This was made by a Russian studio and originally meant to be a sequel to their previous age of sail game, Sea Dogs. In Russia it was still marketed as a sequel, without the Pirates of the Carribean branding. It has basically nothing to do with the movies in reality. I have no idea how or why this ended up being a tie in.

I don’t really have a short hand for describing the genre. It most reminds me of space sims - where you control a vessel which you can replace, has an economy/trade system, management mechanics, factional reputation systems and an open world. It’s not a simplified as Freelancer, but not a spreadsheet game like the X series.

The sailing is great, a happy medium between completely arcade stuff where you just point your ship where you want to go and sims. Wind and weather play an important role without being tedious or overwhelming.

You also control a character for ship environments, like boarding, and exploring towns and islands (with swashbuckling combat, of course). It’s pretty bare bones but the variety is appreciated. There are lite-RPG dialogue/story mechanics and quests, though I do not want to give the impression this narrative heavy game. It’s an RPG style that used to be relatively common but not so much anymore.

But the real highlight is the New Horizons mod which greatly overhauls the game. It’s been developed for almost 20 years. I don’t recommend playing the vanilla game - I enjoyed it at the time, but it’s just an inferior experience to the mod.

Best yet, it’s free. The game is abandonware.

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Citizen Sleeper - From the same publisher as The Pale Beyond, it’s another one of those story games that borders on visual novels. It’s a game about precarity and personhood set on an anarchic, decaying space station. Gorgeous art, fantastic soundtrack and it’s uniquely hopeful. Might be favourite game of the last few years.

Unless Pokemon counts, I don’t think I have ever enjoyed a JRPG. I have zero idea what people see in these except weebs getting horny over anime girls.

I didn’t even like Doom (2016). It was ugly, dull and I hated the finisher system. Really disappointed because I’m old enough to have played the other Doom games as a kid and I mostly enjoyed the new wave of boomer shooters. Great soundtrack though.

TikTok is owned primarily by western investors and it’s board is majority American. Usually I would be here to give the contrarian opinion that the government that is most likely to harm you is your own and that the majority of people would be better off with a non-cooperating country having your data. However, TikTok is just as likely to hand over user data to the US as Facebook is. It’s the worst of both worlds.