Portal 2 co-op is dope.

You know that drive has a 1 year warranty, right?

HDDs have a bathtub failure curve no matter who makes them.

FH is more arcade than simulation compared to GT, very different feeling games.

When I was putting together my NAS, WD was selling their NAS grade drives without disclosing they were SMR. They got hit with a class action for this.

They’re all trying shady shit, no HDD will run forever, no corporation cares about you, so use whatever you want and backup your data.

I have 114TB of Seagate drives right now and they’re fine. I’d use WD too, or HGST. The fanboyism around HDDs is so strange to me.

Yep my first thought of this is as a technicality. One day every pixel displayed on your monitor has passed through some sort of upscaling or frame generation.

When you say peer to peer, does this mean every player communicates with every other player, or does one person act as the “server”?

Don’t forget the mods! You didn’t have to download anything, it was all server side. I forgot which mod I played most but you could set up all sorts of sensors, automated turrets, forcefields, etc using models and textures already in the game but repurposed.

Also, the net code was extremely good, it was very playable even on my 33.6k modem.

CHEEKI BREEKI

It’s way better than any of the prior games were years after release. Granted, I do have a powerful computer (3090/5800X3D) but I haven’t had any significant performance issues nor crashes. A mild bit of jank but nothing that’s totally broken, just some occasional glitching corpses or debris.

Really, really enjoying it so far. Had a classic STALKER experience while exploring, got ambushed, found some really cool mega-anomaly, thought I was safe and got owned. 10/10 would die again

According to Asobo, this issue was caused by a cache that was overloaded and constantly restarting. This was used in part of the authentication process, I believe when they check what content you have. This explains why people had missing content if they were lucky enough to get in. This was my experience - got in after a very long load time and then couldn’t really do anything due to missing content.

This doesn’t seem like it’s a Microsoft cloud issue per se, it seems like Asobo had a single point of failure in the design that didn’t scale well. Today seems like the CDN limits are finally being reached, as it took a while to load up new areas. Getting into the game was no issue, though.

Can you get the unique seasonal cars? They aren’t in the autoshow, you can’t buy them aside from the AH.

See also: Chex Quest

I had this on my “to play” list for years and finally did a full play through as the first game on my new OLED monitor. It holds up incredibly well so many years later. The AI, sound design, and lighting really carry the game, and when I went back to watch Alien I realized how true to the source material it was. 9/10 game for me, had my heart racing numerous times but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I could only do an hour or two a day but wow, very glad I pushed myself to finish it. Probably the most fun I’ve had with a game’s AI since STALKER’s A-Life or FEAR’s AI.

Still Wakes the Deep. Shit goes wrong on a Scottish oil rig in the 70s, it’s sorta like dead space mixed with alien isolation and a walking simulator. Stealth gameplay with some puzzles and a decent emotional narrative. I had a good time playing it and it’s on gamepass. Short and sweet.

I really doubt they’re listening to your microphone. Constantly uploading your audio would be noticeable in bandwidth and constantly analyzing audio on device would kill your battery - at least currently.

What this demonstrates is how good tracking by other methods is getting. You don’t need to listen to someone’s microphone when you know what they and their friends/coworkers are looking up online and likely bringing up in conversation. It’s trivial to fingerprint someone and track near everything they’re looking up online, and even if you’re privacy conscious, many of those you associate with share their contact list with every app that asks for it. This makes suggesting things your friends are looking up pretty easy. Add a bit of confirmation bias to the mix and you’ve got this “listening to the microphone” theory, because you’re not counting the number of times an ad isn’t something you’ve been recently discussing.

You could say the same thing for any Fallout/Elder Scrolls game, too. ‘Boring ride through the country’ < oblivion and Skyrim. ‘Boring walk to the next area’ <Fallout

Exploration is one of the most enjoyable parts of those games. It’s not boring in ES or FO because of all the things you find along the way. Walking from A to B and getting distracted for 2 hours at random POIs you find is a hallmark of these games.

This aspect was completely absent in Starfield, idk how they fucked up exploration so much.

it’s a literal SPACE exploration game, how can you complain about travelling through space

Traveling != exploration. Eliminating the load screens just leaves you in boring space with no POIs to discover along the route.

I felt differently, so many of those stars and collectibles are uninspired filler. Trying to 100% it led to me significantly disliking it. They could have cut so much and it’d be a much tighter experience.

I use the app but all my subs are done through the website. It’s nice getting notifications for new podcast episodes.

Is Apple going to try and stop this? How would they even do that short of removing the app from the App Store ? I already don’t pay for anything in any iOS apps if there’s an alternative method.

“Can” in the headline, “are developing” in the first line. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Chokepoint capitalism moreso than enshittification. Both are terms from Cory Doctorow.