As a vegetarian, this kind of reminds me of what I’m going through sometimes. Eating out in particular can be annoying, with most meal options in most restaurants containing meat.

Are you not using a software out of principle if it’s proprietary?

Both lasted for around seven years. Not great, not terrible.

I’ve still got a Samsung Odyssey+, which is a WMR headset, a standard from Microsoft that they have unfortunately sunseted (update 24H2 drops support), which is why I can’t recommend it. I’m sticking with 23H2, which should give me until November of next year to find an alternative. It’s a shame, really, because these headsets are cheap, easy to use, work with most games and all have rather excellent screens. Controllers aren’t the best, but still good enough even for demanding games.

The best light gun shooter I’ve ever played is a small VR game: Space Pirate Trainer. You’re just standing on a landing pad shooting down waves of robots, but it’s incredibly well balanced, has an ingenious dual-wielding system allowing you to prioritize protection or various kinds of firepower. You’ll leap around, duck and throw yourself to the ground trying to evade the merciless onslaught. It’s a ton of fun and a surprisingly good workout at the same time.

I’m mentioning this game, because I think that VR shooters are the modern-day successors to light gun shooters. Many players are so fully immersed in the latter already that they are instinctively ducking and evading enemy fire with their bodies, even though it has no actual effect on these games. In VR however, it does and the way you are aiming and firing is identical, albeit not limited by a static screen.

I had given up all hope, but we have a winner nine days late!

Black Flag came out in 2013, so this tracks.

Although, having said that, they have released at least a few interesting things since then, good games and ideas that somehow made it through their corporate nonsense (which developers have made fun of themselves, like in the present day sequences in Black Flag) and might motivate someone to hold their nose and play them regardless, like for example their charming “Indie-like” games made by small teams within their oversized studios (Rayman Legends/Origins, Grow Home/Up, Valiant Hearts, various 2D Prince of Persias, etc.), neat VR experiments (e.g. Star Trek Bridge Crew), educational modes/spin-offs based on the Assassin’s Creed games that cut out all of the slop and allow users to explore these game worlds freely - and Ghost Recon Wildlands, which on one hand is a hugely expensive AAA game with all of the typical trappings, from massive production values to godawful writing, but it also has a charming amount of jank and somehow really fun power fantasy squad command gameplay - but only after removing the awful launcher and DRM that makes you feel like the company hates you for buying their games.

This game has a few technical issues. Widescreen is broken by default and the maximum horizontal resolution is limited:

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dark_Sector

There are also stability issues, especially on modern hardware. It’s not a particularly great game anyway, not even by the standards of AA games from the 360 era. I would only recommend it to die-hard fans of Warframe who want to see some early versions of assets and designs they are used to. IIRC, some assets are even identical. At least it’s very short.

You could easily keep the same resolution, whilst dropping things like particles, shadow effects, etc

This would require per-game adjustments, which is not something you can ask of devs mid-gen, especially not retroactively. Developers already hate that they have to optimize for Xbox Series S - and that console was available from the start. This portable PS5 can only be a success if it “just works” and the only way to do that is by having the exact amount of CPU power as the home console and reducing the output resolution automatically, perhaps with the help of PSSR. Until there is an efficient APU that can pull this off, the console can’t be released.

The Vita was a 3DS competitor, not a DS competitor. They kind of tried to outgimmick Nintendo with this one, unsuccessfully, I might add, because they didn’t build the system around these features, but slapped them on in such a way that developers and players could just ignore them.

The PS5 controller is somewhat of a descendant of this device, although its features are a bit better supported - and it would be trivially easy to integrate them into a handheld.

As for processing power, they need to find a way to get the same CPU power as a base PS5 and enough GPU power for somewhere around 1080p (since going any lower would render many games designed for the home console unplayable) into a cost-, heat, space- and power-efficient package. Most of this work is on AMD, Sony just has to package it. Maybe they can get away with a system that simply forces a lower output resolution for existing games so that less GPU power is needed - or they wait long enough for it to be possible to miniaturize a full-fat PS5 into a portable device. I think the latter is unlikely though, at least within a time frame that would allow for a PS5P to coexist with the PS5 instead of the PS6.

arcadey

Only from the perspective of Orbiter and Elite Dangerous maybe.

Well, if you ever change your mind or need one additional player online on a short notice, even for a single session (perhaps for a specific NPC that you would normally play yourself), consider sending me a message.

So in other words, it was a Tuesday.

Are you DMing online or in the real world? I got to play a single campaign (well part of one) of Traveller until the DM didn’t have time for us anymore (because he was getting back into his actual job of being a military officer - go figure) and to say that I enjoyed it immensely was an understatement. I had a great time both learning how these games work and trying to find the limits of what’s possible. I’d love to do this again sometime.

Correct. It’s the one game in the series that pushed Xbox One and PS4 a bit too far, but has, for the same reason, aged rather nicely.

A PS5 port might come later. Microsoft execs have repeatedly (including recently) talked about bringing Xbox games to PlayStation - and it’s not just talk: Grounded, Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves were eventually ported over after some timed exclusivity. This doesn’t guarantee a port and there is no official word on this game yet, but still.

It might take a year though - or longer. The upshot is that by that point, most serious bugs should have been fixed. The downside is that you’ll miss out on the PC modding scene. Older games in the series have one of the best modding communities out there and I hope they’ll refine and expand this game as well.

Until then, you might want to take a look at Chernobylite. It’s a smaller title, but clearly inspired by the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games.

Not quite. Take a closer look at the icons.

Do you mean Skraper?

https://www.skraper.net/

Could be a DRM issue. Maybe this site is using some sort of DRM that’s not working on Linux, similar to streaming sites. I’m just speculating however. Have you tried a fresh install of Firefox instead of your current configuration?

Let’s play “guess the Ubisoft game”: