Mood.

I’m not going to pay $45 for any game. If I’d known about the “never on sale, price only goes up” model they were using, I might have bought it back when it was $20, but I’ll just never play it now and I’m okay with that. There are literally hundreds of amazing games I already own to play, and if I had 100+ hours to sink into a game like this (I don’t, post-kiddos—for now, anyway), then I’d strike the earth for some Dwarf Fortress !!!FUN!!!, which I know I’ll enjoy.

Or maybe finally get around to beating Baldur’s Gate 1… (I never made it past the early game… BG3 I’ll get to in the 2040s at this rate, ha ha!)

Aside from people who just want to play football/CoD/D4/whatever multilayer game, I don’t understand why anyone pays full price for games. I’m glad they do, mind, since they’re subsidizing the development costs mean games get made, and I get amazing games for cheap.

As a recent example, I nabbed MH Rise for cheap recently, and bounced off it. I might try again later, but it didn’t grab me. So glad I didn’t pay more than $15 CAD for it!

Published Oct 16, 2024

(In case anyone else was confused by the timing of this.)

Isn’t it getting harder to find custom ROMs, now? Used to be basically everything was on XDA forums, but I’ve heard lots of custom ROMs are moving to they’re own websites/Discord servers/whatever.

Meanwhile, Steam is raking it in by continuing to offer a better product than piracy. The Steam Deck is making that even more true; it’s so much more convenient to have games in the Steam library than try to keep a repack updated with new patches/content.

Right, but pirating Disney-owned IP is more moral than paying for it. Disney is the number 1 company in the world for lobbying for copyright over-reach. Every dollar that goes to Disney pays for lobbyists who will continue to push for life-of-author + 90+ years, because life-of-author plus 70 years just isn’t enough time to control our shared cultural heritage.

Similarly for Nintendo and software piracy.

Paying for Disney/Nintendo media is immoral.

If you’d read the article, you’d know that the author isn’t suggesting that.

“Family first” is unidirectional. Parents put their kids first. That’s the job. I signed up for it, and I’m going to prioritize then as much as I can.

A friend of mine has (had?) most of the world records in Sayonara Wild Hearts; it’s not as relaxing if you’re going for high scores since you need to get close to collisions for bonus points, but if you just play to beat levels and chill, it’s great.

Brilliant. I should do that. I’m not great at skipping stuff to race faster, so the skull dungeon is really hard for me and I end up save scumming after most runs. I read about people getting to floor 200+, but I can barely get to 100 unless I waste a whole stack of staircases.

Pausing time would make it a lot more relaxing.

I just read the top review on Steam and it answered this question well: TL;DR it’s a shame this is a F2P game since the seasonal cosmetic FOMO is diametrically opposed to the message/spirit of the game, but if you can ignore the cosmetics, then it’s a fantastic experience that’s completely free.

Interesting seeing Hotline Miami make the list since I just watched a short video essay the other day explaining how OTXO is just a better game in basically every way.

I’m still in the 80s working my way down the list, but I searched and OTXO doesn’t appear to be on the page.

Edit: Conversely, I’m pleased to see Portal included instead of Portal 2. The Portal 2 goo was unnecessary and led to more boring puzzle solutions. Portal is a more pure, timeless game. And it has a lot of amazing mods… I should probably look into how to install Portal mods on the Deck…

For visual novels, it depends how you play them. If you’re happy with getting a single story/ending, then yeah. But if you want to 100% them, then there’s a lot of backtracking.

Portal Pro I remember being great. So good that Portal 2 was a disappointment for me when it landed.

I needed to cheat (watch the YouTube solution video) on a few solutions, iirc, too; not because they’re badly designed, just because I couldn’t wrap my head around the solution.

It should be noted that a couple of the portal solutions need reasonably quick portal placement, so I don’t think it would be as good without KB+mouse. It took me a few tries to nail one of the techniques.

I don’t think you’re understanding how trivial this is to detect:

Set up an open WiFi network in an area without any other open WiFi networks. i.e. almost anywhere outside of dense urban areas. Then you don’t even need to inspect traffic, just look at connected devices in admin controls. No devices should be connected aside from your monitoring device.

There’s no way the TV manufacturers are going to risk the legal quagmire that would come from this when there’s no plausible way to keep it remotely secret.

Super easy. Anyone who knows networking could detect new device connections on an open network they set up. I know next to nothing about networking and I could set it up in 10 minutes, 5 of which would be finding my old router in the basement.

So I’m not going to give this a moment’s thought until someone brings receipts. It’s not hard to check if this is happening.

Fake news, as far as I can tell. Lots of claims this is happening, but nobody has brought receipts. Considering how easy it would be to catch, and how likely illegal it is to connect to and use networks without permission, this is definitely an urban legend.

The author of the article is under the mistaken impression that bundling the “smart” features into the TV increases the price. It’s actually the opposite.

By injecting ads and bloatware into the TVs, the manufacturers earn more money, by far, than the cost of the features. A dumb TV would cost more.

The best solution is to decouple them; get the cheapest TV you can with the video quality/size you want, then attach your own device to stream content. I use a modified Fire Stick due to price, mostly with Stremio/Torrentio/Debrid, but there are lots of options.

Fake news. Harris had a high conviction rate for nonviolent drug offenses because she was allowing them to complete a program instead of serving time for a guilty plea. She had great results for reducing recidivism rates.

Sure, the war on drugs itself is a problem, but Harris wasn’t locking people up for nonviolent drug offenses; that completely flips and mischaracterizes her work as a DA.

But you’re just sea lioning anyway. I look forward to seeing how you move the conversation to another Russian/Chinese talking point in your inevitable reply.

Edit: 4 autocorrect fails

You still aren’t “purchasing” it.

For example, you don’t have right of resale the same way you would with physical goods. You’re buying a license to the game for personal use, regardless, you just don’t have DRM limiting your access.

It looks more like a ladle (“dipper”) than a bear (“Ursa major”) to me. Always made more sense to me.

It’s a stretch to say a pair of quadrilaterals with sticks look like a bear family, imho.