I got my account locked on BLU because I stopped seeding when my RAID went down. I was able to recover the data and get back up in about 24 hours but there was literally no recourse other than begging some random mod’s reddit account.

Always sad to see a tracker go down, but this place was a shit show.

I feel guilty about it, but I appreciate the monthly pass. I played EUIV for exactly one month, at a total cost of like $7 (got the base game for free at some point) with all the bells and whistles. It seemed like a good compromise because you’d have to pay it for years at this point to cover the DLC out right, but it is a disgusting level of rent seeking behavior.

Now it bothers me that I’d need to put another $7-$10 into the machine to access those saves, but not as much as if I’d throw down hundreds of dollars on it to own the content for a 10 year old game.

I have a few hundred, but 5500? Sheeeit. The game is definitely evergreen though.

Can’t wait for the expansion, 10/21. I’ve been putting off a new play through for it, and Wube always puts in so much polish (as the FFFs show).

Perfect headline.

Reason number one million capitalism sucks. We should be happy to turn over dangerous or menial jobs to machines but we can’t do that because without jobs our society views us as worthless.

Already happens on streaming, at least with TV. Watched a few episodes of House a while back and they changed the great Massive Attack theme to some generic sound-alike. Honestly put me off a rewatch more than some of the other parts of the show that didn’t age well.

You can, but it’s not a perfect solution. Mostly because the TVs interface is still designed around this app mentality.

I bought a Samsung TV recently and it’s never been on the internet, but I still have to go to a dead home screen where all of the ads would be just to switch inputs and half the buttons on the remote are for services I don’t want.

I think there are some exceptions. Like Kitfox publishing Dwarf Fortress. Taking weird little indies and giving them an art / usability budget to become more accessible and, in turn, make the OG devs a bunch of money. Nobody loses.

Seriously. I remember first getting into Deity and realizing it’s basically just exploiting intimate knowledge of how the AI works. The actual max difficulty is Prince, where the AI doesn’t get bonuses, and it’s so terrible at actually pursuing an agenda it’s not very challenging.

I am a bit hopeful that VII’s decoupling leaders and civs will force the AI to be a bit more generally good. At least make it so you don’t know exactly what sort of tactics to use from the first turn you meet it.

The most recent Hitman games are best in class. Three games worth of levels, rogue-like mode to string them together randomly with random objectives if doing the story again isn’t your thing.

I’m excited to see what IO does with the James Bond franchise too. Even if it’s just a reskinned Hitman, it’d be worth it.

That trackpad was a game changer for playing KB+M games with a controller, but to be honest sometimes I really miss the right joystick. The trackpad can fake it, but it’s not the same.

If they ever do another standalone controller I’d want it to be like a screen-less Deck. Both joysticks and trackpads and a couple more grips.

This better not awaken anything in me…

Surprised to see the opinions on V/VI not being as good. I’ve played every interation of this game and they all brought something to the table. VI and the districting gameplay added a lot to the game. One unit per tile in V also made combat more tactical than doom stacking around.

The big thing I’d like in a new one is less cheaty AI. It’s just so boring that winning on Deity is basically exploiting AI foibles instead of… you know, building a stronger nation on an even keel. At the highest difficulty AI should get no bonuses but still be really good at playing the game.

It’s easier to release tools for a map based game with no real story. Devs have tools to create content, of course, but making something (tools, APIs) safe and logical enough for the public to consume is a task that can easily get backburnered on the way to release.

They don’t, but they define the socket the processor slots into and probably did this to market the newer chips as more advanced than they are (by bundling a minor chip upgrade with an additional chipset upgrade that may have more uplift).

I see no other reason to kneecap upgrades like this when upgrading entails the consumer buying more of your product.

Sims 3 was my favorite for the open world and freelance jobs too. Was nice to be able to secure an income without disappearing off the map for 8 hours a day. Was surprised 4 didn’t follow through on that as much but I only played it a little.

My wife plays Sims with cheats all the time and I get that it becomes a fancy interactive dollhouse in that case, but to me the game is all about that progression from bachelor in a one room box to old family man in a mansion.

John Carmack, author of the Doom engine, is a long time Linux user and for a while the policy was to open source the idTech engines once they had moved on.

However, Doom was hugely popular on its own before this, and was actually more pivotal for making Windows a gaming platform (over DOS).

The reason it runs everywhere is a combination of it’s huge popularity, it’s (now) open source and it’s generally low system requirements.

That review is bullshit. It’s not going to tax your machine, but that’s a good thing. The unit type thing is also missing that not the entire game takes place on the battlefield, there’s multiple layers to it and you almost never win through pure domination.

EDIT: Also, ground vehicles? This is Dune, you can’t cross sand in a vehicle, and they couldn’t go up cliffs. No, instead you airdrop, which is way more flexible.

Honestly, with Flatpak and immutable base systems this is a place Linux is really excelling now too. Being able to show a novice user a shared package manager with a search and a bunch of common apps and them actually install/remove them in a safe manner with a high likelihood they’ll work out of the box (since they come with all their deps in sync independent from distro) is kinda huge.