Am important and timely warning that will probably go unheeded.

Powerful people sucking at tech is one of the ways we get a different batch of powerful people who suck at tech.

Good point. Most people suck.

I do miss the goofballs from my old WoW server though. They were pretty great.

Oof.

“The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult,”

Makes me suspect they were woefully behind the rest of the field in development practices. My team, and many others, gained productivity when all the wasteful manager ego stroking in-person meetings stopped.

Alternately, it tells us they rely on a weird dev kit with a lot of esoteric hardware. Though I would still call that out as being super out of date. Nothing is particularly hard to emulate today, for teams that prioritize having rebuildable test environmenta.

Just wild.

Bummer about the layoffs. Probably won’t fix their agility problem, though.

“Smart as paint, ye are lads! Smart as paint!” - Long John Silver

“He’s got one leg, Jim! Count 'em: … … One …”

I’m still playing endless Luanti while waiting for Guild Wars 2 to get SteamDeck verified.

Edit: Downvoter can’t handle that Luanti is an MMO, now. I can’t help that I’m the world’s most accomplished self-hoster. (This is sarcasm, humorously implying that I’m hosting the world’s biggest Luanti instance, such that it qualifies as “massively multiplayer”. Which one might almost believe if they read my post history… I’m pretty active in both the Luanti and self-hosting communities.)

The other dwarf game I played was The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria.

Ha. I suppose that counts!

“Dwarf” getting added as a category was a publicity stunt write in campaign by Deep Rock Galactic players, if I recall correctly.

There’s not a ton of games with the tag, but both DRG and Dwarf Fortress tend to get a lot of play hours by their players, I think.

I kind of get that. I stopped buying PlayStations when the PS3 was so hard to get, for so long.

I’ve loved every PlayStation I’ve owned.

I’m not sure this tells us much, since the first buyers are usually the ones who don’t care what it costs.

The big question is how long can it maintain the higher price, once the enthusiasts all have theirs.

I’m no pirate, but if I was, I would pirate Mass Effect 3.

It’s definitely one of the titles that makes me feel like EA is handing out eye patches.

Am I misunderstanding that it’s single player?

Why in the world can’t I just give them some cash and get to play it offline without spyware?!

I know who will let me play Mass Effect 3 offline without spyware.

And they be good hearted folk, once ye get to know 'em. Aye!

It’s surprisingly capable hardware.

I know, right?! It keeps surprising me, in a nice way.

That makes sense.

I gotta say, the SteamDeck has been a weird journey. I’m playing a lot more high graphics titles now that I can just quickly check for a ‘SteamDeck Verified’ badge.

On the one hand, mine is a first generation portable, so there’s a lot of games it is never going to run.

On the other, it keeps surprising me what gets ported to it.

Nice. An effective union is probably the only thing that will bring me back to shopping for AAA titles again, so this seems like a win for everyone.

FFVII on SteamDeck maybe? I would probably play that.

I love Rogue Legacy as a casual game. In the early game, it’s decidedly not cozy, due to missing mechanics and how common unwinnable rooms are.

Rogue Legacy 2 fixes these issues, and adds a ton of difficulty sliders, and can be tuned to be fantasticly cozy,

Yeah. I would probably start with Dave the Diver, in their case.

It’s so good. Decently chill. Great vibe throughout. The Boss fights each have a simple gimmick to win, and they don’t try to be clever about it. (Nothing pisses me off like “we changed the pattern of interaction five to turn a narrow victory win into a loss”. Game designers need to cut that out.) Thankfully Dave the Diver has the classic two patterns per battle, and aims for predictable fun. And the Boss fights are rare, anyway.

Yeah. The Breach is fantastic. Ready to pick up and set down. Utterly fantastic tactical gameplay. Cool tech, interesting progression options.

All that said, it’s not my go-to cozy game, because it’s atmosphere is too well done.

They only thing about “The Breach” is that it’s so dang well done that I can’t take a turn not seriously. It regularly makes me make movie heroism level of decisions. Do I make the safe play, or try to save everyone? Am I willing to sacrifice my pilot for this win?

The vibe is fantastic, but decidedly not cozy.

That’s a great point. A nice Debian LTS release could be just the thing.

Yeah. I think you can’t go wrong with either Debian or Fedora with Gnome. I would pick whichever I’m most comfortable with. The grandparents will probably never notice.

I love to give Gnome crap for being a large install, but I’ve lost count of the number of machines that I’ve put Gnome on and had it just work. And I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve searched for a fancy command line way to fix an annoyance in Gnome, and discovered there’s just a simple toggle in settings for what I want.

Who decides what’s “legitimate”?

Ooh! I know this one! It’s the people with all the money, isn’t it? It’s usually the people with the most money who decide these things.