“A narrow use case” is not the same as “no use case.”

On top of this, don’t assume someone’s tech literate just because they’re in a certain field. It took me seeing first hand at a previous job how the IT techs did their job to realize why we ran into so many issues.

We were having some software installed on every computer which apparently had to be installed via PowerShell. While watching our usual IT tech go through the steps on the machine next to me, I offered to help him get this job done faster by starting it up on my machine then he could run his credentials whenever the prompts came up. He knew I was computer literate since we had talked about tech stuff and about how I was at the time trying to get a job in IT, so he gave me a copy of the .txt file with all the instructions and commands to run.

In the file was an 11 step process written by the director of the IT department explaining how to open PowerShell, copy the command below, and run the command. 3 of the instructions were to highlight the command (between the quotation marks without including the quotation marks), right click the highlighted portion, then click on “Copy”.

The tech didn’t believe that I had actually copied the command when I just did Ctrl+C, so he specifically stopped me to tell me to right click the command. I told him that it was copied already with Ctrl+C, and he told me, “No, it won’t work if you don’t do the right click.”

I also found out later that said IT director didn’t seem to be aware that there were multiple types of USB cables. He was setting something up in my boss’s office and sent someone to ask for “a USB cable.” Said person knew I had a bunch of cables at my desk as part of my work at the time so they relayed the request for “a USB cable.” I asked them, “What kind? USB C to C? A to C? Micro? Mini?” “Idk, they just said ‘a USB cable.’”

I think, “fair enough, my coworker isn’t very tech literate so I’ll just ask the man myself.” I bring over an assortment of cables and walk to the office with my coworker. Director see my coworker with me now next to them and ask me for “a USB cable.” “What kind?” “Just a regular USB cable, if you have one.” I show him my bundle of about 6-10 assorted cables, explain that I have a variety, see that he’s working on a small printer/scanner, and offer him one. “Would a type 3.0 USB A to B cable work?” “What? No, I just need a regular USB cable.” I show him the A to B cable and he responds “oh yeah, that’s what I was saying. A regular USB cable.”

Chun-Li definitely would.

• Reviews are mixed: not a great start

Agreed, puts a damper on everything else that follows.

• Requires 3rd-party account: fuck that

Also agreed. If I buy a Steam game, I’d generally much rather it be accessible through Steam and do not appreciate when games are sold on Steam for other platforms.

• 60 euros base game: expensive, especially when the game has mixed reviews

Not the worst price, but yeah I’d definitely expect a much better review score to justify that price. In the absence of a good review score this would be something I’d have to know I’m going to enjoy before I’d consider buying it full price.

• 175 euros DLC’s: are you fucking kidding me? On top of 60 euros for the base game, there’s another 175 fees for content?

I don’t know for certain about this particular game, but I do know people were shitting on Monster Hunter: Rise for the exact same reason: a seemingly exorbitant amount of DLC available from release implying it’s a cash grab and just trying to milk more cash out of the player.

That being said, in my opinion MHR wasn’t even half as bad as the naysayers would have you believe. MHR on release on Steam had a lot of DLC, sure, but it didn’t launch on Steam. It launched on the Switch then later was ported to Steam with all of the same DLC they had worked on since its launch a year prior.

Almost all of the DLC was exclusively cosmetic skins, and almost all of those were part of bundles available for significantly cheaper prices than each one individually. I don’t recall the exact prices but I believe it was something like buy 10 skins individually for $2/ea or buy all of them in a bundle for $5. The real price for any sane person for all 10 skins would be $5, but this showed up on Steam as 11 DLC items with a total of $25. Multiply this by the 6-10 ish bundles they had on the title’s release on Steam to get a huge quantity of items and a massively inflated price compared to what anyone who wanted everything would realistically pay, assuming they paid attention.

I don’t know that CoD is doing a similar thing here, and I certainly wouldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt, but I dislike this argument against them because it can be very misleading.

• purchasable CoD points: so pay to win?

Not necessarily P2W, but yeah I’m not a fan of MTX either and again wouldn’t give CoD the benefit of the doubt to have a good or fair monetization model.

You could always play with mods. One of them adds pollution scrubbers, which you can surround your base with to make sure biters are never prompted to attack in the first place. I have several hundred hours in one save that has a metaphoric wall of filters that has yet to be attacked outside of a few instances when I was expanding.

Out of curiosity and just for the novelty of doing it, I found another mod that made a combinator device which would output the current pollution for the chunk that it was contained within. Using that, I set up a whole system to turn on the exact number of scrubbers I needed to prevent any pollution from leaving my base. Never actually implemented it because it was wildly impractical, but it was a fun project just to see if I could do it.

tl;dr: I use a Note 20 Ultra with stock Samsung ROM because I’m not convinced there’s a good custom or stock ROM that well supports the stylus, but I’m open to suggestions if anyone has one.

My number 1 feature in a phone is having a built in/included stylus. I do a lot of programming stuff which I usually find is easier to plan out ideas for how I want to structure things by drawing it, it’s also easier for writing out math for some of said ideas, when an interesting question comes up, or when I want to show someone the math on how something’s done, and I’m currently learning Japanese so it’s helpful for working on my kana penmanship and learning kanji, especially learning kanji stroke order.

I’ve used other styli in the past and know that palm rejection is pretty much a must have feature. It’s incredibly annoying and cumbersome to hover over your phone to not engage the touchscreen, or have to specifically hold your phone in portrait mode so that your hand is naturally off to the side which doesn’t pair well with how we generally write horizontally. Because of this, I don’t consider dumb styli at all and only really consider powered styli that have an active connection to the phone.

The last time I was searching for a new phone, this requirement (and a few others like expandable storage via microSD card, 5G support, supported my network, etc) ruled out almost every phone on the market save 2. There was some Moto 5G discount model that for some reason had a smart stylus, then the Samsung Note 20 Ultra. I don’t recall the exact reason I didn’t go with the Moto 5G, but I believe it was something like issues with build quality (being a discount model) and the stylus wasn’t very good meaning it would defeat the entire point of getting the phone. So I went with my current Note 20 Ultra.

All of this is to say, I never really considered changing the ROM because I have doubts how well other ROMs would support the stylus. I’ll fully admit it’s not my most used feature on the phone, but there are hundreds of other phones that have a good screen, support fast charging, support Bluetooth, and have expandable storage. My first feature that would significantly rule out options unfortunately rules out almost all options, so I don’t trust that there are many ROMs out there that would even decently support the stylus.

That all being said, I’d be very happy to be proven wrong. I don’t like Samsung’s bloat and would love to move away from a lot of it. The only other Samsung device I own is their galaxy tag trackers which is currently the only reason I’ve logged into a Samsung account on my device otherwise I’d be happy to get rid of it and not give them more information.

There’s also Clone Hero

That’s survivorship bias tainting your nostalgia. We collectively remember the passion poured into games like this but forget all of the the movie tie in games, cereal box games, unplayable tier of poorly made games, and games that were so mediocre to not even fall into the previous categories. Some of them get remembered but often more because of how exceptionally bad they were, such as E.T., Superman 64, Pepsiman, Phillips CDi LoZ, etc.

It’s easy to remember years like 1998 for games like LoZ OoT, Half Life, Spyro, StarCraft, Final Fantasy 7, Goldeneye 007, and DDR. It’s harder to remember the other 158 major titles released that year. While I don’t doubt there were at least some passionate people on the team of most if not every one of those titles, I’d sooner believe many of those titles were just being pushed out the door closer to release than they were passionate works from a team of faithful devs able to fully realize their vision.

I will agree that I think there’s a larger volume of no-passion games today that companies are just churning out to try to make a quick buck, but I think that’s more because it’s easier to do today than it was back in the day. I don’t think it’s because the devs of days past were more passionate about their titles. I will also agree that because of the aforementioned churned out titles that it can be harder to find titles made by truly passionate teams.

Source for my number of games released in 1998, by my own count as I didn’t see one listed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games

The first generation Pokemon games all used significantly less power to maintain their RAM battery saves than Pokemon Gold, Silver, and Crystal by virtue of not having a real time clock constantly ticking the power away. RBY saves only needed to maintain the power for the save itself and did no additional work on top of that.

Original GSC cartridges would last about 10-15 years, whereas RBY could last 20-30 years. We’re currently in the span of time where many RBY cartridge batteries will be failing but it’s still possible to find ones with functional original saves on batteries just barely holding on.

Many people like to try using physically larger batteries when doing replacements, but most of them don’t realize the batteries aren’t losing charge at the end of those many years because they’re drained and out of power. RBY saves use so little power from the battery in the cartridge that they won’t fully drain it after 30 ish years. Instead the battery saves fail because the batteries themselves fail after 20-30 years. Picking the larger button cell batteries won’t help since they’ll still have the same total lifespan and will still lose charge at almost the same rate as the spare batteries that weren’t installed in your cartridge of choice.

Planning on not buying it, that being said I was likely never going to even if this controversy didn’t happen. I’m apparently part of 3% of Subnautica players on steam who really didn’t care for the game. Gave it a decent chance (7 hours playtime) and talked with several people who adore the game but found many aspects of the game to be overrated, poorly designed, or frustrating. Just about the only thing I can remember honestly enjoying about the game was the aesthetic, which even then was held back by some sometimes downright bad graphics.

Make it a legally binding contract, otherwise don’t bother promising.

There’s one nearby where I used to live that was disguised like this but for a different reason. They bought the rights to build the tower from a church only under the condition that it was disguised like this.

The other thing is that there was simply fewer games back then so you either continue to play the good games you own or you don’t play games. I loved Ocarina of Time, but I’m not going to pretend it was God’s gift to mankind just because I played it tons in my youth. I played it tons in my youth because it was one of the best games that I owned, and even then I had plenty more options than I’m sure this person had on the Atari for good games

Currently playing through Rainworld for the first time, and “where the fuck do I go” has definitely crossed my mind more than a few times.

I will say I’ve mostly been enjoying just exploring, but it has been frustrating at times trying to figure out what to do or where to go when my little in-game helper suddenly decides to play coy at another crossroads.

Tbh I’m in the opposite position. Don’t recall why or how, but I had BoF4 despite not being familiar with the rest of the series and still adore it. I recall once having tried out BoF3 but I didn’t get very far, likely had something else grab my attention so I just dropped BoF3 before giving it a proper chance.

Seeing several of these comments saying several people preferred it over 4 is making me think about giving it another shot.

I had heard previously the tariff would be 145% so I guess this is referring to a total price of 245%.

To some extent I can understand since they’re expecting a certain ROI on the console which would include American sales, and therefore if American sales drop because of tariffs they need another way to make up that lost revenue.

That being said I feel like it would be a mistake to make that up by increasing the price of the console for other markets too. In my opinion if American sales drop then they should pivot their focus to other markets until American leadership stabilizes, i.e. stops being an active detriment to the American economy and all the international companies involved in it. Which likely won’t happen until trump/his administration is out of office.

Java is the original and Bedrock is the C++ adaptation that came about once Microsoft bought Minecraft. Microsoft couldn’t really justify getting rid of Java edition because that’s what the entire PC userbase was using at the time, and they’ve gotten very used to the features it allows for. Namely mods. However they still wanted to unify the casual playerbase and better monetize the game.

On the topic of monetization, Minecraft originally had this nasty little clause (for Microsoft) written in I forget either the ToS, EULA, or what, but it essentially guaranteed all future updates to the game for free. I believe it also made some other guarantees about no MTX, should never have to pay for servers, etc but those I’m less certain about. Around the time MS bought the game there was a lot of talk about how the only way they’d really be able to get out of that guarantee to the millions of players who already owned “Java edition” (just regular Minecraft back then) was to make a Minecraft 2.0 that didn’t have that clause. Their approach for that problem appears to have been bedrock edition which they maintain alongside Java edition. Because it’s not the version they bought, they can make changes to the legal agreements including charging for things Java Edition users have a guaranteed right to.

Those are the two main reasons I’m aware of for the two editions. I believe the majority of the PC playerbase is currently on Bedrock Edition so although they would have some backlash if they suddenly decided to axe it I think the majority of the playerbase would chug on like normal. Afaik the main reason they don’t is because anyone who purchased Minecraft before there was a “Java Edition” would have a legal claim to say Bedrock is clearly the same game under another title, they’re not getting future updates as guaranteed, and are entitled to either updates or compensation. And I can’t imagine MS is interested in litigiously pissing off millions of players.

I imagine Minecraft played a large part in popularizing the concept of a player hosted server for survival games. It’s possible that the reason this genre in specific has so many titles where you can do this is because players coming from or otherwise largely influenced by Minecraft see this as a requirement if not just the standard, so devs wanting to appeal to these players may also see it as a standard/requirement.

Worth mentioning that some of these earlier titles were built for IPX networking, which is no longer supported by modern operated systems. I get the impression OP is asking for games with LAN gaming supporting to get recommendations, so I feel it’s important to make sure they or others checking lists like this one understand they may need to go through some hoops to get some of these titles to work with a modern machine.