As I’ve grown up, the most depressing realization I had is that adults are a myth. No one knows what the hell they’re doing. People can be good at doing their thing in a specialty but world leaders are mostly putting on a brave face.

There’s no real plan. No one’s on the same page. No one’s steering the ship. It’s just a whole lot of hemming and hawing, and a few idiots doing the bull in a china shop routine.

The problem with these games is ranked online multiplayer. Back in the arcade days no one knew the damn frame timings. People just played and had a good time with each other in person. Console ports brought that experience home so you could enjoy it with friends and family, without needing a roll of quarters. No one had any issues with anxiety over these games because you were just hanging out with friends playing a game together. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost. If your brother’s Ryu was too good, you just challenged him to beat you with a different character.

Online ranked play takes all that away. It makes the competition serious even if you don’t want it to be. Now you’re always being matched up against an equally skilled opponent playing their best character. You never feel like you’re making progress because every match is tough as nails. For people who thrive on competition, that’s great. For everyone else it really sucks!

Nice! I’ve been gradually playing through a bunch of NES classics: Faxanadu, Dragon Warrior, Blaster Master, Fire Emblem. The next game I want to go through is Castlevania 1 and then Ultima IV after that!

The only problem is too much choice!

Seriously, when you’ve got thousands of ROMs and vintage PC games to choose from, it’s really difficult to land on one to play right now!

Yes, though at least with C you have the compiler to optimize the cruft out of your binary and end up with a nice, clean program.

With JavaScript this is going to incur some runtime cost everywhere this library is used, even if it only happens once when getting optimized out by the JIT compiler.

Also known as coconut coir! Makes a great substrate for starting seeds and growing houseplants!

It’s really critical for me, to have it feel good.

Daggerfall also had this issue with missing but you could get your accuracy up a lot more easily and then you’d hit pretty much every time. The graphics of Daggerfall are of course much less advanced than Morrowind but the “thwack” sounds in DF feel chunkier and heavier, and the simple animations have an abruptness to them that really works for the game. It’s quite strange but combat just feels better to me in Daggerfall than Morrowind.

Of course Morrowind has the far better atmosphere, music, worldbuilding, exploration and all that. DF has the truly gargantuan dungeons though!

I just didn’t like hit chance being a thing in a first person melee game. At all. If my sword connects with the enemy then it should be a hit. When the game decides to roll a miss it makes the game feel broken. It’s like clicking an icon on your computer and it not opening up. Then you click again and it opens. If it’s just randomly not opening it feels broken and unreliable!

Yes. Previously the alternative was payday loans, which charged exorbitant interest rates.

People have tried to ban these sorts of predatory loan businesses before but it usually forces people into the hands of organized crime loan sharks who charge even more exorbitant interest and exact brutal punishments on people who don’t pay up.

Cheap ice cream is pumped up with air. That gallon of store brand crap probably weighs less than half a gallon of Ben & Jerry’s.

So convenient that ice cream is sold by volume and not weight.

Don’t you worry that with everyone on UBI, demagogues like Trump can just cut you off?

That’s my biggest hangup over UBI. I think everyone should have that safety net but I’m afraid of that much centralization of power.

Yes! Go Bills!

Nintendo has never sold their consoles at a loss. They sell them at a small profit which then grows to a larger profit as the cost of making them decreases.

Home video game sales peaked at $3.2 billion then fell to $100 million, a drop of nearly 97%. This collapse, largely blamed on Atari shoving out low quality games, lasted for 2 years until Nintendo released the NES in North America.

Definitely a shrinking audience for AAA games, but I don’t think it will be too bad gamers overall. Consoles will keep marching forward, as will Valve with the Steam Deck and Steam Machine.

I think the highest of the high end graphics stuff has long since hit diminishing returns. You can do a hell of a lot with yesterday’s hardware and less-than-bleeding-edge process nodes for newer hardware. Consoles have never used bleeding edge GPUs and they’ve always done fine with sales (across the whole market, if not always individually). I think we’re highly unlikely to see a repeat of the 1983 gaming crash.

I explained why it needs to be left running: because opening it is too much of a hassle to even bother with. Thus I don’t, and I don’t plan to open it any time soon.

GOG Galaxy is a nonsequitur. I’ve never installed it and it’s never been required to download or play any game. I use GOG’s website to buy and download games. Galaxy might as well not exist and I’m fine with that.

It kills my laptop’s battery. It doesn’t matter if it’s not using much CPU, it keeps the CPU from sleeping and thus wastes a ton of battery. This is a well-known problem with software that uses its own timers and doesn’t optimize for battery life. Thus I do not want to leave Steam running all the time and so my experience is degraded.

When I want to play a Steam game that uses DRM I need to start up Steam, log in, do multi factor authentication, then wait for Steam to do all its updates, then restart while the patches are applied, then finally get to my library so I can start the game. It’s like a 10-15 minute process that is usually enough to kill my desire to play the game in the first place, so I don’t bother.

As for DRM, well none of the games on GOG have DRM. Some Steam games have DRM, some don’t. If Valve wanted to, they could decide to stop offering DRM and then they’d be DRM free too. If developers didn’t want that they’d have to take their games off Steam and lose those sales. This would incentivize more developers to go DRM free.

But they don’t. Thus Valve benefits from DRM and so they deserve blame for it, not just the developers. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too.

I find it very hostile compared to, for example, GOG which lets me download games DRM free and run them without running an app.

Steam is a battery hog and is designed to entice you to keep it running all the time. I hate leaving it running which means I don’t have access to most of my library.

None of what I wrote was intended as a defence of Epic. I don’t like the company at all these days. The last game of theirs that I played was Gears of War. I loved the original Unreal but that was so long ago they might as well be a completely different company.

Anyway I think Valve has some kind of gamer reality distortion field going on. Gamers step up to defend it the way Apple fanboys defended Apple back in the Steve Jobs days. Have people forgotten that Gabe is a billionaire who just got another megayacht?

Proton is a really cool project and Valve has contributed a lot to it but it’s not charity. Valve profits a ton off Proton because it supports game sales on Steam. Linux and SteamDeck users buy a lot more games because of it, games they otherwise couldn’t even run.

The fact that Proton is open source was only partly Valve’s choice. The project is based on Wine which has an LGPL 2.1+ license, which requires Valve to release the source code to their modifications of Wine itself. The extra Proton parts don’t have to be open source, but in practice it creates a lot more work for Valve if they have to maintain their modifications as a fork rather than upstreaming as much as possible.

I don’t see how SteamOS is any different from iOS in this regard. Apple spends a ton of resources developing APIs to support all kinds of optional functionality that 3rd party developers can take advantage of. None of it earns any direct profit.