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!

The ultra-wealthy are terrified of reprisal from Trump. And they control the media (Bezos/WP) and social media (Zuck).

Democracy in America may fail next week. Terrifying to watch.

Or if you can’t pull off the humour, just be honest: “Sorry; I remember you [from place, if you remember], but my blinky ADHD memory is terrible with names. Can you remind me your name? … Thanks, [NAME]. And apologies in advance if I forget it again. It’s not personal!”

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.

… Or pay them for it!

There’s a prolific open-source dev that makes many plugins and themes for a widely-used OSS platform. He’s quite open when asked for new features if it’s something he’s already planning on doing anyway (with no guaranteed timeline) or if it’s not. But if it’s a reasonable ask, he’ll always mention that he can prioritise its development if they fund it. He even posts his current contractor rate; it’s quite transparent.

I think more OSS devs should be more open like that. “Yes, I can do that feature request. Sounds like about 2-3 hours work. My hourly is $120 for contract work. Email me here if you’re interested and I’ll send a contract.”

Canada uses gc.ca for federal government sites, and I think every province gets their own, too, like .bc.ca (but I don’t know if they all use them.)

You can stream remux releases using Stremio + Torrential + a Debrid service, like Real Debrid. 30+GB 4K resolution.

I only have a 1080p screen, so I’ve never tried it, but I’ve tested the download speed from Real Debrid for regular file downloads and it caps out my gigabit line, so it can definitely handle streaming remuxes.

That’s over half a 100mbit line 24/7.

I have my upload capped at 6MiB/s since that’s ~half my 100mbit upload. (I can’t get symmetric gigabit internet here, at least not until fibre-to-the-door lines are run in the next couple of years.)

Impressive numbers for home internet.

Wireless game streaming is another reason to upgrade WiFi. I couldn’t stream anything from my wired desktop to my Steam Deck on WiFi from the ISP-supplied router. I just finished upgrading to a WiFi mesh network partly because of that… but I haven’t tested game streaming yet.

I expect it should do great, though. My Fire Stick used to occasionally buffer even with ~1.5GB/hr content, but I just tried a 1080p remux at 15GB/hr and it worked great.

They also sold 5 million copies in 3 days, and who knows how many copies since then. They can afford to pay good IP lawyers for a long time, if needed.

I’m excited for this. I just got my wife a Deck used to play Escape Simulator together, but this will make it a lot easier for her to play most of my other games, now, too.

Sadly Dragon Age 3 can’t be shared, which I should have added to her account, not mine… But we only had 1 Deck at the time! (On the other hand, I’ll be able to play most of my library on her device while she’s playing, so not a big deal!)

I think you can Steam Remote Play Together with non-Steam games, but that’s the only way to “share” them that I know of.

Right, but Steam still let’s people who own delisted games download and play them forever. (Well, assuming they’re not live service games with no servers, but that’s not a Valve problem.)

I have a slightly different perspective as someone just starting Rise as my first ever experience with this series.

Holy shit, the tutorials are terrible. Massive info dump walls of text explaining too many systems at once, cryptic warning messages to confirm you want to dismiss the tutorials are extra confusing… And despite the massive info dumping, they don’t even tell you everything you need to know to complete the tutorial missions as you complete them. When you go to trap your first monster, there’s no tooltip to teach you how to use items in the “how to trap” explanation or NPC dialogue. I needed to google it.

And no ability to pause in a singleplayer game? I googled some explanation about pause being on one of the menus, but I couldn’t find it. Thankfully, suspending the game on a Steam Deck pauses it, so it’s playable.

Also, why was I given massively OP equipment and piles of loot just for logging in? The entire early game is now so easy that it’s not fun. I’m only 3 tutorials + 1 “real” mission into the game, so I’m going to try starting over without the EZ-mode loot and give it a second chance, but so far, I’m not impressed.

If I’d bought this through Steam, I’d have refunded it already before the 2-hour playtime window closed.

TL;DR: Terrible new-player onboarding has me questioning if I should push through.

Grow: Song of the Evertree has lots of crafting materials, but no money. I haven’t played it much, but it mostly seems to be about gathering daily to grow the Evertree, then using the resources to expand the town.

I haven’t been following PoE2 very closely, but I hope it plays well on Steam Deck. If it plays well, then I’m going to play the hell out of this…

I just looked it up and I already own it from the Itch.io Bundle for Ukraine. I should play it sometime! Also on sale on GOG rn at a historical low price DRM-free.

It seems like the Archive.org .zip dump’s “size” is just 12580366816. I assume that’s bytes, which is only 12½ GB. That seems way too small to include all the romhacks, doesn’t it? I thought a lot created assets and HD textures and such. But that also seems like way too much to just be website data, and most hacks are tiny files.

Does anyone know what’s in that data dump? I’m tempted to download everything, even though I’d only ever use a miniscule percentage of it.