And for how expensive portable consoles can be, I’m not calling anything a “steam deck killer” until I’m also confident it can be repaired and upgraded for years after I buy it.

The only benefit to Netflix games is that these games have no ads or IAP.

Direct report from the FTC. ISPs are DIGGING into your web behavior. https://www.ftc.gov/reports/look-what-isps-know-about-you-examining-privacy-practices-six-major-internet-service-providers

Oh man. As a little kid I burned a LOT of time on the old DOS trek.exe.

Also still fire up Armada from time to time. With all the new ship classes in Online, I’d love to see an Armada 3.

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More stories coming like this to prep folks for price hikes.

Oh good call! That’s cheap too!

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Goggins is what got me on board too.

Had a devil of a time finding a good cartoony cart racer for PC. Giving Team Sonic Racing a try this weekend. The great thing about having a young kid who’s just getting into gaming, it really leans me into patience. We get to revisit a TON of old games, and they’re CHEAP.

That was a wild ride. Bravo.

What’s in it for valve? More games sold. They don’t seem to mind steam keys being sold on aggressive sales through other platforms. Partnering with another hardware manufacturer for a revenue share doesn’t seem like an extreme stretch. Unlikely? Sure. Impossible? No.

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My fave travel keyboard. So sad MS never made a USBC version.

I know Louis CK is kinda on the out for references, but this was kinda spot on his bit about entitlement.

“Something (given out for free) that I didn’t even know about until today, and is just a fun experiment to share and learn from? Not good enough!”

That’s rad. I know I’m gonna take the plunge at some point, but I might wait to bundle a few hardware swaps. Definitely my fan too.

I got in pretty deep on Marvel Future Fight a couple years back. It really bothers me how a family friendly franchise will be packed with pressure points and gambling mechanics.

The game starts fine, as a short mission based story line, and progress happens fairly quickly. You play missions to get character bios (points) to unlock more marvel characters, and then you can build small teams for different missions.

As you start unlocking more characters, you also need to rank up the characters you own to make them more powerful. Again, the basic level upgrades are easy, as you collect material per mission, but as you start getting into the middle game, ranking a character happens through RNG.

You upgrade a character though multiple resource points, Rank, then Tier, then weapons, uniforms, gear, and crystals. There is no set “cost” for upgrading one part of a character. You build up a bunch of materials, and then you take a spin. There’s a random amount of progress made spending the material, and each upgrade path becomes its own slot machine, with its own materials to spend. You MIGHT get lucky and get a full upgrade to a power crystal in one turn, but more than likely you’ll need to burn HOURS of game time grinding to build up the materials, spend all the materials, and be left with nothing.

If you want to shortcut that progression, it can cost HUNDREDS of dollars to rank ONE character to a point where you can be competitive in online events and in guild play. You won’t be competitive with just a couple high ranking players, you need a FULL roster for the multiple events available.

At present, Marvel Future Fight includes over 250 playable characters. Each needs to be ranked and upgraded through multiple game mechanics, and new uniforms are regularly released that also require RNG mechanics to own and upgrade.

Whales will spend THOUSANDS of dollars at the start of a new event, and when new characters are released, to chase the game’s meta. Sure, you aren’t “buying a lootbox”, but players are spending money to build up resources, only to throw those resources away at multiple slot machines built into EVERY character. It’s one of the most insidious games I’ve ever played, and it’s marketed at kids and teens.