Mama told me not to come.
She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.
And I think that’s cool. One of the games I love (EU4) likely wouldn’t have stayed relevant for so long if it wasn’t for twitch streamers.
I don’t watch much twitch, but I think it’s cool that it helps keep games alive. I’m not into the more popular games (esp. FPS), but there’s a lot of communities that are kept alive by a handful of prominent streamers.
Huh, my friends played a ton of PC games. Pretty much anyone into gaming had played Age of Empires, and most had at least heard of the other great RTS games (Command and Conquer, Warcraft 2, etc). Even games like Diablo II were quite popular. And then there was RuneScape that everyone played on the school/library computers, plus the abundance of flash games.
Consoles were also quite popular, and there was a lot fewer cross platform games. Pretty much everyone had a computer in the 90s and early 00s for homework and whatnot. PC was the common denominator, so it’s more likely that two people would have played the same game on PC than console.
The only thing niche about PC gaming was dedicated GPUs, since those were an added cost, and parents would prefer the console to the GPU (and consoles were multiplayer).
Well yeah, twitch tends to stream popular games, because that’s where the demand is. And that tends to add more demand, thus more streamers.
My top 10 on Steam:
It turns out Yakuza games have a lot of side content…
There’s a lot of playtime that isn’t counted since I didn’t make a Steam account until after it came to Linux. If I included that time (not sure how), FTL would be a lot higher since I played a bunch directly on Linux near launch, and I played a ton of Minecraft and Factorio around launch directly on Linux. Same goes for dozens of other games before I got into Steam.
Yeah, I was up to 20% or so, and now I’m around 17% since I didn’t play much for the last year or two. I think they’ll announce a sequel soon, maybe I’ll actually make progress.
Yup. I like reading and working on coding projects.
That said, sometimes I get a hankering to play a game, but none of the dozens I have installed look interesting, so I’ll go play one of my favorites (EU4, C:S, Mount & Blade, etc).
Europa Universalis IV. There are tons of countries to play, lots of variation each time, and so many options for self challenges (e.g. accomplish goal by year).
The only thing that would get me to stop playing is if EUV is good, and then only a few years and DLC in. Even then, I could see myself coming back to it.
Fair criticism. I try to avoid using Link mode, but boss fights are so tedious without it.
That said, I actually prefer Echoes of Wisdom to BotW because it has actual dungeons again, but it does feel a bit lazy to drop into slashing and shooting.
flying tiles from aLttP that you can ride (that one’s kinda cool. I wanted more like that)
Same. Pretty soon after I got it, I was able to largely skip a stupid stealth section by flying across bookcases. I also use it when I’m too lazy to go the long way and just want to cross a gap for a chest or something.
And a big problem in this game is that it’s a pain to switch echoes all the time
Agreed. I wish I could tag 10 or so for quick access and assign to a ring switcher thing. I ended up using about that many over and over, because it’s such a pain to go find the one in the middle I want to mess with.
Or maybe they could group them or something? Like mobs, scenery, furniture, etc? Having some way to get to other echoes might encourage me to experiment a bit more.
Maybe make a separate post for it?
Why? They’ve been shoving their stupid launcher in everything, which provides zero value and just causes problems. They are also rehashing the same IPs over and over, and their biggest new IP was a complete flop.
I don’t know what redemption means for them anymore.
My kids saw me playing it yesterday and asked if they could try. I said, “sure, why not?” They asked if they could play Fortnite and I told them there’s no way that’s happening in my house.
If your kid wants to play a thing, at least check out a gameplay video and read a bit instead of blindly saying yes or no.
I just finished Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and started playing Balatro.
Other games in progress:
Ys 1 is my favorite game in the series, I hope you enjoy it too.
Europa Universalis Ultimate
It’s my favorite game, but you really need to put in a ton of time to really get much out of it.
That said, EU5 is probably going to be announced sometime next year given the dev diaries we’ve had, which means this will probably get another steep discount (and maybe a Humble Bundle or something) and you may want to just get the next game after a year or so. It’s a good price IMO, but I only recommend getting it if you’ll play it in the next few months.
Then we should all buy prebuilts then, right?
I didn’t buy my motherboard expecting to replace the WiFi, I only replaced it after failing to get it working properly. It’s apparently a common issue with this chip (and I have the same chip in another machine without the issue), which is a shame because Intel usually does well on their hardware and drivers. But $20 and 15 min or so of effort fixed an otherwise fantastic motherboard.
I’m interested in small form factors, and there aren’t a ton of options in mini-ITX, especially for new launches. So I look for the things that really matter, and compromise on the things I can either service myself or outside work around. WiFi is one of those things.
There are certainly considerations here:
And Nvidia drivers aren’t hard to install on pretty much any distro, the problem is that they’re not FOSS, so you could have issues with kernel compatibility (esp on rolling distros) and Wayland (largely seems solved?).
In many motherboards, WiFi isn’t soldered on, it’s a mini-PCIe card wrapped up in a metal tin. I replaced mine on my ASRock b550 itx board, and it only took a few minutes.
There don’t seem to be many guides out there for it, so if that’s something you may want to do, check it before you put everything together.
Honestly, I think we hit that point about 10 years ago with the XBox 1 and PS4. Yeah, XBox Series and PS5 look better, but PS4 and XBox 1 still look great IMO.