The success of the Steam Deck alongside the Nintendo Switch I think is the primary reason MS is attempting to enter the market, and So y is giving it another try.

Out of curiosity, is there any reason why you don’t consider the Vita a PSP2?

There were similar levels of fear and worry when Russia was amassing troops just under the border ahead of their “3-day special operation”. But the truth of the matter is that Russia has shown itself to be a lot weaker as a military force than they purported themselves to be.

Their internal war-time economy is anyway starting to flounder as the >1.5K daily casualties they are amassing is having a noticeable impact on not only military production, but also civilian and agricultural. (‘ Russia economy crumbling with food prices skyrocketing as Putin’s problems mount’ - Express.co.uk).

They are relying heavily on Iran, China and NK to supplement their falling arms production; and are now also needing to supplement their conscript forces with NK forces.

Russia has continually been over-estimated, but don’t doubt for a second that it is being cooked like a frog in a boiling pot in a proxy-war solely using Ukrainian forces.

In the event of a handful of allied European nations joining the war to aid Ukraine, Russia would be expelled from the region quite quickly - but at the cost of additional human lives, which is why the escalations have been so slow.

Honestly it sounds like Sino fear-mongering or Tankie wishful thinking.

It’s easy to forget because it’s made up of a multitude of smaller countries - but Europe has a population of ~750m, and a vastly more coherent and powerful combined military (even if the US were to pull out of NATO).

Russia can’t currently steam-roll one nation, how on Earth do you think they’d do anything against Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Finland - all countries with a deeply (& rightfully) ingrained distrust/hatred of Russia.

China isn’t likely to risk making themselves an international outcast just to aid Russia - they are more likely to make a play for Taiwan than anything else.

Not OP; but probably referring to Nixon normalising relations with China; or maybe negotiating with the Viet Cong to prolong the Vietnam War so that he could be elected?; or the whole Watergate fiasco which directly lead to the creation of Fox News… I mean, that man is responsible for a lot of our modern ails.

But if it’s the former, it directly lead to outsourcing production overseas where labour was cheapest, resulting in the gutting of American manufacturing and the entire middle class that depended on it.

I more personally believe that Nixon severely injured the US, but it was Reagan who shot the killing bullet. But that’s honestly a debate for another time.

Downloads folder is a free-for-all; things get properly sorted when they’re moved onto the NAS - there is a seperate network drive for Multimedia (videos), Applications, Photos, etc. Each of those are then usually nested by Alphabetical folder.

The left Shift is A, and Caps Lock is Z.

To get those keys to function as Shift/Caps you would need to hold down the Fn key (bottom right).

I’m all for minimalist keyboards, but this shit is a bit too ridiculous.

I swear I played D2 at 800x600 - was that enabled in the expansion pack?

Yup; RIP to Billie Jean as the first song you hear when you jump into a car for the first time in Vice City.

Yikes; whatever I expected from the remasters - this ain’t it.

The original C&C remaster did a similar graphics upscale, but they at least managed to at least mostly pull it off.

Given they could have potentially rasterised WOW assets to provide a cohesive feel to players, this is just a total ball-drop.

I’ve been mulling over this the past few years, having finally kicked the WoW habit in the second year of Shadowlands (approaching ~3 years now)…

…but how often are quests/missions/objectives etc. just a combination of go to x, collect x of y, kill x of y? At a certain point, all of these become generic - right?

Understatement of the decade, IMO!

I’ve barely touched my Steam games library as it is, have just dived headfirst into emulating my retro game collection (PS1, 2, 3 & Portable); along with SNES predominantly - because fuck Nintendo.

I just thought it was a speech impediment… 🤷🏻‍♂️

I doing think it was an one thing, but more-so a build-up over time - a death of a thousand cuts, if you will:

It was a cultural moment generally, just think back to all of those celebrity commercials (“I’m Mr. T and I’m a Night Elf Mohawk”). All cultural moments pass eventually.

The third expansion (Cataclysm) was quite weak to begin with; coupled with a lack of content in the tail-end of the second (Wrath of the Lich King), which itself was incredible - narratively wrapped up the story that began all the way back in Warcraft 3.

So a lot of people chose that time to bow out of the game, as it required a fair bit of time dedication and seemed like an appropriate time to do so - given the narrative pay-off.

Lastly, the introduction of a number of game tools to automate the group composition process meant that the impact of player reputation on servers was severely diminished. Before then, there players who were toxic (stealing items, intentionally killing the group, failing quests) were infamous on a server.

Once this tool was further opened up to allow for groups to form across multiple servers - the sense of community was shattered as you would have no way to know if the person from another server was good/bad etc. it stopped being about bringing in the individual player, and just getting a body in to fill a role.

As someone who was lucky enough to get to experience those first ~6 years; it truly was lightning in a bottle.

20 years on, I am still friends with a number of those I met in WOW - and an in contact with a few more beyond that!

Unfortunately, it does feel like that sense of community those early years fostered are long gone, save perhaps a blip when Classic first launched.

Who knows when the next game will come along, which will be able to foster such relationships.

If it’s within your budget, grab a Steam Deck and use it in docked Desktop mode. It’s a pretty great introduction into Linux IMO, especially due to the fact that Valve themselves are maintaining the OS, and since it’s running on a fixed hardware platform - most online solutions should be applicable to any problems you may encounter.

Worst case, you don’t like it you can always eBay it off to recoup most of your costs?

Need to leave some features out intentionally, to add later to the PS6 as a selling point and incentivise customers to upgrade!

Noticed similar on my 14 Pro, but at the same time - I assumed it was just my battery health/life degrading.

It was called Kurushi here in our neck of the woods; and I’m glad I’m not the only person who still intensely remembers that game from a demo disc.

I ended up picking up a mint copy to add to my collection; well worth it IMO.

Ill give you this; it was so bad that it looped all the way around and ended up good despite literally everything.

I definitely enjoyed the hell out of it as a kid, but let’s not pretend that it was anything approaching a faithful adaptation.