scops

I would add Neil Newbon to the list that really stood out. I thought his acting through the end of Astarion's quest line was the best in the game.

I know people hate the idea of console exclusivity, but without it, that's what really killed the Xbox for me. I've got a gaming PC and a PS5 (not Pro), and I could afford an Xbox Series X if I really wanted to. I simply don't know of any games on the platform that I want and can't get somewhere else.

And that's not coming from a reflexive Microsoft hater. I had an OG Xbox (and loved the old Duke controller), 360, and One S. I just barely played the latter.

I believe the main concern for periodic password changes is that most people won't take the time to generate unique passwords each time. They will typically iterate a password over time, meaning a couple leaked passwords will narrow down guesswork to a trivial number of guesses and remove the benefit of the timed changes.

NIST no longer recommends password expirations except for cases where it is believed that a breach occurred.

And the amount of money I spend on Xbox consoles, controllers, and games will be unchanged this year.

I loved Death Stranding, but anyone else feel like that guy putting on the bandana might have been Kojima making a little dig at David Hayter?

The character design looks very reminiscent of the MGS Delta materials we've seen, and Hayter has been more open lately about how miffed he was when Kojima dumped him for Kiefer in MGS V. That coupled with how much promo work Hayter has been doing for Delta makes me think it wouldn't be too surprising if Kojima was annoyed with him.

And now it's gone, along with the expertise it housed from developing cult hits stretching as far back as MS-DOS games in 1997, through the iconic Shadow of Mordor, F.E.A.R., Condemned, No One Lives Forever, and The Matrix Online.

Fuuuck. That really sunk it home for me. Other than the Matrix, I played and loved all of those games. RIP Monolith.

The whole point of the Sword of Damocles was that the threat was always looming and Damocles didn't know when it might fall. We know exactly when Microsoft says they are going to drop support. There's a decent chance that they'll push that date back due to slow adoption at least once.

This is more about rats not fleeing the sinking ship until the sea has reached the bow.

It's a far cry from this guy's situation, but I think I had five or six bitcoin back when I was mining in the early days. I cashed out when they were maybe $40-50 each towards a new GPU.

Sure, I could go nuts thinking about what I would do with the money now, but if I hadn't sold at that rate, I probably would have sold at $100, or $200, or...

There's no way in hell I would have had the discipline to "hodl" to this point, so I just get on with my life.

Good point. I remember needing a pretty beefy PC to run Civ V at launch. Even coming back to it after a hardware upgrade, the game could get pretty chuggy towards the end of a playthrough.

When I buy a game from GOG, it comes with the presumption that I will download the installer in a timely manner and store a copy on my local storage device. Assuming I have good backup practices, that's really the end of the story. I can build a 100 new computers and install the game I bought on each one. GOG went bankrupt ten years ago? That's a shame, but my installer works just as well as when they were kicking.

When I "buy a game" on Steam, I technically get an installer, but Steam isn't going to help me keep it. Those 100 new computers are going to download that installer a 100 times. And if the 51st install comes around and Steam isn't around anymore? Or Steam decides not enough people play this game anymore and it no longer makes financial sense to host the installer? Well, at that point I guess I'll just regret not buying the game on GOG.

State of Decay is one of my guilty pleasure series. I know it's got its faults, but I keep going back to it once every couple years or so.

The standard difficulty just nails that dopamine cycle of grinding and reward, until you've got a thriving community that can hold off all threats until the resources in the map are totally depleted and it's time to move on.

I could probably get a bit better at the game and tackle the harder modes, but that would up the stress factor and make me more likely to put it back down faster.

I'm glad Microsoft is dropping their internal releases on competing platforms now, because otherwise I'd probably never play the upcoming third one as a Linux and PS5 player.

Corrupted Blood taught us that we needed to add the vital "I'm a malicious/selfish asshole" variable to our calculations.