themoken

I bounced off Stalker 2 at launch because of bugs, but revisited earlier this year and had a ton of fun with the 90% of the game that is open world scavenging, stealth and combat. The only thing that sucks are some of the boss fights.

Nothing takes me out of being a sneaky, resourceful Stalker more than being forced to drop into an arena, or have a door magically lock behind me, and not being able to advance the story without either beating some bullet sponge or reloading a save from an hour before to change my load out/get more ammo etc and redo it.

I wish they would take more of a Deus Ex approach, where you can action hero your way through if you want, but with some clever/thorough playing you could significantly nerf the boss fights. The game even pretends to do this, but ultimately your choices have no bearing on the bosses.

Damn right.

I'm a couple years younger than you, but a lot of this resonated for me. Custom installers were some of my early inspirations for making apps that didn't have the traditional gray box aesthetic.

However, I will say that Kenshin was a thing in the US. Samurai X was only the name of the OG movies where he was still lethal AFAIK.

I really don't have any problem with any of these types of achievements in general. Even the super basic ones that you get by starting a game are useful to determine what percentage of people who own the game have actually played it beyond the menu screen.

The best achievements are ones you get for being clever, skilled, or dedicated. Or when it's an unhidden achievement for something you didn't even know was possible. Like the BG3 achievement for saving the goblin Sazza - just seeing it was possible made my next play through more interesting.

I do appreciate long ending achievements, but only if they indicate a significantly different playthrough. Good ending vs. bad ending works when that's the result of many decisions and not just an option you chose ten minutes from the end.

I'm with you on rejecting AI being sane, but the idea that gaming wikis should be integrated into wikipedia is kinda nuts. If I search "Iron" on wikipedia I'm looking for facts, not a thousand item long disambiguation cluttered with every game that has iron as a resource. Conversely, on a game wiki my search for "Iron" has an entirely different context and I'm looking for different info.

Not to mention game wikis have way lower editorial standards, their own tone (e.g. making jokes), versioning concerns, their own new user friendly homepages etc.

Wikipedia could tuck this all into a separate namespace, sure, but that's effectively a separate wiki anyway and then it raises questions like "why is wikipedia hosting a mechanical guide for this porn game?" or "How long do we need to host the content for this game that peaked in 2012 and is now abandonware?" that are conveniently sidestepped by those communities supporting themselves.

I have a wife stuck in the Adobe-verse and yeah, going back that far should work great. It didn't become a huge hassle until they started being insane with the licensing.

I burned a Blu-ray a few years back just to supplement some of our encrypted Google Drive backups with copies that would be more accessible in case of my demise, or physically grabbable in case of disaster. I know they won't last forever, but if Drive shut down on the same day my local copies failed at least I have an option.

Otherwise, I haven't used physical media in years. I got the 4K LOTR set when it came out and tried to use it, but it ended up being easier to just pirate the rips like anything else.

Definitely agree. Had a couple of them and loved some of the ideas (touchpad sticks, gyro to mouse aim, all of the Steam Input flexibility) but they never really eclipsed my rechargeable Dualshocks in terms of feeling right. Taking some of the Deck's refinements and giving it another spin is welcome.

In a weird way this makes Linux a microkernel. They're "macro" but isolated and cooperative. Coolest patch set I've read about in a while.

You are getting this from Xwayland, so you're running a rootless X server in the background. It's nice that it works seamlessly, but it's not really Wayland doing anything but managing the X window.

Agreed. It's one thing if it's climate change or something where we at least need to put a plan out there even if there's zero chance of it happening, but for basic common sense stuff like this don't bother. If we ever get back to trying to make average American lives better with the government, this is low hanging fruit.

I don't have experience with MSI recently, but I'd be really surprised if you couldn't flash a new BIOS off the system partition or FAT32 USB. You may not be able to update from Linux directly, but almost all motherboards I've seen support doing it from the BIOS interface.