Nice dude! If you didn’t complete Elden Ring yet and struggled with it as a first souls game I would highly recommend you check out “Lies of P” next. It’s quite similar to bloodborne and also introduces a lot of the advanced souls mechanics in a beginner friendly manner with lots of good quality of life changes from the classic souls games without diluting the core experience.
Yeah the difficulty and Elden Ring in general suffer a lot because of the open world. Lies of P is more like a classic souls game but with a lot of quality of life upgrades and multiple difficulty modes for beginners.
Yeah the DLC for Elden Ring definitely kicked it up a notch. The base game definitely was easy if you’ve been playing souls games, I still found it pretty fun though
OP didn’t expand on it, and his photos didn’t show it, but this mouse apparently has a bunch of thumb buttons, which is a legitimately-rare feature (though it’s not the only mouse out there to have a bunch).
EDIT: Amazon has 786 “gaming mice” with 10 or more — a bit arbitrarily-chosen on my part — buttons, so I guess that there’s a reasonable crop out there.
I have used the G604 for 6 years and the 6 side buttons are perfect for me - not too few, not too many, just right. Plus Bluetooth & Lightspeed to switch between devices.
I’ve printed it a replacement for its rubber cover, but now I need to look at cleaning/replacing the switches as they are starting to double click.
I bought the mouse for ~$68 on sale, the resale market for the mouse is nuts.
Had a Naga at first but refused to buy Razer after it broke (got quite a few years out of it). I’m on my second G600 and bought a third off eBay which is sitting on my shelf new and sealed. Of I ever get to the point that the third one dies, then I’ll maybe scavenge the first two for parts and repair one XD
Second best. The best is actually the reddragon one that’s $20 on Amazon.
I have used every mmo mouse on the market (currently on a scimitar elite, it’s the one op has but silver not yellow) and they are all decent mice, but each has a fatal flaw except the reddragon.
G600 click switches are awful and double click after weeks of use, I had to replace them twice, the final time with the switches out of the red dragon. That was fine for close to 10 years, but the side key caps fall off, they are barely glued on.
The scimitar has an awful encoder on the scroll wheel, I had to open the mouse to pack it with Vaseline to get it working properly, and disassembling the scimitar is a nightmare.
The reddragon has bad software, but it’s also supported by open source options for remapping and RGB, so it’s one flaw was by far the easiest to fix.
The g600 was the most comfortable to palm, but the side keys are in an awkward spot to palm the mouse, the scimitar is nice for the adjustable keypad, but it moves with time and tightening it too much will break the mouse. The red dragon has an odd texture on the far side, very rough, but otherwise the best for a claw grip.
I bought some sort of no name quasi-mechanical keyboard that came with a gaming mouse as a combo, that was like $60 on Amazon, five years ago. Literally my favourites, both of them. And I’ve had many different keyboards and mice over the years too.
Razer is still making their Naga mouse with 12 side buttons. I believe they have a model that you can hot swap the side buttons to be the amount you want.
As cool as the hot swap thing is, it’s incredible they don’t sell replacement parts, mine has some faulty buttons that post cleaning somewhat work, but I use them almost as much as the click buttons, and having such an easy replaceable part that’s not sold infuriates me to no end.
I remember when they went from the old form factor in the 2012 version to the new ones where the buttons stick out more. I hated it at the time, but the side buttons are just so useful that I can’t see myself buying any other type of mouse.
Mandatory launchers can fuck right off. I was lucky enough to get Rockstar support to accept my Steam purchases but even then I had to try twice because the first time they pretty much blew me off.
I also had a similar issue with Ubisoft. There it was actually easier to restore my old email than get Ubisoft support to cooperate.
In short, fuck forced launchers and anyone who says "it's just another account". Yeah, it is at the moment but who knows 10 years from now. You'll be locked out of your games because some fuckery happens and support won't do shit.
You know what I meant. If I buy a game on one launcher it shouldn't open another launcher that then launches the game. The other launcher is completely unnecessary but it is mandatory to launch the game, hence mandatory launcher.
Edit: just to make it clear, if I make another account on another store that IMO is fine. I don't have a problem with having steam, gog and itch accounts. But when I buy a game on one storefront/launcher and then I have to make an account on another storefront/launcher to play the game I already bought, that's bullshit. In OPs case he was forced to make an account for a game he bought elsewhere and is now being punished because the company is stupid.
Think It’s the complaint is where a launcher is required on top of a launcher. Like if you buy Cyberpunk 2077 from Steam, GOG, or Epic it doesn’t required another launcher on top of the launcher you bought it from.
Good thing is that it does seem like majority of games don’t do that. Even EA is moving away from it.
And I’m talking about launcher the type you have to log in again.
Example being Ubisoft games where you get it from Steam or Epic and then have to install UPlay and then log into UPlay.
I’ll even use Finals as an example which isn’t DRM free. You install on Steam and go on playing with no additional login into a secondary launcher. Or you install from Gamepass with no additional login for a secondary launcher.
I mostly play open world games like just cause 2, GTA VC, and total overdose. I have also tried bully in past. Moreover i have played NFS MW, and moto gp2
There are only a few reasons I can surmise that this would be the case:
CRTs don’t add any input lag
There’s no extra latency from being connected to the internet
There’s no latency from bluetooth/wireless on the controller
Because most older games are extremely badly optimised by today’s standards. The original Metroid slows to an absolute crawl when there’s more than about 4 sprites on the screen; the dragon boss in Mega Man (2, I think) was such a laggy, slippery mess that I gave up trying to beat the game; Ocarina of Time runs at 20FPS (worse if you’re in a PAL territory like I am), and that’s one of the better playing N64 games.
I think you’re either noticing one of these extra sources of delay, or you’re blinded by nostalgia.
Unless it’s an HD one, there’s no input buffer so it’s impossible for a CRT to have more than a frame of input lag. And the console needs a frame to notice your input anyway.
You measure lag by taking the capture of a frame an input happens when it is halfway down the screen. Therefore, CRTs have input lag of half their refresh rate. For NTSC, that’s about 8ms. For PAL, 10ms.
Incidentally, a modern gaming LCD has a 2ms average pixel response time. Which is about the same as the difference between NTSC and PAL.
Seeing as Roblox being a groomer infested hellhole has been known for years it’s surprised me that it took this long for that story to actually break into the mainstream.
But anyways yeah. Predator hive is full of predators, more news at eleven.
This is windows, So Valorant is running its anticheat stopping Battlefields anti-cheat from starting up. Meaning you will have to pick one game as they all seem to start from boot though other sources have said the games have to be running.
In Linux you could prob just run a pass-through in a couple of VMs. But Linux itself doesn’t work with most of these anti-cheats so by default no one running Linux is exposed to this sort of thing.
Yes, obviously, and you don’t typically have trouble with display drivers either nowadays, I suppose we were both jesting.
The right way to do it would probably be either to spin a dedicated partition, or to add a boot entry that sets up a dedicated environment for the game (I haven’t really thought about it but it’s probably doable). In both cases it’s a bit silly, when the whole anti-cheat thing is apparently mostly useless anyway.
I’m not an expert, but it sounds like if you finish a session of valorant, the anti cheat never unloads and continues to monitor memory and files.
Easy Anticheat though, according so some sources, only runs during game play.
Riots Anticheat has a bad history though. But both essentially are black boxes that send details both hash and samples back to their owners for them to approve what’s on it computer. Opened a medical record? It’s probably been hashed and sent back.
Opened your employers accounting files when working from home? details you probably sent riot a copy.
Both can be updated. There’s no guarantees that riot won’t do something nasty against a portion of high value targets. They know you from your payment details. They can identify, update the module and get anything they like, they have root.
They do this to prevent cheaters, and it is effective. Some people who have no problems running any other executable that can do just as much damage believe this load on boot style is too invasive.
I wouldn’t mind this feature dying so I could play on Linux though.
Tell me how any other app uploading your entire documents directory is okay then. “Into the kernel” is largely fear mongering. Other, less trustworthy apps can do plenty of damage, and you don’t seem to care about those.
If you really want to be secure, you can’t do gaming on the same machine as your security sensitive stuff. It’s not limited to these anti-cheats.
code running in kernel space is hugely privileged… it can open up enormous security vulnerabilities because when you’re in the kernel you can bypass a LOT of security checks and restrictions… windows code is generally pretty well tested, so is unlikely to have particularly bad bugs like RCEs etc… but these kernel mode apps aren’t nearly as rigorously tested - things like this is what lead to the crowdstrike outage
things running in the kernel can also cause a lot more damage than user space apps, because the kernel doesn’t do a lot of the error checking and validation that stops things like kernel panics
And anti-cheat needs a lot of access (e.g. read app memory) and sees a lot of churn to evolve with cheat engines. More churn means less thorough testing, which means higher likelihood of an exploit.
and also, security isn’t about 100% guarantees… we each have our own risk profile: regular joe gamer doesn’t need to be as security conscious as someone working for the NSA… their risks are different, because their exploitation value is different… most people only need to protect themselves from generalised attacks because they’re not going to be targeted
kernel level apps, however, blast a massive hole in the walls that keep us secure and potentially open attack vectors for generalised attacks… it’s just not worth that risk
You’re running closed source software that has permissions to read your keyboard input to other applications (other than apps running as admin), they can access your files, and and they can communicate over the Internet.
You’re inherently trusting these publishers if you’re gaming on Windows. Who is the publisher of Darkest Dungeon or Deep Rock Galactic or Lethal Company?
And it's such a weird argument to make that just because some other app uploads your entire documents directory (which to be clear is also not okay) you shouldn't care about being forced into an potential attack vector that can take over your entire computer. Do you also leave your home server unsecured because Google is tracking you through your phone?
BioShock 3. Game establishes that it is a multiverse. There are many worlds/universes, but there is always a girl, and always a light house. You did something bad and it caused suffering. At the end of the game, you go back and change something, and create a bright happy future. Everyone sings Kumbaya (literally they play a song called break the cycle). The idea is that there was a single event and everything bad happened because of that. Going back and stopping it prevents all the bad stuff. The problem is, that only works with “Back to the Future” style time travel. The game already established it is a multiverse. So yes, you did create 1 future where everything didn’t go to shit. But because it’s a multiverse there are still an infinite number of universes where things are still very bad, and there is suffering. For whatever reason the writers just didn’t think about that I guess? It seemed really asinine at the time I played it.
spoilerI clocked its ending as you became a coalescence of all Bookers, and since all the Elizabeths kill you it stops you in every timeline in which you exist.
If it means the same as in french, convalescence is the period of time after an illness during which one recovers. Coalescence would be the action of joining/merging things
btw I never really got the ending of Bioshock Infinite, so your explanation is welcome. It felt a bit masturbatory to me at the time. It doesn’t help that I didn’t really enjoy the game itself, contrary to the previous two
It does. My just having woken up brain mixed the two up.
Also, I was actually a huge(ba-dum-tiss) fan of it. It’s one of my favorites. It’s flawed and you can tell that it had to drop some things to make it out the door but I liked it. My wife and I actually have matching tattoos based on the series.
All the Elizabeths come together to kill their Bookers. It’s not just one universe. It’s every universe. You only get to see your universe’s Booker die.
My favorite type of games were really always the story-rich non-linear storytelling of the Baldur’s Gate/Fallout style but in my youth I was far more attracted to Fallout than Baldur’s Gate. However, there are no modern iterations of Fallout in the same style. New Vegas is fun and all, but what I would give for a modern fallout in the style of BG3.
This shit still happens all the time. Somehow, all the morons got in charge of all the tech stuff. So now we have to deal with overly dramatic influencer wannabes, masquerading as social justice advocates. I was on reddit the other day, and the subject of teachers sleeping with students came up, and how no one takes it seriously when its a male student. I had said thats probably because just about every guy on the planet had wanted to sleep with at least one of his teachers when his in teenage years. I said that I had fancied my maths teacher when I was 15. I got banned for “soliciting sex from a minor”…
Cant even talk about our lived experience as human beings without someone looking to twist it into some kind of offence. What happened to Josh was a warning. And we didnt listen. Now we have religious puritains in the house of lords in the UK pushing age verification in online spaces. Everyone thinks about stealing data, its not. Its about pushing morality. They are currently going after the porn term “barely legal”. Why? Because in their heads it means not legal… In the gaming space, it used to be “video games cause violence” that then pivoted to “video games cause sexual violence against women”…
We will enter the post-internet age in our lifetimes, mark my words. People are starting to realize that it is not sustainable to have corporations filter your every word and authoritarian governments hold killswitches at arm’s reach. There is a growing need of a new and independent communication medium built from the ground up for censorship-resistance. And there is no shortage of bright minds to actually implement such a “peoples’ network”. Just look at freifunk, reticulum, etc.
Thirty years ago it was not possible to use a computer without installing proprietary software, but nowadays fully FOSS computing is the everyday reality of millions of people. Thirty years from now it will be possible to access all the world’s knowledge and communicate securely with anyone willing to listen, all without paying a cent to greedy ISPs or having your traffic monitored by government agents. There will be crackdowns and repression, but we will make it through.
Thirty years from now it will be possible to access all the world’s knowledge and communicate securely with anyone willing to listen, all without paying a cent to greedy ISPs or having your traffic monitored by government agents.
Halo 4, kinda suck tbh. This is coming from someone who play the MMC so i basically marathon it and is able to compare it back to back, and it peaked at Reach. The gun play is wonky and no dual wield, Covenant somehow become the bad guy again after the event in 3, and none of the one that help human defeat Gravemind came back as an ally.
But it doesn’t ruin the franchise for me though, to me canonically there’s only 5 Halo game. The rest is fan fic.
It’s explained in the game that the Covenant faction you fight is a splinter faction. There’s more details in the books, I didn’t have problems when I played it.
Right, the books that also seem to constantly have continuity errors with the games. :P
Reading the books has actually taught me to not take Halo’s plot so seriously and instead just try to enjoy whichever piece of the story I’m currently engrossed in.
I never really worried to much about continuity errors. The worse is Halsey being in two different places during the events of Fall of Reach book and the game Reach. The Forerunner books actually smoothed that stuff out by explaining when huge amounts of materials pass though Slipspace or go far too fast through Slipspace(remember that crystal?), temporal errors build up and you get a timeline split. Unlike most scifi timeline splits though, in Halo, the lines can reconverge and Reconcile without most people realizing it happen. Halo 5 made a little nod to that with Halsey’s “Casual Reconciliation” line. Somewhere in the Halo universe, some bookkeep is pulling their hair out trying to figure out how Halsey departed Reach twice.
4 felt like such a cash grab to me. No deep lore or story telling like with 1 through reach. Exposition was just spoon fed to us rather than a great mystery. Still, I plugged through, hoping maybe it’d turn around.
Then 5 came out and I gave up all hope on the franchise. Spent more time playing as Locke than we did Chief, story was more compelling than 4 but the storytelling and pacing were clunky, and it was completely disconnected from 4.
Infinite just got worse. “We lost, chief” (but we have no frame of reference, we have no idea what that means , we don’t know how the rest of the world has been affected, and then we’re put against some no name character when we really just want to know what the hell is happening off world)
The only good thing about Infinite was its return to the classic art style. After whatever the art team was doing in 4 and 5, I am glad at least the art team finally got a clue.
Agreed. It could have been such an interesting concept if it was literally any other place. Zeta halo could have been so cool, but it felt so detached from the universe
4 and 5 didn’t ruin anything for me. There’s stuff I genuinely like about them that got me excited for the next game. Plenty I didn’t like about them too.
Then there’s Infinite… it feels like the DLC or post-game content to a game we never got. And the multiplayer was unplayable last I saw. It made me no longer excited for the next game.
I still do Halo game nights a couple times a year though.
How much baggage do you have to address? Evil Cortana, Guardians, and Prometheans. The rest can be managed around.
If Infinite didn’t have to wrap up the previous games, it wouldn’t have that stink on it. But then it would have had even less substance. And the shitty open world wouldn’t have been any better.
It would have been better if they just used Cortana and the Guardians to wrap up the Promethean saga. But then they’d still have to write a decent story, which apparently they are incapable of.
It’s more that they wrote themselves into a corner with Cortana’s state/loss, all the forerunner lore being out in the open now, the weird Guardians stuff…
Infinite could have been a much more subtle expansion on the forerunners, keeping them enigmatic like the trilogy, and kept Cortana. That’s much more straightforward and “Halo”
The open world stuff wasn’t awful. I loved the marine encounters. But yeah, it felt half baked.
Watched a recent video on magic and writing and it applies for scifi too. Every time you add to the lore you now have to remember and support it forever. 4 just added so much that they clearly didn’t think through like that. Bungie dishes out lore in small bits from 1-3, and it was so exciting when you got just the small tiny bit of backstory. 4 and 5 then just dumped in on your plate in healing portions.
Librarian, Didact, people they didn’t even take the time to introduce well and we were supposed to just jump on board with it. Buck was literally the only saving grace for Halo 5 in my opinion - and they introduced him in ODST
To be fair, they probably had a mandate to go for a mainline chief story. That could’ve worked.
I guess the fundamental issue was they read the novels and such but didn’t “understand” the Halo trilogy’s feel (going for operatic sci fi drama instead of the quieter feel), and quickly wrote themselves into a corner.
Everything after 3 is poorly written fan fiction to me. It still is one of my favorite franchises of all time, but it’s never going to be the same again. Halo Wars 2 was all right though.
It’s okay but Halo 5 makes the whole story worthless and fighting the promethean enemies in 4 is horrible. All of them are bullet sponges and there isn’t enough ammo to kill them.
I don’t think 5 ruined 4. By the end of 5 it’s established that this Cortana is not the same Cortana. For all intents and purposes, the old Cortana is gone.
Infinite however, gave her a sympathetic send-off which undid that.
CE, Reach, and ODST are my top 3 games in the franchise. I think i have a special appreciation for the self-contained stories.
Actually, I had REALLY hoped Infinite would use ODST as a template for their open world. Because IMO, Infinite implemented it terribly in just about every way they could.
Another vote for Assetto Corsa. Ultimate is not the lowest price it’s ever been but still worthy of the price IMO considering how many hundreds (cough thousands) of hours I’ve gotten out of it. If you do get AC, I’d highly recommend a few things:
Content Manager: AC is great because of all of the mods it has built up over the years, but everything starts with Ilja’s (x4fab’s) Content Manager (now referring to as CM). This is an alternate (better) launcher and enables the use of the Custom Shaders Patch (included with CM).
Custom Shaders Patch: CSP brings a whole bunch of advanced settings and capabilities for everything from visuals to physics to how your driver reacts as you drive, weather and more. Both CM and CSP have free and paid versions so you can try them and if you like it you can pay a few bucks (literally) and unlock a whole bunch of additional features. I highly recommend both of these at the very least. The previous CM link has instructions on getting a full CM license through Itch.io. Paid CSP can be obtained via the linked Patreon.
Pure: This is an advanced weather controller from Peter Boese that utilizes CSP’s capabilities to bring fantastic dynamic weather, scheduled conditions, and absolutely beautiful skydomes. I also highly recommend this not only because Peter is awesome, but it’s also incredibly cheap. Peter also made an earlier weather controller known as Sol, but that is now outdated and completely outclassed by Pure. Don’t forget, in game rain comes from paid CSP, not Pure! Lots of people mix the two up since this is a weather controller.
Beyond that, you will find tons and tons of free and paid mods for cars, tracks, track skins and extensions, post-processing (PP) filters (to make the game look even better), sounds, etc. If you want it, it probably exists.
Edit: decipher_jeanne brought up a good point. Default controller support is pretty bad and can really ruin the AC experience. Thankfully, with CM and CSP, we have GamepadFX and custom controller scripts! For controller play I highly recommend Akeyroid7’s Advanced Gamepad Assist script.
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