Finished Baldur’s Gate 3, Act 3 was much buggier than I thought. Still had a great time and want to do another playthrough in a year or two, once most of the bugs are fixed.
Started Quake 2, the recently released Enhanced version. It’s fun, I like the weapons more than in Quake 1, the Super Shotgun can actually kill stuff now. I also prefer the sci-fi environments more than the medieval ones in the first game.
Lastly, I randomly decided to give Baldur’s Gate 1 a shot, after I finished the third one. I never really played it or any of the other old Infinity Engine games before, although I got all the Steam releases years ago. I’m playing as a Half-Orc Fighter, named Big Stick, who goes around whacking stuff with a big stick (a quarterstaff). The game is ok so far, nothing spectacular. I’m still really early, only chapter 2, and I’m just travelling around everywhere I can, bonking stuff until it explodes, and helping people in need.
I agree with you about a 3D Mario: it’s absolutely not incompatible with the release of Wonder. Also, it would be a good candidate to showcase the graphics of the new console, without taking much risks.
Mario Kart/Splatoon/Smash bros. They need a multiplayer game. For Mario Kart and Smash Bros, they have the same (fist world) problem: the switch versions have so much content that it’s difficult to hit harder. And it’s not nice of me, but I feel like they wouldn’t mind milking the Splatoon players.
Animal crossing. The license gained so much new fans with AC:NH, it would be suprising if they don’t try to take advantage of this new popularity.
My recommendation would be to give up on the port forwarding.
If maintaining a ratio is important to you then just rent a seedbox once in a while. 1 month with a seedbox gives me enough upload credit to last me several years.
Thereafter I just download torrents, I may be unconnectable but no big deal.
Does it not impact downloading? I thought the lack of port forwarding on my VPN was what was causing me to not connect to seeders even though qBittorrent shows them
My (possibly mistaken) understanding is that during the download phase your client is contacting seeds requesting parts. Although the data is going to be incoming it’s still an outbound connection because your client initiated it, so you don’t need to be connectable for that.
It’s the seeding phase which is problematic because downloaders can’t contact you to request parts. That said your client will still contact downloaders and offer parts, which again is an outbound connection so you don’t need to be contactable.
In summary download speeds are uneffected, but seeding rates will be diminished. With most private trackers you can still satisfy seeding requirements just by keeping the torrent available for however long.
As an aside I use mullvad & wireguard. I’ve found wireguard dramatically easier to configure, particularly in a docker environment.
I’m not on any private trackers. I’d be interested, but not until I have a more dedicated setup; I’m still very much a casual torrenter.
It’s good news then if port forwarding won’t affect my downloads, because that was the only reason I wanted it, but I saw others online say that lacking that feature is what was causing me not to connect to peers shown in my torrent client. Any idea what’s up with that?
Not really. Either my explanation is wrong or theirs is. Honestly could be either.
There’s so much misunderstanding and misinformation around torrenting.
All I know is that I’ve never had any problems downloading without being connectable. Never ever. It’s just not an issue.
Additionally, the vast majority of people torrenting in 2023 are using a vpn and none (very few) of them will forward ports so it can’t be a big deal.
Thirdly, there’s a lot of piracy purists / elitists who just can’t abide the idea that your set up may not have the best possible configuration for seeding. IMO, seeding on a residential connection is just a waste of time - download on a residential connection, seed on a VPS / seedbox.
My recommendation list is going to be a wild mix of different styles. Basically aynthing in my Games Library that I find visually appealing…
Gibbous - A Cthulu Adventure: While it isn’t my favourite point&click (that price goes to the Deponia Trilogy), it’s by far the most beautiful I’ve played up to now. The attention the devs paid to detail is astounding. The animations are perfect. In other words: A work of art.
Euro Truck Simulator 2: I might be an exception here, but to me the main selling point of this game is the scenery, not the trucks.
Elite: Dangerous: Most of the times this game looks utterly boring. Sometimes however, you catch an exceptional sight. Here’s a screenshot of an eclipse in a binary system, as seen from an icy moon of a gas giant (behind which the primary star is hidden).
Space Engine: Same argument as for Elite. Most of the stuff is boring. Sometimes you find an exceptional sight. Also, Space Engine isn’t really a game, but rather a “beautiful picture generator”, as there is no real gameplay as of yet.
Dwarf Fortress in ASCII mode: The ASCII “graphics” are a work of art on their own. Especially the animations. And the best part: The ASCII version can be downloaded for free, while the (imho less beautiful) graphical version costs money.
Pyre: A mix of Visual Novel and Sports Game. The backgrounds and characters are beautifully drawn.
Beat Hazard: The colours of the effects are stunning.
Thanks! I caught it more or less by chance though. I was just scanning all moons in the system, and thought that landing would be a nice break from the scanning routine. And then this happened. It looked even better a few moments before, when the sun that’s visible in the shot was still partially occluded by the gas giant. Took me too long to fire up camera mode to catch that though…
Just unlucky, I’ve played through the game many times and some runs I get none other runs I get a lot. There is a pattern to some of them, but if you are just picking yourself it’s truly random, there’s no “loaded dice” system involved to throw the player a bone. (though you’d think there would be with how aggressive catchup is XD)
Maybe I’m still in the early stages (blacklist 10) that catchup for enemies isn’t too relevant because I’ve been smoking them (like half the map away).
Although when I do make a mistake (ram head-on against another car, hit a wall, etc.) it is plainly obvious that given enough time I’ll be able to catch up.
The later ones don’t allow that, they’ll just take off and you’ll have to reset. Some mods let you turn it off but really the game just becomes a cakewalk if you do.
I just finished Earl. Either the AI for catchup for Earl is egregious as you’ve said or the tail end of the race is mostly cornering and I’m just bad at it. I had to restart like 4 times.
Being a Mac user, this year is indeed a good year.
I’ve been a very longtime WoW player but couldn’t stand the game anymore. I dropped it after a few months of Classic WOTLK (my personal fav) both out of boredom and because Blizzard contempt for macOS users
Finding a game that I love and runs natively wasn’t easy but it finally happened. I never was an hardcore gamer (except maybe in the early days of WoW) so I never felt the need to get a dedicated PC (I had a PC but it only ran macOS and Manjaro)
I’m currently playing Metro Exodus and BG3 (which I absolutely love even in EA). I also bought REV, NMS and Cliff Empire, but they weren’t for me.
The other game changer is Game Porting ToolKit which allows me to test a whole bunch of Windows only games thanks to a friend who added me to its Steam family.
Most of the games run smoothly enough for me (60FPS) so I guess the times I was thinking about buying a gaming rig are over. This money will go in some overpriced Mac option.
Anyway, I never spent that much money in video games. It definitely must be a sign.
Which Mac are you running on? I haven’t gone through the game porting kit setup yet because it seemed like a real pain in the ass and I want confident the performance would be worth it in the end on my m2pro
I recommend rutracker. It’s great for BD rips of movies and TV shows. The majority of files have the original English audio + Russian dubs. Quite a lot of hard to find stuff and almost always has seeds.
Just realized you asked for plugin tracker, idk what that is
bin.pol.social
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