To be fair, I bet he absolutely nailed that job. It’s like Hannibal Lector being in charge of catering.

Great wee game, def worth checking out if you’re into that sorta thing.

That any government or public figure would subject the public to X’s cesspool in order to contact or keep up with them is as fucked up as the platform itself. It’d be less fucked up to paste government news bulletins onto the walls of a crackhouse.

Whatever replaces Tenor needs to allow for more specificity in searching. If I search “lemur” and I see 3 orangutans, a chimp and a 12 gibbons, and maybe 1 actual lemur, I’m still happy to have simians, but I really needed a lemur, man. I was quite fucking specific in my search term. Had I written “monkey” but it showed me a series of apes, I wouldn’t mind that so much.

Also, “cat on skateboard” has fuck all to do with a poorly staged video of a dog playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with a set of gaming bongos. Again, glad to see it, but where’s my skateboarding cat??

I read his “contributions” to the Gaza genocide article’s talk page, along with the equally mealy-mouthed hand-wringing of Jimmy Wales. Total bellends both, although for different reasons. Jimmy is pressured into being an annoying grandstanding dickhead by Israeli interests, whereas Larry’s pressured into being an annoying grandstanding dickhead by his childhood.

Was there ever a time when PC Gamer wasn’t utter shit? Like, what the fuck is this article even saying? And what justification do they have to tag the end of Sjoerd’s LinkedIn quote with info about UE’s move into AI slop?

Is this what games journalism is now? Stalking LinkedIn pages and reporting when 2 lines of text are edited? And then drawing conclusions not at all supported by said text? 😒

c/NoStupidQuestions style question:

Why is making enough RAM to go around so hard now? I know the cause of it - AI cunts - but what is the actual bottleneck in the production of RAM that means it can’t be pumped out fast enough to meet demand?

2026 is gonna be the year I finally move to Linux. I have huge concerns about many aspects of switching, but they’re being overtaken by concerns about staying with Windows. I don’t even mind if my overall user experience is a bit worse on Linux (I am trying to have reasonable expectations that it won’t be the walk in the park Linux advocates on Lemmy like to claim), I just have much more faith in its security, privacy, customisability and - most importantly - the motivations and intentions of its developers.

It’s literally the most unstable, buggy, crash-prone piece of software I’ve ever used. I completed the game and got 100% of the cheevos, but it took me about 400% longer than it should have because I was having to relaunch the game every 5-10 minutes (not exaggerating, that’s how often it crashed).

Will pay a frankly humiliating amount of money to get one of these ASAP. My OG Steam Controller (my second, in fact) is on death’s door.

I liked Starfield (I even 100%ed the achievements on Steam). I also loved No Man’s Sky long before the shift in pubic sentiment towards it, so maybe I’m just weird. But if you’re reading this and thinking “this guy wouldn’t know a good game if it shat a voxel-based turd onto his chest”, you’re WRONG. I also loved MindsEye. So there.

I don’t think it’s necessary, even from a story perspective (the game does a great job of filling in the blanks for you). It’s definitely worth playing Portal 1 though, it’s a fantastic game with perfect design even nearly 20 years later. I mean apart from engine and graphics tech, I don’t think the game could be improved upon much. Same is true for Portal 2.

Another thing about Portal 1’s story is that it’s barely there at all. Almost all of it is incidental to the puzzles, and the story that is there is either passive exposition from the antagonist, or some very minimal environmental stuff. With that in mind, you could easily get yourself up to speed on the story going into Portal 2 just by glancing at a one or two paragraph summary, maybe with a couple of screenshots (you could probably convey everything in the story in one sentence if you’re creative with the punctuation). Portal 2’s story is much more fleshed out and interesting, though.

Portal 1 is so old and undemanding that you could probably run it smoothly inside a VM even on a meagre PC. I don’t know what OS you’re running, but I presume it’s not Windows?

Won’t it be kinda strange for gamers who buy a game and find that none of the characters look like the ones on the Steam storefront? 👀 Many of these characters are legendary and have been in long-running serieseses, imagine booting up the latest Uncharted game only to find that Burt Reynolds is the main character now, all because you turned on DLSS.

Downright disrespectful of the artistic toil that goes into perfecting characters, lighting, colour grading, etc. Like maybe there was an artistic choice made to not have the character look like an AI ad for an AI-generated OnlyFans model?

It used to be a tool to gain FPS while retaining graphical fidelity. Now it’s aiming to be a full-on infidel; replacing art to the extent that it’s barely recognisable. What will DLSS 8 be like?

Welp, looks like I’ll need to get myself a PS5 then.

Said no cunt ever

‘Steam Store Front’ should be shortened to ‘Stormfront’. At least then no one would be shocked when they discover it’s teeming with illiterate bigots.

All I can suggest is that you report and block as much as you can. If there’s a game, like Relooted, that’s a bug light for scumbags, go to its forums when you have 10 minutes free and just report the shitstains you come across. Steam does take action sometimes.

My parents paid about that much for a SNES copy of Earthworm Jim back in the mid-90s. It was disgusting then and it’s disgusting now, despite the fact that, adjusted for inflation, that would be £140 today. I mean I don’t feel like we’re getting a 50% discount when a game costs 70 fuckin’ quid nowadays.

There’s really no reason to spend that anyway, not on PC at least. IsThereAnyDeal.com and the slightly questionable loaded.com (formerly cdkeys.com) give decent discounts even on day one (and Steam itself will eventually have it on sale, of course). Loaded isn’t like G2A, which is a credit card thief’s wonderland. It’s more like when your uncle Jim crosses the border with 40 cartons of cigarettes secreted in the wheel wells of his truck because they cost 400% less over there. I can live with that level of mischief when it comes to AAA games that take the absolute piss with their prices and their hostage DLCs. EA, Ubisoft and Rockstar have not caused me a millisecond of lost sleep when I get their games for £3 six months after release from a code that was originally bundled with a new GPU. With how extremely easy it is to pirate games (something I haven’t done in nearly 20 years), I don’t feel like those larger AAA companies are meeting us half way, to say the fucking least.

They’re banking on severe vendor lock-in preventing people from moving on. So many communities are solely on Discord now, it’s insane.

Would something like Stoat (previously known as Revolt) eventually have the same requirements?

We expected it to be more than that, actually. If it’s $700, that’s pretty good. It’s not a Switch. It’s a prebuilt gaming PC in a tiny form factor. Building a gaming PC today with the same horsepower would probably set you back a lot more than that, and you’ll also have a giant tower taking up space.

It’s not for me, but I can think of at least 3 people in my family who would get a lot of value out of it at that price point. No PC-building headaches, no researching every bit of hardware and comparing prices and performance, no tedious planning of the cooling layout, no thermal paste, no separate warranties and RMA headaches for every individual component, no Windows bullshit, not needing an entire corner of the room just for the tower, perfect for the living room, driver and software updates that apply to and work for every customer, I could go on. I don’t see any downside for the average gamer. Sure, if you’re an FPS penny pincher who simply has to OC and have the best of the best and latest hardware, it’ll not appeal to you. But that’s a minority of gamers.

$700 is a dream. $1,000 is reasonable in the current climate I guess, but pushing it a little. $1,500 would be unfortunate, but it really depends on what extra value the system comes with from Valve. I wanna know their RMA and warranty plans. If they’re anything north of “Kafkaesque”, which is how it is with virtually every other hardware manufacturer/reseller, the extra money might actually be worth it, for one’s mental health. If they send out a replacement unit before you have to return a defective one, for example, that would be enough to justify a little more cost, but that’s coming from someone with a long and storied history of nightmarish, abusive RMA practices. I’d suck a dog’s dirty dick to not have to go through that shit again.

be on the wrong side of history speedrun

At least they have an AI-free option, as annoying as it is to have to opt into it.

On a related note, it’s hilarious to me that the Ecosia search engine has AI built in. Like, I don’t think planting any number of trees is going to offset the damage AI has done and will do to the planet.