Shenmue III is currently free on Epic Game Store through tomorrow. While the Shenmue series was always too ambitious for its own good, it’s certainly worth checking out for free.
https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/p/shenmue-3
(Looks like Epic Game Store is also getting completely hammered with traffic right now. If only there was a way to anticipate demand and scale to meet it.)
I don’t know much about 5E, but much of this should be adaptable to other systems:
There’s also the FATE Accessibility Toolkit for FATE.
Frankly I’ve bought more books than software from them.
I’ve bought way more games that I should have from them, but never used the subscription service because, really, that many new games per month is waaaay too much of a firehose for me to drink from.
Haven’t used them on Linux, but I hate to see them drop the support. Especially right as Steam is going all-in on Linux game support…
I am a subscriber, and have been for long enough that I am on the classic plan which doesn’t actually require me to make any choices every month as I just get everything (all 12). You are absolutely right that it is too many new games per month, but I crossed the threshold of having way too many games to play so long ago that it no longer matters.
I’m not thrilled with their decision to drop support for Mac and Linux, although I admit that I have made that choice easier for them since I do not game on either platform, despite having more machines running Linux in my house than Windows.
If they later decide not to provide steam keys for their game sales, they will almost certainly lose me as a customer for those purchases.
I’ve been soloing Hollow’s Last Hope to work out my solo rules and to see how Savage Pathfinder compares with Savage Worlds Adventure Edition. I am halfway through, and prefer Adventure Edition, since it’s simpler, and it doesn’t add character classes.
Recently I’ve been playing Fortnite again. Late at night, when I’m too wound up to sleep, it lets me get out some mental energy and focus. And after a game or two, I’m ready to relax.
I think it’s kind of amusing because I quit playing it a few years ago. Most other people seemed so much better at it - faster, able to quickly build, etc. I rarely did well. Kids, I figured, with faster reflexes and plenty of time to put into practicing the game. It wasn’t fun doing so badly all the time, getting eliminated in the first minutes of the game.
But now, I’m having a lot of fun with it. My reflexes aren’t any better, and I’m still not spending much time on it (1-2 games at a time). But I can get in there and with stealth and situational awareness usually end up in the top 10 if not the top 5.
I was playing 2 games at a time - one to warm up and then one to try to place. But this week has been especially fun. Monday night - won my first game, got the victory crown. Tuesday night, won my first game again, and got a ‘crowned victory’ achievement.
I guess tonight I’ll either get a triple crown or lose my crown. Either way it’ll be fun. The game now has vehicles, ziplines, ventilation ducts to crawl through, and other fun stuff. I don’t even see people building all that much anymore. I did learn how to build, but I only do it as a decoy - throw up some walls and then duck back and wait for someone to investigate or start shooting at the walls while I flank them.
My favorite though, is winning with 0 kills. Let the first 98 people take each other out while I’m sneaking around, so I only have one left to deal with. Then let that one either fall off of a tower they built and die from the fall damage, or get caught in the storm looking for me while I’m watching from a safe hiding spot. The nature of the game might be geared toward shooting and running over people, but the fact that you can win with 1 or even 0 kills is something. That’s the achievement I aim for.
Edit: And I did get the triple crown! After the last remaining opponent shot down one of my decoy walls, I ran out from cover and emptied a magazine into him, which he was not expecting.
Wow… for a pretty tiny web app, that’s crazy.
So Chaosium has gone into the NFT scam… cue To Be Eaten First.
Oh how I love that classic 1-bit Mac aesthetic. Its many graphical limitations were actually a wonderful vehicle for creativity.
I’m debating my options on dealing with a running issue with a game I’m playing.
Quick recap: the game in question, Shadow of Death (mobile game, Android/iPhone) has been allowing a player to use a very objectionable username (N-slur+raper). There’s really no direct player-to-player contact in the game; the one “multi-player” segment (Arena) uses player names and stats for their opponent-bots. Nevertheless, it’s not a good experience to come up against someone with a horribly offensive name like that during play.
I have raised the issue three times (last May, November, and January) with Facebook-based customer support, only to get vague “we’ll look into it” responses at best. I still keep “meeting” the player, with our most recent bout occurring last night.
I sent a DM to the moderator on the game’s Discord, but have not received any response. I’ve made note of the game’s parent company, and assuming the Discord mod ignores me, they will get a strongly worded e-mail calling them to account for perpetuating in-game harrassment.
I’m not sure what to do next. I’ve reviewed the Google Play rules, and I’m not sure whether or not I can report them for not moderating their game properly. I could put them on blast on Twitter, but the company’s accounts there aren’t used often so I’m not sure they’d even notice, and the potential blowback could be severe.
I’m honestly questioning whether or not it’s even worth the effort, whether or not I should just drop the game instead. But I’ve been playing this for over two years, 1600+ hours total, so why should I be the one who’s run out of the game for this? I’m mostly sure the answer to “AITA?” here is no… but I’m not sure how much impact I’m gonna make.
Any thoughts?
5.5 years ago, I built this computer to replace my old one. And I built it well, spent about $1000 on it, got the dust filters and everything. I intended it to last at least 5 years, 10 years with upgrades.
Now I’m past the 5 year mark and parts are starting to show their age. Not the RAM, which was the bottleneck on my old system, I did well there. But notably, I could run any/every game at high/ultra/maximum graphics levels back then. But new games are recommending a better graphics card than I have.
Got RDR2 on a deep discount sale. It works. But the settings are mostly low, and can’t go much above that. Some of the other new games I have, the little utility program says it can’t optimize settings for them. I can play and enjoy them, but not to their potential.
So ok, time for a new graphics card. But the new ones are selling at more than triple MSRP, if you can even find them. More than my entire system cost. Tried EVGA, which has had a waiting list program. But they shut down the waiting list, and the people who used it are saying it took about a year to get their order. Mid-range cards aren’t any better. So ok, no graphics card for me, not yet anyway.
But I built this with a small SSD for the OS and a big hard drive for data. In the last half decade, SSDs have increased in capacity and come way down in price. And games have grown large enough that I now put them on the hard drive instead of the SSD. But I have a free M2 slot. So maybe adding a new SSD for a couple hundred would be worth it. 2TB of games with lightning fast load times.
However, that would mean disassembling the entire computer to get at the M2 slot on the bottom of the motherboard, then reassembling it all afterward (which is tricky in a tight Mini-ITX system) . And it wouldn’t even help with multiplayer games since it wouldn’t affect their time connecting to servers, sitting in the matchmaking queue, etc.
So here I am, ready for upgrades, kinda needing them, wanting them. But it’s really hard to justify it. Part of me really wants to, but then the other part thinks it seems like a waste to do so.
They’ve raised $5.3m so far, with 3 days to go.
Also:
Have you looked into Virtual Computers?
I have VMs for Ubuntu and for older stuff - Windows XP and even Windows 2000. But you can’t give a VM more hardware than you have.
If you mean streaming via something like Stadia or Luna, I haven’t tried that. The idea always sounded loony to me, especially having used some remote desktop stuff in the past. But I guess if you can play online games and stream online video, it makes sense that it could work. Maybe I should give that a try.
Disclaimer: I haven’t watched the video yet. I promise I’ll watch it later.
I don’t know that Azure has any VM SKUs that are particularly well suited to gaming, and would likely not be cost effective on an ongoing basis. In my experience, Cloud VMs work well when you have either well defined workloads that have a limited time scope. For example, if you have a process that you run periodically (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) but you don’t need running 24/7, it can be cost effective to create a VM, run the process, then destroy the VM. In some cases, it can even enable you to use higher-spec hardware to complete the process faster since you won’t need it as long. The key thing to understand about cloud VMs is that you are paying for capacity, not usage. If you leave the VM running, or even off but allocated, you will be paying a per-minute charge for it. Contrast that with more elastic resources like functions, containers, and other Platform as a Service offerings, which bill based on usage. To my knowledge, none of the major cloud providers have this option for a desktop/gaming purpose.
There are some consumer offerings worth looking at, though:
Those are the services that I’m aware of. I think I’ve seen at least one service that allows you to rent a cloud VM specifically tailored for gaming, but I can’t remember the name at the moment, and don’t know enough about the pricing to know whether or not it makes sense financially. I also expect that there will be more cloud services that become available over time. In particular, I can see Steam going down that path, especially with the work they’ve been doing on Proton to get it working with the Steam Deck, which could easily be adapted for a streaming platform.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that cloud game services really only make sense if you have a fast, reliable, unmetered Internet connection. Local gaming can work around any or all of those.
