Honestly, Andromeda didn’t deserve the hate it got. It wasn’t awful. It had some issues, sure. But many of the complaints about the story basically boiled down to “it wasn’t larger than the entire first three games combined.” It was trying to start a new story, but instead of being seen as a new start it was compared to the entirety of the original trilogy.

It completely misses that the entire first Mass Effect game was basically just an intro to the Reapers. Like the entire first Mass Effect game is basically just “oh hey here’s a new villain.” And by that metric, Andromeda did a lot more than the first Mass Effect did. But it wasn’t larger than the entire trilogy, so it got panned by the players who were too impatient to wait for a sequel.

Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.

I actually enjoyed the story. Some of the themes and motifs were heavy handed, but that’s par for the course. Honestly, the biggest issue with the story is that players have come to expect a big plot twist. Bioshock 1’s twist hit first-time players hard, so later games have tried to replicate that. But the issue is that it only hit players hard because they never knew it was coming. They only remember it because it was truly shocking the first time you played through it.

So now players have come to expect that from the series, which means the series can’t replicate it; When players are looking for a big plot twist, you can’t really hide it anymore. Because as soon as you start foreshadowing it, players catch on. And if you’re too subtle with your signals, then players who have been looking for it will say that doesn’t make any sense.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t a huge fan of the story at first. It took me a few hours and a few quests to actually get into it. It suffers from Kingdom Hearts 2/The Witcher 3 Syndrome: The two hour long intro/tutorial is absolutely the worst part, which is a shame. The game really begins to shine once you get to Meridian, but that’s several hours in.

That copyright thing was never actually tested in court though, because they settled before the trial began. The “copyrighted keys” argument was what Nintendo originally used to bring the lawsuit, but it was never actually tested because it never went to trial. In fact, many legal experts say it likely would have been thrown out in Yuzu’s favor. But Yuzu didn’t have a legal fund, so they couldn’t afford to actually take it to court and fight it.

FWIW, the PlayStation was meant to have the Nintendo button layout too. In Japan, O is synonymous with “yes/good” sort of like a check mark (✅) and X means “no/bad”. So the X and O buttons were meant to be used in that way. But western game devs didn’t know that, and designed their games with X as confirm and O as decline.

Take it a step farther. Why is cheap grain available on the market? Because European import regulations were relaxed to support Ukrainian grain exports.

In case you weren’t aware, grain is one of Ukraine’s largest exports.

It’s primarily meant for people who have slow connections. If you’re downloading a game over DSL or satellite (which is often the only thing available unless you’re in an urban/suburban area) then the 5GB of extra compression could be a huge time difference. It’s also true for metered connections, where you have to pay by the GB, or where you have a data cap.

I mean, she’s never tried to hide the fact that she’s Russian. And she also hasn’t hidden the fact that she dislikes Putin. But lots of Europe is struggling right now. For instance, the farmers protesting across many parts of Europe, as a result of the war and Ukrainian exports.

I mean, the real end solution is to host your own server. Then you can federate/defederate with whoever the hell you want. As long as you don’t do anything to get banned from a specific instance, you’ll be fine.

But that’s more work than most people are willing to put into a Reddit clone.

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Yup. They can’t take out interest-free loans to pay off their almost-interest-free loans. So now they’re scrambling to save money and build value the old fashioned way.

Yeah, I used to work a job where I was basically on call for 6 hours at a time, but didn’t need to do much unless something broke. I’d help set things up at the top of the day then tear things down at the end. But in between, I was basically just waiting for things to break. It’s safe to say that I used the fuck out of my gaming laptop and VPN at my desk. Because I obviously didn’t want to try playing games on a company computer.

I played a lot of single player and idle games at that job, because those are easy to walk away from at a moment’s notice. Just hit pause and you can give your full attention to whatever problem has popped up. Then once it’s resolved, you’re right back where you left off.

Open exactly one email. Don’t bother reading it; That would put you into overtime. But you can at least commit to opening the email and waiting for it to load before you clock out for the year.

I propose that we begin referring to any type of MRA as “boy love” instead.

Historically, games would refuse to boot unless you had the game disc inserted. Even if the game was fully installed and didn’t need the disc to run, requiring the disc was a primitive form of DRM.

One of the most common forms of cracks was a NoDisc crack, which did exactly what it says on the label; It removed the requirement for you to insert a disc. This was usually just a quick file replacement. So it was easy to take the game disc to your buddy’s house, use it to install the game on their computer, apply the NoDisc crack, and then your buddy could play the game whenever they wanted without using your disc. This was many people’s first intro to piracy. Obviously game publishers hated this, and constantly played whack-a-mole to shut them down. On the data preservation and user friendliness side of things, NoDisc cracks were popular because they allowed you to play your games without digging through your giant book of CD’s. It also meant you weren’t locked out of a game just because your little sibling scratched your CD.

When transitioning to digital sales, the disc requirement obviously won’t work. You can’t require a disc when the user never actually received a disc. So the game publishers had to remove the disc requirement when they put their game up for sale on Steam. And this is showing that in the official Steam release, a pirate’s signature is found. They simply used a NoDisc crack (from one of the crackers that they had constantly been battling) on their own game, to remove the disc requirement. Instead of finding an “official” way to do it, they just used the most straightforward route.

And yet game publishers still constantly harp about piracy.

IIRC it didn’t end with the wiishop either. Off the top of my head, there was some controversy surrounding the NES/SNES Classic consoles. I think they used emulators that were written by pirates, instead of writing their own?

Was going to say the same. Windows and Linux both use “lazy” ways of deleting things, because there’s not usually a need to actually wipe the data. Overwriting the data takes a lot more time, and on an SSD it costs valuable write cycles. Instead, it simply marks the space as usable again, and removes any associations to the file that the OS had. But the data still exists on the drive, because it’s simply been marked as writeable again.

There are plenty of programs that will be able to read that “deleted” content, because (again) it still exists on the drive. If you just deleted it and haven’t used the drive a lot since then, it’s entirely possible that the data hasn’t been overwritten yet.

You need a form of secure delete, which doesn’t just mark the space is usable. A secure delete will overwrite the data with junk data. Essentially white noise 1’s and 0’s, so the data is completely gone instead of simply being marked as writeable.

“removedrdly” means “cheap” or “stingy”. For an example, Scrooge was removedrdly until his visit from the Christmas ghosts.

But good luck using it in mixed company without getting punched in the nose.