I swear I played D2 at 800x600 - was that enabled in the expansion pack?

Yup; RIP to Billie Jean as the first song you hear when you jump into a car for the first time in Vice City.

Yikes; whatever I expected from the remasters - this ain’t it.

The original C&C remaster did a similar graphics upscale, but they at least managed to at least mostly pull it off.

Given they could have potentially rasterised WOW assets to provide a cohesive feel to players, this is just a total ball-drop.

I’ve been mulling over this the past few years, having finally kicked the WoW habit in the second year of Shadowlands (approaching ~3 years now)…

…but how often are quests/missions/objectives etc. just a combination of go to x, collect x of y, kill x of y? At a certain point, all of these become generic - right?

VPN to a country with a lower cost, and sign up there. It used to be Turkey and India, where you could get a Family Plan for like $2/mo - but they’ve cracked down a bit on it.

We use YT for so much in our ‘household’ that it made sense to pool together and get Premium, and honestly it feels good having ~5 people who consume a tonne of content ad-free for nearly no cost while still supporting our preferred content creators.

Understatement of the decade, IMO!

I’ve barely touched my Steam games library as it is, have just dived headfirst into emulating my retro game collection (PS1, 2, 3 & Portable); along with SNES predominantly - because fuck Nintendo.

I just thought it was a speech impediment… 🤷🏻‍♂️

I doing think it was an one thing, but more-so a build-up over time - a death of a thousand cuts, if you will:

It was a cultural moment generally, just think back to all of those celebrity commercials (“I’m Mr. T and I’m a Night Elf Mohawk”). All cultural moments pass eventually.

The third expansion (Cataclysm) was quite weak to begin with; coupled with a lack of content in the tail-end of the second (Wrath of the Lich King), which itself was incredible - narratively wrapped up the story that began all the way back in Warcraft 3.

So a lot of people chose that time to bow out of the game, as it required a fair bit of time dedication and seemed like an appropriate time to do so - given the narrative pay-off.

Lastly, the introduction of a number of game tools to automate the group composition process meant that the impact of player reputation on servers was severely diminished. Before then, there players who were toxic (stealing items, intentionally killing the group, failing quests) were infamous on a server.

Once this tool was further opened up to allow for groups to form across multiple servers - the sense of community was shattered as you would have no way to know if the person from another server was good/bad etc. it stopped being about bringing in the individual player, and just getting a body in to fill a role.

As someone who was lucky enough to get to experience those first ~6 years; it truly was lightning in a bottle.

20 years on, I am still friends with a number of those I met in WOW - and an in contact with a few more beyond that!

Unfortunately, it does feel like that sense of community those early years fostered are long gone, save perhaps a blip when Classic first launched.

Who knows when the next game will come along, which will be able to foster such relationships.

If it’s within your budget, grab a Steam Deck and use it in docked Desktop mode. It’s a pretty great introduction into Linux IMO, especially due to the fact that Valve themselves are maintaining the OS, and since it’s running on a fixed hardware platform - most online solutions should be applicable to any problems you may encounter.

Worst case, you don’t like it you can always eBay it off to recoup most of your costs?

Need to leave some features out intentionally, to add later to the PS6 as a selling point and incentivise customers to upgrade!

Ideally, yes - but if you’re a conscript you really don’t have an option of where you are going to get assigned to. If your commander deems you necessary for the front lines - that’s where you’ll go.

The factory manager isn’t going to protect you like some modern-day Schindler, they’ll likely pocket a bribe for turning you over. This is just how things are done in current-day Russia.

The Tatarstan Republic reportedly implemented a program in spring 2024 to employ minors aged 14-18 in the defense industry.

A draft amendment to the legislation on alternative service submitted to Russia’s State Duma in June 2024 proposed letting new conscripts choose defense industry work as an alternate to military service.

Only a matter of time before those 14yo get called up to the front lines; more meat for the grinder, all in service to Putin’s delusions of grandeur.

Going by that argument though, then EVERYTHING is an indirect act of God.

Bullet wound? Clearly it was God’s will, for ordering the universe in such a way that an individual was armed at that point in time to cause you harm.

Cancer? God willed the carcinoma onto your skin.

Maybe it’s just Argumentum ad absurdum, but insurance companies are basically arguing against their own existence.

It was called Kurushi here in our neck of the woods; and I’m glad I’m not the only person who still intensely remembers that game from a demo disc.

I ended up picking up a mint copy to add to my collection; well worth it IMO.

Good riddance, mines are such a barbaric form of warfare… generations not yet born will likely fall victim to these insidious things.

I specified one generation of hardware backwards compatibility; beyond that software emulation would be more than sufficient.

The PS5 is backwards compatible with all but ~6 PS4 titles. Sure that’s entirely because of the shared x86-64 architecture, but it makes the PS4 stand out like a sore thumb for its lack of direct generational backwards compatibility.

By the end of the PS3’s lifecycle the Cell processor has been die-shrunk multiple times, reducing power consumption, heat output and PCB space required. It could then share the rest of the PS4s existing IO chips and circuitry.

There was literally no reason for backwards compatibility to be removed beyond corporate greed. Blindly accepting it, and actually trying to justify that as a good thing is one of the key reasons this hobby has gone down the toilet.

Hard to improve on perfection, but they had to keep their UI designers employed I suppose?