In 6th grade we could get some bonus point on our final exam for knowing how to spell pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (which isn't actually that hard to spell, just long) and I've never forgotten how.
Thanks! I appreciate it
Haven’t seen a post like this recently so I thought I’d start the conversation !
We normally do a "what are you playing" discussion post at the start of each month, so the next one would have been posted in a couple days. This post is taking off though, so I'll go ahead and feature it and we'll use it instead for the month of August.
On a side note, we're always looking for more routine discussion topics if anyone has any suggestions.
Nier: Automata, first time in steam deck. It runs surprisingly well.
It's a story that's been told here before, but one of the major projects that makes the Steam Deck work (DXVK, which converts DirectX in Vulkan for Proton) was made because a guy really wanted to play Nier Automata on linux.
Tunic is great, I reached the end awhile back but have been slowly going back and chipping away at some of the final puzzles. It kinda feels like two separate games, there's the initial Zelda-like with a moderate share of puzzles, but once you get to the end you can mostly drop the Zelda parts and it becomes a top down version of the Witness.
Honestly I think those type of mechanics can be fine, the issue is that they're normally done to be predatory and try to get the player to spend money to bypass the delay. No Man's Sky also has time-gated stuff, and it works fine.
Helldivers 2 arguably meets some of that criteria too, a lot of the medals you get are from community wide progress, meaning that less active players (like me) get the majority of their medals from time passing in between play sessions.
The key difference is whether the time-gates prevent you from playing when you want to. If it never actually blocks you from being able to play and progress, then there's no issue or frustration with the mechanic.
I'm not against client side anti-cheats in general, but kernel level ones are too big of a security risk in my opinion.
The US government is banning apps like tiktok and considering banning DJI drones due to the amount of data they collect and send back to China. Several of the most popular games using kernel anti-cheat are all Chinese owned companies, and the whole point of kernel anti-cheat is that it has full access to your computer (making it hard to hide cheating). I have a strong suspicion that even if Microsoft doesn't restrict kernel access, we may see government bans on some of these games.
Multicar discounts are pretty significant, my coworker went to drop a car from his plan recently and found out that it would cost him more to insure just 1 car than to insure 2. Doesn't make any since logically.
I mean Valorant has a lot of cheaters, it doesn't really seem like kernel anti-cheat has been more effective than other forms of anti-cheat. There's also an increasing number of hardware peripherals that offer cheating assistance, and these can't be detected by kernel anti-cheat because the cheating happens on separate hardware.
My point is that kernel anti-cheat has major privacy and security tradeoffs, which is a steep cost to pay. A steep cost is only worth it if it has a significant benefit to the users, and in practice it doesn't.
To be honest with you, my reply was supposed to be to the comment saying that humble has gotten worse overall since IGN bought them. Didn't realize my mistake until now.
They still have a good bundle from time to time, but it's a far cry from the bundles of old.
Now we just need a "Sent from my Steam Deck" footer for all our chat messages.