paultimate14
@paultimate14@lemmy.world
- Comment on World's Best-selling Video Game Consoles 6 days ago:
And it still outsold the 360 in the end
- Comment on World's Best-selling Video Game Consoles 6 days ago:
I don’t remember that. Maybe you’re thinking of something like “if the Wii keeps selling at its current pace it will pustell the PS2”?
They said that about the Switch as well and it didn’t happen.
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 1 week ago:
I grew up with a dog. The toilet seat was always kept down to keep him away from drinking it, because we had toilet cleaning pucks in the tank that would have potentially poisoned him. Nothing to do with gender at all.
Also the mythbusters episode on toilet water splashing out onto bathroom surfaces scarred me as a child. We have a soft-close lid and I wait a few seconds for it to get to a low angle before I even flush.
- Comment on Dusting off the old PS2 1 week ago:
I think 2, 3, and Deadlocked/Gladiator were the best ones. Deadlocked was really the best, but it’s so short that I have a hard time putting it over Going Commando, and I’d put UYA as a distant 3rd place.
The first game was always rough- the controls and camera are clunky, and the bolt economy is rough. Plus if I remember there were no nanotech upgrades or armor- you just needed to git gud.
Size Matters was remarkably similar to the first game. Secret Agent Clank is in the conversation for bottom-10 worst videogames of all time and should be avoided.
Tools of Destruction and Crack in Time were both pretty forgettable. They felt like mediocre licensed shovelware- they were still from Insomniac, but a lot of the people who worked on the PS2 games left by then and it just didn’t have the same feel. If I remember correctly, they opened up a new office in North Carolina and gave R&C to that team and had their California studio focus on Resistance, but even in California a lot of the people who worked on Spyro and the PS2 games left. Quest for Booty is basically just a 2hr DLC that they sold standalone for… Reasons.
All4One was… Fine, but a very niche experience. It’s like a 4 player party game, but it’s 10 levels that are about an hour each, and it’s hard to get 4 people together to play through a 10 hour campaign. I only ever played it alone, and it was fine, but clearly designed for at least 2 players.
Full Frontal Assault I remember liking a lot, but not the specifics of it. Wasn’t a fan of the art style, but I remember the tower defense being cool and really suiting R&C.
Into the Nexus was great, maybe better than UYA even. Best story of any R&C game IMO, and the gameplay was okay. Only 6 hours long for a first playthrough though, way shorter even than Deadlocked and not as much replayability.
R&C 2016 was… Fine. They fixed the gameplay issues, but I didn’t like the weapon upgrade system. It felt like they were trying to copy online multiplayer looter-shooter systems in an offline single-player game. I wasn’t a fan of the updated story, art style, or tone either- felt like they were trying to do a less mature version of Fallout 4. I’d say better than the original, but still mid-tier overall.
Rift Apart was… Fine. Gorgeous. The whole thing about using the PS5’s fancy SSD to do rifts was complete BS (the game released on PC later) and didn’t affect the gameplay as much as the marketing suggested. A lot of the weapons were useless, and once again I didn’t like the upgrade system.
Also, Sony seems to re-use a lot of stuff between their AAA releases starting on the PS4. R&C, Horizon, God of War, and Spiderman all have very similar UI’s. I’m pretty sure there is a lot of music shared between the R&C and Spiderman games. The looter-shooter/gacha still item systems plague all of those series too. I haven’t played the newer Uncharted or TLOU games yet but I suspect they will be similar. Heck, out of all of their games recently Knack was the series that felt the most refreshing to me.
On a slightly related note, I would recommend Sunset Overdrive too. It feels like a very clear midway point between Ratchet & Clank and Spiderman.
- Comment on We own the hardware, but not the experience anymore — Big Tech keeps building smarter, more connected devices, but the user experience feels more intrusive, more confusing, and less human 1 week ago:
Sure, I might own the hardware
Not for long. The goal seems to be to make RAM, flash memory, and GPU’s so expensive that most consumers will need to purchase low-powered client devices and subscribe to cloud computing business models. It’s a handful of companies who are cornering the markets, controlling the supply, and seeking rents.
- Comment on What is the cheapest console to get and collect for that still holds up? 2 weeks ago:
I’ve heard people make those complaints in comments on the internet, but I got my Powkidsu RGB10MAX and never had any issues. I mean, some demanding Saturn/Dreamcast/N64 games drop the occasional frame but that’s just from pushing the hardware to its limit, nothing to do with the roms.
I would recommend finding YouTube reviews for a specific device. There’s a whole community of people out there who can set the expectations for performance of different emulators, often picking out some of the harder games to emulate for each system. Eventually you will get to a point where there are trade-offs: do I want to upscale the resolution at 30FPS or drop the resolution and get a solid 60FPS?
Even a cheap mini PC is going to be much more expensive. Still a great option, especially if you also want to do PC things, but not what OP is looking for. For just having a TV box that plays games, ARM is hard to beat. And most of those YouTubers also can tell you how to put a variety of other operating systems and your own roms on if you prefer, but I’m not assuming OP has the skill or will to do so.
- Comment on What is the cheapest console to get and collect for that still holds up? 2 weeks ago:
It’s also possible to just buy android TV boxes that are pre-configured to do this.
I used to closely follow the retro handheld scene. So if OP wants to go down that route, they should check out the RetroGameCorps YouTube channel to get a feel for what kind of devices are available today. But he has occasionally covered those TV boxes too, and being android there’s often a lot of software and hardware overlap with those handhelds. It’s sketchy for sure, but for like $90 you can get a device when all those benefits you mentioned but already pre-configured to work as a console, with minimal mouse/keyboard input required. And tens of thousands of roms without needing to worry about where or how to get them, viruses (as long as you don’t cross with any other devices lol), or getting letters from your ISP for pirating.
- Comment on That boy is all right 2 weeks ago:
If I wanted a clean, convenient, and flavor-neutral method of cooking my meat then I would just stay in the kitchen where I have a variety of electric and natural gas appliances very capable of doing so.
“Grilling” with propane is just silly. Idk maybe there’s some merit to camp stoves while camping, but that’s only if you can’t use firewood for some reason.
- Comment on HDD prices spike as AI infrastructure and China's PC push collide — hard drives record biggest price increase in eight quarters, suppliers warn pressure will continue 3 weeks ago:
It’s classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.
That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 3 weeks ago:
I played a decent number of games this year, and a lot of games that have huge fan bases. God of War 2018, Bloodborne (my first ever soulslike), Baldur’s Gate 3, Disco Elysium, and more. But the one that keeps gnawing at me is Subnautica
I remember when it was in early access I watched Markiplier play it, and it piqued my interest enough that it was the first time I ever bought anything in early access. Which is very unusual for me (I think the only other time I’ve done that was Hades, which was also great). I played through as much of the game as there was at the time, or at least as I could find. Which was still mostly in the safe shallows, no deep areas. Still out in a dozen hours or so and was satisfied given the price so I moved on.
In 2024 i recommended it to my wife, who loves marine biology and base building games. She, in turn loved the game and I watched her play through it. I got to see all of the deep areas. After watching her play it and the DLC I got the itch to go back to it, so I started a new file in late 2024.
By mid-January 2025 I was about halfway through that file. My wife visiting her friend in another city, so I had the house to myself, I think I took some PTO too. Single-digit temperatures Farenheit outside. My wife had taken our only car, so I was loaded up with plenty of weed, drinks, food, and snacks. So I had a few days to focus and finish that first file. I had such a great time I did something else I almost never do: I immediately started a new file to play it again. While I had so much fun, I also learned so much and had so many ideas of what I could have done better. Better places to build based, exploring in a different order, knowing all the great spots to farm resources and get blueprints and everything.
So I played through again. The soundtrack is phenomenal synthwave that perfectly suits the game, but by the time I had built my cyclops and was ready to plunge down into the depths I was also ready for a new soundtrack. I put on one of my favorite albums, which is also one of the most appropriate: Oceanic, by Isis.
I strongly recommend this to anyone who likes Isis or Subnautica. Just absolutely sublime. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.
However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being “the dev doesn’t really care about making money”. Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn’t pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.
Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.
Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 4 weeks ago:
AW2 is going to be a while. Not only because I’m a patientgamer, but because it was published by Epic and I have no interest in setting up an account and dealing with their launcher, plus jumping through all the hoops to be able to play it on my Steam Deck. I’ve already switched a couple of my household’s PCs to Linux, and I’ll probably do the rest eventually. Maybe I’ll pick up the PS5 version some day, but that severely limits the different ways I can play it. I might get FBC Firebreak if it ever goes on sale- I don’t play a whole lot of multiplayer games generally but I’m interested to see if they put any lore in there.
Disco Elysium is great, but at times the “gameplay” so basically just reading a polysci textbook. It’s a very heavy game that deals with a lot of heavy topics. Often I’m tired of processing all of the terrible things happening in the world and look to videogames as an escape, and Disco Elysium is up there as one of the worst games for that lol. Even just seeing the ZA/UM logo starts to get me going from thinking about what happened to the studio and the main creators of the game.
There’s also a lot of friction that just comes from it being a text-heavy game. I had my retina surgically re-attached in one eye a few years ago- it was largely successful compared to going blind in that eye, but that eye is not as good at focusing at screens further away. Action games like Alan Wake and Hellblade are fine on my living room TV, but for Disco Elysium I mostly need to use my Deck or some other screen that can be closer to my face.
Another factor is sobriety. I feel like this doesn’t get talked about in gaming communities a lot- a lot of gamers are children, or adults who are sober for a variety of reasons. I’m adult who does not have any of those reasons, and even a medical marijuana card for my arthritis. I have a full-time job, a house to maintain, and several relationships to maintain. So on the rare occasion that I have an evening to myself to enjoy, I often want to get high (responsibly) and play some videogames. It’s kind of a difficulty customization too: often the difficulty settings in-games are just boring number changes that make enemies bullet sponges. So I’m more entertained by playing on Easy and getting high than playing on Hard sober. Disco Elysium, for as much as it features drug-use in its world and gameplay, is nearly impossible for me to play while high. It’s not a huge deal, but it often means that other games are just more appealing when I’m planning any given evening.
- Comment on How does the private equity bubble compare to the AI bubble if at all? 4 weeks ago:
I would not call PE a “bubble”. It’s not something people are just tossing money into because there are nebulous promises and the numbers are going up. PE is involved in EVERYTHING - restaurants, housing, tech, manufacturing, finance, marketing. It’s not an industry, just a way of investing that bypasses pretty much all of the safeguards and regulations societies have put in place for public trading. And I don’t expect it to “pop”. Either it continues, and all of the wealth continues to be concentrated towards the top, or the populace manages to take enough power back to get legislation, regulation, and enforcement to add transparency and rules to private equity.
- Comment on There are first person shooters and third person shooters, but what about second person shooters? 4 weeks ago:
I don’t know if any whole games, but a lot of games have boss battles or segments that are in 2nd person. Where the perspective is from the target, and you can see the character you are controlling through their eyes.
Off the top of my head, this boss fight from Ratchet and Clank 3 comes to mind.
It’s hard to do this for extended periods for a few reasons. Part of why this is reduced to boss fights so that if you have sections with dozens of enemies, whose perspective do you take? What happens when that enemy dies, or if that enemy needs to suck under cover or go down a stairwell or look down at their weapon to reload?
Even for boss fights, it only works if the boss’s behavior is controlled pretty strictly, like in that Ratchet and Clank example.
You could kind of make an argument about sections where you view your character through some sort of diagetic device, like a security camera. Technically you could count Lakitu from several Mario games in that sense.
Talking about this is giving me ideas though, especially for stealth games. Something that lets you see through the enemy’s eyes and make sure that you do NOT appear in their line of site could be really neat. Maybe.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 4 weeks ago:
Just finished up the Alan Wake 1 DLC, and the American Nightmare spinoff game. I really loved Control and had decided to go back and play the Alan Wake games. The base Alan Wake game had some good ideas, but the controls and balancing were clunky and the combat was tedious. The DLC’s got better, using the dark/light mechanics in much more interesting ways. American Nightmare had controls that felt much better and a neat structure of more open, less linear levels. Still nowhere near as great as Control was imo.
So now I’m playing Disco Elysium. I had tried to start it a few times and bounced off- it’s great, but a TON of heavy text and political theory. I managed to make some headway a couple months ago when I was traveling with my Steam Deck. Figured now is as good for a time as any to try to beat it at least once. It is truly great, and I think needs to be in the conversations for best game of all time. But it also takes a lot of energy and a specific mood to play.
Another game I tried to go back to was Hellblade. I’m, idk, about a third of the way through I guess? First started over a year ago. I love the initial concept of the character’s psychosis manifesting in-game, but it seems like 90% of the gimmick was done in the opening sequence and the game got incredibly repetitive after that. It’s so slow it’s hard to play. My hands hurt after a bit because I find myself pushing on the joysticks harder, pushing on the “jog” button harder, trying to make Senua move. It’s really frustrating to have a puzzle mentally solved but needing to spend 5 minutes moving her slow ass around to execute the solution. It’s a good thing exploration is pretty useless because it also takes forever. The combat is also boring and repetitive: the enemies take way too many hits and there are way too many of them. Even just starting the game, sitting through all the stupid splash screens and the same trigger warning is tedious and dumb. I feel like I’ve put dozens of hours banging my head against this game, but when I look at steam I’ve only put in a little over 5. I think I might retire the game and just watch a lore video of it instead.
- Comment on Usually, silicone nippled showerheads aren't replaced or cleaned regularly. 5 weeks ago:
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This is one of the most shower-related shower thoughts of all time. Kudos!
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A lot of people clean their bathrooms regularly. CLR or generic knock-offs are great for mineral buildup on faucets, drains, handles, etc.
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My local water company regularly takes the main treatment system offline for maintenance and switches to the backup system. I don’t know all the details but every time they do it the water is heavily chlorinated for a week or so, and this happens roughly every 6 months. So until I can afford to get a full-home filtration system installed, I bought a shower filter that goes between the water pipe and shower head. It needs changed every 6 months so I might as well clean everything while I’m at it.
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- Comment on The Algorithm That Detected a $610 Billion Fraud: How Machine Intelligence Exposed the AI Industry’s Circular Financing Scheme 5 weeks ago:
Oh yeah I have as much respect for him as I can have for any other celebrity I’ve never met or interacted with at all. I just wanted to get ahead of anyone responding to me pointing out that he’s not particularly qualified on this subject.
The reason I referenced him at all was not because of his qualifications, but as a way of establishing how popular these conversations were on the internet at the time. In that sense, the fact that he’s not an AI or finance expert and doesn’t specialize in such content speaks to how widespread the topic was at the time.
- Comment on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending trillions on AI data centers will pay off at today's infrastructure costs 5 weeks ago:
The last one standing or the last one left holding the bag?
- Comment on The Algorithm That Detected a $610 Billion Fraud: How Machine Intelligence Exposed the AI Industry’s Circular Financing Scheme 5 weeks ago:
Kind of gross how this article seems to be trying at every turn to say, “no ai is actually good! It helped us catch the bad businessmen that happen to be in the AI industry!” By focusing on a tiny trading period on November 20th.
Hank Green isn’t a finance bro or an AI guy or even really a tech guy. He’s just a guy reacting to things that are trending, and I remember I had seen the main graphic he was talking about floating around the internet for a while before I watched the video. People have been calling AI a “bubble” for much longer.
I am old enough to remember the report that 95% of generative AI companies failed to see returns from using it. That was back in August.
I don’t like giving credit to “trading algorithms” for things that humans figured out a long time ago.
- Comment on To celebrate Oxford Word of The Year, Submit your worthy ones for rating in the comments 5 weeks ago:
It’s hard to generalize, but often it’s really just a few whales propping the whole thing up.
The linked article is referencing Candy Crush, not AAA games, but it’s hard to find published data on the matter. Different games and communities will be different, but I would hesitate to broadly blame consumers for this.
- Comment on Nature 5 weeks ago:
Somehow I don’t think Trent Reznor wrote “Closer” in an attempt to get laid lol.
- Comment on Jeff Bezos reportedly launches new AI startup with himself as CEO 1 month ago:
at a concert
There’s your problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re buying Dasani or Aquafina or Arizona Tea. Venues have captive audiences and jack up the prices because they can.
- Comment on Jeff Bezos reportedly launches new AI startup with himself as CEO 1 month ago:
As of June 2025, Mike Cessario’s estimated net worth is around $80–100 million.
The CEO is wealthy, sure, but very far away from being a billionaire.
I’ve occasionally bought liquid death at my local beer distributor for parties, and it’s a bit expensive but not crazy. Pretty much every drink at a festival is incredibly overpriced - that markup is usually going to the vendors selling it and the venue, not the manufacturer.
- Comment on When we eat the billionaires, we should spare Gabe Newell? No? 1 month ago:
In order to be incorporated, a company has to have stock. Private companies still have shares even if they aren’t traded on public exchanges.
It’s possible that Gabe owns 100% of Valve’s stock, but it’s also possible that he’s sold some to other people or entities. Originally when Valve was founded, it was a split between Gabe and Mike Harrington, but Harrington reportedly sold his shares to Gabe when he left.
It’s also very likely that Gabe owns shares in other corporations, even just as personal retirement investments. But that’s not what I was talking about.
- Comment on Scandal 1 month ago:
This is exactly why I’m wondering if “Bubba” could be referring to someone else. Maybe not a celebrity.
Heck, could be a giant novelty dildo. Or a dog.
- Comment on When we eat the billionaires, we should spare Gabe Newell? No? 1 month ago:
“Billionaire” is a convenient modern buzzword. It used to be “millionaire”. The classic joke from Austin Powers where Dr. Evil demands money is a good example. It’s just inflation.
Plus, a lot of “billionaires” are only considers such because they own shares in their corporations. It’s a “theoretically if they could find a way to sell all of those shares at the current price without tanking the market value of those shares in the process, they could get $X billion from that”.
If there were a theoretical global revolution, on of the the first steps of eating the rich is to seize and nationalize those businesses. Later, land reform will seize the extra mansions they own. They will still be left with adequate personal property to live quite comfortably. Finally, the justice system will need to evaluate what labor laws (or other laws) they may have been violating for years and using their wealth to get away with.
Start with the biggest fish and watch as the rest start to downsize voluntarily and cut deals to avoid jail.
I don’t expect to see any of this in my lifetime. Not in any major country, and certainly not globally.
- Comment on When we eat the billionaires, we should spare Gabe Newell? No? 1 month ago:
None of that was invented by Valve. “Normalize” is subjective but I would argue they didn’t do any of that either.
Launchers existed for a long, long time before Steam- part of what made Steam so successful was having a centralized launcher for games from a lot of different companies together. Before then there was usually a separate launcher for each game.
Online DRM has existed for as long as the Internet was ubiquitous enough to get away with it. Offline DRM existed before that. Even back in the 80’s games would ship with all sorts of anti-piracy mechanisms. The only 2 Valve games that ever had DRM were Artifact and DOTA 2, both of which were online multiplayer-only games, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Maple Story is pretty widely considered to be the first game with micro transactions, and they were in the form of loot boxes. By the time Team Fortress came out the concept was already popularized in MMO’s, Facebook games like Farmville, and FIFA.
Achievements aren’t something I really care about, but game had those concepts for years. I remember playing Spyro 2 as a kid and tracking down all the skill points. Sure it doesn’t use the word “achievement” but even today Sony uses the word “Trophy” to mean the same thing.
Corporations aren’t your friend of course, it’s just weird that people think Valve invented these things. And Valve’s implementations are some of the most benign and consumer-friendly cases in the industry.
The launcher i consider a positive - it’s a great way to organize my library, including non-steam games. There’s tons of free features I use all the time, like Remote Play, free Cloud Saves, friend management. It’s great for managing inputs from all sorts of different controllers, managing systems with multiple displays, allowing me to control everything with a controller without having to set it down to use my mouse and keyboard. They have great mod support for the games that use it. There’s tons more features I don’t use. It’s not just a launcher like EA Play or UPlay- it’s a full platform. It’s so useful that I even added GOG Galaxy as a non-steam game.
Any business needs to balance the needs of its stakeholders. Owners, partners, creditors, consumers, employees, governments, etc. Valve is one of the fairest companies left alive in 2025 at balancing all of these entities, and yet in every online discussion about them someone always feels the need to pipe in and be like “well aktually they are secretly very bad!”, just because they don’t have the power to stop other companies from being shitty. They don’t have the bargaining power to tell Sega to get rid of Denuvo on a games from prior generations selling for $20. They don’t have the bargaining power to Ubisoft or Larian to drop their annoying launchers. They don’t have the power to tell other publishers and devs to stop adding pay-to-win mechanics. They don’t have the power to stand up to payment processors that are demanding certain content be removed from the store.
Valve DOES have the power to promote Linux as a legitimately viable operating system for gamers, behind Linux enthusiasts. They have the power to get Microsoft to drop their ridiculous store. They have the power to get Ubisoft to at least add their games to Steam, even if you need a dumb launcher still. They have the power to clearly and consistently label games with DRM in their store so consumers can make informed decisions without spending hours digging through the legalize or EULA’s or doing research on enthusiast forums.
It’s fair to question whether Valve’s 30% cut is justified for every publisher, though we also know that some publishers have been able to make separate deals at times. I’m sure you can find other things that are fair to question. It’s really weird to accuse people of “kissing Gabe’s ass” just for recognizing that Steam is the best platform for a consumer to use right now.
- Comment on Steam Hardware Announcement 1 month ago:
I think the main hangup is going to be: how easy and simple is this thing for the average person?
The Steam Deck is, any way you slice it, a better value than the Switch or Switch 2. The Steam Deck has sold roughly 6 million units in 3 years. The Nintendo Switch 2 has sold close to 11 million units in about 5 months.
I hope you’re right and that Valve really shakes up the whole industry, but I’m not going to start expecting that until I see it.
- Comment on Rush 1 month ago:
I started typing up my own personal observations about Rush lyrics changing over time, but then I found this quote from Geddy Lee himself:
A few songs may have also been a little naive in their original intent. The nasty little tale called “The Trees,” of course — a comment on forced equality. Being a much more liberal-minded adult, I now have a softer approach to things in life and I’m much more open and willing. I put a lot more importance on social responsibility now than I ever did. I talk about that, of course, when I’m referring to free will. There were a few things we sang about in our early twenties that seemed very important. But as time has gone on, you ameliorate those views because life has told you it’s not so simple. Once you encounter problems and you begin to help your family or friends with some of those problems, you learn a lot about how much of life has lived in the gray areas as opposed to the black and white areas.
The Trees was, and still is, one of my favorite songs for the sake of the music. And I can see how the lyrics may have worked a lot better back during the cold war, just a couple of decades after genocide and famine wiped out millions in the USSR and China.
I grew up listening to both a greatest hits CD that has libertarian tracks like Freewill and The Trees and 2112, but also listening to Snakes and Arrows that had polar opposite messages in songs like Far Cry, the Way the Wind Blows, and The Larger Bowl. They got smarter and more aware of their own privilege as they grew older and saw more of the world.
- Comment on And now I'm reminded I have two of these to repair. 1 month ago:
Pro-tip: I invested in rechargeable batteries, including 9v’s. Every solstice I just go ahead and change out the batteries proactively. (Could use the equinoxes instead but I usually have a bunch of other chores winterizing or de-winterizing the house at those times).
It’s annoying and probably overkill, but it’s way better than dealing with those annoying low battery beeps that always seem to start happening at 3AM.