paultimate14

@paultimate14@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do NOT buy Creality⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  My first was a real cheap thing from Monoprice, but after that failed my second was an Ender 5 I got in 2020. It’s been great and I’ve had no complaints, no desire to get another FDM printer at all. Even neglecting the machine and letting it get dusty in my basement, it still fires up and prints fine every few months when I need to use it (as long as the filament is still dry).

  Sucks to hear another company is going downhill (even though Creality was always a little bit sketchy).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The article is behind a paywall. Do they have any statistics or evidence backing that sentiment or is it just vibes?

  You can find articles and reddit posts claiming this same exact thing going back years, and yet personally when I go through the store and look through reviews it’s really hard for me to come across hate speech, especially if you don’t specifically look at reviews that have been downvoted to hell. It’s never going to be perfect, but I encounter less hate speech on Steam than most other platforms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They also have guidelines for “user generated content” which includes reviews, and you can report people for violating those guidelines.

  Sure Valve does not pay for moderators to check things proactively. I quite like that they don’t have AI or some other half-assed attempt at “moderation” like other platforms have. I hate the way that the whole Internet has moved to censor “fuck” and made up the word “unalive” because the automated systems of platforms I don’t even use have decided they are the arbitora of what language is allowed.

  I think the responsibility to monitor reviews should lie with whoever controls the Steam page: I would assume the publisher most of the time? The publisher and developer should be looking at reviews anyways. Add in the ability for users to vote reviews as helpful or unhelpful and I think it’s one of the better systems left on the internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There are guidelines on Steam that ban such content, and you can report people for violating them.

  So no, Steam does not do “nothing” as you claim. A very basic Internet search can confirm that.

  Even better, users can rate reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Which is great for a wider variety of reasons, but is also good for reviews that get into a grey area or use dog whistles to hide their true intentions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you fell out of love with.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  BioShock 1 and Infinite both have the same problem.

  On your first time through, the story pulls you through the game. There setting and characters are so mysterious and interesting you’re compelled to figure out what the hell happened and get to the bottom of it. You might notice, on your first run, that the games are really easy and the gun play isn’t particularly good. The actual gameplay gets repetitive, basically moving from big room to big room shooting things.

  The special powers are fun the first couple times you use them but are mostly situational and the kind of thing other games just use items for (land mines, grenades, etc), just re-skinned.

  Then at the end there’s a big reveal. Some plot twist that re-contextualizes the whole game and leaves you thinking about the game for an entire week.

  Then you replay them and realize… The big twist at the end? There’s almost zero foreshadowing and it would be impossible to have predicted either of them on your first playthrough.

  There are plenty of factions that have different political ideologies, but they are nothing more than a setting. The most obvious is how they spent the first half of Infinite pretty clearly establishing that Comstock and his associates were violently oppressing the working class in Colombia and that Daisy Fitzroy’s rebellion was both personally and ideologically justified. Then all of a sudden Booker is there enemy because… He thinks they were too violent in their pursuit to overthrow that oppression or something? It really felt like the devs just needed to throw more enemies at you in the back half of the game so they made a flimsy excuse to do that.

  The BioShock games give the illusion of talking about politics and ideology, but really the only message is just “extremism bad”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I have a rasberry pi 5 collecting dust, what are some neat useful things i can do with it?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I always like to think: what happens if some random hacker (either a bored teenager or hostile state) was able to control this thing?

  Operating locks? Hell no. Controlling my thermostat/furnace? Hell no.

  Monitoring locks? Like, having a sensor that indicates that a door or window is locked or unlocked and can notify you when it changes? Well, personally I still don’t do that because broadcasting to the internet that my window is unlocked seems dangerous, but I could also understand how that could be helpful, especially for people with OCD.

  Controlling my window-mounted AC units? Mild inconvenience at worse. I could go without them in the summer and just be a bit uncomfortable (and some years I do to save money). They aren’t powerful enough to be dangerously cold. I could always unplug them or kick them off my wi-fi if I had to. Worst-case scenario is that someone runs up my electric bill if in away from home for a bit. The ability to change the settings, set automation, and monitor room temperatures remotely is convenient enough to be worth the risk.

  Lights? No problem at all, especially because I still have dumb lights in some fixtures that I just don’t use often. So the worst-case scenario is that someone turns them on/off when I don’t want, and the solution is just… Unscrew the bulb, unplug the fixture, or flip the switch to cut the power. Or turn on a dumb light. LED’s are so efficient that I probably wouldn’t notice a difference on my electric bill if all of my lights were on vs off for a full billing period. In exchange, I’m able to use light turning on as a much gentler alarm in the morning, or turn everything off from bed when I’m ready to sleep, or if I’m out at a friend’s house it’s nice to have lights on before I go home.

  Each piece of automation is its own evaluation. What could go wrong, and how much damage would that cause? What information do I care about potentially being leaked? How much efficiency and convenience am I getting in return?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨meal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There is some evidence that it depends on the yerpenes, which vary by strain.

  Humulene (also found in stuff like ginger and hops) might be an appetite suppressant.

  I hope weed gets re-scheduled or legalized in the US so it gets easier to actually research this stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨meal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Humulene, terpene found in some weed strains (and also other plants like hops and ginger), has some evidence of being an appetite suppressant.

  When I first went through the process of getting my medical card, I was required to have a consultation with the pharmacist and she recommended strains with that if I have a problem with the munchies. Personally, I really like to get high and eat so I’ve mostly avoided those strains, so I cannot attest to the effectiveness of this myself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that men who smoke cigarettes are 30% to 50% more likely to suffer from erection problems that men who don't⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also weird that this isn’t an article. It’s not news or an academic study. Only a link to a web page from the Australian government saying “smoking is bad”. It doesn’t even clarify that they are talking about tobacco, unless you look at the directory and see this is under “tobaccofacts”.

  Also to be clear I agree with the message, but I also agree with you that this is an odd post.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the definitive way to play certain games?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I swear every time I start looking into a romhack that claims to just be a mostly vanilla QoL update they always add in a bunch of random stuff to “fix” the difficulty.

  Like, yes I am aware the games are incredibly easy. They’re for children. I originally played most of them as children. Just let me get high and stomp all through FRLG with a perfect-IV Feraligatr and the Gen 4 physical-special split. If I wanted to do Nuzzlockes I would… Do Nuzzlockes. If I wanted a game with difficult gym leaders and level caps, I would go play one of the thousands of romhacks that have that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's up with "Plex Servers"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m really trying to avoid using for-profit 3rd parties. CURRENTLY I could sign up as a free user and probably be fine. But Tailscale could wake up any day and decide to start charging, or put restrictions on the free tier that would force me to a paid tier.

  Part of the reason I bought a Blu-Ray drive, some big HDD’s, and started collecting discs in the first place was to take back control from tech companies. It’s why I chose Jellyfin over Plex. Going with Tailscale would defeat the principal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's up with "Plex Servers"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would probably be this guy if I ever got around to doing the research into how to make my Jellyfin available over the internet safely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Go Back and Play Morrowind and Tell Me That's the Game You Want to Play Again' — Former Bethesda Veteran Delivers His Verdict on Potential The Elder Scrolls Remasters - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The article was updated in 2023 with the most recent data.

  Almost all of the sales of videogames are front-loaded. Most at launch (or at the launch of a re-release), and then it falls off hard over a couple of years. Morrowind came out in 2002. It’s incredible that Bethesda even released any sales data still by 2010. The units sold since then would be immaterial to the conversation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Go Back and Play Morrowind and Tell Me That's the Game You Want to Play Again' — Former Bethesda Veteran Delivers His Verdict on Potential The Elder Scrolls Remasters - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Morrowind only sold ~4 million units. I think you’re overestimating how big the fan base is. The fan base is loyal, opinionated, and vocal, but small.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSA: There's a free Fallout 4 mod for that Fallout Show NCR power armour Bethesda are charging $30 for as DLC⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh yeah I never accused it of being a good deal. But I also try to avoid microtransactions as much as possible in general. I would say to justify $30 you need to add significant new maps, enemies, maybe even some new systems to justify something that costs almost half the price of a new AAA game. Or if it is just cosmetics, charge in the $1-$5 range for those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSA: There's a free Fallout 4 mod for that Fallout Show NCR power armour Bethesda are charging $30 for as DLC⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s almost as if the economies and balance of single-player games are different from MMO’s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ubisoft target audience when they play a good game⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They make some good points about how we view “classic” games too.

  A lot of 16-bit games are remembered fondly because of things like “look at how many colors are on the screen at once! Look at how big the sprites are- they’re almost as big as the arcade version! Hear how there are 4 separate audio tracks that kind of almost sound like real instruments sometimes!”.

  Mario 64 is a great example for me. I hear other people was nostalgic about how incredible it was to be able to move in 3D space at the time, and how they spent hours just wandering around levels and marveling at the technology. For me, I did that with Crash Bandicoot (which came out a few months earlier in the US). And shortly after Spyro blew them both out of the water with its incredibly smooth controls and, imo, better graphics and sound. When I’ve tried to go back and play Mario 64 I find it a clunky mess of a game, more of a tech demo than anything else.

  On the one hand I can respect the pioneers. The original thinkers who push the frontiers of what art can be. On the other hand, those games that rely so heavily on being “revolutionary for their time” often don’t hold up well decades later when tons of games have done what they did better. I think it’s possible to appreciate those games for what they did without enjoying going back and playing them.

  When I look back at what I’ve played the past couple years, games like Control and Horizon: Zero Dawn stick out. I don’t think either one of them had anything particularly innovative or new. I see any games coming out today where I say “wow that’s a Control-like” game. But what they did do was execute on a high level, with a lot of polish and very few flaws. I think that’s the biggest strength of AAA games: execution, not innovation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The singular they is actually such a natural part of the English language, the people complaining about it almost certainly use it without noticing⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You can find critics of its use that are almost as old as its use. Oddly, for some reason critics of its use don’t seem to show up… Until it started being used.

  Poets and authors have been artistically butchering, changing, and shaping language for as long as language has existed. This is neither an argument for nor against any particular change. Just look at the nonsense that James Joyce did.

  I have a non-binary partner and I respect their pronouns, but personally if I cared enough to change my pronouns I would be more comfortable with “it” to avoid any confusion when discussing a mixture of singular and plural nouns. Heck, if I was going to make my own language from scratch singular vs plural pronouns would be much more commonly used while gendered pronouns would be reserved for specific scenarios where gender is relevant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve stress again that there'll be more Steam Machine Verified games than Steam Deck ones, with "fewer constraints" in their testing programme⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Subjective opinions are not part of the validation process.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World's Best-selling Video Game Consoles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  And it still outsold the 360 in the end

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World's Best-selling Video Game Consoles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.