solitaire
@solitaire@infosec.pub
- Comment on Have you ever had a phone call interrupted by a 3rd party voice saying "this call is being recorded"? 4 months ago:
Oh god, I really hope my phone doesn’t do that when it records. The recording button is on the screen during calls and I accidentally hit it all the time.
- Comment on Sequel to Star Control 2 - The Ur-Quan Masters 6 months ago:
Remember that other sequel with puppets?
puppets sounds cool actually
- Comment on Cyberpunk 2077 director thanks fans as the game hits a 95% positive review rating on Steam 6 months ago:
I played it a couple of years ago, before a lot of the patches, and still thought it was one of the better games I have never finished.
spoiler
There is this quest line where a character is abducted, raped, tortured and kills herself after you rescue her. Afterwards, the main character and another are on a balcony and smoke, still processing the horrors they’ve witnessed. I had been off the smokes for a few months at that point, but still needed to go outside and do the same.
I uninstalled shortly after. Not out of disgust, I actually appreciated the game making me feel something, but it just felt right to stop at that point. - Comment on Telltale Games Releases New Screenshots Of The Wolf Among Us 2 Alongside Development Update 7 months ago:
Yeah, one of the most soulless and boring games I’ve played. The Expanse seemed like such a good property to adapt into a Telltale game too.
If you’re looking for a good sci-fi Telltale style game, Star Trek: Resurgence came out around the same time from a studio of former Telltate employees and it is an absolute joy for anyone who misses 90’s Trek.
- Comment on Telltale Games Releases New Screenshots Of The Wolf Among Us 2 Alongside Development Update 7 months ago:
I really enjoyed The Wolf Among Us, but given how terrible their Expanse game was I’m not holding my breath.
- Comment on Descent 3 has been made open source 7 months ago:
I actually didn’t realize there was a Descent 3 for some reason, I’ve only played 1 & 2. They’re the sort of game I can just jump in for 20 minutes and have fun but all the back tracking through the levels makes me feel sick playing any longer.
- Comment on Ultimate Chronological Star Trek Viewing Guide 8 months ago:
nah
- Comment on Ultimate Chronological Star Trek Viewing Guide 8 months ago:
I love the website layout so much lmao
- Comment on Ultimate Chronological Star Trek Viewing Guide 8 months ago:
It’s neat but chronological seems like a psychotic way for someone new to Star Trek to get into it lol
ENT then STD, yikes.
- Comment on What games do you replay regularly/annually ? 8 months ago:
Just a heads up if you do try it, I mean the original not Catalyst. The sequel constantly kills that flow state with all the annoying intrusions you’ll see from other AAA open world games. It’s not the worst game ever, I did finish it, but it was the last time I bought something on release.
- Comment on What games do you replay regularly/annually ? 8 months ago:
Mirror’s Edge - I usually turn the voices off and just run. Once you’re in the flow it’s so calming, and it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome.
- Comment on Why does Microsoft want me to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11? 9 months ago:
I disagree with most of this thread. Microsoft must maintain market share at all costs, any additional monetization from tracking or ad revenue is a very distant third to that. It lives based on being the default option. A new launch will bring in new users and help keep existing ones, but it must be seen as successful. So Microsoft needs to port as many of it’s current users over as possible.
Second I think is pruning the nightmare of legacy support. A “new” operating system lets you set a more modern baseline and tell people to buy new hardware in a much more user intelligible way. No having to explain why Windows 7 no longer works on someone’s 2007 laptop that came with it, or come up with a maze of partial support and having to work out what the last usable update was.
- Comment on Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition gets performance improvements, HDR-bloom, bug fixes 9 months ago:
The editor is truly amazing. It has powerful scripting engine and was easy to use. One of my potentially hot takes is it was so much better than using Morrowind’s construction kit. The game used to be full of custom persistent world servers which were sort of MMO-lite, big communities that were often way more roleplay based and free of the time wasting, money sucking bullshit of actual MMOs. Sadly, one of those ephemeral game moments that cannot be replayed.
And yeah, Deekin comes in the Shadows of Undrentide expansion and remains a companion through Horde of the Underdark. Honestly, if you like Deekin and haven’t played Undrentide I’d recommend giving it ago. It’s a refreshingly small scale adventure - it’s more like the CRPG equivalent of a short paperback fantasy novel than a grand epic. It also makes the wise decision of not being a continuation of the original campaign.
- Comment on Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition gets performance improvements, HDR-bloom, bug fixes 9 months ago:
I loved NWN when it came out but it’s appeal was rooted in the multiplayer and custom content. It had an amazing community with great tools to support it. You can still find servers for it but they’re not worth it, it’s the bastion of people who haven’t moved on in 20 years.
The single player was pretty bland. Shadows of Undrentide is a genuinely fun adventure, and I’ll love Deekin (a kobold companion) forever, but the original campaign is a slapped together proof of concept and Hordes of the Underdark is a mess that’s only really notable for being a high level adventure.
Some of the premium modules were praised but I’d moved on to persistent world servers then other games long before they came out.
- Comment on Why is living with your parents considered a bad thing? 9 months ago:
I’ve been looking for rentals lately. Every inspection has dozens upon dozens of people show up. Rental vacancies are at a tiny fraction of a percent. No landlord will take someone if the rent will cost more than 30% of their income. To qualify for a studio apartment it takes almost double the median wage.
I hate it so much. I’ve budgeted so that I know I can afford these places on my income, I have a significant pile of savings and a stable job. I have been looking for a place for six months and been rejected from them all.
I’ve given up. Even if I could get a place it’d be cheaper to pay a fucking mortgage.
- Comment on 9 months ago:
That’s interesting, when I learned to touch type in school we weren’t taught to use the right shift. Likely an oversight rather than intentional, but I just use my pinky to hit the left shift while using the left hand side of the keyboard.
- Comment on How does employing a rapist not constitute an unsafe work environment for female employees? 9 months ago:
If you aren’t going to find a new job, document any inappropriate behavior. Talk to the other women and get them onboard. Let them know who he is. It wont take much to have him out on his ass if he does anything. Bring up his conviction when you report misconduct as well.
There are plenty of jobs he can work that aren’t with the best friend of his victim.
- Comment on Where are the good political songs? 9 months ago:
I was really hoping for the link to be Let’s Lynch the Landlord tbh
- Comment on Citizen Sleeper 2 still has "around a year of development left", likely coming in 2025 9 months ago:
The only upcoming game I’m really excited for ❤️
- Comment on Recommendations for Pirate Games? 9 months ago:
Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) is my favourite pirate game. No, it’s nothing like what you think a licensed tie in game from 2003 would be like.
It’s a real oddity. This was made by a Russian studio and originally meant to be a sequel to their previous age of sail game, Sea Dogs. In Russia it was still marketed as a sequel, without the Pirates of the Carribean branding. It has basically nothing to do with the movies in reality.
I don’t really have a short hand for describing the genre. It most reminds me of space sims - where you control a vessel which you can replace, has an economy/trade system, management mechanics, factional reputation systems and an open world. It’s not a simplified as Freelancer, but not a spreadsheet game like the X series.
The sailing is great, a happy medium between completely arcade stuff where you just point your ship where you want to go on and sims. Wind and weather play an important role without being tedious or overwhelming.
You also control a character for ship environments, like boarding, and exploring towns and islands (with swashbuckling combat, of course). It’s pretty bare bones but the variety is appreciated. There are lite-RPG dialogue/story mechanics and quests, though I do not want to give the impression this narrative heavy game. It’s an RPG style that used to be relatively common but not so much anymore.
But the real highlight is the New Horizons mod which greatly overhauls the game. It’s been developed for almost 20 years. I don’t recommend playing the vanilla game - I enjoyed it at the time, but it’s just an inferior experience to the mod.
Best yet, it’s free. The game is abandonware.
- Comment on AI tools (chat gpt 4) 10 months ago:
Is the book so obscure that you wouldn’t be able to get a digital copy you could just paste into Chat GPT?
- Comment on Steam has a new hit game, and it’s Pokémon with guns 10 months ago:
I truly cannot think of a less appealing pitch than “Pokemon with guns”. You’ve just made the original premise worse.
- Comment on The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion 10 months ago:
I hate that a lot of the ones with a progression settle on XP to unlock tiers of cars rather than money and buying them too. I liked going to the used car dealer ship in Gran Turismo and seeing what I could afford.
Contemporary racing games literally just throw cars at you in hope to make it fun by constantly giving you new toys.
Forza Horizon 5 is bizarre for this. It has an acquisition system, but right after the intro you pick one of three cars, all new and not cheap. Then you get a custom rally car from the next race. A bunch of unlocks are going to give even you more cars afterwards, and will keep doing so regularly.
Like hang on, maybe let me work up from one of your cheap, older cars first and work my way up?
But this is also the game that unironically calls you “superstar” from the jump and sucks you off constantly.
- Comment on The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion 10 months ago:
I dug my old Logitech Driving Force GT and blew off the dust. I haven’t gotten into a new (to me) racing game since Gran Turismo 5. The hardcore simulationist trend doesn’t interest me, I miss proper career modes and I have just had some awful bad luck with games being broken. I just occasionally revisit some classics.
So after many enthusiastic recommendations I grabbed Forza Horizon 5. My first impressions were great. The intro was a lot of fun, with the big set pieces causing me to fight my wheel as it bucked after being long out of practice.
But this was not representative of the actual game. The vast majority of the content is filled by fairly normal races with long stretches driving to them, back and forth across the same stretches of empty open world. It’s sort of like a Ubisoft game, but just cars.
This still could have been great. I like the driving model well enough, there is a good selection of cars and environment, while bland, is certainly much less of an eyesore than what awaits me if I go back to play Need for Speed: Most Wanted for the umpteenth time.
I’ve got some criticisms of the actual racing (the way it generates opponents and their vehicles sucks, the tracks are boring), but what really killed it for me was this slow build, eerie discomfort that built up in the back of my mind over hours until it became overwhelming. The vibes are fucked.
This is Fortnite, the racing game. It’s full of cameos and tie ins with influencers. Brands are plastered everywhere. Everyone talks in this creepy, corporate approved “wholesomeness” where every is aware of how “epic” what they’re doing is. There is a really uncomfortable tension between this huge festival that completely empties Mexico of pedestrians and how much the game fetishizes Americans.
I wanted to scream during a sub-plot where you race a bunch of rich douche bags who are beefing with some guy at the festival. The game throws out shit like “they shouldn’t be discriminated against for their money, they can help the fact they are rich” and talks about fucking therapy. All the writing is this bad, I hate every single character in these inexplicably unskippable cutscenes.
The radio selection is dogshit too.
- Comment on Why were online subscriptions once rare, but now they are everywhere? 10 months ago:
Online subscriptions have actually been a thing for a long time. In some ways it’s even fallen out of favor, especially with the rise of the “freemium” model. MMOs are a great example of this as subscriptions used to be the price of entry with no other monetization, where as these days if an MMO uses subscriptions it’s a secondary “convince” fee after entry that is almost always combined with MTX bullshit.
If you’re talking specifically about SaaS bullshit, it’s because it required a certain level of infrastructure before it became practical. We had to move away from cash and needed reliable internet connections first, amongst a host of other developments. Anything that couldn’t be a cash purchase in a physical store was losing significant market share. This didn’t stop time restricted licenses on software still being a thing, but it was generally pretty niche software.
- Comment on Games that force you to make hard choices 10 months ago:
Citizen Sleeper. It’s a short game about precarity and human connection. There are a few off ramps out of the current, desperate situation you’re in that are usually weighed against letting someone go or leaving things behind. It’s unique in games with difficult choices for so rarely about being given compelling reasons to do bad things, just choices that are hard for their emotional consequences.
- Comment on Games that force you to make hard choices 10 months ago:
Life is Strange hit me so hard. A content warning for people unfamiliar, but a core theme of the game is suicide. It comes at the topic a few times with different contexts that had me crying a few times. Highly recommended.
- Comment on Games that force you to make hard choices 10 months ago:
I really need to replay Dragonfall and Hong Kong. Never finished either just due to unfortunate circumstance outside the game but thought highly of both.
- Comment on Games that force you to make hard choices 10 months ago:
The ending choice of the Yennefer romance is underrated. You get to decide the meaning of their long, tumultuous story. Both the heart break and the happily ever after are cathartic, satisfying conclusions.
Though maybe you need to read the books for the full weight of it to land, especially for the heart break option.
- Comment on Games that force you to make hard choices 10 months ago:
I also disagree. Even discounting the large number of choices which were just a binary where one side was cartoonishly evil, I didn’t remember any I found impactful.
I ended up following The Emperor path in Act 3 . There wasn’t a moment where I got to weigh up the pros and cons of each major path, as I had decided I didn’t trust Raphael already and he doesn’t give you enough detail to do so if you don’t play along when you meet him at the start of Act 3. If I had then maybe the Orpheus stuff could have given me pause, but that’s not how it played out.
I think part of this was playing as Tav though, as the decisions with real emotional weight are all centered on origin characters and I didn’t dictate what my companions should do for things that were so personal. Shadowheart’s choice in Act III strikes me as one that probably would have hit.
But the bigger issue is I think Larian just isn’t very good at writing evil. You never get those moments of practical evil. I don’t remember ever having to consider doing something horrible for the greater good or being desperate enough to do something compromising out of self preservation. It was all evil for evil’s sake.
which is of course what you would expect
Nah. I would expect there to be difficult choices before the final act, especially in a game so long.