Also why the fuck would they charge for it?

Because they have long since moved away from selling worthwhile products to selling anything they can trick people into buying. Providing value is no longer a concern, only short-term profit.

My friends and I called all annoying companion/escort characters “Buttfuck”. Natalia was the buttfuckiest Buttfuck.

Ambrosia probably provided me the most hours of gaming entertainment over the 90s. They published Mac software and, if I remember correctly, most of their games were shareware and the non-paid versions were pretty well featured.

I wonder how many hundreds of hours I played Escape Velocity and Escape Velocity Override. Those were some absolutely amazing games and they supported plugins (mods) and had a thriving mod community.

For the 90s mac users, you’ll probably recognize a lot of their games (listed on the Wikipedia page). Here are some from the 90s that stand out to me:

Maelstrom

Chiral

Apeiron

Swoop

Barrack

Escape Velocity

Avara

Bubble Trouble

Harry the Handsome Executive

Mars Rising

EV Override

Ares

Escape Velocity Nova

Old farts unite! I’m right there with you, although I think my first wing commander game was 4. I think I did something similar with Myst to escape constant “hunting” on the disc drive. The noise of the cd drive revving up and down 2ft from my head is seared into my brain.

Can we meaningfully say that performance has improved over time when games are getting more graphically intensive and wasting all that potential? I would say a Nintendo DS running Tetris has more performance than a PS5 running that new Bethesda game

Yes, we can. Gamers and computer nerds have been measuring performance for decades. For example, see https://www.userbenchmark.com and https://www.digitalfoundry.net.

You could develop a benchmark around the DS version of Tetris, I suppose, but that doesn’t seem like a useful benchmark to me.

The rest of your question seems to be a value judgement that graphically intensive games are “wasting all that potential”. Kind of ironic considering you appear to be asking for objective ways to measure performance.

Optical drives were a major bottleneck in every gaming system that used them. They were convenient because they offered a lot of data storage for cheap, but the trade off was that games performed worse than they could. The fact that consoles have moved off of optical storage and onto fast internal storage is a boon to people that care about performance. That may be a sad situation for you, but a lot of people find it to be a good thing.

I may have used the wrong term. When I talk about internal resolution vs upscalers, I’m trying to differentiate between what resolution the games are initially rendered at by the “console” vs post processing what comes out of the console and upscaling there. From what I understand, many PS1 emulators are able to actually render polygons in game at higher resolutions so that you get crisp 3d graphics. I think N64 emulators can do the same (but I’ve never really dug in to those).

Thinking more, since this is not an emulator, it seems unlikely that it could increase the render resolution (but we can hope). That just leaves upscalers to increase output resolution. This is what the Super NT does - which makes sense for sprite-based games/systems anyway.

4K output alone doesn’t provide much (if any) benefit. The article (and I assume the company as well) says nothing more. For this to mean anything, they need to talk about the console doing something to internally render at a higher resolution or talk about what upscaling techniques it will use to go from whatever internal resolution the N64 runs at (480?) to 4K.

Putting 4K in the title seems clickbaity, considering there is “no there there”.

Edit: not accusing OP of clickbait, just the article.

I usually have the same problem as you when I play rpgs (or rpg-like games), but BG3 has been different for me. Part of that is that I went into it wanting to just let the game play out. The other part is that the game does an excellent job of making results ambiguous (in a very good way, imo).

You can choose to save/kill/sneak through something and “complete” it, but it often is not obvious whether you made the optimal choice. Most approaches seem valid and you may not find out the real consequences until later in the game. Embrace it. Accept your consequences. And keep going. It really is an amazing experience.

Claim whatever motivations you want, but reading through this series of comments does a great job of showing everyone your real motivation. You are not here for rational discussion of moderation policy. Your trying to argue that bigoted materials should be allowed.

I can’t stop looking at this train wreck. But ima try.

If you wanted to discuss that, your first step would be to look for Nexusmods moderation policy and read it. Or if they don’t have one published to note that fact.

Then start a post discussing that moderation policy and asking how moderation should be done.

Instead you started your post by focusing on the removal of a particular bigoted mod, which of course makes it a needlessly charged discussion if you’re looking for purely rational discussion about how moderation decisions are made. Then you keep making these absurd arguments — like claiming this mod may have just been about streamlining. This looks like trolling. And it talks like trolling. You claim I’m missing the point. I don’t think I am. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck… it’s probably a maga troll that’s “just asking questions”.

Oh, now I see. It was never about the pronouns, it’s just about streamlining the user experience. How could I have been so stupid, thinking that the only intent behind this mod was bigoty, when in reality it was innocent streamlining.

…

Dude, the dog whistle isn’t subtle. Could you stop?

Ever heard of Sealioning? Look it up. That’s you. Your posts are dripping with pseudo-intellectual “just asking questions” spittle.

That sucks. So it sounds like maybe an issue that has been in your saves for a while but hadn’t popped up until now.

I’m not playing starfield, so I’m unsure of the save file structure. Just some troubleshooting ideas:

Do you have multiple saves for your original character and all those saves exhibit this behavior? If so, are any of those saves old enough that you know the issue wasn’t occurring already when you made the save? If both are yes, that seems very concerning, indicating that all that character’s saves became corrupted at the same time.

Does the game only allow you to have one save per character? If that’s the case, also very troubling, since you aren’t able to have saved to fall back on.

Does the game allow you to make multiple saves, but you’ve been saving over the top of your one save? If so, that sucks. Saves shouldn’t corrupt. in the future (in all games that allow it), keep some older saves in case corruption happens.

Three thoughts:

1. I wonder if you would still have this take if you played a newer, high quality AAA game on a high end setup. I don’t mean to imply that your mind will definitely be blown — really don’t know — but it would be interesting to see what doing so would do to your opinion.

2. Gaming is about entertainment. There is no denying that better/bigger/smoother/more immersive tends to add to the entertainment. So devs push those boundaries both for marketing reasons and because they want to push the limits. I have a hard time seeing a world in which gaming development as a whole says “hey, we could keep pushing the limits, but it would be more environmentally friendly and cheaper for our customers if we all just stopped advancing game performance.”

3. There are SO MANY smaller studios and indie devs making amazing games that can run smoothly on 5/10/15 year old hardware. And there is a huge number of older games that are still a blast to play.

Old curmudgeons unite! I totally knew what you meant.

Edit: that said, I would add NVMe SSD as the way to go… although I think that is pretty much all you find these days. Are non-nvme m.2 drives a thing?

I haven’t used other handhelds, but what you say is what I’ve seen from other discussions and reviews. Yes, there are more powerful systems with better screens, but the SD’s OS is miles ahead (but not without a lot of quirks as well). The touchpads are incredible - I couldn’t imagine trying to use a handheld PC without those touchpads. Also, the custom control configuration abilities built in to steam OS are incredibly versatile and detailed.

Voyager has good features for hiding posts as well as marking posts read and hiding read posts.

You might give the Voyager app a try. It’s what I use. It has a hide post option, as well as a “mark read on scroll” option and a button to hide read posts. I think you have to enable the last two in its settings.