I played 3 and NV on 360, both games were badly marred by being as much loading zone as they were game. Ruined the experience of snooping around for loot and side quests as opening a door back into the wasteland could take minutes. I had to stick to mostly the main quest.

4 was a far better “game” for being played on PC, but I agree NV plot was great. I just didn’t want to replay and get the different endings, as the game itself was painful to play.

I should replay them on PC someday, especially if there are graphical update mods available.

but I couldn’t think of a better image to use

kind of sums up the problem our society is struggling with. Chad is perfect here. Why should you try to think of a better image to use?

We need to rationalize that humans like this sort of thing, and also that they shouldn’t demand it of others.

Is it laughable to demand game characters always be hot? Yes

Do people appreciate fan service characters? Also yes

Humans have been sexualizing everything forever, it’s in our nature. But we need to stop being so damn creepy about it.

Digital ownership, not storage. As in DRM, GaaS licensing and always-online launchers.

A ROM cartridge was physical ownership, if you had the cartridge, you could play.

A CD-key was also a form of physical ownership, install the game and type in the key from the case, you could play.

Even with external volumes, I don’t think there should be any mechanism where a container can escape a bind mount to affect the rest of the host fs? I use bind mounts all the time, far more than docker volumes.

Unfortunately it’s rare to find a TV with DisplayPort. I recently bought a 65" TV that supports 144Hz refresh up to 4k with the intention of hooking it to my PC and playing couch coop on the couch. It’s been a blast. The 50’ fiber optic HDMI 2.1 cable works great but it only works as HDMI 2.0. Good luck finding a 50’ DP cable, too.

Apparently the solution is just to buy a stupid DP->HDMI dongle and put it behind the PC. For now, 1440p/120fps is more than adequate. I’d rather have framerate than resolution.

They should really stay away from the dirty word of Live Service / GaaS in that case!

They should have gone with something like “We plan to support the game for years to come”. This model is well respected with games like Terraria and Minecraft that just refuse to stop coming out with free updates despite having no subscription model. Klei has done this with a lot of their games, Don’t Starve, Oxygen Not Included come to mind.

Everyone loves seeing new content for a game that they own, even if it’s just little things, QoL or a new item or two.

Hell, AoE2 still has support with Definitive getting patches all the time, and it’s decades old at this point.

Hades is absolutely not a real roguelike, the only roguelike thing about it is that you make multiple runs through a semi-randomized dungeon, and that you can expect to die a lot.

However there is persistent progression and it’s rare that you get truly screwed by RNG.

The random part is what weapon mods you get each run, but they are balanced. Part of the fun is not falling into a favorite weapon rut, but running with what you are given. And even a full “winning” run is only about half an hour so if you die it’s not a big punishment.

Meanwhile the plot progresses despite your countless deaths, I won’t spoil how. It’s really a well done game and deserves the praise it gets, and you can get it on sale for like $10, I would go for it if you like beat em up type games at all.

Dread on the other hand appears to be love or hate it, people with weak platforming/traversal skills seem to absolutely hate specific sections where you have to avoid the indestructible EMMI robots with a mix of stealth and skill. I thought it was thrilling myself but YMMV

The rest of the game is a must play for any 2D Metroid fan, but definitely play on PC and not Switch as PC blows it away. With the FPS cap unlocked, I’ve rarely seen an action platformer flow so smoothly.

I find it’s more common as part of a difficulty curve in a game than as optional difficulty, for example Metroid Dread introduces a boss which is hard until you learn the pattern. Then the same enemy turns up as a miniboss, easy now that you know it. Then it starts to show up mixed in with common enemies, forcing you to watch out for them, and when it shows up as a pair it’s a challenging boss again as managing two is much harder than one.

Metroid Dread does a great job of making the difficulty track your character’s increased abilities throughout the game, and looks beautiful in 1440/60fps on Ryujinx by the way.

However for optional difficulty the best example is probably Hades which is a great example of good game design anyways. In the postgame optional difficulty “Pact of Punishment” you can tweak all manner of game characteristics. Extreme Measures allows some bosses to team up, and changes boss arenas and behaviours. Middle Management mixes up the minibosses totally, adding trash mobs to manage as well as lots of other effects. There’s also an option to add new attacks to almost all of the enemies.

Then you can also do the standards like make yourself weaker, enemies tougher, boost the numbers of regular enemies, remove your special abilites and even disable i-frames after being hit (!) Hades probably has some of the best post-game replay value out there.

That’s “increasing damage and health.”

It varies. I agree far too many games just make the enemies bullet sponges, which I hate.

Increasing numbers though ramps up challenge in a more fun way, I would rather take on a classic “double boss” than one bullet sponge boss. You have to keep track of multiple enemies and change your tactics. It’s cheap difficulty but much better than just multiplying health.

I would really like to see more games handle difficulty like Halo for sure.

Also sometimes the player needs to be nerfed for balance. Titanfall 2 for example, in normal I can switch my loadout in combat, blasting rockets as Brute and switch to Ion to fire its laser once the core is charged, totally ruining the whole concept of loadouts. Also when the player has a Halo-style shield and enemies just have regular health… Nerf me already, the game shouldn’t feel like you’re steamrolling enemies on Normal. 1v4 Titans should at least feel like a challenge, not a cakewalk.

Sometimes the difficulty will improve enemy tactics, boost numbers or make the player less of a tank, and genuinely add challenge.

But, if the game has a good storyline I like to play on “normal” for the first playthrough as I feel higher difficulty ruins the pacing. Then if I enjoy the game I’ll go back and replay on higher difficulty for the challenge.

This was always the way when a new Halo game came out, they have long stated that they are “meant to be played on Heroic” but me and a buddy would rip through in coop on Normal and then bump up the difficulty.

I finally got around to Titanfall 2 and Normal feels a bit easy, but it also feels like I’m playing a robot mecha movie instead of grinding through tactical battles, which is awesome. Definitely going to revisit this one on Hard though.

Personally I live in a very rural location and I farm, so I can spend a lot of time on the road or in my tractor. 1gb wouldn’t get me through a day in the field, so I have a pretty big collection with a lot of variety. We don’t even have reliable FM radio here, so it’s bring your own music or listen to the diesel roar.

We’re talking about replacing lost content here though. And as such you can use the streaming services as a “backup” by re-ripping your whole collection if you lose it.

I’m actually doing this now as part of a library cleanup. Zotify + beets are a great combo to pull down vast quantities of music and properly sort and tag it.

Then I stream it to my phone in my truck using ampache and ultrasonic, which does have a local buffering option.

However if you have some exotics that you ripped from rare discs, demos or prerelease, live recordings with sentimental value etc. I would suggest keeping those properly backed up. I don’t have many of these, but the ones I do have are backed up both cloud and offsite.

The image generation can be cheap, but I was imagining this sort of watermark wouldn’t be so much a visible part of the image, but an embedded signature that hashes the image.

Require enough PoW to generate the signature, and this would at least cut down the volumes of images created, and possibly limit them to groups or businesses with clusters that could be monitored, without clamping down on image generation in general.

A modified version of what you mentioned could work too, but where just these specific images have to be vetted and signed by a central authority using a private key. Image generation software wouldn’t be restricted for general purposes, but no signature on suspicious content and it’s off to jail.

In this specific scenario, you wouldn’t want to remove the watermark.

The watermark would be the only thing that defines the content as “harmless” AI-generated content, which for the sake of discussion is being presented as legal. Remove the watermark, and as far as the law knows, you’re in possession of real CSAM and you’re on the way to prison.

The real concern would be adding the watermark to the real thing, to let it slip through the cracks. However, not only would this be computationally expensive if it was properly implemented, but I would assume the goal in marketing the real thing could only be to sell it to the worst of the worst, people who get off on the fact that children were abused to create it. And in that case, if AI is indistinguishable from the real thing, how do you sell criminal content if everyone thinks it’s fake?

Anyways, I agree with other commenters that this entire can of worms should be left tightly shut. We don’t need to encourage pedophilia in any way. “Regular” porn has experienced selection pressure to the point where taboo is now mainstream. We don’t need to create a new market for bored porn viewers looking for something shocking.

As the other commenter said, it’s all about depth of discharge. A 10kWh Lifepo4 bank gets you almost 10kWh every time while you should treat a 10kWh lead-acid bank as if it was a 2kWh bank for any sort of decent life, with deep discharges being limited to emergency situations.

All lithium chemistries are practically maintenance free while you are probably familiar with water level monitoring and equalization of lead acid.

Note that all site built lithium banks MUST have a balance mechanism as this is their “automated maintenance”. Without balancing on every charge, lithium cells will be rapidly destroyed.

“Deep cycle” batteries are the best of the lead-acids for the task. But they are still obsolete and you should source lithium if at all practical.

However if power interruptions are short, loads are low or you have an external power source like solar or wind, inferior batteries can do the job.

I use a bunch of old car batteries at my house for my battery bank. It’s more of a big capacitor, but it’s almost always sunny here and kW of solar are pouring in.

My critical equipment i.e. starlink, home and farm automation and monitoring, cell booster and HMI/SCADA only take a couple hundred watts, so no big deal. Most of the solar power goes to keeping the freezers cold.

What you describe sounds almost exactly like the Mass Effect 1 procedurally generated missions. But that game came out in 2007…