With exchange it’s closer to $950 cad, best bang for your buck is probably used. Quick glance at kijiji and I saw some 3070tis for sub $400, heck if you’re fine with slightly older hardware just saw a ryzen 3700x + 2070 super, ram, full system honestly for $650 cad. You’ll probably get quite a bit of mileage out of that CPU, I ran with a 3rd gen i5 for nearly a decade

Afaik the timeline after beating the game splits, the adult timeline carries on from there and then the child timeline carries on as if Gannondorf never took over in the first place

Isn’t windwaker following the adult timeline and twilight princess the kid one but both where Link succeeds?

Guess it kinda makes sense if you think about it as a split at the end of oot? Idk, timeline is wild and I never thought about it too much.

I’ve used MultiMC forever, it’s open source and has linux support. Like it because I tend to have a few different modpacks/versions, keeps things organised.

That’s almost enough time to get through a full Gregtech:New Horizons run!

So my first thought is:

1. Minecraft, even a handful of modpacks would set you up for a long time
2. Morrowind, pretty much any tes game is going to give you lots of replay
3. Rimworld, same as Minecraft in that I’ve already had for years and it’s on the top of my played hours on steam.

I may swap one with Satisfactory if this question was asked after 1.0. Elden Ring would be up there too, and maybe Stellaris, actually really difficult to limit to a small handful, there’s a few I have as semi regular replays (ME trilogy, DA:O) that don’t have the same time investment.

Edit: after reading some comments,

1. Minecraft, modded Minecraft gives you massive amounts of replayability
2. Mass Effect Collection, this is a bit cheaty as it’s bundling the trilogy in one group, but the ME series is still one of the more memorable game series to me, between that and DA:O I’d have a hard choice but think the trilogy would win out.
3. Elden Ring, only picked up before the DLC dropped and it’s already in my top 5, world is amazing, I do loosely themed runs when I play so I’ve not even scratched the surface in terms of build possibilities and it’s great for someone who likes to theorycraft

The only way I ever played StarCraft was StarCraft 64, the split screen multiplayer was cool but absolutely hands down the worst way to play it. I don’t know how they managed to make that work at all honestly, I know there woukd have had to have been a lot of concessions to fit it on the cart, but still, kinda impressive to me. I realised just how bad it was to play after playing wc3 a few years later.

Sunshine+Moonlight has taken over most of my console use, there’s so much less screwing around with games needed these days, if you’re not modding they tend to run well out of the box in my experience, seeing so many games with native controller support + local multiplayer is fantastic, steam input fills the gap on a lot of the others. That said though nothing really beats the pick up and go of a console, my GameCube still runs perfectly after 20 something years, I can emulate them (and do for some games, metroid prime trilogy is better on m+k, but that’s the Wii version of the trilogy) but I don’t feel the need to tweak things endlessly on the native hardware.

Seriously though, it’s been some time be afaik any microsoft product file that ends in x, .docx, .xlsx, .pbix are all just archives and you can totally interact with them programmatically if you want. Really easy to corrupt them but hey, found it interesting years ago.

I’m always personally wary of storing blobs in a database if for no other reason it’s going to totally be more expensive to store on a server rather than in some sort of blob storage.

100% a title that would struggle with full controller, for me it was cities skylines and rimworld. Also played a lot of warframe and spec ops:the line with mine, being able to have actions trigger at different points of the trigger pull was interesting, had a profile I grabbed for shooters that’d enable gyro aiming at the last bit of your trigger pull for fine adjustment and seriously, it works extremely well once you get used to it. The pads also supported osd rotary menus for hotkeys which was probably what the left pad got the most use out of, had the ability to set different behaviour too using mod buttons are by touching the rim of the pad. Also the haptic feedback on the pads was interesting, did a lot to make them feel more real, seriously had a really powerful piece of hardware with the og steam controller.

Totally was, it didn’t have rumble for battery life reasons, but didn’t miss it much at the time, barely used the rumble pack on the n64, think I got mine at EB games to try out the OOT secret hint feature (it’d buzz the pack if you were near a hidden secret), feedback has come a LONG way since then in terms of immersion.

I really liked the wavebird for the gamecube, unfortunately mine went into the aether on my last move, got bluetooth adapters to pair modern controllers with it but the wavebird was really cool at the time, was really amazing to not have to be tethered to the console and it being first party, though at the time the madcatz stuff was decent.

For recent controllers, I’ve been using a knockoff 360 controller for moonlight recently and after a lot of back and forth I really think MS nailed the controller setup back then (OG Xbox being decent but not a preference, I hated the duke, s controller was solid though), I like the xbone controllers as well, but IMO they’re just iterations on the 360 controller, easily my preference as an all rounder controller layout.

I have a steam controller, used it for a while but it’s been some time now, had some really great ideas, I’d totally go for an updated steamdeck style layout on that, probably a second for me.

I’ve had so much drift issues with ds4s that I personally don’t reach for a ds4 or dualsense for non playstation games, I like being able to swap batteries and the Xbox/Steam controllers all seem to have way better battery life in general, I keep a stock of rechargeables around so not generating piles of waste.

I don’t use mine much anymore but I still have it out, was a really cool idea and while it had a learning curve, definitely made controller gaming possible with a lot of titles, steam input in general these days is fantastic for that but even so I’d totally buy a steam deck layout steam controller v2.

Oh damage sponges are the worst, probably one of my biggest complaints with Bethesda’s games difficulty sliders generally just making things a slog, survival mode in fo4 is a good example to me of a challenge that doesnt make things an absolute pain, metro 2033 had a mode like that too that totally changed how you played the game, made it challenging without making it a slog.

The scadutree buffs are pretty big from what I can tell, I’ve got a bunch becauae I explore a lot on first runs and it seems to be at least 3-4% boost to attack and defenses, with some of the new talismans too found there’s a lot of stuff to work with.

So far, feels pretty well balanced, it has challenge but I’ve not encountered anything that made me question how I died, first few big fights were pretty well telegraphed and super enjoyable. What I really like is that you can go try something else if you hit a wall, go level up a bit, try new gear or different approaches

There’s room for accessibility options, no one is forcing you to use them. While there are tools in the souls series to solve issues, there’s no reason not to have some sort of scaling option at the least for people that want it, things like directional subtitles, colourblind mode, those are just basic. Why alienate players who would otherwise enjoy the game but may have limitations, it’s ok for games to have complex systems and themes that may not appeal to everyone, that’s totally independent of accessibility. I personally really enjoyed my playthroughs, and would love other people to be able to enjoy these games as well, and I’m pretty sure fromsoft intends for their games to be enjoyable.

Your point about rhythm games doesn’t support your point, guitar hero and rockband both had difficulty settings and later entries had nofail modes. They also had practice modes where you could slow down sections you were struggling with and work through it.

Quick edit: my only real complaint is FOV, camera is super zoomed in on some of the giant bosses, DS1 remastered supported ultrawide, would have been nice for Elden Ring to have that at leaat

Didn’t know that! Steam has some really nice features, steam input alone is amazing so I’ll definitely give that a try.

I’d love a Morrowind type journal to log some of that, totally get I can write things down outside the game, I’d just like to have that option in game especially as I can tend to jump around games and put them down for some time. They’re almost there with the player map markers and NPC markers, even just having the ability to make notes in game would be big for me.

Yeah this is my understanding, which I mean fair, anything my partner and I play for coop we’re both buying anyhow, or we gift one another a copy if we like it independently.

Seriously, even better with the beta where my partner can now play games in my library even if I’m playing something

Depends on the mod, I’d generally assume it’s an issue unless the mod author says otherwise. The more the mod touches, the higher likelihood it’ll be an issue.

That said, Fallrim tools does include resaver which I have used in the past to rescue Skyrim saves. Obviously backup before trying, worst thing it doesn’t work so there’s no issue trying