At this point everyone should be familiar with this game, but if you’re not then this is the short brief: it is essentially an interactive novel, and it has the best writing in any videogame bar none. It’s also voice acted to perfection (with one exception). It encourages you to explore its dialogue options, and it pioneered a “fail-forward” design philosophy where failing skill checks not only still can progress the story, but are often more interesting or even advantageous than succeeding. It’s the best and most meaningful experience I’ve had playing a video game (if you allow it to count as a video game), and is maybe the best example I can think of for “videogames are art”.

Some people will argue that you should pirate it since at this point I believe almost everyone who actually worked on DE has left ZA/UM, but I think buying it heavily discounted to have in your library is perfectly fine.

Recommended to anyone who enjoys reading novels, just remember: it’s barely a game. Treat it like a good book.

Cute game, superb music, phenomenal art style and a perfect concept. Recommended to anyone who enjoys puzzle games.

One of the top Deadlock players uses a trackball. We all stan our ergonomic king.

I relate to a lot of what you’re writing - almost all of it in fact. Though my birthday is in the middle of the summer so my “feeling like shit due to being reminded of the passage of time” is evenly spaced throughout the year. In a way it would be nice to get them both out of the way around new year’s like this.

I don’t have any helpful words. I’m also just drifting between distractions as I wait for either the courage to end it or death to find me of its own accord. And I relate to the guilt of knowing I have it “easy” really, and can’t manage even given this favourable hand. I’m not going to say that it gets better, because I’ve never experienced that. All you can do is try to find solace in the fact that none of it matters, we’re all insignificant and ultimately fated to be dust, dispersed and forgotten. So the rat race doesn’t matter, and whether you make it within its confines or fail doesn’t matter. There is some hope to be had in that thought, though I often fail to hold on to it myself.

Also, it might be cheesy but who cares. Sometimes when I feel like shit this song makes me feel a little better. It is somewhat comforting to know that you’re not alone, and I hope I managed to convey at least that.

I guess they mean they’re optimized for Nvidia in the sense that they need upscaling technology in some form due to either demanding graphics or poor optimisation or both, and Nvidia has the best one at the moment. I wish it wasn’t the case, but DLSS does look better than the alternatives.

Depressing? There are a lot of other things right now that depress me way more than the type of tools used to project the image I’m consuming in my escapist entertainment medium of choice. Maybe I would be more outraged if I was a programmer and knew exactly what kinds of optimizations developers were (or weren’t) doing these days. As an end user I have no problem with DLSS to be honest, I just see it as another tool and frankly it strikes me as one of the better applications of AI we’ve developed. There have been multiple examples where I was happier with the visuals with DLSS on rather than turning it off but also having to turn off or down a lot of other graphical bells and whistles. Also, making games that require DLSS on current hardware is future-proofing in a way, is it not? A generation or two of hardware down the line and you can just turn off DLSS and enjoy it in its full glory.

Not to be nitpicky but DLSS is a different technology than frame generation, though it also involves AI guessing - just in a different way. DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) means rendering the game at a lower resolution than your screen’s output, then having it upscaled to the correct resolution via AI. This is much more performance friendly than native rendering and can often lead to a better looking visual end product than turning graphics features off and rendering natively - though it will depend on the game, genre and personal preference.

Frame generation is as you described. Worth noting is that DLSS without frame generation doesn’t suffer issues like artifacts and input lag in the same manner as FG turned on. Frame generation also works better the higher your base frame rate is, so it’s a bit of a “win-more”. Using FG to go from 30 to 60 FPS will feel much worse than using it to go from 60 to 120.

The fake frames memes I believe stem from the updated frame generation technology in the 50 series guessing three frames at a time instead of one. So in effect you’ll end up with a majority of the frames you see being “fake”.

I used to buy it a lot when I first started playing, now I almost never do. I much prefer regen items that don’t force passivity in lane and getting hit early after activating Healing Rite can be disastrous.

It’s very good if you’re planning on buying Healing Nova anyway though, and getting it instead of boots for the sprint speed for map movement is also a fair choice if you’re not intending to upgrade into Enduring Speed.

This year I was too numb to cry.

This was a good read, and I’m very excited to watch the documentary. I wonder who else will show up for interviews in addition to those named, Luiga and and Tuulik perhaps?

[email protected] is also fairly active.

I haven’t played myself in about a month since it’s been the holiday period, but it looks to be in a bit of a lurch. Many streamers jumped ship to Marvel Rivals (at least for the moment). Marvel Rivals is also an inherently more accessible game since it’s not a MOBA. I think the initial hype has died down and closed beta testing will now resume in a more normal way. I wouldn’t expect another big player surge until open beta begins - possibly even full release.

Though Unity will always have my favorite game play(…)

I love seeing another Unity enjoyer around here. That game is severely underrated and had it not had that disastrously buggy launch the AC franchise could have gone in a completely different direction than the open world RPG flavour we ended up with. Plus, revolutionary Paris is one of the best realized video game cities of all time, it’s just beautiful.

I thought Infinite was fairly well liked? That’s a bummer to hear, it’s in my backlog docket. I just played Bioshock 2 a few months ago however and while solid I probably do agree it’s got nothing on the original.

Shame. I quite enjoyed F1 Manager 23 despite it being somewhat simplistic and had hoped the series would continue to develop.

How powerful is the PC? Is the question more about games optimised for mouse+keyboard, or is it about demanding recent games that allows his new machine to flex its muscles?

Since you say he likes Souls-likes Black Myth Wukong probably checks both boxes - I never ended up playing it (my backlog is too long) but it looked great with stunning visuals and I heard good things about the gameplay.

Cyberpunk with full path tracing is still one of the prettiest games out there and a pretty damn good game too after the patches and expansions.

Finally, something like Fallout: London could be an interesting suggestion as mods of that nature are out of reach of the console crowd. Could give him a whiff of what he’s been missing out on.

It’s been a while since I last played but the over-streamlining and continued simplification and homogenisation of the classes in combat was definitely part of the reason I stopped playing.

Casey even shows up in the dark place wearing the Max Payne tie and leather jacket! I was geeking out.

If you’re wondering, he is indeed one of those Habsburgs. In fact, I believe he would be emperor were the Austria-Hungarian Empire still a thing.

I grew up in the nineties and PC gaming certainly felt like a niche hobby then, at least where I grew up. “Normal” kids were doing sports, maybe some families had a Playstation, Dreamcast or Nintendo console in the living room. But there weren’t many others who played PC games and us who did were the nerds who got more or less bullied.