Deconceptualist

The dev thought “I know exactly what you meant, but I still insist you to do it my way”.

No, the helicopter was, read the headline again

A: None; it was Devon.

When we’re talking about molecules, millions is usually an extreme understatement. PPB (parts per billion) is a common measure for contaminants.

But PPB is still an enormous quantity. Remember Avogadro’s number (used to relate count to grams) is on the 10^23 scale (aka thousands of billions of trillions). Even 999 million is a drop in the ocean there.

EDIT: The journal abstract lists the leached nanoparticles as 10^9 (billions) per mL, and the uptake by human-derived intestine cells as 100 micrograms/mL. So yeah this is coverage by a journalist who can’t math.

For SR3, just do it, it’s a really well-made game and runs great and you don’t need any prior knowledge except to know that it’s kind of a GTA parody. I don’t think SR1 was even ported to PC, and SR2 is pretty buggy and unstable on modern machines (though fun aside from that). SR4 supposed to be pretty great (same engine as 3 I think) but I haven’t played it.

FH4 has a healthy playerbase and I’m pretty confident it’ll still be worth playing over the next year. However beyond that as the community slowly dwindles it will eventually become less fun with fewer people doing Forzathons or seasonal co-ops or using the auctions, even if the servers are still running.

KSP has what players call “the Kraken” where the game engine sometimes bugs out and causes your vehicle to spin out of control and/or explode for no apparent reason. It happens more with really big vessels and complex missions. But yeah it’s not bug-free and you’ll want to quicksave often so you don’t lose hours of work.

If you like the cheesy story, Saints Row the Third is wacky awesome fun. It’s not 100 hours so you’d have to replay it, but you could do that co-op with a couple of friends. There’s nothing quite like bailing out of your fighter jet wearing a hotdog costume and then blowing up half a city block with your rocket launcher on the way down.

Vampire Survivors is a good candidate too, regularly introducing new characters and weapon combos and weird secrets for pretty non-stop dopamine. Maybe you could get 100 hours with the expansions but that seems like a stretch.

Honorable mention to Forza Horizon 4, it’s everything Burnout Paradise wished it could be and had a smile on my face nearly the entire time. Although there were a few spots where I set the difficulty too high and/or didn’t tune up my car and lost races, so that was less fun, but kind of my own fault. Well over 100 hours on this one, but the base game has only come down to $12 and won’t be sold after today!

Kerbal Space Program’, do I need to say more ?

I love KSP, but no way, it’s full of challenges that require deliberate planning, patience, persistence and more. e.g. Your first Mun landing, or making a vehicle that can successfully return from Eve. Those are not adrenaline-fueled non-stop thrills, but rather careful exercises in engineering and discipline occasionally punctuated with excitement.

No, the last game that got me hooked for hundreds of hours is modded Cyberpunk 2077, but I don’t know if it can be found for 10 bucks.

Nope, historical low is still like $25.

Yeah but like any successful politician he’ll readily compromise his principles in order to hold onto power.

Happy birthday! I actually just started playing Journey for the first time yesterday, less than an hour I’d say (on Steam). The visuals and fluidity of controls are nice, nothing spectacular by today’s standards but I’m sure they were great back in the PS3 era. The beginning felt a little slow trudging through the sand until I understood how the scarf upgrades work. But then when I encountered another player it really started to click and go more smoothly. I like how the game encourages cooperation by pinging and refilling each other’s scarf energy, though I feel like progress might go slow again if I get stuck going solo next session. The puzzles are very simple but I was feeling sick so having a ‘cozy’ game was actually pretty nice.

My dad helped me install the original Wolfenstein 3D on DOS when I was a kid. And he’s 100% a boomer (b.1947). So for that reason it always feels accurate to me.

Yep this seems even more blurry and pixelated than the last 3 times I saw it haha

I imagine people resharing memes (long before OP here) take a photo of their monitor with a potato phone and then reupload that after resizing it with some shitty Motorola app or whatever first. Do that 3-4x and soon it’s a mess.

Looks pretty good, glad to see another true Linux system. No weight listed though, and no backside buttons, so we’ll see how it turns out.

I wish I was as brave and well-spoken as this young man.

When I was 17-18 I scored really well on a test and the US Air Force tried to recruit me. It was tempting because I was fascinated with aerospace and it would have kickstarted my career and possibly meant no student loans. I’d easily be $100k better off today if I went down that path.

But I couldn’t imagine myself dropping bombs on potentially innocent people at the behest of some smug politician, or even loading ordinance for someone else to do it. The thought made me sick to my stomach. So I figured out my own path. But that was easy for me, because there was no major conflict at the time, no one threatening me with jail, and no social repercussions from that decision. I have to wonder if I would have made the same decision if it was under Tal Mitnick’s conditions.

I believe that resolves the same as

ain’t!(!untrue)

EA, Activision, Ubisoft… their BS is on another level entirely and I generally don’t play their games because if it.

For NMS / Hello Games it’s more that I really want to like the game but find it immensely frustrating that after years and years of updates, they still haven’t fixed some of the most basic elements.

Like when your character sprints, the tiniest bump in terrain cancels the sprinting. This even happens in the Nexus where it looks like flat ground. Why?

Again for the alien languages… there’s no dictionary in this universe? I’m supposed to believe interstellar travel is commonplace, but they don’t have an app to translate the 3 ubiquitous languages? I have a device in my hand right now that can do that.

Space combat still isn’t balanced. If you alternate between the phase beam with the shield absorb upgrade and any other weapon, you can basically wear down any threat and win.

What has actually been improved about the core game of NMS? People keep telling me that in vague terms without saying what specifically was improved. I know the inventory system is better (but still kind of a mess IMO), but what else? Don’t say multiplayer because they promised that at the beginning.

Yeah I like the “go anywhere” feel and was happy when I found a dinosaur planet too. But it still all feels 2 inches deep in so many ways.

I’ve come back to it a bunch of times because people keep insisting it’s good or “no you just need to try X” or “but the latest update added so much”. Steam says over 300 hours now but a decent portion of that was standing around trade hubs waiting for ships I wanted in S or A class, or literally just walking away from my PC while refiners ran.

I’m not usually the type of player to use cheats/exploits but I actually had more fun when I started using a duplication glitch. No more limited inventory, money, or resources, I could just pick one ship and one multitool and max them out with all the storage and weapons and whatnot. I don’t enjoy grinding so this was a relief. But it still didn’t make up for all the bad underlying mechanics.

Playing the game felt like satire. Basic questions I would expect other devs of sci-fi games to ask themselves seemingly either went unanswered or got super lazy answers.

e.g. “Should we let players customize their spaceships?” to which HG apparently thinks their system of solely generating ships from a random permutation of parts is plenty. Or “Do you think different planets and galaxies would have different hostile flora?”, to which they decided “nah, the same 3 are fine everywhere”. “Should planets have biomes of any kind, at least ice caps maybe?”… “nah, players don’t care if planets are basically uniform.”

I really wanted to like NMS. The core concept is 100% up my alley, it looks pretty good, and it’s a neat sandbox. I suppose it’s not bad if you’re the kind of player who is happy mindlessly gathering resources so you can craft an ornate base. Hell, I played quite a bit because I was determined to collect one of every type of spaceship.

But I really do think the gameplay is objectively bad by almost any possible measure. The on-foot traversal is terrible, waiting around for refiners sucks (though at least they had the sense to give a backpack refiner), trying to get the actual spaceship you want is awful, flying towards the galactic center is a chore, and I could go on. I guess the gunplay is serviceable, but the enemies aren’t the least bit interesting aside from maybe the largest walker bots.

What are you talking about? The player literally learns nothing about the alien languages. All you do is walk up to a NPC, button mash through absolutely inconsequential filler text, and pick the option that says “teach me a word”. Then a popup says “You now know the Korvax word for ‘THE’”, except it doesn’t even tell you which alien word was translated or explain any grammar or context or conjugation or anything. Your character just does a magical substitution from that point forward.

Or you can do the same thing by walking up to the black pillars if you’d rather trudge around a planet surface for macguffins.

How in any way is that a good system? There’s zero skill or challenge or reward or even real gameplay here. A word search puzzle would have 100x more depth.