I am surprised I’ve never heard of this.

It very much has that mid 90s attitude and unique to DOS too. From what I remember, consoles didn’t really have these sort of games.

The artwork is top notch and stands the test of time.

Very cool interview. Some interesting perspectives on the state of the market back then.

A c/pcgaming and c/games UT2004 server would be a lot of fun!

You definitely need a little bit craziness and unpredictability to make a truly landmark game.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think truly good games (the ones that go down in history) need a certain amount of jank. Not jank for jank’s sake, but because something new, that makes you go “wow”, cannot have the same true and tried game design/gameplay approaches that have been done before.

Just look at the classics, they are considered milestones, but they have a lot of issues:

• F01 / F02 - It is very easy to mess up your build, but the flip side of this is you have a living world where you can play as a slaver, play as a character with development disabilities and discover a whole new approach. Even if you’ve played the game many times and are comfortable with older CRPGs, the early game can be a slog. I find I constantly have to kite and use cheese tactics in the first ~20% of the game.
• VTMB - Combat was generally subpar, especially if you went with weapons. Many abilities/skills were unbalanced. Late game was subpar.
• Deus Ex - Early to mid-game combat is a bit of a slog and considered unpolished by modern standards (but the flip side is that you feel the progression). Some of the stealth gameplay can feel a bit cheesy. I would argue weaponry is unbalanced. Arcanum - Picking the industrial direction resulted in much more tedious and difficult gameplay than going with magic. Both real-time and turn-based combat was shit.
• Morrowind - For some of the quests, I literally had to almost try a “point and click adventure” approach to figure out how to complete it. I was never a fan of the combat in Morrowind.

And yet I strongly prefer this approach (and modern versions such Space Wreck, Age of Decadence, Colony Ship, Consortium, New Vegas, UnderRail) to Obsidian’s recent output (let alone Bethesda with Starfield and Fallout 3).

I don’t know about that. If Valve made Left 4 Dead 3 with some minor iterative improvements (better graphics, same gameplay, maybe a new mode) and no trash monetisation (B2P like the first two games), I think it would be very successful.

Back 4 Live Service Game Failure

Haven’t bought an EA game since the SimCity 2013 reboot. They straight up lied about the nature of the game.

The funniest thing is that 13 years and $900 M later, they still don’t have a working economy or even a basic balance concept. They have 200+ ships (many in JPEG form for over a decade) in their cash shop they’ve thought about beyond flashes sales videos and 3D assets.

This is a very naive and ignorant take. In the major cities, quality of life is on part with EU for many.

Furthermore, even with demographic splits (e.g. russians aged 18-24, urban russians), all major demographic groups show at least strong majority support for chauvinism, authoritarianism and genocidal imperialism.

There are some variations of course. But it’s more along the lines of overwhelming/near absolute majority support (e.g 50+) or strong majority support (18-34). You also find interesting variantions where “middle age” segments tend to be less supportive (on a relative basis, the segment as whole still shows strong majority support) of genocidal imperialism than young adults/early middle age (18-34); likely because they have more to lose.

Russians have the capability to build a better future for themselves (without invasions), they just don’t want to because they haven’t gotten a taste of their own medicine (where they are treated like they treat others).

EU is massive in enabling this attitude. Consider the fact that Merkel, even from retirement, is promoting russian genocidal imperialism by claiming that Poland and the Baltic nation are responsible for the full scale invasion:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/10/06/angela-merkel-poland-baltics-blame-ukraine-war/

When it’s the russians and putin (a symptom, with the cause being russians) who are to blame for their own invasion.

When you use steam, do you mail Newell the cash?

How does that contradict what I said?

You think living in Ukraine, I would be aware of the exact scope of sanctions against russia (and the massive loopholes)?

From the article:

For context, Steam currently doesn’t allow direct purchases by Russian players, in accordance with western sanctions, so Russian buyers have to make use of workarounds such as third-party key resellers.

Btw, I knew this before reading the article. Do a web search around how these workarounds operate (the example cited by RPS isn’t the only one).

I respect your reasoning and I agree that it would massively increase piracy in russia, but remember, russia is sanctioned; Valve isn’t supposed to be selling to russians in the first place.

Disagree on impact on global piracy rates. Pirated games were widely available via public russia sources such as rutracker.org.

You don’t even need to know russian as all titles have english headings.

Here is a link to Vampire Bloodlines 2, originally release on October 21st, with consistent updates since then, last one being on November 18th:

https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6761118

You don’t need to speak russian to figure out what “magnet-ссылке” with a magnet icon refers to.

I strongly disagree, the Workers & Resource DLC link can provide some insights on this; russian language reviews talk about “getting salo for the Ukrainians” and whataboutism about Palestine (like they care about Palestine, if anything most russians tend to support Israel). There is lots of anti-Ukrainian, pro-invasion russian language commentary on Steam.

We’ve lived in russia as an expat family for many years, we left as soon as our finances allowed us to (this was was before the russians invaded Georgia in 2008).

Then there is broader research on russian support for the full scale invasion; even using demographic splits (e.g. people aged 18 to 24, highly educated russians, high income russians), all demographic segments show at least majority support for the full scale invasion (with almost all segment groups showing at strong majority support and very commonly overwhelming majority support).

With respect to arguments that “people are afraid to show their true views”; there are multiple research pieces that specifically account for preference falsification. Some russians do hide their preferences, but this group is so small that even with preference falsification adjustments you have a strong majority support (65%+) for the full scale invasion. That’s specifically the full scale invasion (i.e. 2022), with respect to the annexation of Crimea, preference falsification was found to be not statistically significant with the respect to the baseline ~85% support for the annexation of Crimea.

What’s wrong with Steam getting blocked in Russia? It’s not like Valve allows direct purchases by russian users.

Russian users losing access to their libraries without VPN is their own problem. They are responsible for their government, no one else.

So Valve does not accept money from russian users directly (the roundabout methods are well known by russian users and Valve does nothing in this case even though it acts against similar methods when publishers make the call), so why would they even care what Roskomnadzor says? What can Roskomnadzor do to Valve?

I will note that Valve also does nothing about genocidal imperialist russian reviews on this DLC for support of Ukraine in Workers and Resources:

I’m from Donetsk. We have been bombarded since 2014 by the state in which I was born and lived. Declaring us enemies of the people. I am for the Russian SVO. Buy a dls only because of the Zaporizhia NPP, it is well made <3

You can check the number of civilians deaths in Donbas in 2014 vs 2022 to present and look at what happened to cities like Bahmut during the russian invasion. Not to mention the 1.5 million Ukrainians who had to leave just in 2014 (including my family members).

And yet we have to hear faux-libertarian polemics about alleged belief in “freedom of speech” and arrogant gibberish about “I am a free speech absolutist!” from individuals who know nothing about the value of free speech.

I said it before and I will say it again, American companies cannot be relied upon as a source of digital services. Both for systematic reasons (submission to the local oligarch/criminal regime) and philosophical reasons (a culture of ignorance and lack of desire to go beyond theatrical proclamations about freedom of this or freedom of that).

Let’s say you think I am being uncharitable in my attitude. Then tell me, why does Valve even read notices from Roskomnadzor (not to mention implementing their orders)? Russia is sanctioned and they are not supposed be able to make purchases at all. And yet Valve feels the need to follow orders from Roskomnadzor. What’s the logic here?

“Crypto/NFT disclosures make no sense, because all games will become “Play to Earn” and have NFT objects where you can transfer your Mario hat to COD 2028.”

I am being glib, Sweeney probably has a point, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a critical look at his intentions.

To my knowledge, PCIE4 versus PCIE5 is irrelevant at 1440p.

You probably can’t find compatibility info because PCIE is always backward and forward compatible when it comes to a 1:1 slot:card ratio. Unless you are splitting the PCIE lane, using one of those GPU + SSD combo cards, you should be fine.

Is there a version “made by” Soulja Boy?

I was more thinking about Qualcomm being particularly dishonest (which is a massive achievement in their industry).