For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?

Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.

Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.

Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.

Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.

You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.

Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.

Anyway woo random trivia.

He, entirely unironically, has a cult following.

Like… an actual cult.

How to actually do games preservation:

Reform IP laws.

Mandate open sourcing of hardware and software architectures after some period of time. 10 years? 5 years after no more of that hardware/software is sold? Yes texhnicalities are insanely complicated but you get the idea.

Oh, how about government funding for emulator development? We fund libraries that preserve books, and movies, and other stuff.

Hit detection doesn’t work, going into pure darkness makes the AI hallucinate to the point it distorts the map layout, npcs will teleport around ot just disappear… runs at like 640p at maybe 20 fps, textures are a blurred indistinct mess…

Oh and it requires basically a super computer to run this.

Brilliant.

Gaming has not been ‘fine’ since:

Hypercaptialist corporate acquisitions have basically bought all recognizable IP/dev studios and manage them under an increasingly smaller number of actual parent companies who own increasingly huge numbers of IPs/dev studios, and then basically all of these companies are absurdly mismanaged by corporate nonces who make bank, and game devs are routinely overworked and underpaid.

MTX became the new norm / the mobile gaming scene exploded (basically concurrent phenomena)

Nvidia/Unreal decided that actually, having efficiently coded lighting that runs on moderately priced hardware is stupid, what you actually want is horrifically inefficient lighting that runs on absurdly expensive hardware, and then Nvidia plasters a bunch of AI Frame Gen/Upscale all over that foundation to further enforce their monopoly.

… Like, yes, there are still great indie or AA games, but those are the exception to the rule.

The overall industry is a fucking nightmare for anyone who works in it, and from the consumer perspective, we keep getting overpriced, overproduced iterations of the same basic game… sandwiched on the other side by an avalanche of garbage tier indie slop/scams. Something like 80 to 90 % of the games listed on Steam are that, and they are constantly fucking with their algorithms to be able to actually detect them and filter them.

… It also doesn’t even matter if you personally will never own a high end gaming PC.

All the AAA game dev studios need them to develop the games. And now those are all 30% more expensive, at least. Oh and all of the employees cost of living just jumped 30% as well, I am totally sure that their wages will increase to compensate this. Oh wait no, they’ll actually lay them off even faster and exploit them even harder.

Game dev in America is going to largely grind to a halt, with again, the exception of a few, now even smaller in number, amount of new games that can be developed with much less powerful hardware, or an even smaller number of AAA titles that quintuple down on MTX, addiction based pricing models.

But uh hey, basically every other industry in America is utterly fucked too.

Leisure/luxury expenditures crater the hardest during a depression. Which is what we are looking at. Not a recession for a year or two, no, this is a gonna be a decade of you learning how to cook with rice and beans, sewing your clothes back together because you can’t buy new ones, where your Xmas gift to your kid is decent shoes, not a game console.

I suggest you check out Decky FrameGen.

The technicals are … very complex, but the upshot is: It basically injects FrameScaling/FrameGen modes into games that don’t officially support them on AMD hardware.

So… I’ve done this with CP2077, and if I understand this right, basically it injects FSR3, but under the DLSS settings under the game’s options menu… and it works better than the game’s current officially supported FSR 2 for the Deck.

Elden Ring may also be able to benefit from it.

Yep, I already said the Switch 2 makes sense if all you care about is playing Switch 2 games.

I am not trying to aruge that the Deck is just hands down, inherently superior in all cases, for everyone.

I hope there’s a way for you to put parental controls on your 12 yo’s Fortnite account’s ability to buy microtransactions, and that you have enough time to teach them how to identify and disregard all the dark patterns in the game that encourage irresponsible spending habits, as well as resist all the social peer pressure that comes with an MTX heavy game.

The offical dock is $80, but you can get the Baseus Dock for between $30 and $40.

Point by point:

1: I mean, I guess? I do not even have a mouse myself right now… but if I needed just a cheapo one for basic use… you can get something functional for $20 or under, a basic mouse you’d get for a work laptop type thing.

2: People have all kinds of ‘unusual’ Deck set ups.

The mouse dongle you just mentioned wouldn’t… really make that much sense, as … you can just hold it… and use the touch pads… or the touch sensitive screen itself…

But its actually not uncommon for people to dock their deck, sync it to a controller or M+K, and then stream it to a smart tv, or a dumb one via a dongle or direct connection to the dock. No, you’re not gonna get true 4k on any non retro game, but a good number of people do something like this.

3: … As compared to…? Your minimum 3x more expensive PC you can upgrade with even more money? Another console/handheld you… can’t upgrade?

Unless the Switch 2 can play Cyberpunk 2077 at better than 45 fps, with graphics basically medium/high, I don’t see how the Deck is ‘showing its age’ compared to other similarly priced handhelds.

Decky FrameGen is pretty neat. I think I managed to tweak mine up to an avg of almost 55 on the benchmark, and thats without mucking around in CET to squeeze out even more.

4: I absolutely understand buying a Switch 2 is your best option if you want a very straightforward, doubleplus legal, and expensive way to play Switch 2 games.

Like, if you’re super dedicated to current era Nintendo games, sure, fine, yep, get a Switch 2.

But if you just like games in general…

5: Pretty much yeah, I agree. Its possible to get it working with a Deck, but its gonna be a lot more hassle, and you’ll need peripherals, yep.

wait wait wait.

Fucking… what?

… Are they trying to preempt the expected ‘GTA 6 MSRPs for $120, base edition and breaks all video game pricing’ thing?

I’m seeing $80 for Mario Kart World.

puts on eyepatch and peg leg

So… its $50 more than an LCD, 256 GB Steam Deck (the Switch 2 is also LCD).

A Deck has two touchpads that work as mice.

And you can buy a real mouse with those $50 bucks you saved.

Oh right and it has a bigger screen, can run almost every modern to ancient PC game, and basically every retro game if you can handle an EmuDeck or RetroDeck guided installer, oh and it also just is a computer that does everything a mid tier linux laptop can do.

It can even run Switch games, and probably will be able to run Switch 2 games in… what, 2 years? 3 years?

I’m really not trying to rain on the parade here, but uh… yeah I do not understand the cost benefit analysis on a Switch 2 vs a Deck unless:

You really, really want to play Switch 2 games soon

OR

The Switch 2 somehow has vastly superior performance to a Steam Deck

… I kinda doubt that last one being the case, but the specs aren’t out yet (afaik) so I guess it is possible.

EDIT: Ok, so uh… tariffs just happened.

Switch 2 may now be $600.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104409/nintendo-switch-2-price-may-jump-from-449-to-600-following-trumps-tariffs/index.html

Preorders have been delayed.

Steam Decks are manufactured in Taiwan… so they’ll likely jump in price too… but that could possibly be delayed for at least a bit…

I think Valve has warehouses in the US full of them, and they are also a private company with absurdly deep pockets, and thus don’t have the ‘maximize shareholder profit in current/next quarter’ mandate… so they may be able to keep their costs to consumers from raising, by just internally subsidizing them…

But I really have no idea.

It always sucks to have to cut off or go no contact/ghost absurd family members… but after a long pattern of concerning, manipulative and/or abusive behavior… that’d you really only put up with because they’re family… after a while, that reason/excuse becomes worthless.

Everything Mel Brooks.

Airplane!

The Producers

Blazing Saddles… etc.

So many of his movies have such memorable lines and jokes that still hold up today.

Reading the main post and other comments you’ve made giving more context, IMO you are correct, your aunt is a narcissistic sociopath.

Not a VPN, but you may also want to look into I2P.

https://i2pd.website/

https://proprivacy.com/privacy-service/guides/i2p-guide

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FNp0TRDG0BQ

Basically, a p2p protocol for the entire internet.

Its considerably more complicated to set up than most modern VPNs, where nowaday’s its usually as simple as install an app with a GUI, verify some settings and you’re good to go, and i2p is also quite slow…

… but its totally free, and you can torrent over it, and as far as I know, if you’ve set it up properly, it is basically undetectable by ISPs, due to how it uses ‘garlic’ routing: basically, a whole bunch of users net requests are encrypted, anonymized, and then smashed into a big packet… so an ISP would have to untangle all of that for every packet, and afaik, none of them have figured out how.

I2P would obviously be horrible for watching streaming content though, snail speed.

Its actually perfect. No notes. No possible improvements.

This deserves some kind of award.

np! =]

Aw, been a while since someone’s complimented me, thank you!

Yes, I too fucked up the city planning stuff a good deal until eventually… it clicked.

It isn’t the same game as Civ, a lot of the sort of ingrained ideas you don’t even realize are baked into your subconcious from playing Civ a lot… will lead you to knee jerk, make the kind of ‘well obviously i do this in this situation’ decisions…

and yeah, then get slapped with ‘nope, no workey’.

But… if you stick with it… just like you probably did, many moons ago, with Civ, you can absolutely get much more skilled.

You must empty your mind of false notions you didn’t even realize you had, before you can begin to fill it with correct ones, haha.

Its funny you bring up stellaris… i spent like a month just utterly failing until that ‘click’ moment.

Then, a few months of ‘i am actually decent at this’ and then a few more months till ‘actually this is boring because i win by stupid margins every time on anything but the most absurd difficulties, and in those games its pretty much a completely random dice roll of surviving early game or not due to the absurd early game ai bonuses… and then by mid to late game, the AI is just literally too stupid to engage in 80% of the micromanagement strategies i am using to snowball’.

I never played the demo, started with the full game… maybe a couple weeks after launch.

As I said in another reply, yeah, it absolutely was rough on a technical level for the first few months, a good number of actually fairly common edge cases where the game’s systems would break, things wouldn’t actually work as intended, as described by the game itself.

But, after about 6 months, they fixed basically all of these… and didn’t really even have to do like major tweaks to the balancing of the game… the problems were technical implentations of the designed game, and once they got those ironed out, the game as envisioned was now actually the game as it performed.

Go pull up the steam store page right now: Overall score is still ‘Mixed’ it did indeed have a rough launch… but Recent Reviews are ‘Very Positive’.

The people that bothered to stick with it… well they seem to very much like where the game is now.

So, I’d say yes, the general consensus of people still playing it is that it did indeed improve significantly.

Also, its pretty undeniable that 2K, Civ 7, very much did try to ape some, but not all, of the changes that Humankind put on what is basically the Civ formula, that just never occured to them.

The entire concept of you and other players basicslly just having the avatar of your civilization remain the same for all time, but the civilizations themselves change, with historical eras?

Thats one of the most obviously visible differences between Humankind and any Civ game that existed … prior to Civ 7.

It is also, somewhat ironically, one of the main reasons those initial reviews of Humankind were ‘Mixed’: a whole lot of Civ fans just thought the whole idea was stupid, and were vocal about it.

… And then Civ 7 does the same idea, but more watered down, with only 3 eras, 3 different civs per playthrough, as opposed to Humankind’s … well basically 6 + 1, where that + 1 represents your pre-civilization nomadic tribe/culture, basically playing a fairly different kind of game, prior to building your first real city and thus advancing to your first choice of civilization.

Also, worth throwing in here I guess: Advancing through eras works with a similar mechanic as to racing to build wonders in Civ: You can only have one player as each civ at a time, so if you really want to have first dibs and the full range of civs to choose from, you have to be the first to era advance, otherwise another player may beat you to it and pick the one you were planning on.

But, it also works differently than wonders: Wonders are just built by a city in Civ. Eras in Humankind are advanced by earning points for completing basically era specific mini objectives… and you have a range of different options to choose from, maybe you go for numerous easier objectives, or focus on a few, more difficult ones.

Err… well, without any mentions of specific gripes or difficulties you are having… entirely seriously, actually play through with the tutorial enabled.

There are 3 different tutorial settings:

No tutorial

Moderate tutorial (ie, you’ve played some Civ games and want to mainly focus on what is different in Humankind)

Full tutorial (baby step you through everything like you’ve never played any kind of turn based 4x before)

The middle of the road tutorial does a pretty good job of highlighting and explaining systems and actions that work differently from Civ, or are just entirely not present in Civ, but doesn’t hold your hand through every single basic concept that you would already be familiar with as an experienced Civ player.

EDIT: Beyond that, I guess uh… a lot of the game sub systems kind of work… similarly to a lot of Civ game mechanics, but not quite the same, in some cases, significantly differently.

For starters, your civ progresses as you unlock new ages, but your leader stays the same. NPC leaders have a set of traits that affect their demeanor in diplomacy, as well as give them varying kinds of buffs for their gameplay.

These NPCs and their traits are actually classed by the total score of their cumulative traits, basically just a few minor traits are ‘easy’, up to a whole lot of powerful traits as ‘hard’. You can pick to play against easier or harder NPCs as you like.

You can also unlock traits for your own leader by basically doing in game achievements.

But uh yeah, get used to the idea of swapping civs situationally as your progress through ages… or you can sort of ‘prestige’ a civ beyond its roughly historically accurate age, if you want a buff to … i think its your renown or fame score generation the purple one lol. In some situations, it might make more sense to continue with the unique units, buildings, and sometimes civ specific gameplay mechanics through an age.

Other stuff uh…

City planning is pretty important, Humankind uses a multi tile approach to cities, where you can plop down varying kinds of districts and unique buildings according to the terrain around the actual city center. You may have to balance between urban design/zoning that is super efficient in the short run, but actually inefficient in the medium or longer run, as well as defensive structures, which you’ll may want to place on a choke point tile, even if it would be highly productive with a non military structure on it.

Human kind uses a heigh layered terrain approach, with I think 7 different heights. A height 6 tile right adjacent to a height 1 tile will have an impassable cliff on that border. I like to play with more extreme height variations so as to both make the world feel larger in that land traversal takes longer, things like mountain passes and terrain chokepoints become as relevant as they often are in the real world, and it offers more interesting battles.

Rivers are in tiles, not borders between them. This makes crossing rivers more time consuming and annoying… but plays well into the rest of the games combat systems… also, if you embark on a river tile early game, this is basically the representation of building small makeshift boats… and now you can move much faster up or down a river, which is very much in line with how many real world civilizations used rivers as basically logistics highways.

There’s also a system of regions, basically. You can assign a few cities to be connected to the same major city, and then basically micromanage the entire region of cities to coordinate their production to subsidize each other, in various ways. If you do this well, you can benefit greatly, but if you either screw it up or don’t take advantage of it, you can be at a comparative disadvantage to other players.

… theres a whole lot of stuff that is different than Civ games, I could type for hours lol.