A) that’s not a criticism… Every game in any defined genre is “just another x”.

B) I still think HK is superlative among its peers in many ways.

C) Ori is fine but is a lot more one-note than many games in the genre. The story is very derivative and the main interesting gameplay element is the mechanical way the jump works. The second game I really disliked, but the first one is unobjectionable.

Oh okay yeah on big hits there is a bit of hitstop.

Yeah the “for console” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Mmm, there is a bit of knockback. There’s a trinket you can equip that basically eliminates that, but learning to deal with it is just part of the combat flow.

Hand-drawn animation, creative world and character designs, charming voice acting, abilities that are fun to use and combo in interesting ways, boss fights that are challenging but fair, a world that’s much bigger and stranger than it first appears, satisfying endings, a bunch of free DLC… Yeah you’ve got a point I can’t see why people like it either.

The Bioshock games are the most popular and least good of their spiritual franchise. Prey (2017) and System Shock 1 and 2 are all fantastic games. For story SS1 is my favorite, while Prey has the most developed gameplay (perhaps obviously given the release date). I still haven’t played more than a couple hours of SS2, but it’s a classic on the level of Deus Ex.

SS1 also has the distinction of being possibly the most influential game ever made. It’s bonkers how many systems and ideas it was the first to explore or use. A very faithful remake came out recently, with one for SS2 under development.

Your inability to deal with extremely minor setbacks is pretty funny given the content of the game. You got filtered by being too much like the protagonist, RIP

I hate NMS. I got gaslit into playing it again after people clamoring for years that they “fixed the game”. Big surprise, it’s still the same miles wide but micrometer-deep puddle that is was on launch.

Everything aspect of the game is clunky and frustrating and unsatisfying. Exploration is literally the only reason to play the game and even that manages to be stale and minimally exciting, which is truly impressive given the numbers on display. Within 45 seconds of landing on most planets you’ve seen everything there is to see on them, and the exceptions usually just mean another chore.

Sure, you can build a base, you can build up a fleet of ships, you can play with your friends… But to what end? All the ships handle the same, they just have more space or slightly better numbers. Combat is hilariously boring, and the ostensible goal of reaching the center of the universe becomes old far before you get even close. The story that exists is very “I’m 14 and this is sci-fi”, and they stretch it so hard that each crumb you’re given just feels insulting.

What was revolutionary about it? It was just a mid arena shooter.

You were probably a PC player. Halo was designed for the console experience, which is why (on top of massive marketing) it did so well. It really dragged shooter design into the mud for years, arguably we’ve never recovered.

Yeah… TotK is better, but I felt like I already burned out on how repetitive BotW was so I stopped after a couple hours. If I had only played the second game I bet I would have a more favorable opinion.

I will say Witcher 3 kind of forced AA/AAA games to up the quality of their writing. It still stands up as some of the best writing in games, but maybe a little less obviously so after a decade of other competent game stories.

What’s really exceptional is how pretty much every sidequest is also very well written, with believable characters and compelling situations. Many games, again especially before W3, might have pretty good main plots, but the sidequests would just be endless dross with maybe one or two standouts.

As for performance, you probably enabled some silly options. Both Witcher 2 and 3 pushed the envelope in crazy ways for PC graphics; there’s an ultra setting on W2 that was still bringing GPUs to their knees a decade later as well. The game still looks great if you turn it down a little.

That’s crazy… The only complaint I ever hear about the game that I have to begrudgingly accept and move on is from people who just detest any amount of backtracking, i.e. people who hate metroidvanias.

Everything about the game’s feel, from the controls and movement to the art and atmosphere, I would rate as best-in-class. Unless you get creeped out by bugs or cannot stand anything animated, I cannot fathom what your complaint is.

I’m curious how much you played – I will say that the game does bury the lead a bit, both artistically and mechanically. The first area seems almost monochrome and until you get the dash your prime form of locomotion is walking. But once you’ve been to a few different areas you start to realize how much bigger the game world is than you initially thought.

What might have happened: if you select a global compatibility tool (proton) in the steam settings, it will use that for all non-native games. But any games that ship a Linux binary will still use that instead of Proton. This is generally good, but some devs ship a Linux binary that’s actually not as good as the Windows one. I’ve seen some games not update the Linux binary until much later than the Windows one, so the Linux one is out of date, and for some games it’s just flat-out broken. In these cases you can manually select a Proton version for that game, which will force it to run the Windows binary.

You seem to be reaching for pretty advanced solutions – Docker and HA both require you to read a lot of documentation to get started. Bottles is also a powerful and flexible tool, which is the opposite of simple.

What game are you trying to run? If it’s on Steam it should be a no-brainer, otherwise Lutris can simplify a lot of things.

I doubt you actually need Docker for anything, unless you have a specific use case I would just abandon that. For your lights, I would try searching for “home assistant [model/brand of lights]” and see if you can find a setup that someone else has gotten working that you can mostly copy.

You should only feel bad about pirating art made by small independent artists, and even then only if you don’t have the disposable income to easily afford it.

Piracy is an actually victimless crime, you aren’t depriving anyone of anything except your hypothetical dollars. And that’s only a loss if you were going to spend them in the first place. Then add the fact that selling digital goods at all is basically a massive scam…

Also, in many cases it’s actually better for the artist to donate directly to them than to buy their products from a store that’s probably taking a cut.

I think so – gamers these days complain about having 50 ping or less than 120fps. There’s certainly a point at which it seriously impacts your gameplay, but I find it laughable when they can’t even deal with better performance than even existed 15 years ago.

It’s a flower

Okay? My point is that it’s absurd to say that the USFG has been hard on monopolies until Trump’s second term.

Right, because the single anti-trust action against Microsoft in the 90s is definitely all that was justified during the rise of the tech giants.