• 1 Post
  • 40 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: September 1st, 2023

  • I’m not quite sure what the advantage of doing it that way is

    If I had to guess, it just kept the programmers from being super lazy about it. If the individual enemy AI doesn’t have exact coordinates of the player, it actually has to move around, search a space, potentially manipulate the environment, and possibly fail to find the player, versus doing what is effectively an idle animation while waiting for the player to step out of cover.




  • I bounced off Stalker 2 at launch because of bugs, but revisited earlier this year and had a ton of fun with the 90% of the game that is open world scavenging, stealth and combat. The only thing that sucks are some of the boss fights.

    Nothing takes me out of being a sneaky, resourceful Stalker more than being forced to drop into an arena, or have a door magically lock behind me, and not being able to advance the story without either beating some bullet sponge or reloading a save from an hour before to change my load out/get more ammo etc and redo it.

    I wish they would take more of a Deus Ex approach, where you can action hero your way through if you want, but with some clever/thorough playing you could significantly nerf the boss fights. The game even pretends to do this, but ultimately your choices have no bearing on the bosses.





  • My dad likes Dire Straits, Clapton, The Police, Tracy Chapman, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison. I know a few more from what he’s told me later in life, but those were the casettes/CDs he had around when I was a kid.

    When I was a teen I tried to introduce him to the Pixies, but he looked like I was making his ears bleed.

    It was my mom that introduced me to Pink Floyd though, which is really the only musical common ground I have with my parents (although I will definitely get whiskey drunk and belt out Dire Straits on occasion, or sing along to Orbison).


  • Imo’s in St. Louis, is my favorite overall. Thin, crispy crust, square cut, Provel as the base cheese. It scratches an itch that all other pizzas don’t. I’d eat it 7 days a week if I could, hot or cold.

    I’ve had pizzas with superior ingredients, made in fancy ovens, served with wine instead of cold beer, but if I could get any pizza right now, it’d be Imo’s black olive or veggie pizza.



  • I’m with you on rejecting AI being sane, but the idea that gaming wikis should be integrated into wikipedia is kinda nuts. If I search “Iron” on wikipedia I’m looking for facts, not a thousand item long disambiguation cluttered with every game that has iron as a resource. Conversely, on a game wiki my search for “Iron” has an entirely different context and I’m looking for different info.

    Not to mention game wikis have way lower editorial standards, their own tone (e.g. making jokes), versioning concerns, their own new user friendly homepages etc.

    Wikipedia could tuck this all into a separate namespace, sure, but that’s effectively a separate wiki anyway and then it raises questions like “why is wikipedia hosting a mechanical guide for this porn game?” or “How long do we need to host the content for this game that peaked in 2012 and is now abandonware?” that are conveniently sidestepped by those communities supporting themselves.






I have my Linux box running my TV and it works great, but I’d like the ability to treat my Chromecast as a desktop window for streaming without switching inputs, multitasking etc. I have an HDMI capture card that works great with a Switch, but the Chromecast detects it’s not HDCP (DRM) compliant so it won’t work. Is there a way to outsmart that detection with software or hardware?

I’ve heard some knock off hardware confuses it enough to work but it seems like the info is old and I’d rather not roll the dice on hardware that’s otherwise garbage…