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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Elder Scroll series. Skyrim for the modding and eyecandy potential, Oblivion for the madness that is spellcrafting (also Shivering Isles is the best ES DLC), Morrowind for the true alien fantasy.

    Thief II is the quintessential first-person sneaker.
    Independence War II still has one of the best flight models and a great story.

    X3: Terran Conflict is the best first-person strategy game.

    Half-Life 1 and 2.

    Il-2: Great Battles is the best WWII combat flight sim.
    DCS is the best jet combat sim.

    Elite: Dangerous is the only space sim with actual 1:1 scale galaxy, including many real-life stars and is the best life-in-space simulator with flight model as good as I-War 2 and decent enough on-foot parts (even though there is some jank and glitches).


  • Used to play strategy games quite a lot 20 or so years ago. AoE, Homeworld, Red Alert. But I never got very deep into them.

    The main reason I don’t like strategy games anymore is that most of them simply boil down to micromanagement and actions-per-minute. That is not how my brain works. I hate micromanaging and multitasking. I love planning tactics, doing recon and analyzing the situation (as long as I don’t have to do statistical analysis with spreadsheets for that), setting goals and executing plans.

    Best strategy game I’ve ever played? X3: Terran Conflict. Once you set your plans in motion everything works pretty much automatically—you don’t have to order your traders or military forces around constantly or set up product batches in your factories manually. You set up parameters by which your assets work, and aside from occasional tweaking and optimization you leave them to their own devices. Instead you concentrate on the actual grand strategy or a single battle at hand or putting out some random brushfire that needs your attention without the worry about your “villagers” standing around idle because they can’t figure out there’s a fresh patch of fish 100 meters to the left.

    Plus you’re there, in situ, as an actual participant in the world, not an abstract godhand hovering over the map. First-person strategy. Commanding two task groups steamrolling through a sector from the bridge of your cruiser, sipping coffee as turrets put on a massive fireworks around you is epic.


  • You’re not alone. I’m in the same spot. I love the humor of Fallout and I really liked the TV series; I have played Morrowind, Oblivion, more Skyrim playthroughs than I can remember but I bounced off FO3 pretty hard. For me it was the dreary environment and overall decay of the world.

    People in FO3 just didn’t seem to care much about their living conditions and this doesn’t seem like what would happen in actual post-collapse society. People in general love surrounding themselves with art and beauty, rusty scrap metal shacks wouldn’t be around two centuries after the bombs drop. Earthship, stucco and clay bricks are low tech but can be made very pretty and livable. Murals and paintings made using various pigments, colorful textiles, basreliefs, carvings and sculptures of ceramic, wood and stone would be everywhere, sprinkled with surviving pre-war artifacts that’s been restored, maintained and cherished with pride.

    Plant life would also recover quite fast and be lush in a post-atomic war world—Chornobyl is a prime example how nature claims back human-abandoned land just decades after a nuclear event. Deserts in FO should not be all dreary brown misery; there would be a thriving ecosystem of both flora and fauna. Two centuries is enough time for the most dangerous radioisotopes to decay away and you wouldn’t really find places where radiation would stop wildlife reclaiming the land. More mutations and birth defects, yes, but life will find a way.

    And this overall miserable representation of post-apocalyptic world is the reason FO games never really clicked for me even though the satire and tone hit the spot.


  • At this point there’s just a few pieces of software that keep me on Microshitty’s teat. Foobar2000 being the biggest one—there simply ain’t no good alternative for Linux, and I’ve tried them all. Freesurround, actual dB scale volume control via Jscript, waveform seekbar, precision spectrum analyzers, modtracker player are just some of the essential plugins, as is ASIO (in addition of bypassing all OS audio stack shenanigans it has the accidental benefit of not only auto-muting , but also auto-stopping auto-playing videos on websites that might slip through uBlock).

    Also, Paint.net is so good for converting .dds files. Never got .dds to work properly with Gimp.










  • PC. Because:

    1. Better controller support—I’m not limited to what MS or Sony deem as “certified” or “authorized” hardware. Most of the really good hardware (VKB, Virpil, Arduino) will never be available for consoles and what little is available is bad at best.
    2. Best sims are PC only (DCS, Il-2, E:D, X series, Hunternet etc)
    3. Sims support 3rd party auxiliary software (TacView, EDDiscovery, OMH, EDMC etc) for better experience and that’s simply not going to be possible on consoles, ever.
    4. For other games, modding experience on PC is simply better. SKSE and ENB is what keeps Skyrim going and makes it still relevant 13 years later. Can’t have this kind of code injection and wrappers on consoles.
    5. If I ever get into retrogaming, emulation is the way, especially since actually acquiring retro console games in their original physical format is bound to become a very expensive collector’s hobby if you don’t have your own collection from childhood already or don’t have local second-hand options.





  • Precisely. Headsets for simracing, flight sims or any other immersive entertainment—yay! Headset for an everyday task (recipes while cooking, weather display or whatever) that could as well be solved with putting a phone or a tablet on a stand on your table—why? And it gets worse if there are multiple persons who’d want to use that information display.

    Only use case I could imagine is having a huge high res virtual screen for productivity while travelling. But the Apple Vision is way overengineered for just that. For immersive entertainment I’d rather have Varjo for the price.