What interests me more:

• Will a mostly single player game again be online only?
• Will there be elsusive targets or similar parts of the game, where I pay for something that I might not be able to access, because If I don’t have time or want to play in a specific week I won’t be able to access it?
• Are you going to sell us the game in parts and over and over again until I end up like I do now on EPIC where I have no way of actually knowing what content I own and which I don’t own and having to buy the elusive targets twice (once when they were timed and now that they are not anymore)?

IO Interactive makes good games, but they got away with a lot of shite every other developer would get crucified over. I am just waiting for the day Hitman gets unplyable because they shut off the servers.

No matter how good their next IP will be, if they go on with these practices, then I am not buying. It is unnecessary and anti consumer and there are more good games than I can play in a life time that allow offline play and where I don’t need a spread sheet to find out what content I want/need.

My e-book reader (Tolino).

As I got older and had problems with my eyes, this was a game changer. I had basically stopped reading books and now I do it daily. I can choose the font and letter size, background color, and backlighting based on what works best for my eyes that day and the light where I am.

Being able to hold a very light device with a big screen when I would have to balance a heavy weight as a paper book is also great, and I take the reader with me everywhere, whereas a big book would stay at home most of the time.

The reader has a bigger screen than my phone and the battery lasts longer.

The reader works flawlessly with my library, so I don’t have to buy books, which keeps costs down, and I don’t have to leave the house to get a new book.

Calibre helps us share books in our family, which is one reason we’ve stayed away from Amazon’s Kindle, so we’ve all gone to “.epub”.

Indy games are art. Find an artist(s), pay them a living wage, and let them do their art largely undisturbed, guided by a vision of what the game should be, so they keep working towards the same goal. Let them learn from their mistakes and make their next game better. That leads to Baldur’s Gate 3.

CEO of an AAAAAAA+ game developer/publisher: “No games are a product. The most important thing is that the line goes up, so we check what the user feedback is and listen to the loudest crowd that wants the same old shit, only to complain that they always get the same old shit. Also, hire cheap, treat people terribly and get everyone out of the industry as quickly as possible, and none of that art nonsense - I mean, how am I going to sell that to the shareholders, they just want an estimate of how many skins we will sell in 2025 so they will agree to my pay rise?”

I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and don’t use Mastodon at all.

This is me, I left Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. I reduced my online time a lot and it is better for my mental health and I have more time for my hobbies.

Mastodon made it clear to me how much algorithms steer me and keep me online, when I don’t need that, don’t profit from it. When I had to search for content on Mastodon that was for me it felt not worth the effort while being fed by an algorithm on Twitter /Facebook / Reddit kept me endlessly scrolling.

So I am very thankful to Mastodon for opening my eyes, but I will not use it anymore. Tchncs (world news, tech news and cat owl pictures) , Grouvee (gaming forum, keeping track of my games) and German Tagesschau ( tv news of my country) is enough to stay up to date and I feel freed from a burden that social media became for me.

Also my phone stays in my bag now and I am more in the moment wherever I am - I have used it 99% less than before and my next smart phone will be a cheap one with the only must haves being the newest Android version and a replacable battery so it will last me for long.

The Sexy Brutale

Such a good game and such a weird name for it. I highly recommend it.

In the first region in the midst of the first small village two neighbors are arguing. They are not giving a quest, they just talk to each other and listening gives such an insight in how war can turn people against each other that have been living peacfully and been friends for years.

Do the side quests and take your time with the dialogue. Some of these stories are impactful, mostly sad and worth your time. If you are told that you should talk to people to find out more about your contract, do it. Some of these quests can be done with only talking to one person but you want to get the information from everyone and especially their side of the story.

Do not look up the outcome of decisions. Make your decisions and live with them at least at your first playthrough. Most decisions have impact and seeing the outcome unfold makes this game special and yes often there is no “good choice” - that’s war for you.

Last: Buy every Gwent card you can get your hands on and play with everyone you can. If you can’t win just come back later with better cards and obliterate them - it will feel goooood!

The DLC’s are a must.

Try out difficulty settings - there is a sweet spot for most people somewhere but what it will be for you no one can know, but it would be a shame if you play through the game not having found the difficulty that fits you best because you “always play on <insert difficulty>”.

Have fun, I wish I could play this game for the first time again.

In a perfect world, things like FOMO and group pressure would not exist. People would understand that skins are just useless pixels. We do not live in that world. Yes there are a handful of people who are not affected by the psychological effects of this and if you are one of them lucky you. The truth is, most people are affected, most people feel bad to be the only one with no knife skin, with default armor ( “Default” being an insult in online games with a very young audience) and most people do love the “look” and feel a real need to buy cosmetics.

There is a reason game developers hire psychologists. That’s why all lootboxes have sparkles and sound effects and even look like slot machines although what is in your box is long decided. It is because it works for most people’s brains as stimulating. That’s why some people make a living out of videos where they open loot boxes because even watching someone else open them makes our brain chemistry go WROOOOOM.

It is way less of a choice for most people than you think it is. I remember one FPS game has a quest where you need to open a loot box ingame and others can watch you do it, to animate them to buy loot boxes. These businesses have no shame to invent constantly new ways of making you enter the shop. Like making food rot ingame so you will have to buy a fridge from the shop (Fallout 76).

MTX and loot boxes are part of the core of many games. When they finally got rid of loot boxes in Mordor: Shadow of War , they had to redo the whole economic of the game, because it was to the core made in a way to encourage you to buy war chests for better Orcs.

You CAN live without ever eating cake, but if everyone eats cake, all other food looks bland and boring and you constatnly are shown ads for cake, shiny cake, tasty cake, colorful cake, cake that you can only buy until <date> and cake that only 100 people can buy and all your friends are having cake right now and telling you how good it is… there is a point where it doesn’t matter that the cake is a lie scam, you will want cake too.

… and they could put an end to the black market for skins and the gambling at anytime, but refuse to do so. This would get rid of the account stealing mostly too.

Not to mention that Valve had to be forced to follow consumer laws in some countries by expensive lawsuits.

It was also Valve who started the “you do not own your games” shite, by forcing the connection of licences to an account and a gaming client, which got rid of the ability to resell your games or to have at least the game’s installer offline available.

I’ll never get why Valve always gets a pass. Would it be worse if Steam was owned by Epic / Tencent / Activision …, no doubt, but that doesn’t make it great.

If someone want to give praise I would point to GOG. Not perfect but at least I own my licence to the point that I can install my games from an installer I have archived on my HDD (no deleting the game, no forced updates, no adding MTX at a later time, no taking away licenced music), I can go to earlier versions of Early Access games if they change it for the worse and more.

I am now 58 years old and something happened and I wake up at 6 in the morning every day for 6 months, if I have to get up or not. I was never a morning person, but now I am and I have no explanation for it. I like it, but I try to not bother others with it.

Years ago I had fun with “what if the US never actually went to the moon”. I did not believe it, it was just a nice plot idea, we even made a pen & paper oneshot about it. Nowadays I have no whatsoever fun in thought experiments like this, because the real threat of someone believing it to be true. I want to enjoy “birds aren’t real” or “giraffes do not exist” or … the worst is flat earth. It started out as a joke and now idiots try to proof the earth is flat, proof by accident it isn’t and then question rather their methods than their belief system. We just can’t have nice things.

German, only having been there once some years ago, so no idea if it still is that way:

Not knowing what I will have to pay in the grocery store until the cashier tells me what to pay. Here the price on the shelf is THE price. I might have a voucher that reduces the price in the end, but nothing is ever added only subtracted, all prices on the shelf are easily comparable, because no matter the weight of one package there is also given the price of 1kg or 100 g for everything.

No kids on playing grounds without parents standing around. No kids just playing on the side walk (often there is no side walk anyway), no kids walking to school. It made me aware of how much freedom kids have in Germany, how independent even 6 y.o. are in Germany compared to kids in the US. They walk to to school alone or use public transport alone, they buy groceries alone, they visit friends by foot or public transport, three y.o. already having a bike and cycling besides their parents to kindergarden…

On the other hand seeing so many very young people having a job, like a really hard job for many hours besides school. It broke my heart, they should be free to be young and having all the time, working comes fast enough and goes on forever. Also I saw very old people doing jobs that should be able to retire because you could see them being in pain and barely able to function, definitely not a “choice” for them.

The amount of medication, especially pain medication, people take in the US compared to Germany and how much of it is freely available while it is needing a subscription from a doctor here. Every time I was feeling unwell I was offered pills that I found to be numbingly strong and switching my brain off? Hard to explain. I found them scary, but was told that they take them on a daily basis and they are harmless … nope.

I also love Ryukishi07’s VNs, “When They Cry” series. The art is admittedly ugly, but the stories are very intricate and convoluted in the best sense of the word.

The first of the “When They Cry” series are the only VNs I have ever played clicked through and it was surprisingly good, even for someone like me who isn’t into anime and kept me hooked through all the episodes. I highly recommend it.

Dear Mr. Sweeney, I fixed your words, thank me later:

A lot of games are released with CEOs earning more money than all developers of the game including outsourced work together, that makes the games too expensive. If the budget would actually go into the game we could have great games that sell.

Unfortunately you rather lay off your employees, pay them less, crunch them and burn them out, save on quality control, sell road-maps instead of a finished game and give your customers a lesser and lesser experience instead of accepting a pay cut.

And I have not mentioned the money you throw out of the window and burn because of your dreams of an “EPIC metaverse”.

F you Mr, Sweeney.

But where is the lake?

Jokes aside, this will take a while to clean up and I doubt there is much fish left in that mess and the water quality is probably dangerous.

As someone who had a really bad infection after being in contact with water contaminated by a huge flood: Stay safe and stay away from water like this and wash and wash and then again wash your hands and everything.

Nice joke until reality comes along: https://winfuture.de/news,145540.html

German article translates to:

The Tesla plant in Grünheide had to accept a record number of sick days, at least in August: Around 17 percent of the 12,000 employees were affected. At the beginning of September, the figure had fallen to around 11 percent, according to a report in the Handelsblatt newspaper. However, this is still comparatively high.

As a result, the plant management had begun to visit employees on sick leave at home and check on them. Head of HR Erik Demmler was surprised that he was sometimes met with an aggressive attitude, as he explained to Handelsblatt. It had happened that the door had simply been slammed in his face. There were even instances of people threatening to call the police.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Patrick’s Parabox - Single developer, unique idea, mind bending - think outside and inside the boxes inside boxes.

I hearby announce that I am also not buying Valve & Counter-Strike for £12 billion. You heard it here first!

Also, most all US small to mid sized business transactions are by check.

Why? It is a bank transfer with extra steps. A check can get unreadable, get lost… No one in Germany would write a check for a permit fee or to pay a business partner. You pay online. Fast, safe, can’t get lost, easy to proof what, when to whom you have paid for years to come. And the transfer won’t get through if you do not have money on your account or are allowed to overdraw, while you can write whatever you want on a check and then run.

It is not cash or check it is bank transfer or check and the bank transfer is the safer, faster option. All they do at a bank is to scan the check and to turn it into the exact same bank transfer it could have been in the first place. All you do is adding a layer of risk by writing on a piece of paper.

I find that really funny, because many Germans still refuse to buy their groceries without cash, many like me do not own a credit card only debit cards, but no one younger than 90 uses a check. I am 58 years old and have never owned checks.

It is NOT an “early access period” it is a “late access punishment” for not be willing to overpay for a game. Journalists should call it that and nothing else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxAJEHZDIEw Crazy Baby - Joan Osborne

It is more “stuck for a lifetime”, because this song saved my life and will stay on my “emergency playlist” forever. She sings out of my soul, when depression has me and at the same time sings hope into my soul, if that makes any sense, because it is so hard to describe.

I wish that for every human a song exists that can do that for them!