I'm not sure of those prices on the Terrabyte Update, at least for spinning-rust HDDs. At $45/TB, an 8TB drive should be going for ~$360, but you can find some for half that price ($150-$220 seems to be the usual range). 16TB drives can be had for about $400. So that $45/TB price seems rather high.

Hard drive prices have dropped dramatically over these past few years. It used to be a petabyte seemed an unbelievably huge amount of data storage; it used to be suggested that all the world's information could be stored in just a few petabytes (whether that claim was accurate or not, I cannot say. It certainly isn't true anymore). Nowadays, I could - for just a few thousand dollars - have a petabyte of storage all to myself. While I have no desire to make such an investment today, I would not be surprised that in ten or fifteen years, I will have access to that much storage. I mean, if you took all the data storage I already have available to me - on my computers, network, and cloud storage - I'm probably nearing 10% of that number already.

Kxmode wrote:
I never thought I'd see the day where EA is the good guy and Bethesda is the bad guy.

Forget that, I never thought I'd see the day where EA is the good guy and BLIZZARD was the bad guy. I mean, EA isn't even - at least as far as we know - claiming they'll automatically own all mods made for the remaster. What sort of insane reality are we living in?

I hope that when they re-release/re-master the first Mafia game for this collection, they restore the original music, largely comprised of tracks by Django Reinhart. They were beautiful songs and fit the mood of the game perfectly. The replacement music was very generic.

I believe the original music was removed due to licensing issues, and it can be restored to the currently-available Steam versions with a third-party hack, but if they want me to pay for these games again, it sure as heck better have the original soundtrack.

maddog wrote on May 5, 2020, 14:17:
If I won the lottery I'd blow millions paying a team to update the graphics on F-117. No changes to gameplay...just graphics.

Maybe a little tweak to the gameplay?

I loved F-117 too - it was, in many ways, the first flight simulator I played seriously - but the physics of its flight engine was... imaginative to say the least. My favorite part was that you could invert your airplane, turn off the engines, and then glide hundreds of miles. Well, you'd have to dive every now and again to gain speed when you started to stall, but once you got things moving again, you could easily reach - or surpass - your original altitude. Something about being upside down really confused the game. It was a very useful trick when you were running low on fuel.

I still have F-117 installed on my PC, although these days I mostly just watch its awesomely low-key intro. Excellent game, despite its age.

These aren't bad games and I'm happy to see Telltale's library becoming available to gamers again, but "thrilling" is not quite the word I'd use for any of them (yeah, I know, it's GOG's choice of words, not Blue's).

I've found the source code of the AI:

IF Software_Dev=Microsoft
Bug=Found
ENDIF

Valve said "Fuck you Vivendi, we don't want to pay your outrageous cut of the profits, we deserve the right to self-publish", and they won, and everyone cheered. Now other companies have said: "Fuck you Valve, we don't want to pay your outrageous cut of the profits, we deserve the right to self-publish." And everybody booed.

Actually, the part most people boo'd at was when the Epic said, "You can sell on our store but you can't sell it on Steam. Even if you promised your customers that you would. Even if you already took money saying that you'd do that." That's the part that got most people angry.

It's not the selling on Epic that upsets people, it's the exclusivity. Take a game like Subnautica; available on Steam but also available on EGS. Nobody is upset about that. But if they'd made it exclusive to one platform, that deserves some disdain. Especially if the platform has a significantly smaller audience and offers less features. PC gamers don't like exclusives. This preference of PC gamers was made quite obvious when EA did with Origin, so it shouldn't have surprised Epic when they followed suit.

It is true that I don't like the Epic Game Store. But this is not because I'm a "Steam fanboy"; in fact, in the beginning I was supportive of Epic's move because I agree that to some degree Valve has become complacent and needs shaking up. But I - and many others - do not like the methods Epic has chosen, and to disregard this concerns as simply "fanboyism" seems a willful blindness at best.

The whole thing to me reads a lot like, "Hey, if you want a Half Life 3, better buy Alyx or we're not even gonna think about making it."

I've no interest in VR games, and honestly, at this point even Half Life has very little draw on me. Fifteen, ten, maybe even five years ago I might have excitedly been waiting for a sequel, but now? I'm pretty much over it. Alyx doesn't excite me and, unless it was truly a radical and awesome experience, even Half Life 3 would be a wait-until-the-sale purchase for me. The original game was breathtaking and innovative, the second game was okay, but its been nearly twenty years and I've moved on since then. I can't imagine I'm the only one. Heck, there's an entire generation that's grown up without any nostalgic value to the franchise.

Well, I'll give their interactive recommender this much: it figured out that I'm mostly interested in older games (slider all the way to the left) and average popularity (just a touch left of center). I think that's a fair assessment of my tastes.

Of course, it leaves out the most important criteria for my buying new games: price. They need a slider that lets me move it down to the less-than $5 range before I really start paying attention to any of its recommendations.

"Free prologue"... is that what we call a demo these days?

Now we just need that LHX reboot and we're set!

Watch_Dogs is a nice addition. It is not very innovative but if you haven't played an Ubisoft Open World Game (tm) then its quite passable. The graphics, of course, never quite matched the teasers of course (which caused quite an uproar at the time) and the "hacking" was disappointingly one-note, but it was an decent enough game within the limitations of the UOWG framework.

But The Stanley Parable; now there is a game worth playing. It is one of the funniest games I have ever played, and its inventiveness and ability to surprise were amazingly impressive. The humor is a bit dry, so if that isn't your thing then you probably won't find it as enjoyable but if you like British comedy, then you'll probably love this game too. Its one major flaw is that - once you've seen all this game has to offer - it severely lacks in replayability; the jokes are far less funny when you know the punchline. Still, the game has so many endings that it will take you a good long time to work your way through the games before you stop finding something new.

The cynical part of me immediately suspects this decision was not made out of any real support for Nvidia or even a liking of game streaming, but instead as a ploy to lessen Steam's dominance on PC gaming. Although GeForce Now can play games from Steam, it launches from its own client. If people get used to not using Steam, they'll consider it less essential, and that will lessen its importance.

Is this really the goal? I haven't the foggiest idea, but I've little reason to trust Sweeney or Epic's motives in this area.

Avus wrote on Mar 7, 2020, 15:16:
it is fxxking ridiculous that game developers think they should get a share from a service renting virtual machine to people who put their (PAID) games into it. Game developers really think their customers should double paid for that??

Yeah, but that's a battle long since past winning. Courts have decades of precedence saying that you cannot use display copyrighted works for commercial purpose without permission of the copyright holder. It doesn't matter if it is to one person or many, or if that person already owns a copy of the game. Just as a bar cannot play a movie to its customers or a store use music without getting license, neither can Nvidia stream games. They aren't streaming YOUR game-files onto their virtual machines, after all; they are using a (presumably legally purchased, although at this point I wouldn't even be too sure of even that) copy of the game down to its customers. The fact that Nvidia only allows you to stream games you already own is not a shield.

Why the fxxk these developers not pull their games for the last 2 years?

At least in some cases, Nvidia came to an agreement with the publishers that they could stream the games during the beta phase of GeForce Now. The problem was that NVidia pushed their product out of beta and into public release without making sure all their partners were okay with that. As we've seen, many (most?) of them are not.

Copyright is, I think we can all agree, well out of whack in this country, but in this case it isn't the game publishers being greedy f**cks. They aren't asking for more than the law allows or even pushing the boundaries. Nvidia is the one who screwed up here. I think the fact that so many publishers are unilaterally pulling all their games also indicates that Nvidia isn't being very compromising on their end either.

Arguably, the game publishers could make more money if they stayed with Nvidia, that people with low-end PCs might buy games they otherwise might not just so they can play them on GeForce now. It may very well be that these publishers are being penny-wise and pound-foolish. But morally and legally they are well within their rights to yank their games.

I never played the original games, but I played the 1995 sequel. I remember it being impressive for its scope and scale, if not its actual gameplay. I liked it more for what it promised computer games of the future could achieve, rather than for itself.

Problem: Students aren't attending classes
Solution: Professors use bluetooth devices that connect to students' phones and penalize students who don't show up.
Result: "Hey Bob, you're goin' to class today? Take my phone with you, willya? I'm going back to bed; I got totally wasted last night."

It still surprises me that there has never been a sequel or remake to the original Wolfenstein game. As much as I love the first-person shooter games, I think there would be a market for a isometric stealth-shooter in the same vein as Castle Wolfenstein. I think Bethesda would make a bundle just based on the game's name and nostalgic appeal alone.

That presupposes that Sony would not have released its exclusives to PC without EGS. I do not think there is evidence of that. That they released it to EGS first has more to do with the fact, I think, that it gets them added revenue they might not otherwise have received. It might even have sped up their decision to release to PC. But had Epic never created EGS or not offered an exclusivity bonus, I am fairly sure we still would have seen Sony - and Quantic Dreams - release these games to PC.

Not only is putting these games on PC a good way to profit off a large back-catalog, not only is it a response to Microsoft releasing some of its exclusives to PC, but the entire gaming market is shifting towards streaming (an area where PCs are currently a very important part), and to ignore PCs is a market-blindess Sony is not usually guilty of. Releasing their games is less about EGS and more about Sony dipping their toes into a market where they only have a small presence that needs to grow if the company is to survive. They are just taking advantage of EGS's bribes to get themselves a little bonus while doing so.

There was a similar hack for XP that enabled regular users to access the XP-POS updates. XP-POS was used in "point of sale" devices - cash registers and the like - and Microsoft provided updates for them for years after patches for the consumer version of XP were discontinued. However, the two versions were virtually identical, and with a simple registry hack, you could continue to receive updates on XP Pro and Home.

Microsoft never went out of its way to shut down this hack and I am hoping they'll be as lenient with this one too.

Battlefront Celebration Edition: get access to ALL the game's content... except the stuff that isn't included. Sounds like EA is taking a lesson from American telecoms and their "unlimited data" plans.