I feel like I’m doing something illegal by calling my home a lab. Might be thinking too much ;) Jokes aside, I’m not really testing or inventing anything so I genuinely don’t understand where the lab part comes from.

I see. So it’s like “Ask a friend” of anything. It’s a useful application though, if the responses come quick, with more users joining of course. Say, I got two outfits to wear and I want opinions. If users disclose their nationality, occupation, age group and gender, I’d want to know the responses come from say, all male, then I know people of my gender that have such and such jobs wear similarly so I’ll be more confident in choosing the outfit. I still don’t think it’s a game. You can make it fun to help out others by including daily quest, points system etc. Otherwise, I don’t know why I would want to spend my free time on others.

Genuine question. Why is this a game? Don’t the players just answer questions?

They just didnt manage to make it fast.

You are absolutely right. The vision for sequel can be good but the execution has to be equally sound too. In the ideal situation, I guess CS2 needs to be a rebuild of CS1 with a new engine, so it can fully replace CS1 right from the start, if not do something extra. They did a few things praiseworthy though, like baking in road lane customisation, which was done by mods in CS1.

But then, we are not too fair. Simulation games are different from RPG. Story has an ending and we want to see how it continues to develop. For simulation games, I don’t think players want anything to be removed on a sequel, unless they are absolutely bad design. Even so, players expect QoL here and there to make their lives easier, which alone can be the single reason to buy the sequel.

A great product does not necessarily mean there is a winning formula though. We have a trash sequel when the new game does not do something that the existing game does. Even worse, the existing features are locked behind additional payment, so why would players not continue to play the existing game?

KSP 2 - Let’s forget the technical disaster. A lot of features are missing at the start. You could argue that it’s in early access, but why would I pay for a product that does less? Then we add in the many bugs and performance issues, and you know it’s game over.

Cities Skylines 2 - Again, you can’t do everything you already can in CS1. Plus, the first game is supported by a huge number of mods. There’s really no reason to play the new title. Again, it does not perform any better.

This is a weird take but I think remake or remastered these days are more like sequels than sequels, just because they keep the story and mechanics.

I find that game developers or many businesses try to reinvent the wheel when there’s no reason to. Say the Subnautica sequel, why waste money on voice over, add a land mass, cut the beloved submarine, shorten the story and overall map size, all that. I will never understand and sincerely hope the next Subnautica title does not reinvent the wheel.

Without technical know-how or experience in general using NAS, Synology is a good first-time option. All apps are ready for immediate use. And don’t forget the majority of computer users don’t even know what a NAS is and they simply want to store files for remote access.

I have supported GoG for quite some years. I don’t understand why they keep pivoting different things to do.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I would support paying for the initial game as well as every major patch when a new OS came out. Say, they do something to make a game work on Win 11. One year later we have Win 12 so I don’t mind paying a little for the patch. Then one year later we have Win 13 and I’m willing to pay again if I still play the game.

I would also support paying for online servers for games that have multiplayer components. That takes money to maintain.

As others mentioned, GoG should stop wasting time on a launcher. Hell, even the installer. Just ZIP the whole thing for me to download.

You could ask the question for video gaming. Can a used computer do the job? Yes, but you may not be able to play cutting edge / demanding games if your computer lacks the appropriate hardware. It really depends what kind of things you want to do, for choosing hardware that’s powerful enough.

Jellyfin? You need to consider if you need transcoding. Transcode or not makes quite a difference on the hardware needs.

Well said. It looks too clean/polished.

MMO wise, it has to be World of Warcraft. Played it nonstop when I was young.

2nd place is Oxygen Not Included.

Perhaps the reason is more simple. When did we have a non-indie platformer title well received by the mass? I don’t think people want a combo of “platformer” and “AAA” (hence the price).

Witcher 3 and Skyrim are pretty good. RDR2 is great, particularly because you can see it coming.

Wholeheartedly support Tailscale or similar solutions. Reverse-proxy or VPN are just too complicated (for me, at least).

I know this is not the theme of this post, but I wonder if there’s an LLM that doesn’t hallucinate when asked to summarize information of a group of documents. I tried Gpt4all for simple queries like finding out which documents mentioned a certain phrase. It often gave me filenames that didn’t actually exist. Hallucinating contents is one thing but making up data source is just horrible.

I have a similar issue that the package often goes backward, if that makes sense. It’s so uncomfortable if it happens after taking a seat in a meeting so you can’t fix it. My solution is to purchase boxer briefs from those fetish brands. They usually carry a product line that pushes up the package. I don’t need the visual appeal but the design groups everything to the front, so they have nowhere else to go. Then you just choose a size that the pouch is just big enough.

You have to use the ‘OS’ version though, or is it my wrong understanding?

Agreed that there’s no all-in-one solution to play local music and music on Spotify (if I’m a premium user). I vaguely recall there’s a solution to automate playing Spotify music and record it in real-time (since you cannot download music directly) but it seemed too troublesome, so I eventually chose spot-dl4 to download music from YouTube using Spotify playlist, then the folder got imported into Lidarr/Navidrome, then my Symfonium on Android connects to Navidrome to get the songs.

It’s quite a bit of manual work to add songs to a separate playlist if I like something on Spotify then use spot-dl4 to do the download. At least, I successfully keep a copy of my favourite songs on my server.

It’s a headache most of the time so you might consider purchasing a local SIM card for 4/5G connection instead (and share connection via mobile phone) in the future.

Agree. Definitely a wait and see game.

It was already bad at the beginning. Never improved. Also, there seems to be no plan for a community driven mission system, so you can only play weird auto-gen ones.