I picked up a 4070 and have been really happy with the low power draw (and therefore heat) after undervolting it.

Agreed, I think the first game I saw this in was Tunic. It was a great addition!

Right? When I was a kid I would specifically enjoy the “challenge” of trying to beat something over and over. Nowadays though… I just like playing a game for the experience. I still like feeling “progression”, so things go from difficult to easy as my character advances. But having to repeat something multiple times? Eh… just not my jam anymore.

That’s actually what I tend to do, but would be nice (for laziness) to have two different settings. Or for cases where games don’t allow adjustment after starting.

Funny you bring up Kena, because that is actually probably a prime example for me too. Loved the rest of the game, but the boss fights were a bit too difficult imo!

I played a ton of StarCraft back in the day! I was never too serious about joining a clan (just dabbled), but I now remember some of the things you mentioned with the chat rooms, and clan “tags”. I might be imagining it, but wasn’t there also some way to set colors on letters in names too (holding down alt and pressing numbers or something…) That might have honestly been my first experience with “bots” for things adjacent to games.

Good memories, thanks very much for sharing!

Wow, that’s a crazy coincidence! That “patron” system sounds pretty interesting too, seems like a good way to incentivize veterans to help new players. Interesting that I haven’t really heard of any more recent games having that (as far as I know).

That sounds amazing, it is good to hear there are still some groups that have kept in contact, even after all that time!

Just makes me wonder if the same thing happens in other communities. Say someone posts a photo of a National Park, are there replies how they’ve hiked most of the trails at that park and decided it’s not worth visiting?

I can see both sides too, “well we are informing people about the cons of that park, so they aren’t eaten by the vicious bears!”. I get that, I do! People have an opinion they want to share, nothing really wrong with that. Does that understanding make it enjoyable for me as the person just sharing the photo? Not so much…😂

I can never tell if comments like this are a joke. Starfield has tons of issues, don’t get me wrong, but I’m still playing it because I’m having fun. Why put 80 hours into something if you aren’t enjoying it?

Personally if I’m not having fun in a game, I’d just stop after a few hours.

Sorry, not that I know of! Poor phrasing on my part, should have said “more excited than if there were a Portal 3 announcement”.

I’m honestly more excited about this than a Portal 3 announcement! :) Loved both the puzzles and the story / vibe of the first one!

Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll add that to my list was well!

Started reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. I really like the style of writing, so much detail into the main character’s mind.

It is also impressive just how relevant the topics are today, for a book written back in 1993 (climate change, wealth disparity, etc.). It’s really fascinating (scary?) to see what the author thought the U.S. would look like in 2024 and onwards.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Ventoy is awesome, love being able to load a ton of different boot images on a single USB drive! The only issue I’ve run into is the occasional image that won’t boot. Not sure if this is expected, or you need to sometimes tweak settings to get it working?

There are some archives of the service here -

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Xfire

Supposedly most of the videos, and 20% of the screenshots? I’m not sure if there’s a way to easily search the archive contents, rather than download.

There’s quite a few profiles on Web Archive too -

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.xfire.com/profile/*

It was definitely ahead of its time! Not really sure why it faded away, I guess pressure from Steam (pun intended), and games moving to private in-game server browsers? Along with many other options for voice chat.

For those that didn’t use it, Xfire was basically a combination of messenger, voice chat, and a server browser for games back in the day.

As far as I know, it was also one of the earliest ways to stream your gameplay for others to watch. I remember trying it out years before Twitch was around.

The only reason it came up again for me was I noticed it in some old computer files, ha! Used to be my most used application by far.

Ah yeah, I forgot about Hamachi! It was great for games that only supported LAN multiplayer.