I left it out because its something that can (theoretically) be left for a more convenient time such as a weekend, so its a less one-to-one comparison. That said, thats still additional work compared to buying food.

Relative to cooking a similar meal, absolutely. Getting McDonalds takes like 5 mins and almost no effort. Less if ordering for delivery or pickup. If I want to cook myself a burger its probably going to take me like 40 minutes to makes and fry the burger, and prepare toppings. Im sure a good chef could do it much faster, but thats not me, and esspecially not after a full work day.

Edit: Plus, less directly measurable and comparable, but the time and work for planning, shopping, and dishes afterwards.

Its not really about the taste - its about the speed and convenience. If you want good food, you make your own. If you just finished a shift in a back-breaking job, and hate cooking, then its a chance to relax and free up some time.

Unfortunately, while it only takes one user to make these communities, there is rarely enough to maintain activity and esspecially not discussion on them. Even fairly large niches, such as Dota, rarely get more than a post or two a month, and no meaningful discussion despite it being a game that emphasizes theorycrafting so heavily.

It absolutely can, but doesn’t always. For example, Gamer’s Nexus is well respected for their thorough and unbiased research and journalism. It would be extremely difficult for them to do so without ads and merch sales, as any products reviewed must be purchased, testing equipment needs to bought, and experts need to be hired to use said equipment. Until capitalism ceases to exist, most people who make stuff will need to find a way to fund their work, from paint brushes to high-end testing equipment. If we can’t accept this, we will rarely get creators willing to provide quality content, and what we do get will be biased towards those with the money to burn.

Its not that old (although that does fit the theme) but Hotline Miami 1, and to a lesser extent, 2. Both are limited a lot by the engine, and by the small scale of their development. If they could be re-made in a new engine, with some modern customizability and QoL features, as well as added polish on things like the door physics, I think it could go a long way to ensuring they stand the test of time.

Like:

• Decentralized system that limits abuse

• Great customizaion

• It works (unlike much of the competition)

Dislike:

• Lack of even remotely niche content (aside from Linux and infosec content)

• Generally very pessimistic userbase

• Lacks polish and features in many areas

• Currently trends towards extremist echo chambers - the fact that .ml (an instance known for banning criticism of violent, racist, authoritarian governments) is one of the biggest instances, is a good example of this.

• tends to be extremely hostile to any sort of monitization, regardless of the quality or cost to produce content

Depends a lot on the cat. Mine just started scratching the wall beside it instead.

Even with Ana, while it was the peak of Overwatch’s healers, had a lot of the same issues, esspecially when it comes to juice, and feedback for impactful actions. For example, while your primary specialty was healing, the main feedback for that was your teammate’s health bar going down slower, whereas if you decide to play selfish and shoot enemies, you watch their health rapidly tick down, they die, and you get a flashy kill reward and voice line. Even in terms of the OW1 medals, there was only one healing medal and like, 3 or 4 for damage. Despite healing being such a core part of the game, there’s very little moment-to-moment “reward” for it.

Even for a lot of games with strategic views, being able to hover above the battlefield or fly between your battle lines would be so cool - like the most immersive tabletop wargame possible.

Honestly, this just highlights how badly thought out the gameplay is for non-dps classes in a lot of games. So often, both the healer and tank are left as second-class citizens, as all the emphasis is put on killing enemies. For example, in Overwatch, while tanks and healers were effective, there was little depth and little reward in the role compared to DPS characters. Orisa was a dps who couldn’t leave the objective and had to hit ‘e’ on the ground every few seconds. Mercy just followed someone around, with little agency of their own. Compare that with, for example, Junkrat, where you were encouraged to be flying around the map, bouncing grenades off walls to make yourself near impossible to hit while still killing dozens of enemies. Theres both more depth, and more frequent, significant gratification. This is a big part of why I like Dota - supports (tanks aren’t really a thing in the same sense) have a whole separate game they tend to be playing to manipulate the map in their favour, and can still impact fights with a plethora of significant abilities that are flashy and impactful in their own right.

Honestly, Im really suprised official support lasted this long. Microsoft largely gave up on VR years ago.

I definately care some, although not enough that I want to sit through a photo slideshow or that. That said, if its just daily photos to a family group chat, or listening to them talk about a particular trip highlight, then I certainly enjoy it.

Honestly, I think now is probably the best time in history for discoverablity by far. Things like YouTube have done a lot, but I think Steam has played a massive part. Compare it to most of the other options:

Physical retailers tend to just be a wall of products, with the exception of games with a large marketing budget (esspecially those working out deals directly with the retailer) that often get special placement in their own shelf. Marketing budget is king, and everything else is hard to browse.

Reviewers offer a bit of an advantage as they provide an easy way to assess if games are good or bad, but they are usually limitted in the number of reviews they can publish, and those reviews tend to go towards the games that get sent from powerful publishers or those with most hype, meaning it usually still comes down to marketing budget.

A step up from that is most online retailers. Here, you have easier access to information about the games on display, and often have ways to sort by genre, price, or reviews. That said, a lot of emphasis is always placed on either the top grossing, games directly connected to the storefront owner, or games that directly buy space on the front page. This offers far more discoverability than anything that came before, but still tends to massively over-push higher-budget and/or higher-return games.

Steam on the other hand, has put far more emphasis on featuring good games on their front page. You can’t buy the space, Valve doesn’t bias the store towards their own products as much, and revenue plays a generally smaller part in the algorithm. Instead, they have a much better personalized recommendation algorithm and more tools for customizing your storefront (such as blocking tags). On top of this, they have recognized that this isn’t enough, and introduced a myriad of (often half-baked) additional discovery tools, such the the Discovery Queue, Curators, and the various festivals like NextFest. Sure, its not perfect, but I can consistent find new games I’m interested in, whereas on other platforms its barely worth trying. I think this is a big part of Steam’s success that often gets overlooked.

Can you confirm that this setup still works? At least with Kodi, all the apps had been discontinued, and that link is three years old.

That article doesn’t cover it, but the reason its called duck tape, is because its predecessor was made from duck cloth (a think fabric) with “duck” being a loanword from Dutch “doek”. Modern duck tape was just an improved, standardized version of this fabric tape. Later on, “duck tape” was warped to “duct tape” for its common use on ducts.

How do you get streaming services to work? As best as I can tell, none of them support much in the way of non-mouse inputs, and I wasn’t able to find any scripts/addons being maintained.

I mean, If I wanted to be controlling everything with a mouse, I’d just sit at my desk. Unfortunately every other input method has near-zero support on PC at this point, even for a lot of the more open seas options. Kodi with a paid, illegal service was basically the only option I found, and I’d really rather not go down that route, esspecially when handing off this device to less tech-savvy family.

As best as I can tell, the addon recommended there has been discontinued as a result of having to fight Netflix’s DRM. Most recent posts report frequent issues with it. I was looking at other services, and unfortunately it seems the same or worse. I might try launchbox as another user suggested, and just use it to launch Windows apps, but I haven’t tested it yet.

If you have any experience with using Kodi with streaming services? I’m seeing a lot of recommendations for it, but testing it out, I didn’t really see a good way to integrate it with things like Netflix or YouTube - not even a good way to launch the Windows apps for them.