It’s not a really big thing, but it is a pet peeve of mine (and some others); the name of the series isn’t “Dues Ex” but “Deus Ex” (day-us ex), as in “deus ex machina” (day-us ex mack-in-a).

“Deus ex machina” literally translates as “God from (the) machine”, and originally referred to a type of stage prop used in ancient plays, then in more modern times the term came to refer more generally to the sort of plot device that used that prop, which is a previously unmentioned person or thing that suddenly appears to save the heroes from an otherwise inescapable threat. At some time in the 60s or 70s it started to become popular to use it in a more literal sense in sci-fi stories about machine intelligence or cyborgs.

This genie must’ve read or watched Brewster’s Millions.

I saw it at the cinema and vaguely remember enjoying it well enough. It’s not a great movie, but it’s not awful, either. I didn’t know that it was supposed to be terrible; it looks like reviewers gave it a slightly better than average score.

I don’t expect ever to watch it a second time, if that helps.

Lara Croft and the Cradle of Life, though… All I can remember about it now is that afterwards, my friends and I agreed that we should’ve trusted our instincts and just walked out after about 30 minutes.

That’s still newer than any of my daily-use laptops that are all running full-featured Linux distros just fine. I got 'em all cheap secondhand, and just pumped up the RAM (12-16GB) and installed SSDs.

Did you read all the way to the end of the article? I did.

At the very bottom of the piece, I found that the author had already expressed what I wanted to say quite well:

In my humble opinion, here’s the key takeaway: just write your own fucking constructors! You see all that nonsense? Almost completely avoidable if you had just written your own fucking constructors. Don’t let the compiler figure it out for you. You’re the one in control here.

The joke here isn’t C++. The joke is people who expect C++ to be as warm, fuzzy, and forgiving as JavaScript.

Yeah, I’m sure that almost all of us have felt this way at one time or another. But the thing is, every team behind every moronic, bone-headed interface “update” that you’ve ever hated also sees themselves in the programmer’s position in this meme.

When I go to that URL on a stock, direct FF install, I still see that notice.

Since you seem earnest, probably play_my_game or possibly gamedev.

I reserve further comments until I know whether you posted this in this community: a) deliberately but seriously, b) deliberately and sarcastically, or c) by accident.

The same places you get old console games. Online auction and classifieds sites, and thrift stores, mostly. Flea markets and garage sales too, but they’re more hit-and-miss.

Back in the olden days, when we used kerosene-powered computers and it took a three day round trip to get IP packets via the local stagecoach mail delivery, we still had games even though Steam didn’t exist yet. :b

We used to transfer software on these things called disks. Some of them were magnetic, and some of them used lasers (you could tell them apart because for the laser ones it was usually spelled “disc” with a “c”).

Anyway, those dis(k/c)s mostly still work, and we still have working drives that can read them, and because the brilliant idea of making software contact the publisher to ask if it was OK to run had only just been invented, we can generally still play games from the period that way. Some people kept their old games, but others sell them secondhand, which I believe the publishers still haven’t managed to lobby successfully to be made illegal, unless I missed a news report.

Even if you can’t get the original physical media for a game, sites like GOG sell legal digital downloads of many old games, which are almost always just the actual old software wrapped in a compatibility layer of some kind that is easy to remove, so you can usually get the games running natively on period hardware/software. Finally, some nicer developers and publishers have officially declared some of their old games as free for everyone to play.

There are still legal options for playing old games on old systems.

The Steam Deck is a handheld Linux-based PC with a built-in game controller. The special Steam version of Linux (SteamOS) comes with software (Proton) that lets you run a lot of Windows games, and Valve have put some effort into helping/encouraging developers to get their games working with it.

The Nintendo Switch is a closed system that can only play official Nintendo-licensed software. Even if you “jailbreak” a Switch, I don’t think that there’s any realistic way to get modern Windows games running on one.

I bought this back in the day, and played it through to the end. I vaguely recall somewhat enjoying it overall, but the strongest impression that I have now is of frequently being bombarded with unrepeatable, dense, plot-critical dialogue (usually from teammates via radio) during intense action scenes when I was busy trying to sneak around, evade, beat up, or have a shootout with multiple enemies simultaneously. This often seemed to be by design, with enemies spawning at the same time the dialogue begins. As a passive viewer watching a show, it’s cool when the characters have intense philosophical debates during fights, but as an active player I found it extremely difficult to follow both at the same time. I don’t even remember what the story of the game actually was, because I missed so much vital information that I gave up trying to follow it. That was a real disappoment for a big GitS fan.

Also, many of the missions can seem very open initially in terms of how the player can approach them, but quite soon I got the feeling that there’s exactly one “right” way through each challenge, and it’s up to the player to find it, sometimes with very few hints.

I’ve tried several times over the years to give it another go, but somehow I never seem to make it past even the first mission before I put it away again.

It is available on mobile BUT I encourage you to get the PC version on Steam because the mobile one doesn’t include the pretty decent voice acting

That’s odd; I was sure that I played some of this on Android with voice acting, so I searched my records and discovered that I also got it from Humble Bundle. I just downloaded and installed it to check, and aside from a warning that it was written for an older version of Android, it seems to be working fine, full voice acting included. There’s an option to turn it off, but it was on by default for me.

Maybe there was an issue with your specific device?

Perhaps similar to OP, I gravitate toward whatever’s handiest. That’s usually my smartphone or one of a number of old-ish Linux laptops. I have a handful of smartphone games that I play pretty much every day, and I’ve got controllers for both, so there’s also lots of emulation of older games, and also some newer indie games on the laptops. After that I have a “gaming” PC (nothing amazing but it does enough for me) for more current games, although I’m finding that I don’t turn that on as much as I’d like to, lately. Then I have a handful of less-old consoles that my other devices can’t emulate well, but I can’t even remember the last time I used one of those.

I played this on the PS2 and it’s s fantastic experience.

Interestingly, the PAL version (and probably the Japanese version, too) has content that wasn’t in the NA version. There’s an extra puzzle, a semi-hidden alternative “funny/happy” coda after the main ending if you play through a second time, and some extra in-game options that are unlocked after you finish the game for the first time, including understandable subtitles for ALL characters, even ones that are normally speaking an unknown language. I’m not sure if the hidden weapon you can get in the middle of the game becomes a light saber on the second playthrough in the NA version as it does in the PAL version, but it may.

This was before video streaming sites, so there were many arguments on forums about how these things are in the game, no they aren’t you trolls, yes they are here’s a picture, that’s obviously fake… and so on. It was interesting that once people figured out that the NA and PAL versions were different, there was a vocal core of NA players still insisting that it was all fake for quite a long time afterward.

It’s a persistent dynamic memory allocation that’s accessed by multiple processes! :)

There are several reasons that people may prefer physical games, but I want people to stop propagating the false relationship of “physical copy = keep forever, digital copy = can be taken away by a publisher’s whim”. Most modern physical copies of games are glorified digital download keys. Sometimes, the games can’t even run without downloading and installing suspiciously large day 0 “patches”. When (not if) those services are shut down, you will no longer be able to play your “physical” game.

Meanwhile GOG, itch, even Steam (to an extent), and other services have shown that you can offer a successful, fully digital download experience without locking the customer into DRM.

I keep local copies of my DRM-free game purchases, just in case something happens to the cloud. As long as they don’t get damaged, those copies will continue to install and run on any compatible computer until the heat death of the universe, Internet connection or no, just like an old PS1 game disc. So it is possible to have the convenience of digital downloads paired with the permanence that physical copies used to provide. It’s not an either-or choice at all, and I’m sick of hearing people saying that it is.

It really depends on your expectations. Once you clarified that you meant parity with current consoles, I understood why you wrote what you did.

I’m almost the exact opposite of the PC princesses who can say with a straight face that running a new AAA release at anything less than high settings at 4K/120fps is “unplayable”. I stopped watching/reading a lot of PC gaming content online because it kept making me feel bad about my system even though I’m very happy with its performance.

Like a lot of patient gamers, I’m also an older gamer, and I grew up with NES, C64, and ancient DOS games. I’m satisfied with medium settings at 1080/60fps, and anything more is gravy to me. I don’t even own a 4K display. I’m happy to play on low settings at 720/30fps if the actual game is good. The parts in my system range from 13 to 5 years old, much of it bought secondhand.

The advantage of this compared to a console is that I can still try to run any PC game on my system, and I might be satisfied with the result; no-one can play a PS5 game on a PS3.

Starfield is the first game to be released that (looking at online performance videos) I consider probably not being worth trying to play on my setup. It’ll run, but the performance will be miserable. If I was really keen to play it I might try to put up with it, but fortunately I’m not.

You could build a similar system to mine from secondhand parts for dirt cheap (under US$300, possibly even under US$200) although these days the price/performance sweet spot would be a few years newer.

I can’t respond directly because I haven’t played either Metroid Dread or Hollow Knight specifically, although I’ve played and enjoyed many other metroidvania games, including the majority of the Metroid series (I even enjoyed Metroid Other M… mostly). But I’ll say that there’s no rule that prevents metroidvanias from being entertaining until you unlock some specific part of the ability set. The search to unlock new abilities should be fun itself.