Ellison.

There’s a Half-Life mod that brings it to PC, along with one that ports the Decay co-op expansion.

Spec Ops actually did have choices where you could be good (or at least less bad), but ironically people missed them because they didn’t think being good would work.

For example, at one point you’re being harassed by an angry mob of locals. A lot of players simply shot them because a lifetime of experience with shooters told them that no other input would be recognized. But in actuality, if you fired warning shots at the ground or over their heads the civilians would flee without incident.

You’re able to run MemTest? That’d suggest it’s not actually fried if it can still run things.

Check your BIOS/UEFI to see if Secure Boot was re-enabled. If your CMOS battery died and you didn’t notice, your machine config could have reset to its default values during the power loss.

I believe you are correct. I had my MBR overwritten a few times back in the Windows XP days, but haven’t heard of it happening on modern UEFI setups outside of warnings like these.

I still segregate my system drives out of paranoia though.

You may enjoy Dungeon Keeper.

I liked how SimCopter actually used the same systems as SimCity 2000, with cop cars coming from police stations and fire trucks from the firefighters. Well thought out SimCity maps actually made your life easier, rather than being window dressing.

I wish someone would bring back the concept. There was a SimCopter mod for Cities: Skylines back when it first released, though I think it was abandoned. That would be the perfect game for it, since half of SimCopter was dealing with traffic and Skylines had an amazing traffic simulation.

Mostly, I just liked the Apache helicopter you could use to blow everything up

Until you hit a nuclear power plant and it wiped out half the city (and probably fried your copter too) once it burned down.

UFOs would also start spawning when an Apache was present on the map and start abducting civilians and blowing up buildings until you shot them down. I think that was the only other disaster the game simulated?

Both can be played on modern Windows with Krimsky’s patches. They’d probably work in Wine, but I’ve never tested them.

I believe the last pre-Paradox build is still available under Steam Betas.

It’s a damn shame what Paradox did to the game. It turned from a near-perfect sim with excellent optimization and stability into a laggy, buggy mess with loads of DLCs that both fixed and introduced more bugs. So the usual Paradox product, where stability is completely random based on which DLCs you own.

Hey, I just wanted to say I bought Lunacid right after your comment and finally got around to playing it. I’m only at the Catacombs, but so far it’s excellent and a great throwback to Kings Field (though I miss having armor; with only weapons and rings there’s far less exciting loot).

Thanks for the recommendation, my friend!

Just take the first panel, but the end of the parchment goes into a shredder.

There’s a much cheaper model, the Zero, that’s good enough for messing around with and performing simple server tasks like PiHole. Even it has had its price increase multifold over the years, though only to fifteen bucks from an original price of five.

It’s also much smaller than the already tiny Pi, being able to fit in a standard orange pill bottle. Though the downside of that size is smaller and fewer ports, so you need a USB OTG adapter (preferably a hub) and micro HDMI adapter to plug things into it if you don’t want to run it headless.

It definitely slows down development needing to find third party solutions for basic tasks. On the other hand, knowing the implementation details means it’s easier to tweak things to meet your needs.

The Asset Library is supposed to be a middle ground, but it needs a lot more content and polish before I’d call it ready.

I mean technically…

Or some sort of vegetable chopper for megaflora vegetables that didn’t survive the Climate Wars.

“Perhaps for some sort of fertility rite.”

Or to bump up the price by twenty bucks. And it still won’t be finished, either - stuff like the story and bandits will come in future updates after 1.0.

It’s still there, but hasn’t worked in ages. The Play Store rebuilds its app database multiple times a day, which finds the detached apps again.

Not only that, but he has enough clout that he can usually convince GOG to put whatever game he’s reviewing on sale when his video comes out. He’s a great channel to follow for patient gamers.

How big is 10 MB anyway?

To be honest, after typing all these numbers, 10 MB doesn’t even feel that big or special. Seems like shipping 10 MB of code is normal now.

If we assume that the average code line is about 65 characters, that would mean we are shipping ~150,000 lines of code. With every website! Sometimes just to show static content!

And that code is minified already. So it’s more like 300K+ LoC just for one website.

An important takeaway, as I feel byte size can be hard for people to intuitively visualize. And for those who didn’t read the article, many of the sites tested sent significantly more than 10 megs of JS, even sites containing nothing more than simple input boxes that should be doing any processing server-side.

I want to see the difference with ad-block enabled. Analytics and tracking are certainly complex enough to account for a lot of that payload. Same with an addon like Decentraleyes to see how much is bloated frameworks that could easily be cached locally.

I would have been happy with the change if they dropped the slot system entirely for cargo now that it serves no purpose (equipment gets bonuses based on slot and adjacent gear, cargo does not). For some unfathomable reason they kept the manual slots for cargo and it makes finding anything specific in a large cargo hold a nightmare.

This is compounded by their terrible crafting system where you have to manually pick every single component of a recipe rather than just clicking on the recipe and having it grab stuff from cargo for you. Cargo should have been turned into a sortable list like in nearly every other RPG.

The inventory has been one of the primary sources of complaints since day one, but despite several major overhauls they haven’t fixed the core issues, just made it slightly less inconvenient to use each update.