The Beginning got TONS of crap when it came out. DK2 as well, although a bit less so because it's less of a departure.
I've gone back to both since and I agree with you that Populous was way ahead of its time and holds up much better than other strategy games of the time.
It is exactly the same beast. The beasts are the same. It's the same picture.
I mean, respect to your extremely wrong preferences, friend. Not everybody has the same use case. I'm not too sure who feels the need to come all the way out to do PR for a multibillion dollar corporation specifically on the basis of not being super into playing the stuff they buy from them, but you guys are clearly out there and I hope you are living your best lives. I'm not gonna say the cultish vibes one sometimes gets from the Valve apologia aren't concerning, but if it works for you it works for you.
For the record, I don't even dislike Valve. They're just a gaming first party like any other gaming first party. I buy stuff on Steam just like I buy stuff on PSN. It's all good. And I do like most of their first party stuff. If they ever decide to get back in the business of actually making games I'll probably check them out.
Also for the record, I do download and back up everything I buy on GOG. It all goes to the same backup space where I dump my BluRays and my CDs. And I absolutely have purchased most of the 2000+ games I own on GOG through sales, so I don't know about the value part either. Just today I played a 30 year old game and bought a brand new game from 2024 on GOG, so...
Well, most of these run on Dosbox and you can download DRM free installer packages directly from their website, so there's that.
But the Linux gaming crowd here keeps telling me how well Lutris and Heroic are supposed to work when I explain to them that I use a Windows handheld while my Steam Deck is gathering dust, so I'll point them to this next time instead of just telling them those don't quite do it for me.
All joking aside, yeah, I'd love GOG having a better client overall, including a Linux port, but the quality of the packages and the lack of DRM easily trump that, so still buy these on GOG.
All of these were already on GOG.
Buy them there instead.
dark
We do "my dick sweats", for the same thing, which I now realize sounds super gross.
I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn't storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don't grow on trees, you know?
It's still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We'll see where or if they resurface next, but I'm pretty sure we're not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.
The tech is certainly "interesting". I've started giving up on trying to predict which of the obvious behaviors you'd expect form a text or image generator is presented as either the second coming of Google or the end of humanity now.
It's been a while since these have become either interesting testable things or full-on products and people are still doing the thing where clumsy prompt injection to counteract bias is a major political drama and some weight files getting corrupted on a server is a dystopian robot having brain damage and both of those signal that "AI magic" is cracking.
The scary part is the actually new and unexpected events, like that one scam where they actually used real time digi doubles to do phishing on some poor guy over Zoom, get washed out in all the random panic about basic dumbassery and rush-to-market silliness. The fearmongers are making the snake oil sellers' job easier in places.
I'm going to sleep, wake me up in a couple of decades when we're all hitting the "hey, maybe we didn't get how this worked" Facebook moment.
I haven't faceplanted, but I have punched myself in the headset repeatedly. Turns out looking at things up close is not advisable when your face happens to have an invisible box strapped to it.
Well yeah, but that's not the one I'm talking about. I'd be referring to The Batman, the 2022 film starring... well, let's be honest, starring Zoë Kravitz, but yeah, with Robert Pattinson as Batman. There are so many of these now that giving out titles is starting to be useless.
That one spends a bunch of time talking about how Bruce Wayne isn't doing anythign with his money to help because he's too busy seeking revenge and gets into the weeds about how charitable donations from billionaires end up being used. It's weird. And long. But it's actually alright.
I mean, somebody must have agreed, because they made a whole movie about it.
This tweet is the entire premise of The Batman.
It does end kinda going back to justifying why he's more useful in the suit instead, but at least they spend a bunch of time talking about it, I suppose.
It absolutely does.
I do take issue with the idea that shilling for Valve versus GOG is on the same level, though. CDPR's entire market valuation is like 20% of Steam's revenue for one year. Based on best data available CounterStrike loot boxes make more money than all of GOG's store.
I'm not shilling for GOG. I'm shilling for DRM free stores in general. GOG just happens to be the one that has these EA games, but if you can find what you're looking for in a different place with a DRM free mandate go for that!