Translation: We’re extremely short staffed, so we are shaming our employees into sacrificing their vacation

Sodas

Buy a used copy of GTA 2 from someone who purchased it legally.

Good luck finding one.

These 5% of negative reviews probably has nothing to do with you. There’s always a small amount of people unhappy for random or unrelated reasons (broke up with boy/girlfriend, car broke, etc) and who would write negative reviews no matter what. It’s possible they cannot dissociate the course from other things happening in their life. They just happened to be unhappy at that time, and felt like leaving a nasty review.

That’s interesting. Thanks for pointing it out.

My point is having a very old constitution isn’t much of a boast if keeping it as-is causes political issues.

Tradition and inertia.

The USA is proud to have the oldest and longest-standing written constitution. The fact it hasn’t been rewriteen in a long time help explain why there’s still an electoral college, slavery for prisoners (13th amendements), and weak regulation of campaign finance.

This is a common issue in software, not limited to scripting. Software are getting more and more layers of wrappers/adapter code, like a Russian doll. It contributes to dependency hell, as each layer brings new dependencies.

Developers often find it easier to wrap existing apps and software, and add another layer on top, rather than improving or replacing what exists.

That’s the solution I picked at work. Refused to install that Microsoft software on my personal phone, but instead provided a phone number.

If you have a VoIP provider you could even try to the VoIP number for MFA instead of providing your real mobile number.

If IT make a comment about you not having the app, ask if they intend to provide a company device for that.

If the company cared, they would provide MFA hardware like Yubikeys to their employees.

Arkane is a gem, don’t close it damnit

That may be stretching the definition of the survival genre a bit, but the game does have some survival characteristics.

Anyway that’s the closest thing to a survival game that I enjoyed playing.

Prey

It has a good storyline. It’s not horror focused, and ennemies won’t suprise as much as in resident evil or doom. They’re mostly there to add difficulty or be part to the mission. Recycling makes the low amount of munitions/inventory tolerable.

Please enforce this for console games as well. Digical games and DLCs are typically more expensive than both new and used physical games. Physical games prices usually decrease few months after release, digital one rarely do.

It’s obvious that vendors rely on digital restriction (aka DRMs) to kill the used market and sell older games at higher price. I’m avoiding digital games and DLC because of this, and I’m reluctant to buy a new console given the hard push toward digital games and attempts to kill the used market.

Half Life 25th confirmed

Prices definitely increased, over the last 20 years new AAA games price increased from 45-50 EUR to 70 EUR.

With inflation taken into account that would probably mean flat prices.

With the increase in the numbers of players, the spread of DLCs and micro transactions, I suspect revenue increased even with inflation taken into account.

Could it be the cost of creating game is rising faster than inflation? Or game studio just got more greedy?

Well, another Mass Effect now looks less likely.

How many people work at Bioware right now? I wonder how big of a cut it is for the company.

My guess is either gambling addiction or money laundering.

I wonder to what extent gambling addiction is fueling the growth of casual/social gaming.

Loot boxes in video games have been linked to problem gambling.

Candy Crush is using a strategy that is “known as a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement and is the same tactic used in slot machines”.

I played Watch Dogs 2 back when there were enough players to make it interesting, then Watch Dogs Legion but didn’t enjoy as much as the previous one. Played a couple single-player video games since.

NFT sounds like a convoluted way to earn money for games. If a company can make a exciting, engaging, fun to play game, can’t they just sell them? Adding NFTs into the game/gameplay might just annoy players and scare people away.