HL2 is more than just the gravity gun. The art style, the open levels on the beaches, the facial animations, the improved storytelling from HL1, the antlion army, game was so much more than just an updated half life. Without HL2, portal wouldn’t have any legs to stand on, valve took on narbacular drop, hired the team and put them to work on the source engine to make portal. Counter strike source was the defacto mp shooter for years if not decades, hell even the portal 2 goo came from half life 2 ep 3 just like they mention in the documentary. Saying they ignored all other aspects of the game for the gravity gun does half life 2 a disservice to what it accomplished.

HL2 still did more for the industry than probably any other game on the market. Also, Minerva is a must to play, one of the best HL2 mods.

This is why you’re seeing news articles from Sam Altman saying that AGI will blow past us without any societal impact. He’s trying to lessen the blow of the bubble bursting for AI/ML.

Knee jerk reaction based on OEM feedback for a built in handheld interface for the OEM handhelds like the rog ally. Steam deck clearly caused a disruption in the market that Microsoft simply cannot stop. It’ll probably have alps joysticks that drift, they’ll slap an over powered AMD apu in it with a shit battery that it’ll chew through in an hour like every other handheld PC. Valve hit the sweet spot with the deck, and there’s no real reason to upgrade it, sure you have more powerful apu’s but battery tech hasn’t caught up yet and the only way to counteract it is slap a bigger battery on the device. At that point what’s the point of putting a power hungry apu in a handheld?

The irony of it all is SO making deals for AI to scrape their site for machine learning but in doing so more people are using chatgpt and copilot more because it’s easier and just as accurate. AI/ML is really going to destroy these websites and yet it’s the websites signing off on their own death sentences.

Firefox is the solution people, make the switch.

At least Xbox made some sense, it was originally going to be called the DirectXbox, thankfully they shortened the name to something catchier.

It looked good, but the gyro is apparently awful and the trigger travel is basically non-existent.

Well I didn’t say they were perfect.

While the 9000 series looks decent, I honestly think Intel has a really interesting platform to build off of with the core ultra chips. It feels like Intel course correcting with poor decisions made for the 13th and 14th gen chips. Wendel from Level1 techs made a really good video about the good things Intel put into the chips while also highlighting some of the bad things, things like a built-in NPU and how they’re going to use that to pull in profiles for applications and games with ML, or the fact that performance variance occurs between chipset makers more often with the core ultra. It’s basically a step forwards in tech but a step backwards in price/performance.

Not sure you know what swap is…I looked at my m1 after a night of gaming on GeForce now and filling out forms on Google Chrome. My swap was at 0, my used ram was at 4GB used out of the 8GB and didn’t show down at all. I’m sorry you have had a terrible experience with your Mac, I love my Mac mini and will enjoy it as a really cool piece of tech.

This is some real doom and gloom shit right here. You really think it’s a single-vendor market? I guess if you want to buy a 4090 then yes it is, but everything else is a three horse race. This doesn’t mean AMD is saying buy consoles, all this means is they’re focusing on the midrange market that I’m 100% confident Nvidia will completely ditch sometime in the future and tell most customers to use Geforce Now if they want midrange prices. To be completely real here, Nvidia only has ray tracing holding them up right now, as soon as the competition catches up they won’t have anything to gouge and will be kicking themselves for not really innovating any further.

This is how it’s always been for the past 30 years, Nvidia makes a good card and prices it high with 4 or 5 generational updates, Radeon makes a good price/performance midrange card that undercuts Nvidia, everyone wins. The only difference now is Intel has created a very compelling product with their GPUs and I’m pretty confident battle mage will be a big improvement over the current Arc cards and give AMD a run for their money.

Intel is learning from AMD and playing the long game with their hardware, the latest core ultra CPUs are great in Linux vs Windows and will hopefully get better over time, and the battle mage cards will hopefully have day 1 support for Linux and good support for Windows. You simply have to change your expectations here, the market is shifting, Nvidia makes more money hand over fist with AI/ML chips and GFN than they do their consumer graphics cards, they don’t have to make their cards cheap anymore to compete, they can price them however they want due to the cost offset of their server market. I personally find the midrange market to be way more compelling these days than overpriced high end Nvidia chips, maybe you should rethink your position as well.

MacOS, no matter what anyone says, has extremely efficient memory management. It’s seriously impressive how efficient that OS truly is, and it’s no surprise they stuck with 8GB for so long. The thing these clickbait articles don’t really bring to light is that the 16GB increase is really for Apple intelligence. If that wasn’t a thing these Macs would stick to 8GB.

You know, I was honestly going to give you some credit for trying, but then you edited your post and decided to turn the conversation political. Your entire argument has lost all credibility, these are video games, please try not to take them so seriously, have a nice day.

Still running an m1 Mac mini right now, it’s a damn good machine, but the performance gains over the years on the m series chips haven’t really forced me to upgrade yet. As for gaming, I just use GeForce now to play my steam library and it’s awesome, it’s a really great combo. The 8GB of ram is lacking, but I’m using GFN and not pushing it too hard, so I don’t notice any meaningful performance problems. I’m also not editing photos or videos, so that probably helps.

There have been more positive reviews so far than negative, and not a single post has shown any proof that EA is manipulating reviews and cherry picking. The only thing we’ve seen is one guy at fextralife throwing out conspiracy theories about how EA hates him, another guy who’s apparently a racist and sexist asshat, and that’s pretty much it. Mortismal has even stated he wasn’t paid off or anything by EA and would be fined and his account deleted if he was and didn’t disclose that fact, which he didn’t.

Bioware has made two bad games, Andromeda and Anthem, two. One is objectively not that bad, the other is a game in a genre they’ve never dipped their toes into, and the biggest issue is that those two releases were back to back, so that apparently means they’ve gone to shit now and everything else they’ve created means nothing. It’s really sad how petty and ridiculous some people are over bioware. As for the EA hate that’s been around forever, but God forbid someone say something positive about a bioware game.

Do you have proof that EA is forcing reviewers to use catchphrases as you’ve said? I get it, we all have our hate boners, we all have our pet peeves, but damn son…the conspiracy theories and review embargo nonsense is just stupid at this point. Like you said let’s just wait for the objective reviews but how about we simply don’t write the game off because bioware apparently murdered our puppies.

Yet mortismal gaming says it’s his persona goty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCz1ITSy2O8

I don’t really know what to say about it at this point, but as I loved inquisition I’ll probably love this one. The best thing to do is wait for release and make your own opinion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Age_II lots of good information in the wiki page, of which none of your claims are accurate except for maybe the polarizing views on reused assets but that’s literally by design, not crunch. It sold more than origins and sold over a million copies in two weeks, that’s pretty damn good. Nice rage baiting though.

Thank fuck I use Linux as a daily driver. I won’t touch this AI infested bullshit that windows and Google are becoming. This is just an IT security nightmare.

You have your opinion but it’s definitely in the vocal minority.