PhobosAnomaly

also branding

particularly the style that gives up on capitalisation and punctuation

this is not primary school

It was, but as Atari was known for, was just a fancy new shell on eight year old hardware not too dissimilar to the 2600 or VCS or whatever your region calls it.

My parents went down the home computer route, and I ended up with an 800 XE.

It was beautiful. The detachable keyboard, the IBM-grey sleek housing, the pastel console buttons, and satisfying “chi-chuunnnggg” of the spring loaded power button.

I felt like I had the future under the palms of my hand.

hey BB got SIM? 18/m/Florida

join #LagoPoolParty for deets

Game Pass is cool and all, but the rebrands and weird omissions make it a bit of a shambles.

I still have an Xbox One, but I’ve got a chonky internet connection (at least for my area) and Cloud Gaming is a fantastic bit of kit. I was tempted to buy a cheap one-month Game Pass code and play this Black Ops 6 campaign and another game or two… but this isn’t on the Cloud Gaming service.

It’s shit like this that makes the high seas a far more attractive option. I know not every game is Cloud Gaming enabled, but one would expect that certainly all the Game Pass titles would be included.

Oh well, I just won’t play it I suppose, I’m sure I’ll find something else to do with those five or six hours!

When the Xbox 360 was out in stores, I wasn’t really arsed about getting one. My Dreamcast was still doing me just fine.

Mass Effect looked cool (it was), and Alan Wake had taken my fancy and looked great (it was).

What really tipped my hand into spending a couple of hundred quid on a console was… Doom. The XBLA version of the original.

I’m a massive Doom nerd, but the first time I heard the new positional audio of a Imp’s fireball in 5.1, I just about spaffed - and I took a day off work to hoon through Doom 2 and No Rest For The Living.

I think there’s something quite satisfying about playing a game on a device massively overspec’d for it. I played Quake III on a Pentium 3 450mhz with 64mb RAM and a TNT2 M64 card, and every new PC or laptop that I get, I still find it deeply gratifying installing Q3 and seeing it run silky smooth.

I do it for two reasons: partly because it’s fuck all business to anyone else (within reason) what the status of my relationship is.

Mainly though, because it generally messes with folk because they don’t understand what it means, and feel compelled to ask silly questions about it.

Well that’s just fuckin awesome, thank you my friend.

That’ll be a giggle on the weekend 👍

Awesome, so it’s usable without an account now?

Honestly, I never checked after I stored it.

I bought a second generation of Rift (no idea what model it was, but it was the second retail one, not including the CV1 or whatever dev build it was) - and it was fantastic. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

The moment they forced the use of a Facebook account, it stopped getting used. The visor, controllers, and sensors have been sat in a cupboard for a year or two.

I really should see if it has been jailbroken, or if there’s a way to utilise the Rift features without any Meta bollocks.

I think even in terms of recent history, I enjoy going through stuff before it goes in the shredder.

I’ve cleared out loads of work files that are outside of their retention period, and most of them are utter dross that have been superseded many times over, but every now and then I see a staff list with long forgotten names, and it’s a reminded to get in touch with the decent spuds that used to work there.

That, or finding an old payslip down the back of a drawer, and wondering just how I used to live on wages from that era, through the lens of 2024’s cost of living.

I think it’s brilliant that people publicise their political affiliations - it’s like a big red flag to either avoid certain topics… or just avoid them altogether.

It’s like Social Interaction for Dummies.

That single long-tone before the discharge roughly translates to “Bonsoir, motherfucker”.

I’m pretty sure a more natural translation would throw in a couple of putains but I’m neither qualified enough nor French enough to comment with any authority.

Banging idea, love this.

Only changes I would make is changing out the SOS for a five-second long-press, and changing reset to a ten-tap - to make sure people aren’t just fucking about turning it on and off.

Just for the lols, I voted on the “Is Trump mentally fit for president?” question. It just asks for an email address and a couple of validation questions.

what the fuck is that though? Automatically enrolling someone in a string of “update” mailing lists is a dick move.

I only hope their reporting attitude is better than their data management policy is.

Patience is the key - I hate Denuvo, you (probably) hate Denuvo, and most devs hate Denuvo… once the magic first week or two are done, the new trend seems to be devs patching out Denuvo once their release sales have peaked so fingers crossed this will continue.

A cheaper, patched, DRM-less game a few months behind release. Winner.

I don’t miss the tool, I miss the general vibe and feeling of the late 90s or early 2000s.

CD’s for everything, over engineered autorun splash screens, the seeking of mechanical harddrive heads when computing a route, the sense of adventure, and the general positive outlook that consumer tech is working for us, not because of us.

I miss those days.

I miss the days of Microsoft AutoRoute. No internet connection needed - but you were stuck with the map and routes present in the release version that was on the CD.

Printing was optional and encouraged!

I understand that mine is an entirely subjective and emotive opinion, but I hardly think being followed about by the Led By Donkeys mob and being made to look silly twice a year, is comparable to the hundreds of thousands (if not millions, I don’t have the stats) of folk who had their mortgages go up ten per cent after the markets got kami-Kwasi’d in the sum total of twenty minutes.

Fuck right off Liz, enjoy your tainted career and seeing lettuces in comedy places for the rest of your life.

That’s not the problematic metric though. It’s the 70-80% (link) install base of the Windows OS on desktop computers that Edge is installed with that’s the basis of the anti-competitive allegation.

The fact that it still only takes 5% of the browser usage is more of a happy accident.