The API shit happened alongside one of the worst arguments I’ve ever gotten on the internet from Reddit. I realized those people lost the plot. I deleted my account.

Sim City 4

Metal Gear Solid 2

Dino Crisis

Mass Effect 2

Terraria

Never heard of that site. One quick visit tells me it’s Canadian. Arc B580 is listed at $359.99 and it’s out of stock. In fact the three models they do have are all out of stock.

Because it has risen in price and availability is so sparse. Intel is playing under the same rules of scarcity as everybody else. There’s simply less of these cards to go around as well. There’s not a huge market available.

Base model has been sold out for a while. My closest Microcenter hasn’t had them since last year. You could actually get them at MSPR($250) for a while too. The next cheapest version is a 3rd party model that has been siting at $290-$310 for most of the year now. Then there are these $500+ models that are basically collectors items at that price. Ebay is the wild west of prices and they’re all $100 past where they’re reasonable. Ebay’s not a super trustable source either. Everything on NewEgg that is sitting at $250 is refurbished. The one new base model they have is almost $600. It makes no sense.

I’ve been in the market for one of these cards to replace my 5700xt. It’s been a wild year keeping track of these prices. At times it is the best card available, and at other times you’re playing a guessing game with older but stronger AMD stock. The kicker is the 12GB of VRAM. There’s nothing in the price range of the Arc with that much VRAM. But there’s also cards with less VRAM that are supposed to be more performant. As much as I want one, I’m probably gonna wait till the holiday season to see availability and sales. That’s been the game since last year.

Whitechapel - Devolver - I’m actually surprised no one has used it for any type of entrance anywhere. It’s got the little splash of sound in the beginning. You get two measures of this chugging guitar, then Phil kicks in and it’s perfect. It’s a fast song. The lyrics are the opposite of motivational but if you’re a heel it doesn’t matter. I would use this for baseball. I would use this for Football. It’s practically made for wrestling.

The rising tide lifts all boats or some shit. Arc is rising in price too. Newegg has them at $310 if they’re available. Ebay is $325+S&H. Any listing that’s under $300 has $20+S&H fees in small print under the cost. Amazon has some models that are pushing $400 which is insane for this card regardless of what extras third party manufacturers are throwing at it. The market is extremely fucked right now.

Yeah I tried them all. None of them come close to the magic of SimCity 4. They’re all scaled wrong, more like settlement builders or incorrect numbers representing population or worker counts. Janky like Workers and Resources. Songs of Syx is great but crawls to a halt on my system due to a memory leak after 30 minutes. The Transport Fever series is excellent but they’re not city builders. Some of them are good. Great even. None of them can fill the hole left behind by SimCity 4.

EDIT: A word.

Cities Skylines 2. I’ve got thousands of hours in the SimCity franchise. Over 500 hours in the original Cities Skylines. CS2 is a fucking mess of a game. It actually ran pretty decently on my PC when it first came out but you could tell it was an incomplete mess right away. The simulation was non-existent. The game looked like dog shit. The only way to get it to run decently was to turn everything down to low and medium. Somehow I squeaked out 75 hours in that first 3 month release window. For a working adult with responsibilities, that’s a lot of time for me now. I install it occasionally and see if it’s any better. It’s not. I did this last week and it actually runs worse on the same PC than it did at launch which is counter to what most people are experiencing.

Mods through the Paradox launcher is a necessary evil for the game to function. I can barely get it to run stable without mods, I don’t think tricking out the game is gonna help the situation. It’s such a sad case of a game killing a whole genre. Especially when it’s my genre. I love city building games and no game has hurt more than Sim City 2013. I didn’t even play SC2013. I watched my favorite franchise die and made probably the smartest decision of my gaming life by saying fuck no to that mess. Fucking Cities Skylines 2 is right there with it, but I made the opposite choice. I gave it a chance and it stings all the time.

What’s even worse is how such a staple of my childhood has turned into an almost impossible task to recreate. I’ll never understand how gaming went from being able to produce 4 generational city building titles in ~10 years to not being able to get one to function at the same level at all in 20. You can count CS1 sure, but even that game was missing something compared to SC4. CS1 is not even close to the same level of SC4. Even now when the game is hard to run on modern hardware.

What’s even more killer is we see other examples of Maxis era staples getting second life in new franchises all the time. Planet Zoo 1 and 2. Transport Fever for Transport Tycoon. Planet Coaster taking it’s place next to Roller Coaster Tycoon. Hell even the Jurassic World Evolution series fills a gap from the old Jurassic Park Genesis game. But the modern city building attempts are all backwards attempts.

They all focus on the wrong thing. Agents. They all want to be able to simulate every living being and everything they do. It never works. It’s why the newest Citystate is such an intriguing project. They’re not doing every individual agent. And the dev finally decided to focus on modernizing the engine to work with fully 3d spaces. There’s a couple contenders out there that are a year or two away. Citystate, Metro 1998 even though that’s more of a throwback. City Masterplan. If just one of these games hit, we’re back in business. Until then I’ve watched my favorite genre die twice. Hopefully the third time is the charm in terms of longevity.

Honest question here. Does this game even have a story/campaign mode?

Huge agree. There are so many albums that tell a complete story. They take you on an emotional journey. Or you’re just missing banger after banger. The only time I ever listen to a random assortment of songs is if I’m listening to music on Youtube or the radio for some reason. I almost never sit down to listen to music in a random playlist when I’m going through my collection. Don’t even have Spotify installed. Years of collecting music doesn’t require a Spotify account.

I can’t believe I’m about to say this but Playstation can fuck off. No ArcSys game(that I’m aware of) has ever needed a PSN account to play on PC. This bullshit can fuck right off. Makes this a no buy for me.

Oh no. I’m joking about Mayor Parker of Philly. I made a bad joke.

I just want a mayor that wants to do the job and can spell the football team’s name. Is that too much to ask?

A good meal and hiding with my dog.

Most - SimCity 4. I don’t remember buying the CD but countless hours later I can say it was worth it.

Least is really hard. Like you have to really really fuck up a game for me to not like it. Three come to mind. Cities Skylines 2. Mortal Kombat 1. Starfield. Both games coming after two of my all time faves. I spent 500+ hours in CS1. If you can’t tell city builders are my jam. So for me to actively despise a city builder is pretty condemning of the quality of the game. That’s my problem with Skylines 2.

MK1 I powered through the story and had no desire to play any other part of it. It was a buggy incomplete mess. The roster was a step back from MK11 IMO. The game play was supposed to address the main complaints of how slow and limited MK11 was. They did that by adding a gimmick instead of going back to the MKX formula. MK1 is just a failed mess of a game.

I would have forgot about Starfield if not for seeing it in my Steam library just now. Mechanically this game fucking blows. I really hate some of the design decisions they made in the game. Like oxygen frequently stopping you from sprinting early game. The menu designs. Space flight. It’s all so baffling to me. They really fumbled the ball.

I believe our atoms scatter off and bounce into the next thing they can cling to over and over again until we make up a new being. Then we start over.

If it was up to me our souls would convene out in space, get a fresh coat of paint, a report on how we did this go around, then go off to do whatever’s next.

The nerd in me says a solar generator, a laptop and a book on computing. See what they come up with.

Anybody else remember publishers trying to push the idea that games needed to be digital only because packaging and shipping games was too expensive?

Two of my favorite games of all time got remakes and are frequently on sale on Steam. MGS3 and FFTactics. Even on sale neither one is justifiable at $50 and $35. Death Stranding 2 at $70. Nahh. Pragmata at $60. Nope. Hell even Tempest Rising at $35 is too much for me right now. This hobby has been pushed to the extreme margins. There’s a large center girth of games I’d love to play but calling it justifiable is hard for anything over $20 right now.

Start here. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=313892

AUR, the Arch User Repository is under an attack. The attack vector is any orphaned package that doesn’t have a current maintainer. Those packages are being taken over by a malicious group. https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/archlinux/comments/1u3tn4e/tons_of_new_infected_aur_packages_were_just/ If a package maintainer quits/leaves/abandons a project, anybody can take control of the package if there’s been no maintainer for a certain period of time. What we’re learning now is that this process could be automated and done en masse. They’re modifying PKGBUILD files to use a java script installer like npm, bun, yarn, nodejs to shove malware onto a system. So if you have a package that’s marked as infected and you’ve updated your PC using an AUR helper like yay or paru during this time without checking the PKGBUILD you could be in trouble.

What users are advised to do is not update any AUR packages until otherwise noted. Scan your systems for any packages where the PKGBUILD reports installing an atomic-lockfile, js-digest file through npm, bun, nodejs, yarn and the like. Delete those packages.

The number of infected packages has gone from 400 to 600 to 1500 in a matter of hours last night. The AUR team has been on top of it almost the moment it got recognized. The AUR has well over 100,000 packages. Last night another user ran some numbers and at the time 718 infected packages had no users at all. The most popular package is an old Gnome dependency libgdata that was dropped years ago but could still be on systems. There’s a lot of old packages using ancient python2 deps that look to be infected as well. https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/archlinux/comments/1u4fzea/according_to_pkgstats_these_are_the_most_popular/ list of infected packages https://md.archlinux.org/s/SxbqukK6IA Seems like this was caught because old maintainers started getting emails about package updates to old projects they were on. Those OGs sprung into action.