MudMan

Hah. I almost wrote that I also think the two Ultima Undergrounds are better than Deus Ex despite being much older and having an objectively very clumsy interface. Then I thought that’d get us in the weeds and pull us too far back, so I took it out.

Look, yeah, Deus Ex rolled in elements from CRPGs and had good production values for the time. But all those things were nothing new for an RPG, they were just new for a shooter. Baldur’s Gate and Fallout were a few years old. The entire Ultima franchise had been messing around with procedural, simulated worlds for almost a decade at that point, which in the 90s was a technological eon.

And yeah, System Shock had created a template for a shooter RPG, they just applied it to a lone survivor dungeon crawly horror thing, rather than try to marry it to the narrative elements of NPC-focused CRPGs, which is admittedly a lot more complicated. And Deus Ex was fully voiced and had… well, a semblance of cutscenes. In context it’s hilariously naive compared to what Japanese devs were doing in Metal Gear or Final Fantasy, but it was a lot for western PC game standards.

But it wasn’t… great to play? I don’t know what to tell you. Thief and Hitman both had nailed the clockwork living stage thing, and at the time I was more than happy to give up the Matrix-at-home narrative and the DnD-style questing for that. The pitch was compelling, but it didn’t necessarily make for a great playable experience against its peers.

I didn’t hate it or anything. I spent quite a bit of time messing with it. That corny main theme still pops up in my head with no effort on demand. I spent more time using it as a benchmark than Unreal, which I also thought wasn’t a great game.

Also, while I’m here pissing people off, can we all agree that “immersive sim” is a terrible name for a genre? What exactly is “simulated”? Why is it immersive? Immerisve as opposed to what? At the time we tended to lump them in with stealth games, so the name is just an attempt to reverse engineer a genre name by using loose words that weren’t already taken, and I hate it. See also: character action game. Which action games do NOT have characters?

Man, I am a grumpy old fart today.

Thanks for the link! International press is still running the 33% estimate they probably got from the French morning papers or have taken down the results, so my references hadn’t updated the number.

For the record, the image is not new, there was a lot of international coverage regarding Le Pen’s presidential chances in 2022. But presidentials are presidentials, only one person gets to win. Legislatives raise a lot of questions about parliamentary dynamics, alliances and the potential for the second round to generate another bout of Macron shooting himself in the foot followed by him shooting everybody else in the foot for good measure. That, and there is more paranoia about the tilt right across the EU and internationally about the US.

The closest thing we had was the System Shock duology, since both predate Deus Ex. Deus Ex was basically accessible System Shock. Having dialogue trees and NPCs without losing the open-ended nature of System Shock’s more dungeon crawl-y approach was the real selling point. Well, that and the trenchcoats and shades. The Matrix was such a big deal.

But even then, each of those elements were already present in different mixes in several late 90s games. Deus Ex by some counts was one of the early culminations of the genre blending “everything game” we were all chasing during the 90s. The other was probably GTA 3. I think both of those are fine and they are certainly important games, but I never enjoyed playing them as much as less zeitgeist-y games that were around at the same time. I did spend a lot of time getting Deus Ex to look as pretty as possible, but I certainly didn’t finish it and, like a lot of people, I mostly ran around Liberty Island a bunch.

I played more Thief 2 that year, honestly. I played WAY more Hitman than Deus Ex that year. I certainly thought System Shock 2 was better. Deus Ex is a big, ambitious, important game, for sure, but I never felt it quite stuck the landing when playing it, even at the time.

I’m not of the opinion that more simulation and more “realism” are always better, but I would absolutely take a System Shock 2 remake, especially after the System Shock one (1 one?) turned out great.

FWIW, I’m seeing projections based on the counts that still have them at 34, but I guess we’ll see.

I agree that a resurrection of the cordon sanitaire is probably a positive and I agree that Macron was extremely clumsy, like much of the EU’s centre and demochristian right, in sliding towards far right positions they just can’t defend any better than the actual fascists. But still, from an international perspective France is now firmly in the club of Central European countries with a major fascist problem in a way it wasn’t yesterday, even if the outcome was already understood to be going this way.

Kind of overrated? I mean, it was cool to see a bit more of a palatable cinematic presentation in real time to go along with the late 90s PC jank, and that theme did kick ass, but it’s less groundbreaking in context than I think people give it credit for. And it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as System Shock 2, in my book.

I get that immersion tends to normalization…

… but man, 34% is still a LOT. Especially when it’s 2x the previous result and the largest bloc.

It’ll be good if they are prevented from having easy access to legislative action, but it’s still an underpants-threatening result in my book.

I don’t think that’s true of either. They’re not saving all this video in RAM. Steam’s system even asks you during setup to choose a temp folder for the video to sit in until you choose to save it as a clip. I don’t know when it flushes that cache, but I’m assuming it doesn’t and simply overwrites it when it runs out of the allocated space to allow you to go back and save something after you close a game.

It’s not just the games that support it, it will also tag other metadata it knows automatically on all games, like achievement unlocks. And you can manually add tags, too. It’s all telemetry that Valve and the devs are already extracting from you, of course, plus whatever you volunteer in manual markers, but it’s still a bit creepy to see it laid out on a timeline like that.

Well, it’s two different things, one is the background record, which is less “freaking out” and more “not for me on PC”.

The other is blending the background recording with metadata on a timeline, which starts getting Recall-y in terms of logging a video recording of what you were doing where there is also a data record of what you were doing. I do think that part starts stepping over to kinda creepy.

It’s more useful here than as a OS feature, though, because yeah, I can see it saving one the trouble of recording different matches separately or having to scrub back and forth to find certain things.

Yeah, I get that, but that’s also true of Steam Link and Steam’s general streaming solution (which I presume is what this is using) and it’s trivial to get a different window to show up or even to get to the desktop from the in-game streaming, particularly if you have a non-Steam app in your library.

So yeah, it’s gonna be on demand recordings from me… assuming the quality holds up (Nvidia’s kinda sucks). Otherwise that’s what OBS is for.

Well, that was MS’s argument and I don’t think it flies there either.

On a console it’s fine, it’s only ever gonna catch a game. On the Steam Deck as well, same deal.

For a desktop PC that you also use for work and media and other stuff… yeah, I want to be extra sure that if I alt-tab from a game to quickly answer some work email that’s not going to accidentally be recorded anywhere, even locally. Like Recall, I can see people who would not mind that as long as the data stays in their computer, I myself like knowing that I don’t accidentally leave exposed files with potentially sensitive information laying around without my knowledge.

I mean, it’s fine, it just means turning the feature off. I don’t use the equivalent feature from Nvidia for the same reasons. I still think it’s funny that MS got (rightfully) put on blast for basically doing this and then Apple and Valve both announced similar features immediately afterwards. It’s made for some awkward mental gymnastics on the Internet recently.

Hah. So if you turn the background recording on it keeps a browsable timeline with metadata about which modes you were playing, presumably based on your rich presence data?

How freaked out do you think everyone at Valve was this past month watching Microsoft’s Recall feature get ripped to shreds?

All joking aside, I do not trust background recording on PC. I’ve seen how easy it is to bypass Steam Link’s restritions on streaming your desktop, I guarantee that some of these clips would end up with something I don’t want in them. I do think metadata annotation on long manual recordings is potentially interesting, but it IS creepy.

I wonder, too. Pro-EU centre-right parties and social democrat parties still hold a majority, so on these things I’m not sure we’ll see a major shift, but I genuinely haven’t checked the voting record to see if the far right parties generally take a different stance on the more pedestrian consumer protection regulations or not. I probably should do that.

I see next to zero discussion about Gaza here.

People seem to be arguing about whether vandalizing libraries is good or bad. It’s bad, for the record.

Of course that’s only failure if your goal is for people to talk about the thing you’re supposed to care about. If your goal happens to be to get people to talk about you, screw Gaza or anybody else… well, then yeah, mission accomplished. We can all go home now.

Speaking of schnitzel, I was once in a very much European (but not German or Austrian) snitzel place and got served a schnitzel as the base of what seemed to be a pepperoni pizza topping.

You could also get it rolled up like a kebab with the cheese on the inside to eat on the go. I wish I had pictures, it’s simultaneously the worst and best thing I’ve put in my mouth.

Italians will cook your pasta inside a whole wheel of cheese. Spaniards deep fry pork belly and serve it as a snack. Last time I was in Eastern Europe I thought something was a sweet only to discover it was a lump of straight-up pork fat. Just raw. To munch on.

Americans may be more consistent at eating gross murderfood regularly and in large quantities, but they sure aren’t the only ones to have it.

Fun fact, in many places, soft-serve ice cream is known as “Italian ice cream”.

What we are seeing here is a slightly botched traditional Italian lunch.

I don’t do that with anybody, normally. People of all genders will sometimes give you a hug here if it’s been a while or if they’re happy to see you. Cheek kissing is mostly a women thing, though.

I guess that depends on the use case and how frequently both machines are running simultaneously. Like I said, that reasoning makes a lot of sense if you have a bunch of users coming and going, but the OP is saying it’s two instances at most, so… I don’t know if the math makes virtualization more efficient. It’d pobably be more efficient by the dollar, if the server is constantly rendering something in the background and you’re only sapping whatever performance you need to run games when you’re playing.

But the physical space thing is debatable, I think. This sounds like a chonker of a setup either way, and nothing is keeping you from stacking or rack-mounting two PCs, either. Plus if that’s the concern you can go with very space-efficient alternatives, including gaming laptops. I’ve done that before for that reason.

I suppose it’s why PC building as a hobbyist is fun, there are a lot of balance points and you can tweak a lot of knobs to balance many different things between power/price/performance/power consumption/whatever else.