I have good news for you:

https://www.polygon.com/24074441/gigantic-game-relaunch-rampage-edition-steam-release-date

The art style reminds me of Scavengers Reign.

Sid Meier’s Pirates! is a wonderful mix of exploration, sea battles, romance, swordplay, trade, and subterfuge.

Tropico 2: Pirate Cove is one that I’ve only played briefly, but I remember it having a fun style that made me want to try it in depth some time.

Or by people formerly paying for their internet service with money that should have been going toward food or heat.

Losing the $30 monthly discount could force families to choose between broadband and other necessities,

Exactly.

It’s also important to note that some ISPs created a low-cost service plan specifically for ACP. (It’s reasonable to assume this was possible in part because ACP handled income verification and eliminated the costs of individual billing and credit card payments.) That plan will likely disappear if ACP goes away, leaving poor people stuck paying a bill much higher than the program ever paid.

I don’t know whether I would be comfortable murdering pokemon, but if the gameplay turns out to be great, I would give it a try. I think I’ll wait on this one until it develops a bit and there are enough reviews to balance out early adopter (dev friends & family) bias.

Direct link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1623730/Palworld/

*r34 ;)

Your current approach of talking raw SMTP is likely to be more hassle than is worthwhile, and since the days of permissive SMTP servers are long gone, might not work at all.

Since you appear to be using an Debian-based Linux distro, I suggest this approach:

• If you don’t specifically need exim, consider replacing it with the lightweight dma package (DragonFly Mail Agent): apt install dma
• Configure dma (or exim) to use your ISP’s SMTP server as a smart host. (Or the Gmail SMTP server if your ISP doesn’t provide one.)
• Use the /usr/sbin/sendmail command (which comes with dma or exim) to send messages from your scripting language of choice.

If you prefer to receive messages as SMS, note that most major mobile carriers maintain an email-to-sms gateway for this purpose. Some web searches will probably lead you to the one for your carrier. They usually accept email at an address like 123456789@sms-gateway.example.com

I meant that I ought to use it for its intended purpose after all.

(But yes, I would still like the option of replacing the OS.)

I bought one during the clearance sale for the price of shipping, assuming that it would be abandoned but maybe still useful as a low-power linux server. I guess I ought to set it up and take advantage of it.

Thanks, Valve, for not letting these things become instant e-waste.

Joke’s on them. Google locked me out of my account when I refused to give them my phone number.

*Yuzu or Ryujinx. Not Cemu. Not Dolphin.

Valve was scanning your DNS cache

The story I read was that they didn’t collect or report anything, but just flagged a user if the cache contained a known game hack site, and that they stopped doing that years ago.

Not comparable to what Epic was caught doing, IMHO. Still, if there’s an article with more detail, I wouldn’t mind reading it. (Maybe it was part of their anti-cheat system of the time?)

somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all “evil” MTX and DRM in the process

Having worked with DRM systems since long before Valve existed, I’m reasonably certain this is just plain false.

In Steam’s case, the slowness looks more like a side effect of it being a Chromium Embedded Framework application (similar to Electron) with a lot of extras bolted on. It’s just not built for efficient use of resources.

Epic cons:

Also:

• Epic has already been caught scanning and collecting data from files on people’s hard drives that are totally unrelated to Epic or its games.
• Epic’s habit of interfering with game availability, through exclusivity deals.

Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)

To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic’s largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic (likely including user data) and they directly benefit from Epic’s growth.

Steam pros:

Also:

• Actively funding and supporting development of linux gaming technologies for more than a few years now, to the point where linux is now very much a viable gaming platform.

Steam cons:
Drm

Given that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don’t think it’s appropriate to list under “Steam cons”. I’m not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.

If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM, and it’s trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.

Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games

Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)

I don’t think getting freebies from them counts as supporting them

I do. Some examples off the top of my head:

• giving them access to your stored data, by letting their code execute on your computer
• giving them access to your behavioral data (a form of biometrics), through the same
• giving them access to your system fingerprints, through both code execution and account creation
• giving them legal influence over you, by agreeing to their terms
• giving some of their legal arguments greater weight, by increasing their market share
• giving them greater sway with publishers, such as when seeking exclusivity deals, by bolstering their user count
• giving them greater value to investors, by the same

There are probably other ways in which it supports them. Those are just the first ones to come to mind.

This seems like a step in the right direction. Much like language translation, doing it on-device is the only way to preserve people’s data agency / privacy.

This seems like a good candidate for a bookmarklet that would append the (site:…) parts to an existing DuckDuckGo search result URL. Then you could just do a normal search followed by clicking the bookmarklet.

Civ 4: Baba Yetu

I actually found the side quests’ writing pretty good, and indeed, sometimes even memorable. Unfortunately, most of those quests share a handful of nearly identical tasks, so the good writing started to feel like little more than window dressing before long.

The map encounters were worse, though: Lots of question marks telling me exactly where to go meant there was nearly no real exploration to be had in this open world, and arriving at them led to the same copypasta events over and over again. If you happen to enjoy those events enough that you can’t get enough of them, then that’s great, but I was bored after the first dozen or so. (Skyrim was far better in this department.)

I remember liking a lot of the main quests, and the characters, and the story, and the world building. It’s just that the bulk of the gameplay felt like filler content, with forgettable combat and awkward controls. (I swear, Geralt, if you plod forward one more time when I pull back on the stick, or let one more candle get in the way when I try to interact with something useful, I’m gonna smack you.)

I hope Witcher 4 maintains (or even improves upon) the writing quality of its predecessor, and adds responsive controls and interesting gameplay beyond the main plot points.