And if you're on PC platforms other than Windows, it's more like "never."

I'm shocked that RE4 got a GotY nomination. I thought there were rules against remakes or remasters getting Game Awards nominations; am I wrong, or did that change at some point?

Star Ocean: The Second Story R.

The PS1 original was good, but it had some noticeable flaws. The book writing skill was more or less useless, side quests were often too well hidden from view (which was especially bad when most of them were time-limited), the accessories that gave you items were a bit in-your-face, there was no in-game mini-map, the invisible random encounters and lack of fast travel didn't age well, and the voice acting… What were they thinking when they released this…

The remake fixes most of what went wrong in the original game, including re-casting the English voice actors, and even adds some new content (like fishing) that wasn't in the original. I'm enjoying it a lot.

If you're talking about the VESA mount, there was a lot of tech that went into that that explains the price, including sensors that auto-rotate the display when the display is rotated. It wasn't just price gouging.

I'm not sure why people are surprised by this. In a lot of ways, Apple was a pandemic darling that didn't take as big a fall as the other pandemic darlings did when the pandemic ended. When the pandemic started, there was a big splurge in tech spending that benefitted Apple + the other pandemic darlings (Zoom, Fiverr) as the whole world was going remote.

But then the pandemic ended, and so tech sales went way down as everyone started to step outdoors again.

They released the first ARM Macs with the M1 chip during the pandemic, which were a big step up in performance and power efficiency over the Intel Macs they replaced. That further raised their sales as people upgraded their old laptops.

But the M2 and M3 had the majority of their work go into improving the GPU for apps used by hardcore gamers and creative pros; the non-graphics processing increases are not as substantial. The majority of their customers are not gamers or creative pros; they just use their computers for email, social media, and word processing or sometimes spreadsheet use.

So this is not surprising at all. Not when the pandemic ended, and the M1 was good enough for most of their users. I suspect their Mac sales will go up again in a few years when the M1 is obsoleted.

They are good enough for the vast majority of their customers. You have to remember that the vast majority of laptop users only use their laptops for email, social media, and occasionally word processing; they aren't using Baldur's Gate III or Final Cut Pro or some other app that needs the extra RAM. You don't need more than 8GB of RAM for that.

Maybe. Have you tried using Whisky?

Yes, the volume controls on the USB-C EarPods work with Android.

The playback controls work as well, but they're a little different on Android than they are on iOS. Holding in the middle button summons Google Assistant, for instance, instead of fast forwarding. But the all-important pause/resume control works the same way.

"This is notably the first real instance of game developers using AI voices instead of human performers, and to a near-full extent."

No, that is not true. There were a number of older games from the 1980s that had AI voices, such as Impossible Mission on the C64, but that was done out of disk space requirements.

No, because none of the above have multiplayer.

Looks like the new M3 chips are a significant upgrade from the M1 chips, a very significant upgrade from the Intel/Radeon chips, and a super significant upgrade from the Intel Macs with no discrete GPU. Except for 3D content creation, gaming with games that actually support Metal ray tracing, and video production, it's not that significant an upgrade from the M2 chips.

And I see people on social media bashing it for the default configuration only having 8GB of RAM. It's like they don't realize Apple intentionally keeps a low end, compromised, and cheap configuration around for the large amount of MacBook users that just want a cheap-but-not-uselessly-so laptop for email, social media, and the occasional word processed document. The people bashing it on social media are free to buy a less compromised model; Apple does sell them.

Here are some more good puzzle games that are not Portal/Portal 2:

• Colossal Cave
• The Entropy Centre
• Hourglass
• Myst
• Obduction
• Pneuma: Breath of Life
• Quantum Conundrum (one of the original Portal developers was attached to this project)
• Quern: Undying Thoughts
• Riven (this is the sequel to Myst, but unlike Myst, it has never been remade since it first came out back in 1997, so you'll have to excuse the old graphics and gameplay)
• The Talos Principle (the sequel is coming out soon)
• The Turing Test
• The Witness

If you can only play one of the above, then as the other commentors have said, make it The Witness. The recent remake of Myst is also very good.

The problem is, we must care if the game is to have any sequels, follow-ups, or lasting legacy. If the game is awesome, but doesn't sell well, then it probably won't get sequels, and will be forgotten to everyone except Wikipedia & Moby Games over enough time.

Please ignore cloud; they have been posting inaccurate flamebait throughout this thread.

I would never not buy a laptop from Apple. Not only are they the last PC maker that hasn't fallen to the Microsoft Monopoly Machine, but their laptops are well-built†, futuristic, and have incredible value and battery life for what you get. Especially since they migrated off of Intel.

† I know someone will inevitably come up with a counter-example, but the last time they had a widespread quality problem was a little more than ten years ago.

Character speed control is even older than that; many of Sierra's games in the 1980s/early 1990s (like King's Quest, Space Quest, etc.) had them. Adjusting them made some of them even easier, because it didn't affect enemies, allowing you to easily evade them during chase scenes.

I can only think of a few games that have had customizable difficulty. The problem with them is they complicate the user experience, and most people would rather not tinker with them.

Apple has their own Proton, called the Game Porting Toolkit, and it works well for games that don't need a launcher & are mainly played with a keyboard and mouse, but I've found that game controllers don't work very well with it.

There's also MoltenVK, which is Vulkan for macOS, and DXVK, a DirectX-to-Vulkan-to-Metal layer that was used to play some Windows games on macOS before the GPTK came out.

Yes.

It will be once Call of Duty becomes a console Xbox exclusive, and the millions of people in the Americas & Europe switch from PlayStation to Xbox in order to get their CoD fix. We've already seen this in the PC market, where CoD has been a Windows exclusive for years now, to the point where people won't buy Macs because they can't play CoD on them.

With Minecraft, the Java edition was & still is available on many different platforms, but the later Minecraft games that were made after the Microsoft takeover have, for the most part, only come out for Microsoft platforms. Minecraft Dungeons, for instance, never came out on GNU or macOS.

The Bedrock edition was ported to PlayStation, but for how much longer will it be available, I wonder…

I'm talking about the platform, not the store front. Windows has far more than 90% of the PC gaming world market share, far more than what's enough to monopolize the PC gaming scene; GNU and macOS are a super distant second and third place. Whenever most people talk about "PC gaming", what they really mean is Windows, even though there are other PC platforms out there.