Humans are very good at convincing ourselves and finding excuses. I’m convincing myself that my cat would be out there destroying the ecosystem and making more cats, but now it mostly chills home, castrated, but well treated. And vegan pet foods are not possible for my circumstances so we’ll have to buy the food we think will better support him.
Still, it’s all a point of contention, and you can understand why.
Get a B12 supplement, maybe Omega (DHA type), install Happy Cow or Vegan Maps, or both (and maybe some local alternatives, like some cities have vegan delivery apps), on your phone to see vegan places around. Oreos are accidentally vegan, chips depend on flavor, lactose free milk is not vegan. Honey is not vegan for a lot of different reasons that were hard for me to internalize and one that was not: honey bees are not native pollinators for a lot of flowers and regions, and are forcing the native pollinators out of business. It’s like what would happen if every bird was replaced with free-range chickens.
Eggs are not vegan because the conditions are horrible and even when they are not, the gender for new generation of egg laying chickens is checked after birth, by “sexing” the chicks. And the male chicks go into a shredder to become cat good I guess.
Cat food and owning cats (or dogs, or pet chickens) is a difficult topic you should rather not raise. There are vegan pet foods but availability and prices vary a lot.
Don’t expect miraculous health benefits. A bit better heart health, a bit lower blood pressure and a smaller cancer risks are hard to actually notice even if they are shown to be present in studies. Better bowel movement if nice though if you actually start eating more veggies and not just continue eating (vegan) junk food.
And remember that the definition of “vegan” is what is “possible and practicable” so don’t beat yourself up for buying a shampoo without checking if it was peta approved or getting pills and finding out they have gelatin cases. The nightmare world we live in doesn’t always make it practicable to live a 100% pure life.
Oh, and be prepared to see your opinion of peta to change for the better the first time you try to explain to someone why you are vegan (or worse - try to convince them to reduce consumption of meat, milk, eggs and other animal products). Most people don’t even know cows need to be pregnant and give birth before they can start giving milk, and it seems impossible to convince them even of this one simple fact.
Oh yeah, and every restart takes 10 minutes of “preparing updates”
Valve takes care for brand new stuff on steam usually, except for kernel anticheat stuff where they can’t fix it.
Step 5. Watch it reboot overnight and download even more useless bloat
We should be applauding that they no longer lock their games to a single platform (despite fanboys crying over it).
That’s true, but you were wondering why PS5 would be selling better, and it’s definitely one of the factors, because why would you buy Series X when for the same price you get PS5 that runs all of MS games and all of Sony games.
GP pricing increased but it’s still great value for the money and the best deal around.
That depends on how often you play and how many games, and how many of those games are on GP. I have time for maybe one game a month and buying that one game on sale is usually cheaper.
Epic’s free games promotions are also a much better deal value wise. If you’ve been getting them since the beginning by now you would have the library of around the same size as game pass. And at least those games are not getting regularly deleted from your account, like what happens with GP when they phase out some games.
Their main franchises get new entries consistently and there’s been new IP too in the meantime (Indiana Jones is a joy).
Mostly Forzas got new releases consistently, not the other ones, and there is tons of stuff they bought and never did anything with: no Banjo games, no Conker, no Mechwarriors for many years (until they finally licensed the rights), no Black and White, 16 years since Fable III…
Neither Sony nor Valve are doing that great with their own IPs either, but at least Nintendo shows that it could have been done much much better.
I think they ran out of publishers that wanted to participate in backwards compatibility program but I’d be surprised if ActiBlizz cat join it sooner or later.
There are still some really disappointing omissions, like older Forza titles, Front Software games like Armored Core, all Tony Hawk games (I wonder if we should wait for them to be added with Activision at MS), and it was also upsetting that the enhancement program ended with just a few titles getting it and a lot of the rest are still 720p and/or 30fps
Honestly, what are the titles that Sony released in the past 5 years that aren’t sequels or remakes? I’m super confused how Sony is getting away with this.
Astrobot is great, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon is pretty new as well, even if the first game is older than 5 years now. And they’ve tried with Days Gone and Returnal. And I guess Concord, but we don’t talk about that.
As to Valve. Why is Microsoft stopping physical sales bad but it’s ok when Valve does it? Valve killed physical sales for the entire platform.
Valve just had a better store, they didn’t really push anyone out. I’ve also resisted getting steam for longest time (I remember buying Humble Bundles and giving away steam keys because I was against steam and the end of ownership it represented), but in the distopian future we live in there is no choice left. I had an xbox because I could still buy disks for it, but now they want to kill even that.
Once they got a monopoly sales with deep discounts ended.
What are you talking about? We are in the middle of Summer Sale, I just bought like 10 games.
Can you really trust Valve with backwards compatibility and long term support over Microsoft?
You can mod games that you buy from Steam, even if they are broken for new systems there is usually a way to run them with community patches, you can’t do that with Microsoft stuff, even on PC you can’t apply modifications to a Game Pass game. I can still play games that I’ve got before they were delisted, like Dirt 2, on my new PC or on Steam Deck, but there is no way to play, for example, Forza 4 on the new Xbox.
One has a history of abandoning stuff when they no longer find it profitable, the other is probably best in class still.
Is valve the first one? What did they abandon in this way though, besides dead multiplayer games?
When I moved from PS4 to XSX it was because I could sell my physical copies, something not possible on PC. End goal for Valve seems to be Android for games where they exert power over some Linux based platform with their app store - that’s no good for any of us.
Valve still releases their updates as open source, and Steam is available in other Linux distributions besides SteamOS. And even SteamOS has the full desktop mode that is not locked to only running apps from their own store. So far their goal seems to be to free games from Windows monopoly rather than establish dominance in OS world.
And that’s without addressing elephant in the room that Valve is no different if not worse than EA when it comes to gambling.
That’s an overstatement to say worse than EA, at least it’s only cosmetic items and largely contained within CS and Team Fortress
I don’t have favourites and use what I think is best for me at a given time. I’m deeply confused with what other gamers are choosing for themselves.
The biggest problem with MS is how confusing and inconsistent they are, they don’t know what they are doing so we don’t know what we are supporting with our money. Just look what XBOne went through in one generation: from TV box with Picture in Picture support and mandatory Kinect voice control and Mixer streaming platform to a bare minimum game console with a subscription that is basically Netflix for games. Focus on buying studios one day and closing them the next day. Pretty consistent bad treatment of the studios and ips that they buy in general, and even if in some years developers say MS was running their studios well, MS shifts focus to often, so even if they are good today there will always be a big chance that tomorrow they’ll switch to cloud/AI/GamePass-only or whatever will be the next crazy thing.
Titanfall 2.
And the fatal flaw is that it’s basically dead, the sequel will never release, and the “sequel” we’ve got in Apex Legends is nowhere close to how good tf2 was
They are constantly yo-yoing over making games or just providing cloud services, they’ve closed the only studio that made them a highly rated exclusive in recent years, released all decent exclusives to competitors, stopped the backwards compatibility program, increased GP pricing, stopped making physical games, haven’t done anything with any popular ip they’ve bought since early 2000s, pioneered paid multiplayer and ads on the dashboard, and I have a lot more complaints. And I’ve had both xbox one and series x, and they were fine as game systems, but I’m not getting the next thing they make.
Sony hasn’t been that much better, but at least they are actually making games, and these games are well made, even if we saw fewer releases this gen.
Steam Deck is the only sustainable option it seems, considering where the industry is these days.
Psychonauts 1 and 2.
Some of the most imaginative big budget games in existence, from themes to art style to level design
What have you been playing
Jak and Daxter 2 via opengoal on Steam Deck. Such a clunky game, but it runs beautifully (except I had to stop right now because it crashed in the middle of the mission, but that’s one crash in several hours). This game feels like a sequence of levels that are just hard enough to be infuriating, but without feeling impossible. And the characters make it more interesting and easier to keep trying the same mission 20 times in a row.
Thanks for doing these, this is some top quality content!
I wonder if Microsoft is making dev mode free because hackers got close to a working exploit in retail mode. There was one shared almost an year ago, but it required a specific app from the store that had been deleted since, but maybe it led to something behind the scenes.
I don’t know about that, it’s super noticeable when that happens, it’s just that it mostly affects languages other than English, so it did not get noticed by Western media unless there is a review bombing campaign after a particularly atrocious localization