Having worked in IT for over 40 years, while playing computer games for that exact same stretch of time, I have the reality of Moore’s Law embedded in my bone marrow. That has kept me wary of consoles — I see a new model come out and think, “Wouldn’t that be nice?” and then think, “Yeah, but what about 3 years from…

To be honest, I gave up on multiplayer games — as an adult male — several years ago. I’d start a new one, it’d be great for a while, and then the chatter would devolve to the level of a toxic 13-year-old male who felt both untouchable and anonymous (and for the most part, rightly so).

I tend to be a “Ah, no big deal”-kind of guy about this. But yesterday, my wife and I were driving to the local grocery store and stopped at a red light going through the (small) downtown district. While we were stopped, seven people walked through the crosswalk in front of us — IIRC, groups of 2, 4, and 1.

Yanny. All the time.

My reaction as well: “Really? This is the best you can do?”

I’ll probably do a few more rounds of Phoenix Point, though to be honest, I’m a bit underwhelmed by the pre-alpha release (some nice movement tweaks on XC2, but it still lacks, well, almost everything else).

Nope. If I start playing the game and don’t like it, then I feel hacked that I wasted my money. (Which is why I rarely by early-release games any more, unless it’s from a publisher I trust or in a series I already love. Been burned a few times.) So, no, life’s too short to play bad games. Even if they’re expensive…

I can’t remember when I stumbled across “Darkman” first, but I know it was on TV (I suspect on the nascent SciFi Channel), and it was just a few years after its theatrical release. I was expecting a schlocky Saturday afternoon creature feature and was pleasantly amazed at how original, manic, and dark it was. I still…

LOTR:BFME I & II are my favorite RTS games ever. I don’t like RTS as a genre, but these had me hooked.

I saw the 2nd trailer for the ‘Tomb Raider’ reboot movie a few days ago, and it made me nostalgic. So I reinstalled Tomb Raider (2013) and have been happily making archery headshots.

Tomb Raider (2013). No, really. Saw the new trailer, got nostalgic feels, reinstalled it. I’m right after the helicopter crash and (spoiler alert!) Conrad’s death.

Wrong on several counts. Shuttle program was under development for years before Reagan was elected. I worked on the Space Shuttle flight simulators at NASA/JSC in 1979, and the first Shuttle was launched in April 1981, just three months after Reagan’s inauguration.

tl;dr: Thanks, because I am seriously pondering this, which amazes me after nearly 40 years of using Apple products.

Look, I’m GOP (not an AL voter, though) and I don’t support Moore at all. Not a fan of Jones, but I’d prefer him to Moore in the Senate; Moore’s just creepy.

Having raised several kids — yeah, very much this. Teenage boys, in particular, sweat great amounts of pungent sweat, and pretty much everything they sit or lie on soaks it up. Forcing them to keep their window open as much as the daily weather allows helps, too.

Battle for Middle Earth II. Yes.

Heh. Yeah, I look back and think, “That was really weird.” But I also remember that I thought it tasted good. Plus, I was a bit macabre as a young child, so it appealed to that part of me as well. :-)

Being a Navy brat, I grew up eating, uh, chipped beef on toast on a regular basis.

I wrote this some years ago about how this problem shows up in IT — a lot of the responses I got back spoke to the universality of the problem.

Actually, I re-installed (via Steam) and started a new game of “Space Rangers HD: A War Apart”, a space-trading / pirate-fighting / invasion-defeating game that first came out of Russia over a decade ago (as “Space Rangers 2"). It’s quirky as hell, and an odd mishmash of genres, but it’s great fun.