It was some on board gpu with my super amazing AMD K6-2, it couldn’t even run mega man X without chugging. Then a friend gave me an S3 Virge with a glorious 4mb vram.

Considering it’s technical limitations the game boy had some amazing games. Gargoyles Quest games were amazing

R Type was such a good game

I think it was some asteroid style game in arcade, but first really memorable game was Dizzy 1 on C64. Was a wild time when a couple of quid could get you a magazine, some sweets and a cassette full of indie games and demos.

There is too much to respond to all, will be interesting to see how the wolfire case continues then.

I just wanted to chime in on the last bit.

So as you say steam wins on features, and Epic and MS have both chosen not to compete on features. It’s not that they can’t, they both have the means and money to do so, they just don’t want to invest the money on the infrastructure incase it’s a big flop I guess.

Either way you are making out like the only valid perspective here is focusing on the game price, but as I said to me the feature set is VERY important. Literally the only reason I use steam over other platforms is the features, being able to use any controller and remap it to however I want. Knowing my saves can be transfered to any computer, streaming to the TV so the kids can play games on it etc.

I appreciate not everyone else uses these features, but some of us do, and this is why steam is the better platform. If MS let me stream games to my TV and use controllers properly etc I would happily get game pass, but their platform is rubbish, same for EGS.

This whole thing is just crap platforms complaining they can’t compete when they havent even tried, they just want the free publicity in the hope they can get more users “in the door”.

Wolfire v valve was thrown out right? So they didn’t successfully prove valve were doing anything anti competition.

To my knowledge the price parity is only on steam keys sold elsewhere not for you selling a game on another storefront, happy to be shown evidence that isn’t the case.

In terms of what is a “fair deal” we could quibble about the 30% but that’s literally the only thing up for discussion right? And at the moment that’s an “industry standard” so by all means lower it if they can, I’m all for savings as a consumer, but not at the expense of the service they provide.

For example if Valve personally came to me and said “you can either have games 10% cheaper but we would have to retire X features” I would happily keep the features and forgo the discount.

Also being realistic if Valve were to drop their cut to 20% game prices wouldn’t change, the publishers would just pocket the difference, as we have seen with Epic.

Again most other mainstream platforms take 30% and while I do think they could ALL trim that down a bit, I don’t see why Valve should be the first one to cut back when they offer the most bang for buck, get Sony and MS to reduce their cut and start offering more basic features, then once the competition is ACTUALLY competing we can turn our eyes to Valve.

I think that sums up my perspective here, most storefronts are not trying to compete, they are just offering the bare minimum for same cut and then wondering why everyone wants to use the more feature rich store front… Why wouldnt you?

I don’t think it’s quite as simple as “let’s crack down on steam like other monopolies” as what do you crack down on?

They do little to no anti competitive behaviour, clutching at straws would be that they require you to keep price parity on steam keys (except on sales).

All these other monopolies do lots of shady stuff to get and maintain their monopoly, so you generally want to stop them doing those things. Steam doesn’t do anything shady to maintain it’s monopoly it just carries on improving it’s platform and ironically improving the users experience and other platforms outside of their own.

Like what do you do to stop steam being so popular outside of just arbitrarily making them shitter to make the other store fronts seem ok by comparison?

The 30% cut is often something cited and maybe that could be dropped slightly, but I’m happy for them to keep taking that cut if they continue to invest some of it back into the eco system.

Look at other platforms like Sony, MS who take 30% to sell on their stores, THEN charge you like £5 a month if you want multiplayer and cloud saves etc. Steam just gives you all this as part of the same 30%.

Epic literally does anti competitive things like exclusivity and taking games they have some stake in off other store fronts or crippling their functionality.

Steam has improved how I play games, it has cloud saves, virtual controllers, streaming, game sharing, remote play together, VR support, Mod support and this is all part of their 30%, the other platforms take same and do less, or take less but barely function as a platform.

Anti monopoly is great when a company is abusing it’s position, but I don’t feel Valve is, they are just genuinely good for pc gaming and have single handily made PC gaming a mainstream platform.

• Suikoden 2
• Final Fantasy 7 (original)
• Dark Souls
• Resident Evil 1
• Castlevania SOTN
• D&D Warriors of the Eternal Sun
• Resident Evil 1 Remake (GC)
• Gran Turismo 4
• Road Rash 2
• Oblivion

Big shout out to SFA2, FFT:A/2, BOF series, Roadwarden.

10 feels too little to condense 40 years of games.

I’ve tried them and they were hit and miss, also to make things more niche most of my music is a mix of video game music and film/anime music, which Spotify is quite short on.

Spotify and other services are trying to make you discover new music. While that’s useful I just want it to analyse my local music and work out what to play.

Its a shame the tech exists but as its patented (I think) you can’t simply make an open source version, I believe really it’s just a 2d graph plot against tempo and some other metric derived from analysis.

I just want an mp3 player to replace my Walkman with sensme, they killed sensme and nothing has replaced it so to date the best mp3 player I own is that little thing, I tell it what mood I am in and it always delivers, I dread the day it dies.

I’ve tried cloud based music services like Spotify etc they are not really same thing as it’s just global playlists for a mood/genre, not something tailored to your tastes in a set catalogue.

All people who think this is a good read should Google about the Bitcasa saga, that was a wild ride.

Maybe but I don’t know how they can realistically do anything worthwhile. As forcing companies to keep staff on and not automate isn’t a good outcome and isn’t fixing the societal issues that make this a problematic scenario.

If a robot/ai/machine can do a job safer, more efficiently, quicker than a person, it should 1000000% be automated by the given thing. This has been happening for hundreds of years in all industries.

In isolation the automation of roles is a great thing, but the way society is currently run your entire quality of existence is tied to your job, and retraining and getting a new job is harder than ever and costs a lot.

If society made it easier for people to retrain and get better jobs and slowly replaced all those bad jobs with an automated workforce it would be better for everyone.

Can’t see it happening though…

It sounds like it may build some playlists like what I would want but depends on how it builds the metadata, as sensme worked off tempo and beats etc to classify music into moods etc.

Also for me personally it seems like plexamp would be more geared for people who’s devices are always online, which is another reason the mp3 player is great as I don’t need the Internet to access all my music etc.

I still have a Sony Walkman with sensme. I loved being able to set a mood and set it going.

These days you can no longer get sensme in any way, there are no android/ios music players with that functionality and cloud based music services offer a sort of skewed version of it but it isn’t really constrained in what music YOU like and tbh most of my local stuff is a mix of game/tv/film music and chip tune stuff which you don’t really get on cloud music services anyway.

I really wish there was an android app that did same thing as nothing fills that niche and I’ve tried making complex playlists etc but it’s a massive pita when you have gigs and gigs of music.