And even in the cases when you think it might have games, it turns out they’re not on the cartridge.

Yes, that’s exactly one of the scenarios described therein.

Ragnar Benson wrote a whole book about that.

Alas, flamethrowers are illegal in my state.

That falls under the category of “expectations.” Run software contemporary to your machine and it’ll fly just as fast as it ever did. Go ahead, slap Windows 98 on that bad boy.

Words of wisdom from my father, an engineer:

“The computer isn’t any slower than the day you bought it. Only your expectations of it have changed.”

Fortunately (?) my PSU let the smoke out about three years after I bought the initial one for that build which had IIRC a pair of 7950GTs in it from my previous machine, in SLI. So I had the opportunity to throw a modern-ish Corsair 850w power supply in it which has all the modular plugs I need. That box has had a succession of random graphics cards in it ranging from that old pair of 7950GTs, then a GTX680, then finally my current GTX1080Ti. Honestly, the 1080 is still plenty enough for most games in 1080p (possibly serendipitously) as long as you don’t feel the pathological need for raytracing or frame generation.

You can sidestep the NVMe issue as long as you don’t care about 100% speed by slapping a PCIe to NVMe adapter board in one of your handy unused x16 slots now that you’re no longer using SLI (if that reminds you of anyone you know). I’m not certain booting off of that is viable and I haven’t bothered to try to figure it out, so the boot drive in that machine is a SATA SSD currently.

On the bright side, that board has ten SATA ports so turning into a drive farm is a trivial prospect if you’re into that kind of thing.

It says in the article.

The reason given is rising raw materials costs, i.e. metals, and the price increases they’re talking about are on the order of around 10% which is obviously a slap in the face along with everything else that’s going on in the hardware world, but by the same token pretty minimal compared to said selfsame everything else.

I think I paid $40 for my CPU cooler. So, if I ever need to buy a another one for some reason and now it’s $44, well, I guess I’ll live.

Hell, I have a Sandy Bridge based machine I built in 2012. It’s getting there, 14 years old now, and with its 1080ti in there it can still play most games just fine. It’s not my primary rig anymore but it’s still trucking the same as it ever was.

Mainstream PC performance really hit its plateau by, when, like 2018? I imagine somebody with a machine that’s only 8 years old will probably do just fine unless some critical and irreplaceable component in it explodes.

Your example sounds like Ikaruga if it were deliberately designed to be annoying.

…We probably shouldn’t give any mobile game developers any ideas.

Also the model number for this friggin’ thing.

Especially the gold chests that give you a fiver. However, my gripe is with the 3-4 second delay after it goes “bling” but before it presents you the button that allows you to dismiss the popup.

Make sure the edge of your bed isn’t resting on something it ought not to be and/or doesn’t have any crap stuck to the underside of it. My Qidi has two plastic tabs sticking up at the rear which are supposed to be end stops to assist you in lining up the magnetic plate back onto its base, but if you’re not careful you can wind up with the back edge of the base siting on top of them which has the net effect of making the build surface the equivalent of about a 1:64 scale skateboard quarter pipe. This has predictable results if you try to print anything on the back third of it or so.

Hey, our boat landed here 419 years ago. That’s totally different, see.

Yeah, Sarah Palin can see it from there and everything.

This reminds me in a roundabout way that I still need to order tires for the KLR. Spring needs to hurry up already.

Basically every console RPG ever. Certainly those which are not voice acted, and present characters “talking” at you by slowly ghost typing their lines out one character at a time into a text box and then awaiting your input at the end before proceeding to the next line, but inevitably with the dialog box refusing to even start listening for button presses until some seconds after I’ve read the text multiple times over, plus its partially completed form several times more.

I’m adding another dishonorable mention on this front which isn’t even a text box: That fucking treasure chest opening animation in Vampire Survivors. If you know, you know.

I’m always verbose. If you see that penguin knife over a post you ought to know what you’re signing up for.

Voles are tiny, like field mouse sized, and they’re also short and fat. Stoats are long and thin, like a ferret. They’re also much larger than voles. If whatever you have is one or the other, it’ll be hard to mix up between those two if you can get a good look at it.

Meta.

They’re almost always .bik files somewhere in the game directory. I have no clue why so many games still insist on using this specific format in particular even today, but at least it makes them easy to find. I have determined that quite a few games will barf if you delete the files outright, but if you just replace them with an empty text file with the same name it will still allow the game to launch.

Console players are usually out of luck.