I’ve played a bit of the Pokemon Adventures Red version romhack, but never completed that as it wasn’t particularly interesting. What ROM hacks would you recommend? I’d like a challenge but nothing crazy.

Gosh, I’ve realized I don’t finish games lol. I’ve put many hours in Forza Horizon, Factorio, Pokemon, Cities Skylines, and incremental games but here are the ones I actually beat in 2023 so far, although I’m about to beat Pokemon Scarlet so I’ll include that too.

1. Pokemon Sun (cartridge). (4/10). Why am I rating this so low? It’s my least favorite Pokemon game I’ve played. I finished it this year, but started it in 2018. The game leans way too heavy on the story and not in the gameplay. The game felt like a huge downgrade from OR/AS. It also plays incredibly slow. Not touching Gen 7 again. The battles were nice and intense with enough difficulty to excite me though.

2. Chip Defense (8/10). You can find it on F-droid, and it’s free. It’s a little tower defense game with a theme on CPUs and instructions. It took me a few hours to beat all the levels and it hooked me.

3. Pokemon White (emulator), limited pokemon center challenge. (9.3/10). I absolutely love Gen 5 and I did a challenge a lot like a Nuzlocke but more interesting and far less stressful. You can only catch the first pokemon on each route, and any non-forced heal would cost 5000*2^(number of prior heals done) poke dollars. That way, I could have a pokemon faint and not have it be the end of my 40 hour playthrough. I actually (unintentionally) lost to Ghetsis at the end but I planned for that and had enough money for one more heal, and then beat him the 2nd time.

4. Factorio Bob’s/Angel’s (hardcore Factorio mod). (9.5/10). Do you like Factorio but want 10x more complicated recipes that include lots of byproducts to deal with? Then this mod is for you! It took me 123 hours to launch a rocket, and apparently that’s pretty quick. The base is one huge pile of spaghetti with a 90 lane bus split into three.

5. Pokémon Scarlet (cartridge). (8/10). I haven’t quite gotten to the credits yet but I’ve beaten the Top Champion so I’m very close. This game is one of the most fun pokemon games imo despite being extremely flawed. The open world is a huge breath of fresh air after the last 4 gens being 4 big lines. The frame drops are not the really annoying thing about this game, it’s the cutscenes and long battle animations. (Gen 7 was even worse with this). The exploration isn’t groundbreaking but I love how random encounters were ditched for overworld pokemon (even with the lamentable draw distance), that you could run into and instantly fight without a 10s cutscene playing. Trainers are finally all optional. I don’t play for the story but it’s one of the better ones for pokemon games. Having multiple arcs at the same time keeps things interesting for me. The game isn’t the most difficult (probably average+ for pokemon standards) but I made it satisfyingly hard on myself when forcing myself to comply with set mode, no items in battle, and trying to win while underleveled. Also the music is a masterpiece, bravo Giacomo.

How is this even legal? So now suddenly every chromium extension has to go through a play store style review? How is Google entitled to do this on their competitor’s browsers?

Weird. I have a Ryzen 9 5900HX (about Ryzen 7 3700 performance), Radeon RX6800M (15% slower than RX6700XT), 32GB DDR4 RAM, and a 2TB 970 Evo Plus SSD, which is 40% filled right now.

I know a lot of the recent increase in the launch and shut down time of Steam has to do with this stupid splash screen. It waits for the network for about 8s even though I have good Internet, and takes a long time to do other stuff as well.

Interesting. I’ve only had Steam since 2017 but currently it’s the slowest it’s ever been.

It takes 20s to start and 5s to shut down on fast hardware. This is 6x slower than the electron-based open source Heroic launcher. It’s also 20x slower than opening a web browser, considerably slower than opening Word, LibreOffice, unmodded Factorio, Kdenlive (a full-featured video editor), Cities Skylines 2 (known for poor optimization lol), or even the 11GB Quartus Prime (used for programming FPGAs) It’s not far off from Windows itself.

The only apps slower to open than Steam are large games, some pro-level software, and the absolutely horrific MS Teams desktop app and Epic Games Store.

You mean rent premium (it’s a subscription of course)

Forza Horizon 4 did this but worse. It would be an unskippable 2 minute video ad ignoring your volume settings. It only played 5 times in my 45 hours of gameplay but it was so damn unacceptable that it’s reminding me to give that game a negative review.

Forza Horizon 5 does not do this. Get that game or something else instead.

They should allow premium users to use third party YouTube clients using an API, like Reddit before Spez’s war on third party apps.

It is currently overhyped and so much of it just seems to be copying the same 3 generative AI tools into as many places as possible. This won’t work out because it is expensive to run the AI models. I can’t believe nobody talks about this cost.

Where AI shines is when something new is done with it, or there is a significant improvement in some way to an existing model (more powerful or runs on lower end chips, for example).

This is my biggest concern about video games when I become a parent. My parents were far more concerned about “violence,” but I’d rather have a 10yo child play doom than candy crush. One might initially look more dangerous to the untrained eye, but looks can be deceiving.

You probably mean the 13700H, but yeah. I wonder if there’s a way to separate the P and E cores in the graph.

No, it’s a premium commodity because of how much Apple marks up the storage cost. 128GB costs you $100, even though you can buy a 2TB SSD (or 6TB HDD) for under that.

You can click on the files it shows, and if it’s a .exe file you can start the program

My phone (Moto G Stylus 5G 2022) costed $300 and has 8GB RAM and 256GB storage

Use “everything” by VoidTools to search the file system. It’s the perfect search tool, very powerful and lightning fast.

On storage, the markup is about 2000%.

And on RAM if we compare to DDR5 (not totally fair because of how Apple’s unified memory works), it’s about 800% marked up.

The unfortunate consequence of this is that old working apps need compatibility updates.

What I’m noticing is that the first game had 2015 graphics and on a medium to large city runs at cinematic framerates (20-30fps). On Cities 2 the graphics are a mishmash of 2010 and 2025 graphics that run somewhat poorly, but also stutter a lot. On my 10k city I’m getting 45fps average with low-medium settings with the recommended changes to improve performance, but large lag spikes are frequent.

I’ve been having playable framerates but they’re not improving. On a 10k city I get about 45fps average but I frequently experience frame drops which definitely make it less enjoyable to play the game. My specs are Ryzen 9 5900HX, RX6800M, 32GB RAM

Interesting. I’m guessing the changes were too big to just be added incrementally in updates to GTK 3?