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Steam | 02.2016 - Orangeade

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J

Jazz573

Member
kagamin said:
Japan.
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I'm sure they're used to it. :p They used to be owned by a Japanese company. Yes that company was called JAST, but they don't exist anymore, because they all went to other eroge devs. Only their US branch exists still, and of course they are more than that now, because J-LIst is the main part of the company (although I don't think it existed when JAST USA became a thing in 1996 or so). Apparently JAST USA is just a pet project for the owner of J-List. :p
 
S

shortsFortallPeople

Banned
Rhaknar said:
I adored enemy unknown but never played within. A long war enemy within run wouldnt be a bad idea
Click to expand...
I finished enemy unknown at launch but even still enemy within took awhile to get past that initial hump of "why am I playing this again" to "did I really put 4 straight hours into this thing again?" The additions they made with how you can customize your soldiers and the different branches and stuff really adds to the experience.

They also added some interesting options like allowing you to reset the RNG seeds with a save scum option and to randomize skill trees and attributes, among other things.

If you have it already and aren't going to pick up xcom2 for a while then I really suggest you give it a shot.
 
K

kagamin

Member
Jazz573 said:
I'm sure they're used to it. :p They used to be owned by a Japanese company. Yes that company was called JAST, but they don't exist anymore, because they all went to other eroge devs. Only their US branch exists still, and of course they are more than that now, because J-LIst is the main part of the company (although I don't think it existed when JAST USA became a thing in 1996 or so). Apparently JAST USA is just a pet project for the owner of J-List. :p
Click to expand...

That's interesting info though and I didn't know.
 
E

ExoSoul

Banned
SalsaShark said:
jTNp5t5.jpg


bruh
Click to expand...

What? No diamond?!
You're shite!!!!
which is the color of mine
hatty
 
corrosivefrost

corrosivefrost

Member
kagamin said:
But isn't it like limited hats, but worse (and also better) because you can't trade for them? :p
Click to expand...

Unless you can sell them for cash (like rare CS:GO/KF2 skins), actually like the aesthetic and would use it as your customization, or just want to brag cause you think you've got skills or something... it's pointless and Dr. Dogg shouldn't feel bad. :D
 
S

Sch1sm

Member
AHA-Lambda said:
Just finished Firewatch. That was mediocre. Spoiler bars below are just thematic in nature, but I'll keep them blacked out considering how new this is.

Gameplay wise, it gets quite tedious too quickly, despite how short it is (5-6 hours my arse), due to how much backtracking there is and the need to keep checking your map to make sure you're not going off path.
Click to expand...

...Even at its price point it's mediocre? Okay. Maybe winter sale. It'll be like... 7.49CDN by then, right?

I ruined it for myself because I'll forget eventually, but that's a lot of unanswered questions at the end of the day. Does it look like it'll lead to a sequel?
 
S

Sch1sm

Member
Oreoleo said:
Firewatch? Not even a little.
Click to expand...

That's disappointing. It was a title I looked forward to. Granted just based on the art style. But then the pacing made me question preordering. And a few general writing complaints told me to wait. It's too short and I've yet to see a good review to throw the money at it, so I bough Unravel (non-Steam bc EA IP) instead and it plays fantastically. Not a game I expected them to publish ever.
 
Dsyndrome

Dsyndrome

Member
AHA-Lambda said:
Just finished Firewatch. That was mediocre. Spoiler bars below are just thematic in nature, but I'll keep them blacked out considering how new this is.

Gameplay wise, it gets quite tedious too quickly, despite how short it is (5-6 hours my arse), due to how much backtracking there is and the need to keep checking your map to make sure you're not going off path.

Story wise, it reminded me of why I find Sunshine a problematic movie; it feels composed of two distinct and separate halfs. In this it starts with a
very personal storytelling focus on your main character's past, and where he finds himself now in his life
. This was by far the better half.

The second half ramps up in intensity becoming an almost faux
thriller
, that by the revelations of the end underwhelms and left me with a profound feeling of "is that it?"



ok, real spoilers now but some things I didn't get:
Ned was the one doing all the surveillance? So what was the camp with the surveillance equipment all about? It manned 3 people, had military grade tech and kept recorded logs of psychological behaviour. I highly doubt that was him.

What happened to the girls? Who wrecked their tent? Ned?

Why would Ned even bother stalking you and D? Why mess around with these weird tracking devices and all that shit, the guy seems to want to be left alone but he's messing around getting in everyone's shit
Click to expand...

Is it really Gone Homeish with projecting one atmosphere (creepy horror vibes) and the game being totally not that? If that's the case, may not get it at all.
Volimar said:
I haven't even touched psionics yet in XCOM 2.
Click to expand...
Just captured a Sectoid Commander in EW, hopefully doesn't take too long to interrogate and train a new psi operative.
 
R

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
Firewatch is Gone Home all over again, and thats coming from someone that really liked Gone Home. But I didnt pay 20 for Gone Home, I paid 5 :/

Time invested has always been important to me, much more so these days when money is tight. You know whats also 20 and great value? Darkest Dungeon which ive put 50 hours into. Or Dragons Dogma for 30 which I put 40 hours into.

I just cant justify paying 20 euros for a 3 hour game, im sorry :/

Also, unrelated but one of my dogs has diabetes apparently. Dont diabetics need insulin every day? Thats gonna be lovely on the wallet. And isnt that shit injected? How the fuck am I gonna know how to give a dog injections, ill be afraid to pop a air bubble into him (or have I seen too many movies?) >_>

Today was not a good day.

Volimar said:
I haven't even touched psionics yet in XCOM 2.
Click to expand...

I didnt touch it at all until I was on the last mission. And now its too late to try it because it takea ages to get all the skills, ive been trying but at this point im just dalaying finishing the game. I have every upgrade posible, every continent and tower. Stupid psi soldiers, game should have been more clear about it :(
 
lashman

lashman

Steam-GAF's Official Ambassador to Gaming-GAF
When it comes to Windows 10 privacy, don't trust amateur analysts

Another day, another sensational report from Forbes. Oh my goodness, is Windows 10 really "phoning home" thousands of times a day? Nope. in fact, anyone who has even a basic understanding of how networks work should cringe at this shoddy report.

Gordon F. Kelly of Forbes is at it again, whipping up a frenzy over Windows 10. This time he claims to have found SHOCKING EVIDENCE that Microsoft's telemetry is collecting STAGGERING amounts of data from Windows 10 users.

Sadly, what Mr. Kelly's post* proves is how very, very little he understands about modern computing or networking. Seriously, his article is pure gibberish, technically. But more than 100,000 people have read it so far, and apparently they believe Mr. Kelly.

I feel sorry for those poor benighted souls.

What makes this whole sorry state of affairs even worse is that Mr. Kelly hasn't even done any of his own research. Instead, he is relying on ... well, I'll let him tell you:

Blowing the lid on it this week is Voat user CheesusCrust whose extensive investigation found Windows 10 contacts Microsoft to report data thousands of times per day.
Click to expand...

Voat is a Reddit clone. The user CheesusCrust is ... well, we really have no idea who he is.

Henceforth, I shall refer to him as "Mr. Crust."

There is nothing in Mr. Kelly's article to indicate that he spoke with Mr. Crust to verify his credentials or gather any additional data.

What Mr. Crust did was to install Windows 10 Enterprise edition (apparently an evaluation version) in a virtual machine, using the free VirtualBox running on Linux Mint. Mr. Crust says he performed a custom installation where he "disabled three pages of tracking options."

[A side note here: Actual network administrators configuring Windows 10 Enterprise have hundreds of Group Policy options at their disposal, including fine-grained controls over telemetry and privacy settings. There's even a fourth option, not available to users of retail and OEM Windows 10 editions, that dials telemetry back to an absolute minimum. There is no evidence that Mr. Crust is aware of these options.]

And then, Mr. Crust reports, he "configured the DD-WRT router to drop and log all connection attempts via iptables through the DD-WRT router by Windows 10 Enterprise."

Oh dear.

Mr. Crust says his intent was to "analyse the network traffic of Windows 10 on a clean install." If there are any readers with networking experience in the audience, they might see the flaw in his methodology. If your software needs to connect to an outside resource to perform a specific task, and the connection drops unexpectedly, you will not get any traffic to analyze. Even worse, when the software detects an unsuccessful connection it will try to connect again. And again and again and again.

So what might have been a single, short data exchange could instead turn into multiple connection attempts.

Mr. Kelly is outraged:

The raw numbers come out as follows: in an eight hour period Windows 10 tried to send data back to 51 different Microsoft IP addresses over 5500 times. After 30 hours of use, Windows 10 expanded that data reporting to 113 non-private IP addresses. Being non-private means there is the potential for hackers to intercept this data. I'd argue this is the greatest cost to owning Windows 10.
Click to expand...

I might have to pause here for a second to allow those of my readers with networking experience to try to make sense of those last two sentences. Don't even try. It's gibberish.

Helpfully, Mr. Crust supplied the raw data, which I plugged into a spreadsheet so I could perform my own extensive investigation. The results are unintentionally hilarious.

First of all, 602 connection attempts were to 192.168.1.255, using UDP port 137. That's the broadcast address where Windows computers on a local network announce their presence and look for other network computers using the NetBIOS Name Service. It's perfectly normal traffic.

Another 630 of those connection attempts were Domain Name System lookups to the router itself, 192.168.1.1, using UDP port 53. That address is the router itself.

Why is Windows performing those DNS lookups? One big reason is that's how Windows checks whether you have access to the Internet. If there's a problem with your Internet connection, you get a yellow overlay on the network icon down at the right side of the taskbar.

To do that test, Windows first performs a DNS lookup of www.msftncsi.com. It then makes an HTTP request to retrieve the page ncsi.txt from that site. This file is a plain-text file and contains only the text "Microsoft NCSI." (NCSI stands for Network Connection Status Icon.) Finally, it performs a DNS query for dns.msftncsi.com.

The whole procedure is extensively documented .

DNS queries aren't "spying." Neither are NetBIOS name broadcasts on your local network. So far, that's 22.3 percent of the so-called traffic that's easily accounted for as "not spying," unless you think there's something sinister about a two-word text file that has been downloaded trillions of times from that poor Microsoft server.

Next up is a staggering 1,619 connection attempts using UDP port 3544 to the address 94.245.121.253, which Mr. Crust was unable to identify, along with another five attempts using the same port to other servers.

That address does indeed belong to Microsoft. It's a Teredo server, teredo.ipv6.microsoft.com. Teredo is an Internet standard that is used to supply an IPv6 address to a PC that speaks only IPv4, making it easier to perform secure and reliable communication between two endpoints without having to worry about network translation. It's also well documented and doesn't involve any exchange of information other than IP addresses.

In short, Windows keeps trying to make a simple connection using its IPv6 capabilities, but the router keeps dropping those connection attempts. So it keeps trying again and again.

That's another 1,624 entries we can add to the "not spying" list. So far, by my tally, more than 52 percent of the connection attempts are completely harmless and involve no data collection at all.

Another three connection attempts are using port 123. That's the Network Time Protocol, which devices use to retrieve the current time from authoritative servers on the Internet. Setting the clock on your computer is not "spying."

Mr. Crust's list has another 549 connection attempts on port 80, which is plain old HTTP. Windows doesn't have a web server installed by default, so those are all incoming connections, with Windows trying to retrieve data from Microsoft's servers. They're not sending it the other direction.

Many of the addresses on the list belong to content delivery networks (CDNs) like Akamai Technologies and CloudFlare. Some of those downloads are possibly trying to refresh live tiles in the provisioned MSN apps (News, Sports, Weather, Money, and so on). There are perhaps some updates to the Windows Store in there too.

We might know more if Mr. Crust had allowed his machine to complete some of those connections so he could perform some actual traffic analysis. But he didn't, so we can't.

We can, however, safely conclude that none of those connections would involve any "spying."

Which leaves us with 2,100 connection attempts in eight hours over port 443. Those are secure (HTTPS) connections designed to exchange data so that it can't be intercepted in transit.

We have no idea how many secure connections that machine would have made in eight hours had Mr. Crust actually allowed them to complete. The number would almost certainly have been smaller, perhaps by an order of magnitude or even two.

And of course, those connections are not all about telemetry.

The most important one is the Software Licensing Service, which checks the state of Windows activation periodically. By dropping those connections, Mr. Crust is not allowing those activation and validation checks to complete. Windows gets very cranky when that happens, which could explain why there were more than 1,700 connection attempts to a handful of addresses in a single range of IP addresses managed by Microsoft.

Other content that gets delivered securely over port 443 includes Windows updates, Windows Defender updates, and updates from the Windows Store for apps that are provisioned on every Windows 10 machine. Windows 10 attempts to contact OneDrive, also securely, to see if there are any saved settings for the current user. There are lists of known malicious websites that get delivered to the SmartScreen service in a hashed and encrypted format.

And yes, there is certainly some telemetry data in there. We have no idea whether Mr. Crust changed the default Diagnostic and Usage settings to Basic. If he had, there would probably be a single ping to Microsoft's servers when the machine starts up, which would disclose what that setting was, whether Windows Defender was up to date, and whether his installation had experienced any failures in software or driver installation.

If he had kept the Enhanced or Full settings, Windows would periodically deliver a batch of anonymized usage data to Microsoft. (Of course, since he wasn't actually using the machine, there would be no data to exchange.) But we don't know, because Mr. Crust didn't actually do any traffic analysis.

Meanwhile, Mr. Kelly might want to write a little less and study a little more. I know some networking experts who've done some excellent video training courses where he could learn a lot about TCP and UDP and HTTP. I could even recommend some books that might be helpful.

But something tells me he really isn't interested in learning.
Click to expand...
 
L

Leafhopper

Banned
Time of Dragons, uhh well in time maybe can be the real DRAGON: THE GAME but, it has too many problems. The game is free to play but so free to play that it feels cheap.

You have an assortment of dragons that all have laser guns and a special ability you can activate with items you can buy, like flashbangs. It being in Unity, it kinda runs like poop. There is only Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch and TDM involved just spawn camping. Flying isn't overly cumbersome either, somehow.

Good ideas but, it's too demo feeling for me to ask people to play it even as a dumb joke.
 
J

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
L

LurkerPrime

Member
Leafhopper said:
Time of Dragons, uhh well in time maybe can be the real DRAGON: THE GAME but, it has too many problems. The game is free to play but so free to play that it feels cheap.

You have an assortment of dragons that all have laser guns and a special ability you can activate with items you can buy, like flashbangs. It being in Unity, it kinda runs like poop. There is only Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch and TDM involved just spawn camping. Flying isn't overly cumbersome either, somehow.

Good ideas but, it's too demo feeling for me to ask people to play it even as a dumb joke.
Click to expand...

The Divinity series is here for all your dragon needs.

Or, if you must, Skyrim will also suffice.
 
F

freshVeggie

Member
In my quest for something more traditional I'm tackling Metro 2033 now. Vanilla, not Redux.
JgDburn.jpg
2abAxmQ.jpg
Click to expand...
Game looks really nice apart from the blurry texture here and the odd face there.
z3K7YZS.jpg
Click to expand...
But man, man the UI is hideous! What were they thinking? Looks so off with the otherwise great visuals.
Turned on Russian VO and English subs but so much is not subtitled. How am I gonna get immersed in the world when I can't understand what little Andrej is talking with his dad?
There is also heavy screen-tearing which is still somewhat present when forcing it through Nvidia. Will try forcing in-game one through config files tomorrow.
Game recognized my plugged in DS3 but wouldn't let me switch to KB/M. Not even after unplugging it, haha. Had to google and find a fix for it.
Man, I'm in for something ain't I. But the atmosphere is nice and gunplay feels great. I'm liking it.
lashman said:
When it comes to Windows 10 privacy, don't trust amateur analysts

Another day, another sensational report from Forbes. Oh my goodness, is Windows 10 really "phoning home" thousands of times a day? Nope. in fact, anyone who has even a basic understanding of how networks work should cringe at this shoddy report.
Click to expand...
I'm sorry man. Like I told you, it's Linux from now on. Gotta learn my sudo. Been nice knowing you Windows, best OS I used o7
 
C

Crimsonclaw111

Member
freshVeggie said:
In my quest for something more traditional I'm tackling Metro 2033 now. Vanilla, not Redux.

Game looks really nice apart from the blurry texture here and the odd face there.

But man, man the UI is hideous! What were they thinking? Looks so off with the otherwise great visuals.
Turned on Russian VO and English subs but so much is not subtitled. How am I gonna get immersed in the world when I can't understand what little Andrej is talking with his dad?
There is also heavy screen-tearing which is still somewhat present when forcing it through Nvidia. Will try forcing in-game one through config files tomorrow.
Game recognized my plugged in DS3 but wouldn't let me switch to KB/M. Not even after unplugging it, haha. Had to google and find a fix for it.
Man, I'm in for something ain't I. But the atmosphere is nice and gunplay feels great. I'm liking it.

I'm sorry man. Like I told you, it's Linux from now on. Gotta learn my sudo. Been nice knowing you Windows, best OS I used o7
Click to expand...

I think I cut my eyes on your images.
 
O

Oreoleo

Member
Sch1sm said:
That's disappointing. It was a title I looked forward to. Granted just based on the art style. But then the pacing made me question preordering. And a few general writing complaints told me to wait. It's too short and I've yet to see a good review to throw the money at it, so I bough Unravel (non-Steam bc EA IP) instead and it plays fantastically. Not a game I expected them to publish ever.
Click to expand...

Disappointing is definitely the word for it. The game is absolutely gorgeous but it falls short in both gameplay and narrative IMO. Not bad by any means but I expected something more.
 
Tizoc

Tizoc

Member
From the rise of toom braider steam sales thread
Pixel Warrior said:
Steam sales threads are always great fun. Not a single PC game sells well, we should all know that by now, it's just NVIDIA giving hundreds of thousands of games to everyone or hundreds of thousands of cd keys being sold illegally without the developer getting paid. Why do they even bother with PC gaming anymore.
Click to expand...
Really hoping this a bait joke post xp
 
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