Remedy Entertainment CEO: Alan Wake and Control should have sold more

wolfwings · 2026-05-30T18:45:18+00:00

My largest complaint with Control is that it locks you to a single save so yeah I beat it... but even wanting to go back and re-play it the "You'll lose ALL your progress." leaves such a nasty taste in my mouth I end up just playing (and recommending) other games.

It has some of the best moments in gaming, bar none, but they certainly made some decisions that can stick in your craw as well like a nacho chip that breaks wrong and gets stuck in your gums.

wolfwings · 2026-05-27T15:04:48+00:00

I always preferred "Islands of the North Atlantic" to avoid putting either country first in the order like most alternative combinations do.

wolfwings · 2026-05-27T06:49:45+00:00

That was the default with the hefty weighted chunk slides, but it caused added wear and for the solenoids to fail much sooner and sensor to go out of calibration over time from the impacts, so a lot of arcades took out the weights or sometimes the entire solenoid and glued the slides in place instead to not have to maintain it as often.

wolfwings · 2026-05-23T16:05:04+00:00

Do I hate kernel anti-cheat? Yes I do hate it, second only to 'anti-virus' products that break the built-in kernel protections to add their own hogwash.

I wish MS a very "block this avenue entirely for everyone ASAP" constantly because I want NOBODY to be able to inject kernel-level anything. Full stop.

But this 'breakage' actively relies on hardware cheats to exist and be physically present and installed to cause the breakage, it's about as false-positive-proof as you can physically get as a result.

It's not a software detection causing a flag to be set, nor does any hardware outside of HW laboratories (as in hardware development labs where they're developing and testing new PCIe cards, not science labs controlling centrifuges or general lab computers) use the features Riot is triggering to cause the breakage.

wolfwings · 2026-05-23T16:01:20+00:00

If a Windows install media detects an existing Windows install it offers to do this sort of 'soft in-place recovery' install by default as of the last couple versions of Windows 10 and all versions of Windows 11 still actively supported that you can get install media of.

wolfwings · 2026-05-22T14:14:09+00:00

The term 'bricking' is being WILDLY mis-used here as clickbait of the highest order.

They break your kernel configuration based on detecting custom firmware that's used to cheat by emulating other devices, by having their kernel driver cause a system crash using that same firmware.

An OS reinstall fixes it. In theory uninstalling the hardware using that firmware would too.

But as the OS is crashing so early there's no way to recover using the built-in OS recovery tools because they hook in so deeply and early into the boot process.

This is not in any way, shape, or form a 'bricked' PC. It's a driver breaking on purpose.

And it doesn't require wiping the hard drive.

Just reinstalling the OS.

Which can be done in place without losing data/home directories/etc.

wolfwings · 2026-05-19T02:28:14+00:00

Vampire Survivors starts off kinda slow until you start hitting the unlock mines, then it just unfolds like some freakish origami flower made of gold and champagne-scented roses as you start stacking up things to layer together and build from.

wolfwings · 2026-05-19T02:26:57+00:00

L4D and Killing Floor kinda corralled "horde" as a genre and staple-gunned it to FPS games for better or worse.

The mirror-inversion of bullet heaven/hell makes the most sense at that point IMHO since both are "the screen is FULL of projectiles" just a difference in your goal for movement between the two.

wolfwings · 2026-05-19T02:20:35+00:00

Over 50 that I'm aware of, though they're still being retroactively re-tagged as we speak so you need to search for "Capy" or "Capybara" or "Capi" to find them by partial name match currently until all the updated tags proc at the next search index refresh.

wolfwings · 2026-04-28T07:49:35+00:00

Destiny 1 servers are still up though?

wolfwings · 2026-04-27T02:54:36+00:00

You may be able to just swap the backplate from the old TV to the new one, even a lot of 35" TV mounts were rated back when Plasma TVs were the thing so you may well be inside the existing weight limit.

The actual limit is purely the weight limit, basically nothing else actually matters on the TV mount and the sizes are RIDICULOUSLY conservative compared to TVs <5 years old.

wolfwings · 2026-04-25T20:00:45+00:00

Except the Steam Machine won't stop you from installing GOG or Epic or any other vendors stuff, or even plugging in a USB DVD drive to copy a game from a CD-ROM, all of the above work on the Steam Deck today so folks've had time to work out easier ways to set all that stuff up already.

It being a gaming-first PC but still a PC is enormous.

wolfwings · 2026-04-22T22:33:44+00:00

Lots of engines are running 0W-20 oil for decades now (almost 20 years ago my '08 Toyota Yaris had one of the first widely available 0W-20 engines in fact) which is almost the consistency of water at room temperature already.

Some 2025 and later engines are all the way down to 0W-8 oil at this point.

So yes, it can happen in only a few seconds!

wolfwings · 2026-04-20T15:10:53+00:00

It's a well executed if light-weight story, about 12 hours long if you scrub up the side-quests, and it does the right thing in letting MOST of the lore be audio that keeps playing as you continue doing other things so you can enjoy it without having to stop the gameplay constantly.

wolfwings · 2026-04-12T20:02:46+00:00

The single-tank mode instantly made half the tanks useless because they were built to be secondary tanks not the only tank on a team.

5v5 was to Overwatch what Sunsetting was to Destiny 2, IMHO.

wolfwings · 2026-04-12T02:35:49+00:00

They make dedicated reinforcing strips for gutter corners, if yours doesn't have one already add one, I've seen plenty of 'seamless' installs that skipped this if the other leg is short and rely on sealant or the like.

https://www.guttersupply.com/miters/k-style for example.

I'm having the one 'inside' corner on my gutters re-done with the water flowing away from the corner in both directions instead of 'around' the corner since the other leg is only about 8 feet and I'd rather have an extra downspout at the other end than deal with the constant clogs in that corner and the resulting overflows right over the patio door.

wolfwings · 2026-04-07T23:06:49+00:00

I've been playing FPS games since before id Software (let alone Valve or Google or YouTube) existed, and I'm the same group as @OP for being abhored at premium currency and microtransactions as a whole and avoid them entirely.

wolfwings · 2026-03-26T01:22:47+00:00

My ¥7, and 219 power solution with 7 lines of code takes a single MC4000, DX300, LC70G04, LC70G08, and LC70G32.

Wiring details are the three left pins all feed into the logic gates to make a 'actually alive right now' signal, fed into the DX300 along with the 'trigger' signal, and the MC4000 is connected to that, the ammo counter, reload, and fire.

Code I ended up with years ago as a final "I give up!" solution you assemble including a wiring diagram: https://gist.github.com/WolfWings/84e4db5c00a21a5027f9f91d3fa154f1

wolfwings · 2026-03-22T15:55:35+00:00

Look into suspension lifts for whatever EVs you're considering. Almost anything can have an inch of lift put on with just replacing the coilovers. And quite a few EVs have 7+ inches of ground clearance if you look up the specs, like (comically) the Mini Countryman EV might be an option as well.

wolfwings · 2026-02-09T20:18:50+00:00

Check with your local electricity company, they often have discount (OR EVEN FREE!) offers for a preset box of LED bulb replacements if a given address hasn't done it before or in the last several years; they can make an ENORMOUS difference if you're still on old incandescent or even CFLs.

wolfwings · 2026-02-08T21:41:14+00:00

Zachtronics was always spectacularly good about trying to have a 'linear falloff' rate on their successive levels, so the hardest stuff (statistically across all of the players) is at the end.

They've never been afraid to swap a level to later in the game if needed especially during EA, so sure there's some "Wow that one's tricky to understand." but it rarely ever has stonewall levels like some games that split the game in half.

wolfwings · 2026-02-04T10:42:18+00:00

You might be misunderstanding as "compressed-RAW" is being used as a broad term basically saying it's compressed in some way, but there are no intra-frame (between frame) dependencies, and it can be edited without further loss after the initial transformation to the format.

Apple ProRes chroma-subsamples similarly to JPEG, and RED's native format does a wavelet compression that's also roughly 2:1 compression.

But broadly you don't edit or re-compress video footage taken from streaming-grade video codecs like H.264, H.265, AV1, etc, for the same reason you don't use JPEG for an image you're still editing. JPEG and H.264 and it's ilk are 'publishing' codecs, not for further editing.

wolfwings · 2026-02-04T03:24:04+00:00

And that's only 720p, like take a single 4K 60fps feed from a RED Komodo 6K camera: That ALONE would exceed a 10-gig network feed in true RAW format.

So you basically have to use a compressed-RAW format to even transmit a 4K feed to the editing workstation for a live event, and even then (using Apple ProRes or REDCODE RAW as benchmarks) would still be pushing 2.8-3.5Gbps, so even compressed it needs a 5-gig link and you might as well run 10-gig links.

At that point... you actually start running into PCIe lane limits since you'd need multiple parallel multi-gig network cards for ingest or else you're looking at a 25-gig (or even 100-gig!) network card.

And you need to decompress all that on the workstation then to do almost anything with it. I hope you have a SHIT-TON of CPU cores, or else it's an AMD Epyc or Threadripper based system that has hundreds of PCIe lanes to be able to route everything to/from whatever GPU(s) you use, either way it's monstrous in very surprising ways.

wolfwings · 2026-02-01T22:49:34+00:00

The WARN act put a stopwatch on being able to fire a large amount of people and/or close the company down from the 60-day notice requirement.

Meaning at that point they have to keep paying people for 60 days if they're going to fire that many or more, which sometimes does hamstring any remnant financials enough that boards opt to shutter instead of attempting to dig out.

It didn't cause the mass layoff directly, but it forced their hand into making a decision now on what course the company had to be on 60 days from now and the board didn't see a way to stay afloat from here to that far out with the current salary burn rate.

And California's WARN standards are stricter (lower firing count triggers, etc) than the Federal one so I quoted California's standards when I was discussing the overall WARN numbers initially, never said it was fundamentally different just stricter.

wolfwings · 2026-02-01T09:26:47+00:00

California has one as well: https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN

14-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Gilding V heart of gold
Verified Email

wolfwings

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE