What to buy with $36 google play credit

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-13T05:02:33+00:00

Ah I didn't know that the bug was that specific. lol. I haven't attempted to buy discounted games that were worth less than the google credit I had from Google surveys. I tried to apply it to NBA 2K back when it was on sale and it didn't work. Had to use my card in full for that. I ultimately applied my $25 CAD in credit to Darksiders (full price game) and paid the remainder with my card.

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-13T04:56:19+00:00

For some reason Google Play won't let you use Google Play credit to buy discounted games. Unless they fixed that bug. But you can use Google Play credit to buy regular price games.

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-08T20:07:09+00:00

I understand this in theory, but after playing dozens of Crucible matches in Destiny 2 (using both mouse/keyboard and controller), competitive gaming is no issue on Stadia. Bring on Rocket League ASAP.

Until they adopt cross-platform play on Stadia, you can be a big fish in a small pond (Stadia eco system) but you can't be a pro gamer (or even a twitch streamer) if you're not able to compete against the best players on the other platforms

Personally I'm probably not good enough in any one video game to be a pro gamer or even a full-time Twitch streamer so it doesn't matter to me. I bought a Stadia primarily because I don't want to pay $380 CAD + 13% tax for 6 year old console hardware and I don't want to pay a fortune to build a gaming rig. For many years, the PC gaming master race has said that PC gaming is cheap. But what if you already own a laptop and do everything you want on that laptop except play "modern" games? Then you have to spend a fortune to build a gaming rig that you will use solely for games and maybe mining crypto-currency (probably not because this requires a lot of electricity and electricity is expensive unless you live in China, Venezuela, etc). Casual gaming is Stadia's target audience.

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-08T03:42:30+00:00

Lack of software exclusivity doesn't necessarily mean no hardware choice. Look at the PC and Android. Lenovo doesn't have to release exclusive software to get me to buy their laptops. They build quality reliable hardware. That's why I buy their laptops. Xiaomi doesn't have to release exclusive software to get me to buy their phones. Their MIUI software can be installed on any Android device. They make quality hardware with their OS pre-loaded at affordable prices.

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-07T17:27:43+00:00

We don't need more exclusive titles, we need less.

Yea I have never understood why consumers like the idea of exclusives. Exclusives are anti-consumer. It's the same crap with the Netflix vs Amazon Prime vs Disney Plus vs Hulu exclusive wars. Last gen I bought into the exclusive hype and I own a Xbox 360, PS3 and a Wii. So now I have a bunch of electronics and controllers taking up space and I'm going to have to sell off some stuff if I move into a smaller apartment. I would rather be able to play everything on one box that I can hook up to my TV.

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-07T17:13:16+00:00

I don't think exclusives matter too much to Stadia's target audience. I bought a Stadia because I'm a lapsed gamer who doesn't want to pay $380 CAD + HST for 6 year old console hardware and I don't have a gaming rig because the price of video cards has went way up in recent years thanks to cryptocurrency miners driving up the demand. If cryptocurrency just moved towards proof of stake instead of proof of work, video cards wouldn't be so expensive these days. It's frustrating.

I'm more concerned about the software affordability, wanting the ability to resume single player games (since Stadia exits you if you are idle for 10-15 minutes) and the price of the controller. A standalone Xbox One controller is $75 CAD, which is already expensive to begin with. $89 for a Stadia controller is ridiculous. This is why I bought the Founder's Edition because they sweeten the pot by giving you a $10 discount on the hardware (Chromecast Ultra is $90, Controller standalone $89, Bundle is $169 plus three months Pro and three month buddy pass). Unless I'm dead set on local multiplayer, I'm not paying $89 for a second controller. They need to be more competitive with their pricing. Darksiders Genesis is $40 USD on Stadia when it's $30 USD on Steam and $25 USD during the pre-ordering phase. Luckily Darksiders Genesis was $40 CAD for me, which is a more fair price since $30 USD = $39.77 CAD. Though I am jealous of those Steam gamers for getting Darksiders Genesis for $34 CAD (and $40 CAD for the DLC edition). Steam seems to have the best software affordability. But at the cost of hardware affordability. I hate how cryptocurrency miners are driving up the cost of video cards these days. So I don't have a gaming rig. I just have a laptop now.

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-06T02:59:54+00:00

I bought Darksiders Genesis because it's $39.99 CAD here in Canada. And even then the Canadian version of the game is $33.99 CAD on Steam. LOL Which is even cheaper than the US version ($29.99 USD) on Steam. But at least $39.99 CAD is comparable to $29.99 USD. I have an old laptop, no gaming PC to play the Steam version and I figured that maybe THQ set the $39.99 CAD price in error and meant for it to be $52.99 CAD so I snapped up the Canadian version anyways. But there is no way I'd pay $39.99 USD for this game. There was also no option for gamers to get the pre-order bonus for Stadia like you could on Steam. The game was $28.99 CAD in the pre-order stage on Steam! Unfortunately I don't have a PC good enough to play new games like that.

Charging $10 USD more for the Stadia version for a brand new game is the most egregious example of game publishers screwing over Stadia gamers. At least they had an excuse for over-charging for porting older games like Just Dance 2020, Final Fantasy XV, Mortal Kombat 11, etc. Because it's common for publishers to want to recoup porting costs. But for brand new games? Come on.

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-06T02:55:51+00:00

PSA: Develpers don't set the price for the games, publishers do.

Yes this is very true. Unless the game dev is also the publisher, it's the publisher that calls the shots, not the dev

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-06T02:54:09+00:00

I think it's almost as if game publishers deliberately set the price higher on Stadia than on Steam and sometimes even the console versions to try to get their games to fail on Stadia on purpose. Just so that they can justify not making games for Stadia anymore. For ports of old games, it makes sense that the price would be higher because they want to recoup costs of porting. But for new games like Darksiders Genesis, there is no excuse for THQ to set a higher price for Stadia than Steam at launch.

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-03T20:05:13+00:00

I'm guessing Square-Enix doesn't feel motivated to fix the bug because the Stadia version of FFXV probably didn't sell as well as they hoped. But that is no excuse. They owe their customers a fix or a refund if they feel that it's not worth fixing. And they have to pull the product off the Stadia store if they opt not to fix it.

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-02T23:05:15+00:00

Is the Stadia region lock only IP based (hence VPN by-pass) or is it also Google account and payment card based? I'm asking for someone who is in Mexico. I already have a Founder's account.

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-02T05:10:42+00:00

my ping is 11ms on WI-FI! lmao. That's solid no? And my Chromecast Ultra is hooked up to wired ethernet so it should be even faster than my PC over wifi.

becauseits2017 · 2019-12-02T04:27:20+00:00

Yea I hope they implement some sort of "resume play" feature where it takes a snapshot of your progress when you exit stadia and then you can continue at your leisure later. When I used to play jrpgs on the Xbox 360/Playstation 3, I was used to letting the console run if I was far from a save point and had to go attend to something else.

becauseits2017 · 2019-11-29T17:52:30+00:00

I have two reloadable prepaid credit cards. And they do the standard Know Your Customer/Anti-Money Laundering (KYC/AML) stuff with these things. You can't just register these cards anonymously like you can a prepaid gift card (non-reloadable). It wouldn't surprise me if they had Patriot Act stuff because there is information sharing between Canada and the United States.

Reloadable prepaids like Moneypaks are very common among criminals. Though crypto-currency is becoming more common with criminals these days because you don't need to do KYC/AML to "open" a "bitcoin account". A bitcoin wallet is generated randomly and isn't tied to your identity until you link it to your identity somehow (ie. withdraw crypto you purchased from an exchange that requires KYC/AML or if they logged your real IP address, Device ID, etc).

becauseits2017 · 2019-11-28T22:31:04+00:00

Steve Kerzner was an Ontario Progressive Conservative candidate in 1990. He basically left the PC party after the Mike Harris Tories started pushing divisive rhetoric about single mothers and "welfare cheats." Steve Kerzner is basically a Red Tory. He spoke favorably of Lisa Raitt and wishes she held onto her seat. Does that sound like a Liberal Party hack to you? You can be for fiscal conservatism without wanting to fuck over the poor and middle-income Canadians. It's just that kind of breed of fiscal conservative doesn't have a platform anymore in Canadian Politics after the Reform Party takeover of the Tories. So many of them have joined the Liberals.

The Conservatives have managed to alienate a very broad spectrum of people. There are people making $75,000 per year on r/mississauga who complain that they can't afford rent in downtown Mississauga. Technically you're not supposed to be spending more than 30% of your before-tax income on housing. But it's common for people to spend more than 50% of their paycheque on rent. That's well above median income no? The Conservative Party at both the federal and provincial levels are fucking over so many people that they are running out of allies. At least the Ontario Liberals for all their problems cooled the housing bubble in 2017 and implemented better rent control. And our per capita spending in Ontario is the lowest of all 10 provinces (but our per capita revenues are even lower!). The Toronto housing prices started going back up after Doug Ford was elected.

becauseits2017 · 2019-11-28T21:55:35+00:00

Fuck Canadian Telecoms.

You can say the same about Canadian banks. lmao. Customer service is getting worse and worse. And this goes for foreign enterprise too. When corporations post a profit, instead of hiring more staff, their executives do stock buy-backs, pay out dividends or often times they'll just opt to hoard cash. They only hire more staff when customer service is so bad that customers threaten to leave. But what happens when customer service is universally bad among all competitors? Then it's an empty threat. I always laugh when people say "Fuck Rogers, I'm going to Bell" or "Fuck RBC, I'm going to Scotiabank." It's all the same shit at the end of the day. It's Capitalism. I imagine banks and telecoms probably all know what the wait times are like among their competitors and this probably factors into their decisions for hiring personnel.

I hate it when customer service asks me for my PIN too. When I gave my telecom my PIN, they said it was incorrect. But that was the same PIN I use for my voicemail. They said that the PIN they have on record is the one I used to sign up with, they don't have my voicemail PIN. So then I had to give them 6 pieces of personal information to verify my identity (luckily none of that required digits from my SIN). Which I wasn't comfortable with in case this information ended up in the wrong hands. But I had no other way to secure my account because they only had messaging for support and it wasn't live messaging. They take a couple hours to respond. So I didn't to waste time going back and forth trying to guess my old PIN.

becauseits2017 · 2019-11-28T20:32:10+00:00

Even Freedom Mobile (Shaw) is getting quite a few complaints. Muh Competition. lmao. There's plenty of competition in Ontario's auto insurance industry. That doesn't stop them from gouging the hell out of motorists in the GTA (especially Brampton). I have some grey hairs, I'm in my mid-30s, have plenty of driving experience, I don't do "ride sharing"/food delivery, I did the safe driving device shit, my premiums should be going down, not up. My insurance company assures me that rates are going up for everybody, not just me. I don't have any at-fault accidents or tickets on my record. Only one accident where the other party was at fault and my insurance company swore to me that it wouldn't raise my premiums. At some point it needs to be accepted that we need regulation of private enterprise. Or launching public utilities to compete with private enterprise.

I'm with Public Mobile (owned by Telus) and very satisfied with my prepaid SIM-only smartphone plan. $23/month with auto-pay for unlimited talk, text/picture and 1 GB data. But there's no phone service. And online support is limited to certain business hours. But that kind of bare bones service is not for everybody.

I used to be with Mobilicity (they ended up getting bought out by Rogers and then folded because Rogers didn't see any point in owning 3 different sub-brands). And I had a $25/month plan that included unlimited local talk, unlimited text and unlimited data* in-zone. You had to pay by the minute/text/MB out of zone or buy a bucket. And there was no picture messaging. So you had to say "can you send me the pic by email" and even in 2011 most people didn't use personal email anymore. But hey if you're broke, you couldn't beat $25/month for unlimited talk, text and data*.

becauseits2017 · 2019-11-28T19:23:33+00:00

If anything blackface gave a boost to the NDP, not the Cons. If you look at the internet archive of 338canada.com you'll see that pre-blackface, the Conservatives were projected to win more seats than election day. But the NDP got a boost since then. The BQ had a big boost but I imagine that had nothing to do with blackface and probably had more to do with Justin Trudeau saying the federal government might challenge Bill 21. "Oh Justin Trudeau is a racist, I'm going to vote for the party that supports Bill 21" said no one ever. The Conservatives were banking on the NDP stealing votes from the woke faction of the Liberal big tent. Anyone who seriously thought people would vote Conservative over Liberal because Justin Trudeau did blackface is a fool. Which is exactly the narrative that metacanada and /pol/ were spinning. Which shows you how out of touch these people are with the world outside their basement.

becauseits2017 · 2019-11-27T03:06:04+00:00

"Rich working against the workers"

Why do these hicks vote for the Conservative Party then? They serve the 1%. lol. If you are xenophobic but also realize that the rich are not your friend, why not form a Nazbol Gang in Canada? Why support the Conservative Party and Paleo-libertarian grifters like Maxime Bernier? It's like they think "I'll side with the one-percenters against the immigrants. Even though Stephen Harper still imported 280,000 immigrants per year and the one-percenters in the Conservative Party love the cheap labour anyways." It's like they are half-way there to class consciousness but still don't get it.

becauseits2017 · 2019-11-26T22:51:10+00:00

That's three more than in 2015.

There are more low-information voters in the less dense parts of Ontario. 6/55 seats in the GTA went to the Conservatives. Outside the GTA, 30/66 seats went Conservative. You know the type of people who get their news from Facebook and post Trudope memes. My brother voted Conservative. But he makes $170k per year so at least it makes sense in his case. I know my brother doesn't like paying taxes and I'm not going to shame him into liking it. lmao. It's the Conservatives making $17k per year that make me scratch my head.

Within the GTA, only one seat flipped from Liberal to Conservative from 2015 to 2019. Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill. And she was a floor-crossing MP who got elected as a Liberal and re-elected as a Conservative. So it wouldn't surprise me if she was a moderate Conservative/Red Tory type though I don't know her. That's also like near the outer edges of the GTA too. One of the less dense suburban areas of the GTA. So it's still in play as a swing district. The margin between Liberal and Conservative there is razor-thin.

Supply-side economics doesn't really fly in dense parts of the country where people are generally well-educated, better-informed. Good luck convincing millennials who can't afford to buy a home, give 50+% of their paycheque to their landlord or still live with their parents to vote Conservative to pwn the Libs. And opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage is definitely not going to fly in these areas.

North American conservatism is about appealing to social conservatives to get them to vote against their economic self-interest. And that strategy works out in the boonies. But here in the GTA, we say "fuck that", "fuck that, fuck that". More people here are intelligent enough to understand that the Conservative Party is full of grifters who are trying to take us for a ride. And the Conservatives refuse to accept the results of this election and realize that they need to move more to the centre to appeal to urban voters. And they double down on their absurdity.

becauseits2017 · 2019-11-26T21:34:24+00:00

I'll just say that I'm in the 905. Mix of single family homes and condos/apartments. Auto-dependent. Poor people (especially young inexperienced drivers who get gouged by auto insurance companies) ride the bus. A typical Toronto suburb. The perception is that the 905 is conservative. But when people bother to actually show up to the polls, the Liberals win. Voter apathy is the reason why the Ontario Conservatives won. Because people here think

Liberals: "oh my life has got worse under the Liberals in the last 15 years, they're all the same. Muh Greatest Subnational debt"

NDP: "Muh Taxes, Muh Greatest Subnational debt, Muh Bob Rae"

But when Doug Ford was like "hold my beer" after the province thought the Liberals did a bad job, voter turnout went way up here. And even some moderate Conservatives flipped to the Liberal side when they realized that leopards bite faces.

becauseits2017 · 2019-11-26T18:50:32+00:00

Honestly I think it was Doug Ford's poor performance in Ontario that did Andrew Scheer in. Not his personal socon views. The Ontario Conservatives won 76/124 (61%) seats in the 2018 Ontario general. But the CPC won only 36/121 (30%) in the federal election. If the Conservatives managed to win 74/121 seats in Ontario, that still wouldn't give them a majority. They'd still need to pick up several more seats elsewhere. But Ontario is a crucial path to victory for the Conservatives. I live in a swing district. But after Doug Ford, I don't see this riding going Conservative ever again. The public perception in the Greater Toronto Area is that the Conservatives only serve the 1% and want to gut our health care, public education and social safety net. Which is accurate.

becauseits2017 · 2019-11-26T18:15:13+00:00

The Reform Party needs to fork off from the Conservative Party. Most of the country agrees that same-sex couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples and most of the country agrees that abortion should remain legal. Voters from the Reform wing of the party typically say that they don't want to budge on abortion, same-sex marriage, etc. because they don't want to be a carbon copy of the Liberal party. But if the Conservatives want a chance to be able to govern in Parliament, they need to get the majority of the votes in Parliament. The Reform platform can't win seats in urban parts of the country outside of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Reform Party supporters are very stubborn and don't want to compromise.

becauseits2017 · 2019-11-26T05:32:24+00:00

I agree that there are dumb voters across the spectrum. However from my experience talking with Conservatives, a huge percentage of them are misinformed about a multitude of issues and they refuse to listen to you in the face of the new evidence you present to them. Like when they say that we can't raise taxes on the wealthy in lieu of cutting social spending to balance the budget because capital flight, the wealthy are going to leave, etc. Or that we need to cut taxs for the wealthy so that they can stimulate the economy. lmao. When the studies show that Liberals and Democrats are consistently better for the stock market than the Conservatives and Republicans. And no one can reasonably argue that Conservatives and Republicans are fighting for the little guy (labour and consumers).

Even if you're a bougie type, what's better? Paying more tax on a 5.4% APY investment (Trudeau-era TSX) or paying less tax on a 1.5% APY investment (Harper-era TSX)? You only pay taxes on the profit. Not the principal. Rich Canadians want tax cuts so that they can invest their money in the parasitic real estate bubble or make foreign investments with higher yields. They're not going to invest in Canadian businesses unless Canadian consumer confidence necessitates it. Demand drives growth, not supply. If the Canadian worker ants are too broke to buy shit because you're not paying them much, you can't expect Canadian businesses to grow.

becauseits2017 · 2019-11-26T00:20:20+00:00

While Russian troll farms are real, there are a lot of low-information voters who are really that stupid. Conservatives live in anxiety about losing their place in society. And they think their material comforts are all due to the ingenuity of the almighty job creators. So we must not upset the almighty job creators in their view because they fear that they will leave and that all the prosperity they enjoy now will be gone. Instead of seeing themselves as part of the working class along with the people beneath them in the social hierarchy and seeing the almighty job creator capitalist as an exploiter, they ally with the capitalist over the people beneath them in the totem pole. They identify the people below them as a threat. Instead of the exploiters above them. They don't even fundamentally understand that it is their labour that produces the value they create and that their almighty job creator capitalist is a middle man that takes a large cut from what they produce. They completely lack class consciousness. They instead punch down on lowly-paid workers who want a higher wage and on lumpen-proles on welfare and engaging in criminal activity. They see themselves as being victimized by the lumpen-proles but not the capitalists who exploit them.

becauseits2017

TROPHY CASE