The better ones tend to be about on par with older “not quite gamer tier” cards like the GTX 1650.

720p is fine on a handheld, but it’s going to look pretty rough on a TV.

Got plenty in my retirement pot, but I’ve been saving up bottle caps just in case.

Yeah, that’s not a bad bet. Profiting from instability seems to be his thing.

That’s the French nukes.

No need for it now. America is so shit nobody wants to go there.

Be Mexico building the wall soon to keep Texans out.

Imagine how much better off we’d be if “My country is in a bit of a state right now, but I’m going to choose to look at my role within that rather than blaming a convenient minority” could fit on a hat.

And to add to that, it also gives you the tools for discovery. It’s not just “Ubisoft, but they hide the icons”.

The shrine detector (which can become an anything detector), the ability to look through binoculars or whatever it is and stamp a limited number of visible waypoints onto the map. Tears of the Kingdom gives you a slightly obscure ability to highlight all the cave entrances nearby, which you can then try to mark up and see if you’ve been there.

Other games have started trying to do some of this, but I think a lot of it is added late on in development and doesn’t really work well. Like Jedi Survivor gives you the ability to mark things with icons, but what for? You can’t see the markers when you’re walking around. There’s not really much to discover from a distance, and it’s pretty far from being a vast open world.

Is it perfect? No. The last few shrines are often a complete ball-ache to find, although a lot of them are just a generic fight and they’re pretty optional, it feels like you should do them.

Is it better than a world as a menu screen as offered by Ubisoft and those that copy them? Yes.

I think in general a lot of developers should take a long look at what they’re actually trying to make before going with the open world approach. It’s getting tired, and they’re mostly doing it badly.

If we’re going to have a religious book, it should be The Egg.

🏏

Sounds perfect. A nation free of oppressive morning people.

It does, but that’s not the one you’re going to war with.

It’s not a war, it’s a special military operation.

Yeah, I removed Snap mpv and reinstalled with apt.

Lo and behold, it works perfectly all of a sudden.

Firefox looks like more effort, and apt will install the snap version. Even if you uninstall snap. Fun. If I could enable what is missing I’d be OK, but I’ve no idea what it is…

Well, shit…

I went with Ubuntu because the N150 is fairly new (even if it’s just a slightly faster N100) and the 25.04 Ubuntu kernel supports it out of the box.

Yeah, tried all that, and not having much luck in Firefox and MPV. VLC fine. Replied to the other post, and it might be Snap blocking it. I dunno though, because I know basically fuck all about snap other than a lot of Linux people don’t like it.

Yeah, I thought I’d ticked something similar during setup, but maybe it wasn’t for that. I installed them and it hasn’t really changed anything in either mpv or Firefox.

The compositing in Firefox is webrender (software) and appears to be using llvmpipe as the GPU. There’s a 2nd “GPU” listed, but doesn’t seem to use it All the codecs say hardware is disabled…

Installed VLC and that seems to use the hardware renderer. MPV and Firefox are both installed with Snap. I’m seeing a pattern that might not be there, but I’m already hating Snap. This is day two of my rebooted Linux experience…

It’s like chewing gum. You just keep going as it gets blander with no end in sight.

But instead of playing the map as a menu screen, you actually play in the world and discover things.

That was the crucial difference for me.

I got a cheap mini pc. It had W11 on it which I promptly broke (I think it was when it insisted on me putting in a PIN but I closed the window). It also ran at 100% for no reason trying to do updates, but then refused to do any updates.

So I put the latest Ubuntu Linux on it. Seems OK, but I can’t get anything to recognise the video codex stuff in the N150 CPU. It seems to know it’s there, but Firefox and MPV won’t use it…

Yes, I’m sure a nation with huge oil and gas reserves wants nuclear just to have very expensive energy.

They want nuclear weapons to prevent regime change due to external interference. Russia can’t protect them. There’s no NATO style protection for Russian allies. I think we’re only seeing this now because of how weak Russia is on the global stage.