Glide

So, these "awards" are just bought out, right? I just don't understand how anyone is expected to believe that people actually voted for these results. I can only assume money exchanged hands at some bot farms to put these AAA titles on the front page.

Even if you want to make some weird claims about "popularity contests", RDR2 taking the labour of love award over 4 live-service games that actually receive updates? If the vote is just mass visibility, I'd still expect Apex or the like to take it. And that's ignoring the reality that it makes no sense for RDR2 to have even made the ballot in the first place. You expect me to believe that that's one of the top 5 labour of love titles by open nomination? I mean, c'mon.

Likewise, Starfield taking any award while it sits at 64% positive reviews overall, and 28% positive recent? You expect me to believe that the same consumer base that gave it those horrible reviews still voted for it as "most innovative" of all things? The idea that anyone expects us to believe these are the results of genuine human votes in the era of fake account traffic, purchased viewership and AstroTurfing is just insulting.

I just bought a series of 8bitdo controllers, and they are fantastic. The off green/purple USB Xbox controllers are literally $20 USD a pop and imo feel better than the Series S controller. And that's their cheapest option; if you are willing to spend money for more features, they keep getting better.

~~OP said he wants motion control though? I feel like his options for motion control controllers are EXTREMELY limited. Like Nintendo proprietary limited.~~

Apparently the 8Bitdo Ultimate DOES have motion control. I'd dare say it's just hands down the correct option, unless you want to just flat buy a Switch Pro controller. That said, if off-colours don't bother you, the Switch targeted Ultimate C Bluetooth is cheap af, has motion controls and actually has ABXY in the correct format.

Unpopular opinion: I fucking hate noise-canceling headsets. It creates something of a booming, echo-y sound, and I just cannot stand it. Open ear acoustic headsets are an absolute godsend.

I use the Sennheiser Game Zero, because if you want a combined headphones/microphone headset, and you want an open ear acoustics, your options are extremely limited. That said, it is awesome. The "flip up to mute" feature broke extremely fast, but beyond that the quality of both incoming and outgoing audio is fantastic. And I drag the thing around with me quite a bit, so, despite one feature breaking, it has survived quite a bit of abuse.

I'm curious. What game do you think drops to single digits fps on medium settings with a 1080TI?

I was playing Darktide on a 1060 with minimum 30fps recently, and that game is optimized like absolute trash.

A 1080TI still plays every release at medium or higher settings. /shrug

Unless you're worried about 4k or VR, I wouldn't upgrade anyway.

Reddit is mainstream. Being mainstream makes it a huge target for political propaganda efforts. It's filled with bad actors and astroturfers spreading misinformation as wide as they can.

Until they take massive measures to curb such behaviour, Reddit will continue to be a pit-hole. At this point, I hesitate to even say that hole is filled with "people".

I've been saying for a while now that we're just beyond the world of grindy, random encounters. The early games weren't fun because of the dozens of zubats we had to deal with. They weren't even "harder" for these reasons, despite the absurd opinions you'll stumble across online. Remembering to stock up on repels isn't really a skill check. Completing the set challenges that you are aware of and planning around then is fun. Having to smash "A" through random encounters and opening the menu to hit a Fresh Water every once in a while is not.

For me, it was pure philosophy. When I came to terms with how totally insignificant I and my world is in the grand scheme of the universe, something as simple as the dog tracking mud across the floor became less then inconsequential.

As an aside:

Meanwhile I'll get pissed that I didn't wipe their feet and be mad the entire time I'm cleaning it up.

This reads like someone who takes everything upon themselves and doesn't cut themselves enough slack. I don't know you and this is the tiniest snippet of your life experiences, so take my statement with a massive heaping of salt, but give yourself a break. You aren't super human, you aren't responsible for everyone and everything, and you will make mistakes. Holding yourself to an impossible standard is a common source of anger and unhappiness.

Subjectively speaking, every person I've met who I would describe as "angry" when discussing their personality (I'm a believer that some things are worth being mad about and choosing to be appropriately angry does not make you an angry person) is deeply unhappy with themselves. This is usually because, thanks to a combination of external influences like narcissistic friends/family, they never measure up to their distorted beliefs of how they "should" be. "Should" is a bad word. Thinking in terms of "should" is self-abusive and rarely helpful. "Will" and "next time" are fine. They're about learning. "Should" is nothing more than a way to internalize the things you've done wrong without focusing on how you'll learn from them.

Anyway, I could be way off, cause man I don't know you. But, some food for thought, anyway.

I want to note that Steam isn't inherently a DRM platform, as there are many games on Steam which are DRM free. Even ones that require the Steam backend can be bundled with Steamworks, serving all the same backend requirements without Steam needing to be installed on the machine.

This.

I fundamentally have no issue with the Epic Games launcher. Steam needs competition to keep it in check. Without alternatives, Steam can and will strangle Dev profits, which is a problem. But Epic is a mediocre service, another app to be running, and actively going out of their way to prevent games from being on the platform of the consumers choice, which I am not a fan of.

Related note: does Epic have any DRM free games? Even Steam has a fair portion of games that are DRM free and work perfectly well from a flash drive on a computer that doesn't have Steam installed. As far as I am aware, Epic does not.

There's just a series of minor ways in which epic is worse, and I don't like having front-end clients for my games as is, so a second, competing alternative going out of its way to push me into using it rubs me the wrong way.

This could in fact be any generation.

Don't go making it sounds like an organization I'd actually support.