They are more of a thing in Asia, as well as in developing countries around the world where ownership of PC hardware is prohibitively expensive, not just due to lower incomes, but also because computer hardware is costlier and more difficult to get there than in the developed world.

Spotify competitor. Pretty decent in my experience, although it’s been years since I last used it.

Thanks for taking the time to write this in-depth reply!

The disadvantage is that this is the first time I’ve heard of Friendica (and I usually hear about these kinds of things much earlier).

Perfectly understandable. Putting Linux on any kind of OEM device can be a bit of a hassle. I’ve had the best experience with PCs I built myself, not things with custom components, weird drivers and locked down nonsense.

Have you considered installing Steam OS?

Barely anyone remembers Sony shipping rootkits on their music CDs as well.

The real issue with this game is just how off-putting and abrasive writing and characters are (including and especially the astonishingly unbearable protagonist). I think I played it soon after release on Game Pass and despite the impressive visuals and art style, it felt deeply unpleasant as an experience because of this, to the point that it actually upset me. It tries to replicate the “shiny Utopian paradise that actually isn’t” shtick of Bioshock Infinite, but it feels like a pale imitation that mistakes production values for actually saying anything valuable. With better writers, it could have perhaps been the Russian equivalent to that masterpiece, deconstructing founding myths and sham ideals of the Soviet Union just like Inifinite so eloquently did with American exceptionalism, but it falls way short of that.

Despite the imaginative Soviet utopia of Atomic Heart collapsing even more spectacularly and embarrassingly than the real one, the devs do not have anything meaningful to say about either of these universes, being deathly afraid of appearing too political and critical of the Russian past in Putin’s Russia - but by being this “pretend-apolitical”, they are of course making a very loud and obvious political statement, one that is not a good look for them or the country this game originates from at a time when said country is trying to brutally subjugate a smaller neighbor.

It doesn’t help that in terms of gameplay and pacing, Atomic Heart is merely average at best. There’s a stark contrast between how it looks in carefully edited gameplay footage vs. how it feels to actually play, but I would be more than willing to tolerate such shortcomings if writing and world building (beneath the admittedly gorgeous veneer) had been any better.

For the price, it’s very bad, regardless of the progress that has been made.

No. Chinese GPUs have been complete disasters for gaming. Instead of the claimed 4060 competitor, the one you are referring to (which is the most powerful) struggles to compete with a 660 Ti from 2012.

https://www.howtogeek.com/are-chinese-gpus-coming-to-eat-nvidias-lunch/

They might be more useful for AI, but as of right now, they are extremely far behind in the GPU space, far more so than in most other areas.

detested the CCP

Detested or detest?

Good point on availability, by the way, especially globally. It reminds me of cheap Chinese cars booming in the developing world, for example. They are often extremely subpar, but some people like to take the risk of a new car that might be crappy over the perhaps even greater risk of an imported used car with an unknown history.

I’ve heard of CXMT RAM and it appears to be solid in the few tests that exist, but by ‘viable’ I meant commercially viable. Even with current RAM prices (where their stuff is barely any cheaper than reputable brands), I don’t know how much they rely on subsidies from the Chinese state. Production capacity appears to be limited, with one issue being relatively low yields, just 80% for DDR5. They are also using an outdated 17 nm process, which means it’s running a few degrees hotter than the competition (and you need more or bulkier chips for the same capacity) - make sure your system airflow is up to snuff. This is what I meant by playing catch up with moving targets.

Granted, you don’t need the latest node for every computer, especially in the consumer space, but personally, I wouldn’t risk running RAM from an unproven vendor (same with storage). I’ve had issues with faulty RAM in the past, which, among other things, resulted in data being invisibly corrupted over the course of months, so I tend to err on the side of caution. If their stuff turns out fine over the course of the next four or five years or so, I might probably change my tune - or be simply forced to buy from them, if for example the memory shortage continues.

Yup. Recording TV shows and movies aired on TV was far more common than copying tapes. No copy protection to worry about (although there were some attempts to prevent fast-forwarding over ad segments, IIRC) and you only needed a single tape mechanism instead of two.

China isn’t competitive yet and might never actually be, given that they are playing catch up with moving targets.

How’s compatibility with older games these days? I remember drivers having trouble with games that aren’t among the typical titles used for benchmarking being a surprising weakness of Intel cards.

Wow, that’s oldschool. I haven’t even thought about IRC for at least 15 years. How actively is this still being used in general?

Is it just me or do production values look surprisingly low? This barely looks like an AA game - not exactly what I was expecting from Sega.

Is that a thing in Canada?

Gearbox developed the PC version of 007 Nightfire in 2002. While it shared the same plot as Eurocom’s much more ambitious console game, it was a fundamentally different title, being based on the by then dated GoldSrc engine from the original Half-Life, which Gearbox was intimately familiar with. It looked worse than the console version too and lacked some of its features, like driving segments.

Reviews were indeed poor, but with the passage of time, it has become quite interesting as a retro experience, thanks to the unique feel of the 007 setting combined with GoldSrc flair.

The best version of Goldeneye is actually the unreleased Xbox 360 remaster, which leaked a few years ago, emulated using Xenia or running on native hardware. It’s basically the same as the Perfect Dark Remaster: Gently updated visuals (with the customary toggle for original graphics), modern twin-stick controls and 1080p/60 on Xbox 360, which means it has really low hardware requirements in an emulator. Unlike the Perfect Dark remaster, it runs flawlessly (from what I can tell) in said emulator.

The original version of this game feels very dated, but it’s remarkable how well it holds up with just these relatively minor improvements.

In case you’re wondering why it was never officially released: The licensing situation was a mess. Rare developed it, Nintendo published it, but the IP belonged to the Broccoli family (before Amazon gobbled it up). Rare was bought by Microsoft, but they kept working with Nintendo for years afterwards. They managed to come to an agreement with Perfect Dark (and most other Rare titles), but with the James Bond license, it was never figured out, in part, because it was licensed to other game publishers - namely EA and then Activision - over the years. There must have been some progress in the negotiations, because why else would you develop a remaster to near 100% completion, but then it had to be shelved. It was only recently that a port of the original N64 game, not the remaster, was released for current and last-gen Xbox and Switch, with online multiplayer.

There’s one other interpretation of this game: Eurocom developed a rather excellent remake for the Wii (Goldeneye 007), which is one of the best shooters for the platform (my second favorite after Red Steel 2 and just ahead of Dead Space Extraction). It’s more linear and imitates contemporary Call of Duty’s gameplay, scripting and pace to a T (unsurprising, given that it was under Activision), but I still enjoyed it a lot as a supplement to the original, not a replacement.

The stealth gameplay in particular is excellent and the way it uses the WiiMote for gadgets is extremely clever - but you could also use normal twin-stick controls. Daniel Craig works surprisingly well in this role and setting. It was later remastered for Xbox 360 and PS3 with shinier visuals (Goldeneye 007 Reloaded). Reviews on those platforms were a bit worse (low to mid 70s instead of low to mid 80s), likely because it faced far more significant competition in the genre. Still decent though - and on PS3, you can even play it with Sony’s copy of the Wii remote. While I have emulated the Wii original (way back when, when Wii emulation was nowhere near as good as it is now), I haven’t tried it with the Xbox 360 and PS3 port, which I’ve only played on original hardware. It’s obviously not just prettier on these more powerful systems, but also runs at a more stable - if not perfect - frame rate.