This. I strongly believe that achievements killed my passion for gaming and replaced it with a desire to complete, or 100%. Once I realised that I began to shun achievements (turned off notifications, switched to PC, started playing games with them nonexistent or disabled) I renewed my passion and rediscovered the joy of gaming.
Ooh that’s an interesting stat! My most seeded movie is +1 (over 340 copies’ worth), and for shows It’s Always Sunny seasons take the top 3.
This touches on one of the reasons I am inclined to pirate – the majority of the time it’s not the author or developer that you pay, it’s the distributor or streaming provider (who often takes a 30% cut), then the payment processor takes about 5%, then the publisher takes a significant and usually undisclosed portion, until finally (and this differs between media) the actual creator sees perhaps £10 of a £60 purchase. Until the vultures clear the field and stop taking hefty cuts, or if I trust the publisher, I am inclined to find a way to actually pay the developer, or not at all, because even though it takes effort to research the sources and distributors, I would much rather vote with my wallet and not accept astronomical distributor fees and anti-consumer practices.
When I was younger I found an album I really liked on Bandcamp. The monetisation model the artist used meant you could actually pay 0 for the music. As I was tight financially I took it but was extremely grateful. This can be seen as consensual piracy, because in my eyes that produce is worth a certain value that can be exchanged with money, even if the seller doesn’t say it. Anyway, Bandcamp takes a 15% cut which is low for the industry, and this particular artist was also independent, meaning they were their own publisher/record label, so when I could I honoured that ‘pay what you feel it’s worth’ approach and bought it a couple years or so later for more than a commercial album. Trust is also extremely infrequent in capitalism, and I appreciated the design.
Forget Liberation, original AC Mobile is the real shit (link)
I know it’s a joke but the fact is Al Qaeda was founded by people whose friends and family were bombed by the US military. There’s very little that people, who lost everything to live for in a country kept destitute by attacks from America, can do except keel over or find a way to attack back. The US government creates their nemeses through cruelty, and are ultimately the cause.
Then they somehow convince their people that some gang member in Bahrain poses an actual threat to the lifestyle of their children in fucking rural Wisconsin, and gets them to train up so they can go and murder four gang members and 48 civilians, whose family members become radicalised against America the violent untamed oppressor, and the cycle continues.
I use Freesm. Looks like ElyPL is geared for custom skins and externally hosted servers. Both is good I guess.
I own the game, I just don’t like relying on server logins to fucking play single player/locally. Freesm lets you have the whole game without a M$ account. Combine that with a self-hosted server in offline mode and I can play multiplayer with an offline profile.
Yes, and their doc pages and personal site of the same name. Here’s hoping they don’t resurface the same code under a new name
Pretty much everything I owned in 2000-2020:
I deleted my first account while reducing my connection to corporations, but here’s what I got on my secondary account:
– And well, any popular game sold on Xbox 360. Call of Duty… Got WaW and BO1 completed, and BO2 half the camos toward diamond… What broke me was when I spent - no, worked - 9 hours a day, 6-7 days a week on the Modern Warfare reboot (2019), collecting as many calling cards as possible on my way to 10th Prestige L70(?) and unlocking every weapon and fancy badge… After overworking full time, and completing the Season Pass, I had four days left until the next season started. Something like two months on for four days’ break. It basically turned my passion into an addiction.
I still complete puzzle games on my mobile, but I almost exclusively play Zen or story-driven games on console and PC now