I grabbed literally the cheapest HOTAS from Aliexpress a few years ago and it has been awesome.*

*It required tweaks. The stick centering spring was WAY too tough and had to be shortened. And the measured range of motion was only about 80% of the physical range of motion so there were deadzones at the end of each axis. Resistors can be added to each POT to stretch out the measured range.

They took away Lost Coast? I know they removed HL2 2D because of some burned in ads but Lost Cost was 100% Valve material.

I played HL2 when it came out but never played HL1 until around 2018. Some how I never learned about jump-coruching, do you know how much harder HL1 is when you can’t jump onto crates? I had to walk the entire underground train level.

Is this The Onion? It sounds like The Onion.

Our sales specialists have found that adding diamond to the GPU can increase profit margins by up to 30%. And with optional ruby studded HDMI cables we expect out customers to be selling their parents into slavery this holiday season!

App /ăp/

noun

A small program designed to duplicate existing features while collecting private data and monetizing user interactions.

Welp, looks like I’m changing brands next time I buy a router.

Pretty on brand for EA to take a good thing and just fucking murder it.

Interesting when I fired up steam Apex was the title ad on the Store page.

Unless their machine doesn’t meet the hardware requirements.

Unless you pirated W10 it was not free. The price of laptop and PC hardware with Windows per-installed is subsidized.

In our efforts to combat cheating in Apex, we’ve identified Linux OS as being a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats. As a result, we’ve decided to block Linux OS access to the game.

Translation: Software development is hard and we would rather spend our time maximizing in-game transactions.

Valve continues to do the minimum to keep it’s users happy, and that’s 100x better than than the industry standard. Tiny steps but in the right direction.

When my gf buys a new laptop she hands it to me and says:

Linux this

In 19 years I have never been burned by Valve, in the same period I have lost access to software (and hardware) from Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and Epic. They are a money making business and will always act in their own interest but so far it seems like their own interests includes not stomping on customers (in my experience).