$4.79 (you’re welcome!) is a heck of a deal for a game you’ll get 100+ hours out of (across all three). And you’ll probably play it more than once. There are choices that carry over from the first two into the third games, and, as such, there are optimal paths in the third one you need to start setting up in the first one. So, play it normally the first time, then look up some guides and then save everyone.

I paid $5.99 for this on Xbox. So for the guy saying you have to run Origin (EA’s launcher) in the background, that’s not necessary there. I have an Origin account but I did not need it.

Oh, and it is a single player game, but keep in mind Mass Effect 3 was designed around lootboxes and gambling. The Legendary version takes all that out and rebalanced the game around not having any of that. I’d say they met us more than halfway. Now granted, if your computer isn’t fast enough to run the game and Origin at the same time without losing frames, yeah, come to Xbox and play it here. Otherwise, it’s not really an issue. How resource hungry can Origin be?

This is a good game, but I don’t think they ever finished it. After playing the four Mass Effect games (which I got at deep discount — I paid $10 for all four), I found this in my Xbox library. It’s a bit dated as far as CRPGs go, but it’s about what you’d expect from the Mass Effect team after Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and before Mass Effect. The whole game is pretty good, but I ran into a loop I couldn’t get out of at the end. I got to a point where it seems like you’re scripted to die. Only, it just sends you back to the beginning of the fight like you’re not. But you go through all your healing stuff, all your party members die, you give it everything you got, and you still lose. Over and over again. After three or four times, I called it a loss and figured, I saw all the game has to offer. And I wasn’t mad. I don’t think I paid for the game. I think I got it with Games With Gold one month. And I got like 20-30 hours out of it that I enjoyed. So maybe on PC, there’s a fix (or a cheat) that lets you see the ending cut scene. Me, I don’t care about that. I went to Wikipedia and read what happened at the end. I could have watched the scene on YouTube. Sounds like sour grapes, but I’m still recommending the game. It’s about the journey, not the destination. And maybe you’ll fare better than me.

But this isn’t the only time BioWare has pulled this exact bullshit. Mass Effect 1, the original (non Legendary) does the same thing, but it’s way more obvious what is happening. If you set it to anything but the hardest difficulty, your experience is managed by set amounts. The experience management gets turned off (i.e. you default to the hardest difficulty) when you take the Mako down to a planet. The same thing happens in Dragon Age: Origin in that final fight. The game stops respecting your difficulty choice, and you’re forced to use tactics you were never forced to learn. They decided that was wrong for the Legendary Editions of the original Mass Effect trilogy, but they never fixed it in the first game, nor in Dragon Age: Origins despite knowing about it. They just don’t care.

So manage your expectations accordingly.

I also had Dragon Age II, but I couldn’t get into that one. It’s just not fun. I do not recommend that one, so I don’t recommend the third one (Inquisition) either, just because I couldn’t get through the second one. Not because it was hard, but because it was boring. Just my opinion. I hope someone with a different one speaks up.

There really is an easy solution to this. Firmware locking, like how phones do. Like how if you steal my iPhone, you can’t use it because it’s tied to my Apple account, and you don’t have the password.

Tie each Steam Controller purchase to a Steam Account. Lock it to that account for one year. After the year, the user can connect the Steam Controller to their computer running Steam, and unlock the firmware.

This would make it so the scalpers wouldn’t be able to resell them. Well, they still would, but once word gets out that it’s locked to their account for a whole year, two things will happen. One, they’re gonna lie and say it’s unlocked and they’ll rip a bunch of people off and no one will trust them. Two, they will offer to be your agent, you will need to give them access to your Steam account so they can buy it for you and then sell it to you.

The problem with the latter, and the Steam controller in general, is the thing is $100, and with everything going up, you can get a better controller for half that or less — you just don’t get the trackpads. But, give it time. Someone else will add them, and then you can get basically the same thing without contributing directly to Gaben’s eighth yacht, or his ego.

I use a Mac. It’s like Linux (UNIX actually, OS X is based on NextStep which was based on UNIX) but with corporate backing. It’s as user friendly as Windows. And the AI has an off switch. Siri can be disabled.

I like it. I feel like Apple is the last real computer company left that makes their own software. I don’t know how “real” the company is, though. The iPhone is straight up jank. Always hallucinating text on the keyboard after you type it. Changing what you say to appease some unseen overlord. But I don’t want to use a phone made by an advertising company either. That’s dystopian AF, topped only by the legions who will defend it. But I’m not sure it’s entirely worse.

Here’s the thing though: they’re gonna run ads, and GamePass Ultimate isn’t going back to $15 and the Series X isn’t going back to $500.

Sony can say “no ads on PlayStation”, but they will just jack prices up again. They aren’t the good guys here.

I liked Dragon Age Origins but I couldn’t figure out the ending. Difficulty ramps way up, it feels like you’re meant to lose the fight, but when you do it just starts the mission over. If the game has an ending I never found it, so I just quit and read Wikipedia.

Couldn’t get into the second one.

You can’t really talk about BioWare games without talking about Mass Effect though. The first one is kinda trash, but it sets up the story. The first one is also badly broken and it never got fixed. The Legendary Edition is the first three combined and it fixes most of the bullshit the first one was on. The fourth one was good too, but don’t pay for any online stuff. They still sell it despite the server shutdown years ago. Just buy the base game. First half is great, second half is nothing but fetch quests. I think it was also going to have romances and maybe a sex scene, but all I got was friend zoned by everyone. So I guess they ran out of budget there, too. Honestly the first half is great and it’s worth finishing, but it’s exactly like that meme with the horse drawing that goes from good to terrible. The ending was such a let down and they teased DLC that never came.

Loved this game. The Skyrim Grandma infamously rage quit this game. But it’s really no harder than Skyrim if you’re reasonably good at that. It just has a few tricks The Elder Scrolls never attempted, like areas that don’t level with you and are really hard until you’re ready for them… and radiation from Fallout except it’s magic residue.

Enderal is also much darker than Skyrim. I caught myself saying, “Holy shit they really did that” a couple times.

The Witcher 3 includes all the DLC now, and it’s like $10 on Xbox. Or at least that’s what I paid last week. Just started for the first time.

There’s a comm with PC gaming hardware deals. Mac user here, but I’ve seen some pretty good deals. Haven’t built in 10 years but the itch never fully goes away. I think I saw an i7 for like $300, couldn’t tell what generation though. That’s not bad. I think my 4th gen Xeon was like $275? I prefer Xeon to i7 but my preferences are years out of date.

Shigaraki Tomura, Boku no Hero Academia.

For starters, he’s this regular emo kid (about 19-20), except he’s got like a dozen disembodied hands grasping him from his torso and arms to his head and face.

The reason for the hands is pretty bizarre. Spoilers for the second half of season 5:

Oh, his super power? “Decay.” Anything he lays all five fingers on turns to ash. It’s as awesome and terrible as it sounds. What’s worse? Final season spoilers:

The author, Horikoshi Kohei, is a huge Star Wars nerd. If Shigaraki Tomura sounds like “anime Darth Vader,” that’s intentional. Except when “anime Luke Skywalker” tried to turn him back to good, final season spoilers:

And the kicker? Minor season 5 spoiler:

Note that all names use the Japanese naming convention of giving the family name before the given name (e.g. “Lincoln Abraham”), and the show is known outside of Japan as My Hero Academia.

Edit: I also like GLaDOS. YSK she’s also in Cyberpunk 2077, if only in spirit. Ellen McLain reprises her role and reuses some lines while voicing a psychotic robotaxi. I assume, with permission from Valve (who probably loved the cameo).

If you don’t do it every day or on a regular basis, you lose the drive.

Also, between AI, fan fiction, and social media, no one from the newer generations is reading original hand written fiction anymore. Some are, I’m sure, but most of, say, Stephen King’s Constant Readers are Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. Looking at Gen Z and later, they know who Stephen King is, but most of them don’t care. They’ll watch a Stephen King movie, but never care about the book. And that’s Stephen King. One is the world’s biggest and most prolific writers (and my favorite) isn’t getting new readers. So how do you think the little guys are faring?

If you wanna write to write and not get paid and have a few people read it, write fan fiction and publish it on Ao3. If you wanna write original stuff, write fan fiction and convert, like what happened with Fifty Shades (it was originally Twilight fan fiction). Even still, it’s rare that that’s profitable.

Mass Effect.

I’m Gen X, I don’t.

I might say “that’s pretty fucking funny” though

Yeah, and Meta isn’t Facebook and Alphabet isn’t Google.

It’s the same company. Might not be all the same people, might not be Todd Howard’s team, but same company

As opposed to going to regular population and being a target? Yeah, I think they’re good with being alive.

Also, I’m not sure they have solitary confinement like in the movies. Then again, what do I know? Not more than the average wage slave, that’s for sure

Which is fewer and fewer all the time. Internet to the last mile has been a thing for like, I dunno, 20-30 years or something. A lot of rural areas in the US have gigabit fiber and many have two or three options for 100Mbit or better.

And outside the US it’s usually better

As long as they can get enough, they’ll make money. I mean Netflix and other streaming services rule out people with slow Internet and they’re not struggling. It’s been a moot point for years.

I think the greater concern is if you can be kicked off the Net or excluded from it.

Yeah. It’s been a long time but Human Error, the quest that takes place in Covenant, was one of the first quests they made. Your character comments on things like you do in the first Vault and basically nowhere else. They fixed it though, but the settlement basically isn’t good. The good ending is them turning on you because they’re the bad guys. Well, they’re humans who hate synths and torture people they think might be synths. So basically evil. The bad ending is to continue letting them do that.

I do think they changed it to where you can keep the settlement, but some parts are still broken, like the turrets will always be hostile or something.

Starfield’s pirate quest line could be broken with no resolution and it was random. When you had to destroy or defend the three space turrets, the quest line would randomly lock up and there was no way to advance. It took them a whole bit I think they did fix it. They were having a hard time replicating it.

Maybe the PS6 (and next Xbox) will be a $100 streaming box, and the games will be run on their servers, and you’ll pay a monthly fee to access the games, which gives you a break on the cost of the game, which you won’t own, you’ll just borrow a license to it.

And you’ll like it. /s

But really, on one hand it kinda sidesteps the issue of RAM/storage cost, but it’s also kinda shitty. It also begs the question of, why do I need their box at all? I should be able to pay for their streaming service and run that on my MacBook Air. I mean if they’re doing the heavy lifting, why do I need to buy their branded box at all? And PlayStation does not like to play well with others.

I’m on the Xbox side, but I started with 2600/NES. I think 360 (PS3 on your side) was kind of the peak for graphics/gameplay. With XB1/PS4 we saw bigger and more expansive games, but I felt like something was lost on the way. And then with XSX/PS5 era, everything’s so pretty but I’m not really seeing those amazing gaming experiences.

The generations don’t perfectly translate… PS2 had GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas, I believe. Then GTA 5 came out (after GTA 4 which is beside the point) on PS3, then it was on PS4, and now it’s on PS5, they just keep adding onto it. But is GTA 5 really better than San Andreas? I mean, it’s prettier, and the three protagonists was cool, but IMO San Andreas was when the series peaked.

Same with Bethesda. Now, Bethesda games suck on PlayStation because PlayStation has some funny quirks, developers used to it can turn out some amazing experiences, but developers who aren’t turn out buggy messes, and Bethesda games are a buggy mess in the best of times. But again, their best games were in the 360/PS3 generation. Fallout 3 and Oblivion. Skyrim isn’t trash, but it’s very shallow. Fallout 4 is pretty, and it isn’t exacltly shallow, but I feel like something was lost from Fallout 3. Trying to turn it into a city sim, they half assed both sides of the game.

The Mass Effect series was on 360 and PS3 and is some of the best games ever. Andromeda was on XB1/PS4 and was a big step back — but it was pretty. (The best Mass Effect is the Legendary Trilogy, which is the original trilogy remastered and a lot of things fixed, was on XB1/PS4, but that’s an exception.)

My first iPhone, the 6s. I’m sure if I still had it, it would still be kicking ass. After that I got the SE 2, the 13 Pro, and now the 16 Pro Max. I do like having USB-C, but the SE 2 and 13 Pro were unnecessary.

So, an iPhone — but you really have to be careful. Some of them are bested by the next one. A few of them are good to run for a decade or so.

Not dumping on Android. I went through a few of them before I switched, and I liked the Galaxy S3. The others were all trash. I have a Galaxy S10 and I love it. I think these days it really doesn’t matter what you have as long as it has USB-C (for universal charging) and it’s decent or recent. The S10 will run for ten years. A lower-end Galaxy from a few years more recent would probably be fine, too. And that’s the thing with iPhone — none of them are bad, per se, they’re all flagship quality, they just have different compromises. Some Android phones are straight up duds. If you’re fairly tech savvy, this isn’t an issue. So, if you don’t like Apple, get a Galaxy S26, it should last you a long time. If you do, the iPhone 17 is the best deal in tech. It should last you at least a decade if you don’t suffer from FOMO.

MacBook Air. I’ve gone through a few Wintel laptops. None of them are good. No laptops are great for gaming, so you might as well get the MacBook. For a desktop, it’s a harder decision because no Macs are reallly good for gaming; even if you spend a few grand on a Studio, it’s only gonna be mediocre for gaming and you have fewer choices. Spend less on a decent gaming PC and have a better time. If you don’t care about gaming, it’s an easier decision.