30TB unraid or bust!

(all the copy and paste rule of 3 quests to find three MacGuffins then SAM will figure out how to find a location for another fight).

This has been my biggest complaint as I've been going through ME:A for the first time. I have limited time/energy to play so jumping into ME:A for 2ish hours and basically accomplish nothing really hurts my motivation for the next play session.

When I first started playing it, I was really enjoying the game. It was about the 3rd planet where I had to go to 3 places to unlock a vault to do a thing that the progression loop really started to weigh me down.

The original trilogy was brilliant for me. Get in, do a couple of missions (each one progressing the story a little more) maybe get sucked into a couple more missions and go to bed excited for the next session. But ME:A is just a slog. I'm doing various loyalty missions which is a little better, but still seems to require a lot of go here, here, and here and shoot some guys and then go into here to finish up.

Oh so if you have an android phone with a custom rom and no play services you can't get the proton apps? That's pretty lame.

Thanks for the recommendation!

The funny thing (or sad thing depending on how you look at it) is that at the age of 37 I'm not that young, but there's a lot of music out there I have little to no exposure to. Music hasn't been a huge part of my upbringing despite all of my brothers being musicians; I was always a movie/tv/game kid. These days I trend towards heavy metal and some rap (depending on the artist).

You're right though, that video is the most 80's thing I've ever seen. I can see a montage of 80's music flowing through my head when I was listening to it.

On Disturb's album 10,000 Fist is a song called Land of Confusion. First listened to the album way back in the mid 2000's.

Around 2006 or so I heard the same song being played on the speakers at the Ikea I worked at but it was a lot softer than I expected. Turns out it was originally done by a band called Genesis.

Both version slap but in different ways.

Yeah it was a headache for me in the past too, but the latest Steam Big Picture which behaves more like a Steamdeck has made it pretty easy. Since it launches right away, I can easily launch and quit steam games with 0 issue and when I'm done I used big picture to just shut the PC down.

One issue I found was if I let the PC sleep, it always brings up the login screen on wake so I just shut it down everytime. NVME's are so fast the boot up is whatevs. Non-steam games are also a little painful as sometimes it won't switch active windows, or I have to login or something.

I only use this machine for games. Like you said, HTPC was a pain. I have a different server that I have Plex setup on and I use Apple TV's / Roku's for streaming.

I wouldn't buy any consoles, I would build (though you can buy) a really powerful gaming PC to plug up to my 4k TV. I've actually recently done just that and it works amazingly well.

Things to make it a good experience:

1. Make sure you have a 4k TV with HDMI 2.1 for 120hz gaming
2. Configure Windows to bypass the login screen on boot
3. Configure Steam to launch in Big Picture mode on startup
4. Buy an Xbox Controller and the little dongle for it (it works better than just bluetooth)
5. Buy a small wireless keyboard with built in trackpad for the odd occasion you need to use a mouse and keyboard (looking at you EA Play).

With that, you've got the best console ever. Huge backlog of games, games on steep discounts, a machine that has a much better experience outputting to a 4k TV than something like a Steamdeck or a console. I've tried the Steamdeck to a 4k TV and the quality was pretty awful; 720p does not upscale to 4k well at all. And if you wanted to, you could set it up with emulators using retroarch for any games you are missing.

My TVPC specs:

1. Ryzen 7800x
2. 32GB DDR5-6000
3. 2TB NVME SSD
4. RTX 4080
5. Fractal Design Torrent Nano

I picked that case specifically for the huge 180mm fan in the front, the fact it can fit a massive cooler like the Peerless Assassin and the GPU gets fresh air from the bottom. It's not the smallest case, but it stays cool and super quiet.

That's totally fair. I'm not sure where MS' steam games fall on "working with linux" via Proton. I haven't heard them being actively hostile like Bungie is with Destiny, but I'm not sure where that's at.

I've not cracked it in any way that's helpful as it's super situational. I find that when other people say a persons name, I have a better chance of remembering it. Like at the dog daycare I take my dog to, I've slowly learned the staff's names from hearing other staff members talk about them or mention them in some way.

This happened to me when I was streaming. My favorite hobby became like a job. I only played while streaming and the time I was putting in outside of work was kind of killing me. Working a full day, coming home to do dinner and time with my wife and then start streaming by 8pm a couple days a week. It exhausted me. At some point I started to skip days and then I just never went back. Now I play games as a form of entertainment like watching Netflix/Hulu. I do it for leisure.

Sometimes I miss it though and think maybe I should try and get back into it but so far I've just not.

Matrix Path of Neo. I loved that game so much and the last time I tried emulating it was so bad. I was completely hyped at that recent tech demo until I realized that was all it would be.