One of those games where I absolutely love the concept, and the atmosphere is great, but the implementation is kind of a disaster. Has so much good dialogue and moody technogothic art that they forgot to add a game. Also a bit disrespectful of your time; it’s very easy to mess up early and keep playing it for hours when it’s become unwinnable - do better the next time.

Am pretty sure the manual describes a whole pile of stuff that never actually got implemented, much like XCOM: Apocalypse. It won’t help you much - maybe find a walkthrough instead of you actually want to see it all. It’s one of the games that I’d love to see a remake of - there were a lot of games in the early 90s where their huge ambition exceeded what was feasible at the time.

Both GOG and Epic stores are quite full of games. Give developers the chance to sell things, and they’ll take it.

GOG doesn’t have everything since they require DRM-free, but I do most of my indie-game purchases on there. GOG have said in the past that their most-requested feature from developers is “can you make your achievements / social integration just basically exactly the same as Steam, so that it’s easier for us to integrate?”. Means game updates sometimes take longer to arrive, but hey.

Heroic launcher starts faster than Steam, so I’ll grab whatever’s free on Epic that week while waiting for it to load; but fuck giving Tim Sweeney any money obviously. Seems to have quite a variety of stuff, tho.

The problem with displacing a company with established network effects is that simply “just as good” isn’t enough - you need to be much better to start moving people over. And I’m not really clear what “much better than Steam” looks like. They have great Linux support, great workshop integration, regular sales, the forums are well-regulated, and so on.

It’s how I installed Arch btw on my desktop, tiny boot image basically downloads the installer into RAM - NetBoot.

But yeah, if you’ve got a computer that’s old enough to be fully supported yet new enough to have the UEFI for hardware, an ethernet network which is robust enough to download full system images on every restart yet simple enough for the firmware to understand, and tonnes of memory free to hold the whole OS at all times, and you can tolerate the fact that restarts take ages, then it works great.

I think the detailed description of this vulnerability described it as non-persistent in UEFI, but that you could install something that runs before secure boot that would be persistent. I think that’s splitting hairs, though - if you’ve been compromised by someone that has the skills to pull this exploit off, then they can probably chain something else into it now that they’ve got basically bare-metal access.

You also need to have sufficiently infiltrated the target’s local network to masquerade as a PXE server, and be in a position to force a server to reboot / just wait for one to reboot. Yes, a few places have large, fairly open networks with a lot of devices configure to PXE boot and they should apply the update before the next reboot, but vast majority of people, no issue at all.

Can still set up a header-matching rule - just need to mark the email with a label, so you can report it without even having to read it.

Can’t copyright gameplay mechanics, and the plot is basically “get a team of misfits together to battle an incoming evil”, ie. it’s Seven Samurai IN SPAAAAACE. Plus, one of the big criticisms that I saw about ME:A is that it’s lazy; it’s the same old aliens as we’ve seen before even though that makes no sense in a new galaxy, and the plot is just trotting out some weary old tropes. Very risk averse, very insipid.

So yeah:

• could spend millions getting the IP off of the shitty owners, to make a very safe and boring addition of the ME games

• make a completely new game with similar mechanics, but take some risks with the story. A fun game with a stupid plot is still fun; a fun game with a great story is exceptional. So why not roll the dice? You can get the staff easily enough to form a new company.