Oh absolutely. The reason isn't financial, the reason is cruelty. It always is with this shit.

The original Test Drive Unlimited was great, but it rightfully bombed in reviews due to some really bad technical issues. Some of the car characteristics were really bad and off the mark, and the game suffered from an engine issue that was a problem other racing games had solved long ago;

On long slopes, the geometry of the road didn't curve properly; the angle would have a polygonal jagging issue. This was most likely to shave off performance cost on the 360. Other games had already solved this issue by effectively smoothing angle changes, but TDU did not do anything of the sort. The result was that on hilly terrain cars would constantly bump around and lose traction due to weird unexpected air-time. Some cars were affected far worse than others, particularly super cars had a bad time.

I loved TDU, I loved cruising around in my Shelby Cobra and doing the one-hour tour around the island for decent money.

But the list of flaws is pretty long, and the technical issues made it a nonstarter for anything competitive.

What's wrong Glen? I thought you said this game was your baby, exactly how you envisioned Dead Space was supposed to be, if you had completely creative control?

Turns out maybe the problem was you, Glen. Because that DDR-inspired wet napkin of a game that was Callisto Protocol, had zero of the appeal that draws people to Dead Space. The DLC was something you should creatively be absolutely ashamed of and made it pretty much impossible to actually continue the story.

I switched to using Moonlight to stream rather than Steam's built-in RemotelyPlay months ago. It was just absolutely unusable; not a bandwidth issue, had that in spades. The problem was that it would either not connect, connect to a blank/green screen or the audio/video would randomly cut out. It would work maybe a fifth of the time, and if I had to reconnect for whatever reason, it would absolutely always fail.

Moonlight? It worked out of the gate, and has never failed despite running on some beefy encoding settings since I have very good WiFi with next to no interference from neighbors.

I desperately want Steam's own offering to be better though. Not having to install a second tool, and to just connect from Steam directly would be a much more polished experience.

I'm mildly autistic, to the point I do have to put on a "face" and try to act "normal" in social situations. I am generally quite sociable and outgoing, so I don't feel it's held me back. It's just different.

Both socially and through work I interact with a diverse range of people, and I don't think I am any more different than a British person is from an Italian. I've taken the mindset that if someone has a problem with that difference, it's merely an excuse for their bigotry that would've surfaced for a different reason either way.

On the flip side, it's been incredibly helpful in my career. I have an affinity for processes and an analytical brain, as well as the ability to disconnect from any discussion emotionally. I have always felt that this stems from my autism and it's allowed me to have business discussions about difficult topics while leaving Ego at the proverbial door.

So I would say that for me in particular, it's been a positive. Someone having a problem with me being different is just that; their problem, not mine.

Hey Op, since you appear to be somewhere in the EU based on your mention of Euro pricing, would you be willing to name and shame the wheelchair manufacturer and/or model?

Without giving too much of my own personal information away, I might be in a position to cause a bit of ruckus for this particular company in terms of bad PR, possibly legislatively. I work for a company that profiles itself on doing this stuff "the right way" (secure practises, not screwing users this way, etc) and we are working on building a list of practises we are hoping to root out EU-Wide with some examples that are clearly exploitative.

I need nothing personally identifiable, just the brand and model, and I can pass it along to the team that can investigate further.

Tell me you've never used PHP without telling me you've never used PHP.

It's known for giving a complete stack trace, it's nearest neighbours and their god damn grandkids the moment it so much as coughs up a warning. For the longest time it was notorious for doing this as the default error logging level.

I'm aware it's cool to hate on PHP, but it has plenty of things to dislike without straight-up inventing nonsense.

I have some bad news...

It's doubly absurd considering Microsoft owns one of the biggest build and deployment automation pipelines as part of their Azure offerings. Most of it is aimed at Azure, but so much of the Xbox backend is just Azure under the hood anyway. Azure Pipelines should have had integrations for this on day one.

My tried-and-tested method has saved my (company's clients) ass a few times.

Every Mysql/MariaDB server has at least one replication target. This replicant is not used for access by the infra, and can be paused, restarted, etc with no issue and is configured with this in mind.

We run a mysqldump on the replicant. Depending on the resiliency required, we store the dump on the replicant and/or a third location.

The tools differ, but the practice applies to pretty much every database system and the database has the benefit of not being interrupted during the backup (replication is paused during the backup, and resumed after completion). This also has the benefit of already having replication configured, and adding a secondary redundant instance you can swap out for the master (or using the backup replicant in a pinch) means disaster recovery is much faster.

Also, I dislike many things about Azure's offerings, but their Flexible Database for MySQL does the above for you as one nicely packaged solution for a reasonable-but-not-cheap price.

Well, I suspect they will get their chance. The remake was incredible, and if they can pull it off a second time with DS2, I suspect 3 will follow too.

The third game had some decent ideas. The weapon crafting was conceptually interesting and thematically appropriate with Isaac being an engineer. The co-op could have been done better, but I had a blast with it.

Nuke the MTX shit from orbit and redo large swathes of the story though. What they did to Ellie was a disgrace.

If you're on PC, there's a few configuration file tweaks you can do to make enemies less spong-y. Enemies gain 20HP per level in this game, and thus get very tanky, very fast. This doesn't change per difficulty. The damage scaling modifier does, but not enough to counter this.

I've set this to 5HP and increased how much damage I take as well. Feels much better that way, in my opinion. Legendary enemies still have more health, but not to an insane degree.

Do you want me to share the settings?