Bioshock 2 is the best game in the Bioshock series. I know â itâs fucking astounding.
I played the first Bioshock when it released. I got to the Andrew Ryan reveal, hit the âwould you kindlyâ twist, walked a few more minutes, and then dropped it. The game had already fired its biggest shot, and everything afterward felt like a victory lap. The combat never clicked, the pacing sagged, and the whole thing played like a museum tour with guns.
Years later I played Bioshock Infinite and thought it was âmeh.â The combat carried me through, but barely. In hindsight itâs probably the weakest entry. The story tries to be clever in a way that collapses under its own ambition, and the places it goes feel stitched together from rewrites. Itâs the kind of game people defend with thinkâpieces because the momentâtoâmoment experience doesnât hold up.
But Bioshock 2? Shockingly good. The story is fine, but the pacing and gameplay are fantastic. It reminded me of Call of Juarez: Gunslinger â that strange spinoff where the developers stopped chasing prestige and instead focused on making a tight, stylish shooter that actually plays well.
Bioshock 2 does the same thing. It stops trying to be a philosophical thesis and instead becomes a game.
The original Bioshock is iconic, but mechanically confused. It never figured out what genre it wanted to inhabit. If the walkingâsimulator trend had existed at the time, and the budget had been lower, it couldâve leaned into that â more audio logs, more atmosphere, less combat. Sometimes it wants to be a Resident Evilâstyle horror game where resources matter and every encounter is tense, but the FPSâshooter flavour gets in the way. Sometimes it pretends to be a systemic shooter with clever plasmidâgun combos, but switching between gun or plasmid made it easier to just shoot stuff.
It was three game styles fighting each other, and it became a shooter with extra stuff interrupting it rather than a coherent blend.
The plasmids are thematic rather than mechanical. Theyâre central to the world and the story, but in actual combat theyâre clunky toys you use because the game keeps handing you syringes. The shooting is okay, if a little floaty. Encounters repeat themselves. Once the twist hits, the pacing collapses and the game drifts toward the exit.
The setting was creative, the philosophical undertones differentiated it, but the shooter underneath never found its footing â which is exactly why Bioshock 2 feels so fresh.
Hereâs the wild part: Bioshock 2 didnât struggle because it was bad. It struggled because people assumed it would be bad. A new studio took over, the first gameâs story had already wrapped itself up, and the marketing made it look like a reheated plate of Rapture leftovers. The audience expected a cynical sequel designed to squeeze more money out of the brand.
Nobody wanted a mechanically focused shooter in the Bioshock universe. They wanted another groundâbreaking ideological spectacle, another twist, another round of âgames are artâ discourse.
But Bioshock 2 is the best shooter and most playable game in the series. The dualâwielding system â plasmid in one hand, gun in the other â transforms combat into something fluid and expressive. Youâre chaining lightning into shotgun blasts into fire traps without ever pausing the game. The levels are tight, the encounters are tuned, and the weapons finally feel like they belong in a shooter rather than a narrative diorama.
People went wild for Doom 2016, but frankly Bioshock 2 did that style of aggressive, expressive combat years earlier. And this is where the funny realization hits: Doom 3 and Bioshock 2 shouldâve swapped names.
Doom 3 already played like a spiritual cousin to Bioshock 1: slow burns, tight corridors, flickering lights, audio logs, atmosphere first and mechanics second. It wouldâve fit perfectly into Raptureâs world. Meanwhile Bioshock 2 had the encounter design id Software eventually rediscovered â push forward, stay moving, stay lethal. The plasmidâgun chaining, the arenaâstyle Little Sister defenses, the constant forward momentum⌠thatâs Doom DNA wearing a diving suit.
Right letâs dive back into the core issue, I really respect is how Bioshock 2 almost never wrestles control away from you. It locks a door, talks at you for a moment, and then youâre back in motion. Infinite couldnât do this â it kept grabbing the camera, freezing your movement, forcing cutscenes because it couldnât blend story into gameplay. Bioshock 2 keeps you in the driverâs seat, and the game is stronger for it.
The Little Sister defense segments slow the pace down, but in a good way. They give you a moment to look around the environment instead of constantly pushing forward. They work and have a point â something most defense sections in similar games fail at. Theyâre mechanically coherent in a way the first Bioshock never managed.
This is the closest the series ever came to an arcade shooter. You can practically imagine a Bioshock 2 cabinet in a neonâlit arcade, Big Daddy drill mapped to a giant plastic trigger, plasmids on oversized buttons. It has that punchy, immediate rhythm youâd expect from Time Crisis or Virtua Cop â not in tone, but in feel.
So when Bioshock 2 arrived and quietly delivered the best combat in the series, most people ignored it. The name âBioshock 2â was a curse. It shackled the game to expectations it never intended to meet.
And yet that same name is the reason the game survived long enough to be rediscovered. If it had launched as a standalone title, it wouldâve been buried under 2010âs shooter competition and forgotten. If it hadnât been part of the Bioshock brand, it never wouldâve resurfaced and I never wouldâve played it.
The title is both its albatross and its lifeline â the thing that doomed it at release and saved it years later.
Bioshock 2âs story works because it never tries to dominate the experience. Sofia Lamb is fine, Eleanor is fine, the emotional beats land well enough, and none of it drags the game down. Itâs a functional narrative scaffold â enough motivation to push you through the levels, enough escalation to justify the encounters, and never so loud that it interrupts the part of the game that actually matters: playing it.
And then thereâs Minervaâs Den, which feels like the moment the new studio fully understood what Rapture should be. Itâs tight, focused, and emotionally clean in a way the main campaign only gestures toward. It doesnât overreach, it doesnât drown itself in ideology, and it doesnât waste your time. Itâs the proof that Bioshock 2âs approach to storytelling â restrained, purposeful, secondary to the gameplay â was the right one.
Together they form a rare combination: a game that plays well and a story that knows when to get out of the way.
Bioshock 1 and 2 feel like artifacts from a very specific moment in gaming â that earlyâinternet era when designers were inhaling halfâdigested philosophy books and dumping the ideas straight into level design. Rapture has the exact energy of a 2006 forum user who just discovered Atlas Shrugged and decided they had profound thoughts about society. Itâs the same vibe that produced Too Human, Prey (2006), Mirrorâs Edge â that whole wave of games built out of edgy paperbacks, forum debates, and âwhat if society collapsed but in a cool way.â
It was a time when âgames as artâ didnât mean prestige cinematics or auteur worship. It meant someone on the team had just read a book and now they were dangerous. Bioshock 1 is the purest version of that â a thesis stapled onto a shooter. Bioshock 2 is the moment where the industry accidentally realized the gameplay should probably work too.
Both games radiate that preâsocialâmedia, preâprestigeâgaming vibe: messy ambition, weird ideas, and a willingness to steal from whatever paperback was lying around. That energy basically died after 2013, replaced by safer narratives, bigger budgets, and corporateâapproved themes. Bioshock 1 and 2 are fossils of that era, and part of why theyâre still interesting is because theyâre soaked in that earlyâinternet cultural marinade.
Finding a genuinely good game is rare. Plenty of games have good moments, or a strong opening, or a clever mechanic, but very few actually stick the landing. Modern games especially tend to overstay their welcome â bloated maps, endless postâendgame chores, a final act that drags on because someone decided âcontentâ mattered more than pacing.
Bioshock 2 is the opposite. It ramps up cleanly, escalates with purpose, and finishes before it wears out its ideas. Itâs tight and confident, like my wife.
If the first Bioshock is the museum exhibit, Bioshock 2 is the arcade machine next to it, and frankly it is more fun.
]]>There ainât no fucking vibe in professional software development. You build something that works, or you donât.
Every developer starts the same way: copying code, tearing apart examples, stitching features together, and learning by breaking things. Itâs the same as any craft â you take the machine apart, you put it back together, and you figure out why it rattles.
Stack Overflow became a rite of passage because every coder has, at some point, crawled in there at 3 AM, hunting for a fix buried under ten layers of contradictory answers. GitHub Copilot: The Agent That Launched a Thousand Script Kiddies
Thereâs a strange parallel between the rise of Copilot and the old wave of script kiddies. Both groups gained access to powerful tools long before they gained the understanding required to wield them.
A script kiddie fires off payloads because the interface makes it feel like hacking. An AI-assisted coder generates functions because the interface makes it feel like programming. In both cases, the sense of capability comes from the toolâs output rather than the userâs internal model of how the system behaves.
This is why AI-assisted coding creates so much rework. The model pushes you forward quickly, but it pushes you forward on rails it chose long before you noticed. When youâre building anything modern â new kernels, fresh APIs, evolving frameworks â those rails rarely match the direction your architecture needs to go. You get speed, but you also inherit every assumption baked into the generated scaffolding.
For me, getting the latest suite of pentest tools working has been a mix of LLM prompting, documentation reading, and the usual dependency chaos. The LLM helps me explore ideas faster, but the real progress comes from understanding why a particular approach fits the environment Iâm targeting. That understanding doesnât come from the model; it comes from reading, testing, and adjusting until the system behaves the way I expect.
If youâre building something old and stable, an LLM can act like a cheat sheet. It throws out workable code that gets you moving. But when youâre shipping something that needs to evolve, the early assumptions matter. The model often picks a framework, a pattern, or a dependency because its training data leans that way, and those choices shape everything that comes after. You end up rebuilding because the foundation wasnât designed for the direction you needed to grow.
Model produces code based on patterns, and the problem of that is: Legacy bias shows up because most training data is preâ2023, so the model leans toward patterns that were common years ago. Goal drift happens because the model follows statistical momentum instead of architectural intent. Hidden assumptions creep in when the model selects tools or structures without surfacing the reasoning. Iteration inflation emerges because the generated scaffolding accelerates testing but increases the number of corrections required to reach a stable design.
Documentation remains the only reliable source of truth. Modern systems evolve too quickly for statistical patterns to keep up, and the only way to align your architecture with reality is to read the material written by the people who actually maintain the thing youâre building on.
When youâre working with new kernel features, fresh Android ROM quirks, cloud APIs that change every quarter, or pentest tooling that depends on exact versions, the LLM becomes useful only when you anchor it with documentation. The constraints you feed it determine whether it behaves like a helper or a hallucination engine.
AI is becoming more diluted each year because the volume of legacy data keeps growing faster than the volume of modern examples. The next generation of coding assistants will need to treat documentation as a first-class input rather than a suggestion. And developers will need to keep producing high-quality documentation so the tools have something worth learning from.
]]>Thereâs a tiny genre that has always been close to my heart. No battle passes, no cinematic cutscenes every ten minutes, no âlive service roadmap.â Just slow, methodical roomâclearing where one bad angle ends the whole run.
The geanera had itâs golden days in the late 90âs early 00âs, Rogue Spear was the first one where it really clicked for me, and in many ways the genera peaked and died with SWAT 4. These days the genera is niche, the ARMA series is probably the highest profile series that serves the mainstream, excellent simulation, but not very fun games. So youâre left with small teams, weird engines, broken AI, and games that look like they were assembled in a garage. And somehow, thatâs where some of the best tension in gaming still lives.
I went through three of them:
Zero Hour
Ready or Not
Black One Blood Brothers
They all aim for tactical realism. They all miss in different ways. And one of them accidentally gets closer to SWAT 4 than it has any right to.
Zero Hour is tiny, Short campaign. Mid graphics. No story. UI held together with tape.
But once youâre actually inside a building, gun up, leaning around a doorframe, it suddenly becomes something sharp.
The pacing is slow, but the levels are small and the rooms are tight. So the atmoshpere stays tight without dragging. Enemies arenât geniuses, but theyâre placed in ways that both allows for taticall solutions while punishing overly aggresive play.
And then thereâs the K9 system â a feature that should elevate the game but ends up fighting against it.
A dog in a CQB game is a brilliant idea. It adds a chaotic, urgent element that isnât just another grenade or gadget. When the dog charges into a room, youâre committed. You have seconds to back it up before things go sideways. Itâs one of the few mechanics in the genre that creates tension dynamically, without relying on a bomb timer or scripted pressure. It changes the rhythm of a breach in a way that feels genuinely fresh.
But the implementation is completely misaligned with the rest of Zero Hour.
If your entire SWAT team gets wiped, theyâre magically ready for the next mission. If the dog dies, youâre locked out of using it for multiple missions.
This creates a backwards incentive structure. Losing operators â the thing that should matter â barely affects anything. Losing the dog â the thing that should be a dramatic moment â just encourages you to restart immediately. Thereâs no longâterm progression, no XP, no unlocks, no campaign persistence. So the cooldown doesnât protect anything meaningful. It just punishes you for engaging with one of the gameâs most interesting mechanics.
Instead of adding tension, it undermines it. Instead of creating stakes, it creates avoidance.
It feels like a feature designed by someone with a completely different vision for the game â someone who thought Zero Hour needed a âcostâ for using the dog, without considering how players actually interact with the rest of the systems. The result is a mechanic that should make the game more exciting, but instead pushes you toward saveâscumming and resets.
Zero Hour has one more design issue that drags missions down: objective items are almost impossible to see. Whenever you need to grab a folder or interact with a laptop, the game suddenly turns into a searchâandârescue operation for props. Thereâs no UI hint, no outline, and under NV they blend into the environment completely. Itâs common enough that players have built maps of spawn points just to avoid running in circles.
A subtle indicator wouldnât break immersion. It would simply make the objectives readable in a game where the tension comes from clearing rooms, not scanning desks for a texture that looks identical to the background. Zero Hourâs encounters are strong when theyâre about angles and pacing; they fall apart the moment youâre forced to hunt for an item that doesnât want to be found.
Zero Hour is stripped down to the bone. Thereâs almost nothing extra. No elaborate progression, no sprawling customization, no narrative wrapper. Itâs just: hereâs a building, here are suspects, hereâs your team, donât screw it up.
And because it focuses so hard on that one thing, it ends up feeling more like SWAT 4 than anything else on the market â even with the K9 system tripping over its own feet.
Ready or Not is the opposite problem of Zero Hour.
On paper, itâs the âbetterâ game.
Better command system.
More levels.
Clearer visuals.
AI teammates that actually act without babysitting.
More customization.
Unlockable cosmetics as rewards.
More narrative and environmental storytelling.
You boot it up and it looks like the future of tactical shooters. Then you start playing, and something feels wrong in your bones. The surface problems are obvious: The compliance system feels disconnected from the rest of the game. Civilians and suspects donât react in ways that build tension â they behave like theyâre following two completely different rule sets. Sometimes they stand still waiting for instructions, other times they bolt the moment they see you, and the game never establishes a rhythm you can read or anticipate. Itâs not unpredictability in a good way; itâs unpredictability that feels unintentional, like the AI is flipping between behaviours that were never tuned to work together.
But the deeper rot is architectural. Ready or Not feels like a game built by people who understand the components of tactical shooters but not the hierarchy of them. The levels are filled with AI meshes, clutter, props, and visual noise. Thereâs a ton of stuff in your peripheral vision. The game is busy. It looks livedâin.
What it doesnât have is a clear set of deliberate elements that define the encounter.
You donât need a room stuffed with assets. You need a room that communicates danger, sightlines, and intent. You need spaces that create tension through layout, not decoration. Ready or Not often feels like a diorama where the important parts are buried under noise.
The result is a game that has all the scaffolding of a great tactical shooter â systems, commands, AI routines, level dressing â but the actual experience never crystallizes. Youâre going through the motions, but the emotional weight isnât there. The tension doesnât build. The payoff doesnât hit.
And then you reach the ending â or rather, the absence of one.
If you finish the final mission successfully, you get nothing. No cutscene. No text crawl. No wrapâup. Youâre dumped back at the station like you just finished a random midâcampaign level. It feels like the game forgot to acknowledge that you completed its entire narrative arc.
But if you make the mistake of pressing F on the detonator â the same button youâve used to secure every other piece of evidence in the entire game â you donât secure it. You activate it. And suddenly the game plays a tiny âendingâ scene that feels like it was hidden behind a practical joke.
Itâs a perfect snapshot of Ready or Notâs design problem: the game is full of systems, assets, and ideas, but the connective tissue â the part that makes those pieces feel intentional â is missing. The structure is there, but the payoff isnât. The game keeps building toward something, and when you finally reach the top, thereâs nothing waiting for you.
Ready or Not tries to be everything at once, and the core gets smothered under its own ambition.
Black One Blood Brothers sits in a completely different lane, itâs chasing the old Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear DNA.
The tactical map is the strongest part of the game. Youâre not just breaching a door; youâre building an entire operation. You draw routes, assign teams, sync timings, decide who covers what, and then watch the plan either come together or collapse. Itâs the only game of the three that actually lets you design a mission instead of just reacting to one.
But everything wrapped around that core is uneven.
The interface is barebones. Onâtheâfly commands are nowhere near Ready or Notâs. Gunfeel varies heavily between weaponsâsome feel sharp, others feel like placeholders. The levels are big and sprawling, but a few missions feel more like proofâofâconcepts than finished scenarios. And despite years in Early Access (since January 2022), parts of the game still feel like prototypes taped together.
The biggest red flag is feature removal. Female operators and K9 units were cut because the developer wasnât happy with their implementation. I get that itâs Early Access, but removing entire systems instead of simplifying or reworking them is a worrying sign. It makes you wonder what the release version will actually look likeâand what else might disappear along the way.
The Prisoner of War mode is the clearest example of how good ideas get stranded. On paper, itâs brilliant: a tactical âescapeâ scenario where you start with nothing and fight your way out by looting gear. In practice, the design undercuts itself. Corpses arenât persistent in a way that supports reliable scavenging, the looting interface is clumsy, and you canât take armor or clothing from enemies. Because armor lives in the customization layer rather than the loot system, youâre stuck grabbing guns and a few gear items while stuck in t-shirt and jeans. Thatâs fine in the normal game; in PoW, it guts the whole concept. It also highlights how something strange, you can customize your guns endlessly, but the enemies all use one of 4 or 5 guns, one for each class, with no differencisation in mods. If this mode didnât exist you might never have noticed, but again this âgood ideaâ mode accidentally shows you how undercooked the whole system is.
Black One Blood Brothers is full of these moments: strong ideas, rough execution. Every part shows promise, but the game needs to stop stacking experiments and start finishing modes with a clear vision. If it doesnât, it risks staying in permanent âalmost thereâ territory.
Itâs the most replayable of the three because the planning layer always generates new problems. Itâs also the one most at risk of never fully solidifying.
A tactical sandbox with huge potentialâstill made of paper.
None of these games are bad, but they all land in strange places.
Zero Hour and Ready or Not are both âtwoâweek games.â Theyâre worth picking up on a Steam sale, youâll have a good time clearing rooms, and then youâll probably never touch them again. Zero Hour nails the momentâtoâmoment tension but has almost no structure around it. Ready or Not has structure everywhere but never quite gets the momentâtoâmoment right. They each succeed at the part the other struggles with, and neither becomes something you return to longâterm.
Black One Blood Brothers is different. The planning layer could be the thing that sets it apart â if it were smoother, faster, and easier to use. Right now itâs clunky, slow to work with, and often gets in its own way. The potential is there, but the current iteration doesnât fully deliver on it. After years in Early Access and multiple features being removed outright, itâs hard to believe the game will reach the state itâs aiming for. At the moment itâs more of a study piece: a collection of strong ideas wrapped in thin execution. Interesting to explore, but not something you recommend without explaining the caveats first. We just need a game that can actually pull all of it together â a modern title with a clear vision, finished systems, and the confidence to commit to what makes this genre special. Hopefully someone will eventually deliver the masterpiece
]]>Itâs no secret that AAA studios have spent years trying to keep their games out of the hands of Linux gamers. Between Denuvo, firmwareâlevel antiâcheat trash, and spyware disguised as âplayer experience systems,â the message is loud and clear: DONâT PLAY OUR GAMES.
Iâve always thought this was stupid, especially for highâbudget singleâplayer titles. If youâre making a giant cinematic blockbuster, why wouldnât you want to sell it to everyone?
But then the best girl on the internet dropped a packed SWO build that runs flawlessly on Linux. It installs cleanly, performs well, and gives you the full Star Wars Outlaws experience.
And thatâs exactly why todayâs topic is:
Ubislop actually did you a favour by blocking Linux users from playing this thing.
SWO is an insultingly bad game. Itâs an idiot savant of failure, managing to screw up every system in the most annoying way possible. Thereâs something uniquely aggravating about being handed a project that clearly had effort poured into it, yet still lands as completely worthless. It grates against the human spirit to see so much labour wasted on something this hollow.
The core gameplay loop is basically a ductâwalking simulator. Once youâre past the tutorial, half your time is spent squeezing through endless identical ventilation shafts. And letâs be clear: this isnât stealth. Thereâs no tension, no risk, no discovery. You hold W, crawl forward, pop out behind an enemy, and then dive into another vent. Itâs like the designers built a whole universe out of air ducts and forgot to add a game around them.
Combat exists, technically. You can shoot enemies, you can get into fights, but itâs a soft failure state. Enemies drop nothing. You gain nothing. You donât progress. All combat does is slow down your walk from mission start to the terminal you need to hack. Itâs busywork disguised as gameplay.
SWO somehow ends up worse than the sum of its parts. The nerfâgun combat is functional enough, the open world technically exists, the game runs, characters speak lines. Yet the whole thing is painful to play. Itâs like every system is individually mediocre, but when combined they form a black hole of boredom.
Iâve played other Ubislop titles like AC:Odyssey and GR:Breakpoint. Odyssey was fine â janky, grindy, but good enough to carry me through the story. Breakpoint, once you strip out gear score, scratches the âshoot some dudes and clear a baseâ itch.
SWO doesnât scratch anything. The designers somehow managed to strip out every reason to interact with the gameâs systems. Combat gives you nothing. Stealth is a slog. Loot floods you with junk that never matters. The economy pretends to exist, but every upgrade is locked behind some questâspecific ârareâ item, which makes all the credits and materials you collect feel like background noise rather than progression.
The whole loop collapses under that emptiness. You can fight, you can loot, you can scrounge â none of it moves the needle. If the game let you save in hostile areas, you could delete the combat entirely and the experience wouldnât change. All that would remain is the one thing SWO actually leans on: stealth that somehow manages to be even less engaging than the shooting.
Kas starts out fine for about a minute. Thereâs this flicker where you think she might grow into the role, maybe bounce off the world, maybe show some edge. Then it all falls apart instantly. Sheâs bland in a way that feels manufactured â like someone scrubbed her down until nothing interesting was left.
The bigger problem is she has nobody around her who can lift the material. No rival pushing her, no partner sharpening her, no mentor challenging her, no antagonist forcing her to react. She just drifts through scenes, talking into empty space. Every conversation feels like placeholder dialogue that never got replaced. You can practically hear the writers straining for emotional beats, but they never give Kas anything to work with.
And the worst part is that this exact fantasy has already been done well. SWTORâs Imperial Agent storyline nailed the vibe of a morally flexible operator navigating the Star Wars underworld. That was an MMO â the genre Ubislop has been flirting with in their singleâplayer games for years. They had a working template sitting right there. All they had to do was adapt it into a focused solo experience. Instead they managed to fumble the easiest shot imaginable.
Itâs the same curse that sank Skull & Bones. They had the pirate magic from Black Flag ready to be refined, and somehow turned it into a monument of wasted potential. SWO feels like the spiritual sequel to that disaster â a studio staring directly at a winning formula and still steering straight into a ditch.
Kas couldâve been a great character. The story couldâve carried her. The cast couldâve lifted the world. Instead everything feels like it was stitched together from scraps of other games, none of which fit. Itâs a parade of missed opportunities marching across a galaxy that deserved better.
What fries my brain is how those scraps got downgraded. Kas isnât just underwritten â sheâs stuck inside systems that actively drag her down. Every time the game tries to give her momentum, one of its broken mechanics yanks her straight back into the mud.
The combat feels like someone took Breakpoint, scooped out everything that made firefights satisfying, and replaced it with toyâgun nonsense. The exploration somehow lands below Odyssey, which is wild because Odyssey already had its own share of repetition. SWO doesnât just borrow from those games â it copies the wrong parts, waters them down, and then acts shocked when the whole thing collapses.
Every system feels like it was designed by a different team that never spoke to the others. You can imagine the meetings: âWe have this mechanic from Game A, this idea from Game B, this halfâfinished concept from Game C â letâs glue them together and hope nobody notices.â And instead of landing at âmediocre but functional,â the whole thing sinks below the baseline of every game it cannibalized.
Thatâs why the âidiot savant of failureâ line fits. SWO doesnât just miss the mark â it invents new ways to screw up things that were already solved problems. Youâd think copying working systems from your own catalogue would be the easiest job in the world. Yet somehow they managed to downgrade everything they touched.
SWO had the kind of pitch that practically writes its own hype. A scrappy outlaw clawing their way into the Star Wars underworld, stealing a ship, blasting through space, taking jobs, dodging syndicates, and carving out a place in the galaxy. Add some simplified Freelancerâstyle space combat and youâve got the sort of concept people have been begging for since the early 2000s.
And somehow, despite delivering those ingredients on paper, the final product is still awful.
Itâs almost impressive how thoroughly SWO wastes its own premise. Youâd think a game built around being a rising scoundrel would lean into improvisation, chaos, and clever escapes. Instead you get a checklist simulator where every âhighâstakesâ moment feels like it was assembled by a committee terrified of letting the player have fun.
And then thereâs the story.
I Nopedâtheâfuckâout the moment I realized the entire overarching plot is just âassemble a crew to redo the exact same heist you already did in the intro.â Who the hell thought this was exciting? âCan we beat the guy we already beat? Can we break into the same vault again?â Wow. Incredible stakes. Truly breathtaking narrative ambition. This could maybe work as mission two, but as the grand finale? Holy shit, what a failure.
Itâs like the writers took the opening mission, slapped a piece of tape on it that says âfinale,â and called it a day. The whole thing feels like a pitch meeting where someone said, âWhat if we just⌠do it again?â and everyone nodded because they wanted to go home.
SWO is the kind of game that looks incredible in trailers, screenshots, and curated review builds. The moment you actually play it, the illusion collapses. Every system fights every other system. Every mechanic feels like it was designed in isolation. Every moment that should be exciting is smothered under layers of pointless busywork.
Itâs a game that technically exists, technically functions, technically delivers its promised features â and still manages to be a miserable slog.
]]>Jesus fucking Christ what a fucking trash fire.
I remember the PC Gaming magazine that first teased the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R game, it sold this survival/extraction shooter concept of a brutal dynamic world, you went in looting and if you didnât make it out before dark you would hold up in an apartment, hearing firefight and mutants while you waited for dawn.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R never lived up to those promises, the open world was broken up into maps, helicopters and vehicles where pulled the night before release, they âworkedâ but the change to the maps and world unbalanced everything.
After many years of DLC and stand alone expansions to the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R I had high hopes for S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2, I expected a brutal version of a single player COD:Warzone. Gunfights, roving assholes, and helicopters sweeping past strafing mutants, the storms and environment as much a threat as any any enemy. You would work your way into the zone, you would scavenge and explore.
INSTEAD what i got was a single player MMO?!?! what fucking joker balanced the economy in this game? Terrified that the player would scavenge and find useful stuff, or mule trash back to the vendor they put the player on a strict linear curve. Just like any MMO where boars drop 3 copper and 1 vendor trash item, the bandits here in full combat gear drop 1 sausage and 9 bullets, their guns are worn out and red so you canât even sell them, you canât loot clothes or armor of a corpse, they might as well just drop 10 copper and skip the other stuff. Not only is the combat and looting boring and unrewarding, the game design fights the stupid economy at every step. In Far Cry 2 you would automatically pick up ammo, and if you wanted to pick up a weapon you had to interact with it, in this game where most guns are literally worthless you press âFâ to pick them up, or long press âFâ to take the ammo out. DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW FUCKING MENTAL THIS IS! This more than maybe any other fact shows how the game and economy fight. Yahtzee said that some games feel like the game designer and story writer had worked in different rooms and refused to communicate, the same thing can be said about this game with the game designer and economist.
This is not even touching on the level design, itâs own unholy mess! This foliage is so dense you canât see more than 10 meters in front of you, there are so many encounters, anomalies, bandits, and mutants infecting every square cm of the world it feels like Dead Island 2, a town stuffed to the gill with zombies, instead of this dangerous and rewarding landscape. When you make the world so dense with shit, nothing feels special, and the stupid environment hazards donât even host artifacts, it just makes moving around anywhere a pain in the ass, and the whole game feel like trying to swim in crude oil.
There are many other problems, the mutants are bullet sponges and it feels like just mag dumping into them is the only way to deal with them (âbUt ItS a SuRvIvAl GaMeâ you say skulling a bottle vodka. I WOULD AVOID EVERY COMBAT IF THE ENVIRONMENT ACTUALLY LET ME SEE ENEMIES BEFORE I STUMBLE INTO THEM!!) Trust me i would like nothing more than engage with the systems in this game as little as possible, not because they are scary or intimidating, but because they are so unrewarding the only winning move is to not play!
I have seldom seen a game THIS at odds with itself, none of the systems compliment each other, itâs not a brutal or difficult game, itâs unrewarding and boring in the extreme.
When i was in Chernobyl and we drove by the starting area of S.T.A.L.K.E.R 1 me and some other blokes in bus did the Soyjaks point meme, because it was iconic and recognizable. If you want the starting zone of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 just shove your head in a bush.
Mods did wonders for the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R, I am not really interested in the hardcore survival stuff, but the ability to more freely explore and experience the world is great. I had much more fun with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. G.A.M.M.A. on GoG than i did with the sequel.
All that being said, it did run very smooth on my fedora machine. Heroic game launcher makes gaming on Linux a real smooth experience, i am very happy to be able to install a game and press play without having to spend 30 minutes in the terminal.
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]]>Some people drink whiskey like itâs a religion. Aged in oak, stored underground, blessed by a Scottish wizard â anything less is heresy. Same energy as the Arch crowd who think you should build your distro from primordial source code and document your suffering on the forums.
But part of being an adult â and a professional â is not just following whatâs common or wellâknown. Itâs choosing what actually fits your life. As my dad used to say: âPrinciples are for people who canât analyze a situation.â
If I need a server, or Iâm building a computer as part of infrastructure, Debian is the distro iâll always default to. But for daily use? Fedora has been a surprisingly good fit.
And part of why Fedora clicked this time is the machine I built. I handâpicked components that fit a modern Linux stack: ASRock B850 ProâA WiFi, AMD Ryzen 5 9600X, Intel Arc B580.
Itâs a rig built for fresh kernels, current Mesa, and once i booted into Fedora for the first time, it really felt like home.
My old desktop still runs Pop!_OS. I boot it occasionally, check in on Cosmicâs progress, and use it for LAN lab work. Itâs a solid machine, just built for a different era of computing.
Fedora is Bourbon in the adult sense: not flashy, not ceremonial, not something you have to justify to purists. Itâs the choice you make when you know what you like.
And Fedora behaves that way. Updates land cleanly, hardware cooperates, and I donât have to babysit my repos like theyâre houseplants. The defaults feel familiar coming from Debian, but Fedoraâs philosophy is different in a way I appreciate: DNF is built for correctness first, speed second. Itâs the package manager equivalent of a bartender you trust â not the fastest pour, but always the right one.
Debian is the workhorse, the bedrock of what I consider the heart of Linux. Fedora is a comfortable and reliable desktop enviroment. And honestly? Iâm at a point in my life where I appreciate a distro that doesnât demand a thesisâlevel commitment just to stay functional.
Sometimes you just want the Bourbon. Sometimes you just run Fedora.
]]>Fedora installs cleanly, but modern video formats donât decode out of the box. HEVC files open with audio only, H.264 behaves inconsistently, and AAC doesnât load. It doesnât matter which player you try or how you install it â system packages and Flatpaks behave the same. After rebuilding mpv and getting identical results, the next step was checking the codec layer directly.
Fedora uses ffmpegâfree, a reduced FFmpeg build with many formats removed. To get proper decoding, I created a folder for FFmpeg and built it there. A normal source build with the formats I needed. When it finished, I had a complete FFmpeg installation in my home directory with its binaries and libraries in predictable places. This handled HEVC Main10, H.264, AAC, and the rest without issues.
mpv lives in its own folder. I built it using its standard waf system. During configuration, mpv detected the FFmpeg I had just built and linked against it. The resulting mpv binary uses that FFmpeg directly.
To make runtime consistent, I added a small wrapper script in ~/bin that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the FFmpeg libraries and launches the mpv binary from the build directory. I added ~/bin to PATH so the wrapper is easy to call.
mpv built from source doesnât install a desktop entry, so I added one under ~/.local/share/applications. It points to /usr/bin/mpv and lets the system handle doubleâclicking video files normally.
With that in place, video playback works reliably. HEVC Main10 loads, H.264 behaves normally, AAC decodes, and hardware acceleration operates as expected. The repeated mpv builds made it clear the codec layer needed a full FFmpeg, and once that was in place everything functioned correctly on this hardware.
]]>RustDesk tightened its public infrastructure recently. After botnet abuse and automated scanning, the public relay now requires login, and that finally pushed me to set up my own server. RustDeskâs backend is small: HBBS for ID resolution and HBBR for the relay. I deployed both on the garage machine, opened the ports, and pointed a dynamic DNS hostname at it. With that in place, the kiosk can ignore the public servers entirely.
The real problem wasnât RustDesk â it was SSH. SSH is great when you control the network and the IPs stay put. Over the internet, dynamic IPs turn it into guesswork. My garage machine solves that by updating deSEC whenever its own IP changes. The kiosk doesnât touch DNS at all; instead, it uses the deSEC hostname to send a small POST message to the garage machine. That message contains only one thing: the kioskâs current public IP. The garage machine logs it, and thatâs enough to keep SSH reachable without exposing any sensitive keys on the kiosk. If the kiosk ever gets compromised, it has no credentials that can modify my infrastructure.
deSEC is the one external dependency in the chain. Running my own equivalent is possible in principle, but itâs right at the edge of what you can reasonably build without extra cost. For now, this setup works: RustDesk on my own hardware, SSH reachable through dynamic DNS, and a simple heartbeat that keeps the kiosk visible wherever it ends up.
]]>I needed a Linux environment for my laptop that didnât touch my main drive and didnât forget everything every reboot. That shouldnât be a big ask in 2026, but here we are. Live USBs exist. Theyâre great for troubleshooting, but not something you actually want to use daily. Persistence can help, but getting it to behave reliably is more work than itâs worth. I want my browser set up, my plugins in place, the right keyboard layout, dark mode, WiFi â the basics. So I went with a full install. I used a small promotional 8GB USB drive as the installer and a Cruzer Blade (SDCZ50-016G-I35) as the target. The Cruzer Blade is slow â not benchmark slow, but real-world slow. Itâs a cheap USB 2.0 drive, and in practice it sits somewhere around:
Thatâs fine for a backup USB, but for something that constantly reads and writes like an operating system, it is a real bottleneck. A standard Linux install assumes storage is reasonably fast. It writes logs, updates access times, swaps memory to disk, and constantly touches the filesystem. On an NVMe drive, thatâs fine. On a USB stick, it isnât. Cheap flash also doesnât fail gracefully â it wears out. Iâve already had two drives die: one locked itself into read-only mode with no warning, the other simply stopped working. To make this usable long-term, the goal was to reduce writes as much as possible. The system came with a swap file. I should have disabled it during install, but after spending hours installing different distros I got sloppy and went with installs.
So I removed it and switched to zram â compressed swap in RAM instead of disk. Same purpose, but it avoids the USB completely and removes one of the worst bottlenecks.
Next was /tmp. A lot of programs use it constantly for temporary data, and on slow storage that adds up. Moving it into RAM with:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,size=4G 0 0
This means those operations never touch the USB at all. Itâs not flashy, but it makes the system feel much smoother.
The rest was small but important adjustments: the system was already configured to use noatime to stop updating file access timestamps, but I added commit=60 to batch writes instead of constantly syncing them. That reduces background disk activity significantly. The tradeoff is you can lose up to a minute of data in a crash, which for this kind of use is acceptable.
The result is a full Linux system running from a cheap USB stick thatâs actually usable. It boots, it remembers everything, and once itâs up it behaves like a normal machine instead of fighting the storage.
After trying a few options, I ended up using MX Linux. Mint is my go to for easy, all around installs, but it felt heavier than needed for this setup. MX is a better fit for slow storage â it still gives you a full desktop, but with less overhead and fewer background tasks. It boots quicker, writes less, and stays closer to what the hardware can handle. At the same time itâs still Debian-based, so everything is familiar. This turned out to be a surprisingly comfortable system given the constraints. Running a full install from a USB drive is niche, but itâs also something Linux handles extremely well. You can control memory usage, disk behavior, and make the system adapt to hardware in a way that simply isnât possible on Windows or macOS.
There probably should be a proper âUSB installâ profile at some point. Not because this is difficult, but because the capabilities are already there â theyâre just not presented as a standard option.
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