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The Slowdown

A blog by vrap in General

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About this blog

A blog for those who spend more time thinking about gaming than gaming

Entries in this blog

Destiny 2 Incompatible with AMD Phenom II?

I just published my List of Games That No Longer Run on AMD Phenom a month ago, and then Bungie’s Destiny 2 launches on Oct 24th. The launch has raised the ire of tons of Phenom II users, as the game seems to be crashing mightily on those processors. In the developers’ known issues thread, the following SSSE requirement is mentioned: SSSE3 Required: Destiny 2 will not run on processors without Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (SSSE3). Wait, what? Usually, the common problem with gam
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Warframe Starter Guide for Plains of Eidolon

Warframe is huge right now – and for good reason – after their latest big update, Plains of Eidolon, has come out. It is indeed a fantastic update to a fantastic game. If you are thinking about jumping in, here are 12 important things about Warframe you absolutely need to know before starting out. 1. Warframe is really, truly free Warframe is free to play. Really! Make no mistake: If you want, you’ll never have to pay a single dime. It is common for the games press to make the mistake of thi
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Fallout: New Vegas 2017 Soft Touch Modification Guide

To celebrate Fallout‘s 20th anniversary, I figured it would be fun to completely start from scratch and tool the Bethesda Fallout game series for new, fresh playthroughs. Since I have now spent an evening’s worth of catching up on, and customizing, each of the Fallouts, I figured I might as well put my lists out here. In fact, I have actually written an article on Planescape: Torment (hilariously obsolete today, with the new Enhanced Edition out) before, and it’s a ton of fun to share this type
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Fallout 3 GOTY 2017 Soft Touch Modification Guide

To celebrate Fallout‘s 20th anniversary, I figured it would be fun to completely start from scratch and tool the Bethesda Fallout game series for new, fresh playthroughs. Since I have now spent an evening’s worth of catching up on, and customizing, each of the Fallouts, I figured I might as well put my lists out here. In fact, I have actually written an article on Planescape: Torment (hilariously obsolete today, with the new Enhanced Edition out) before, and it’s a ton of fun to share this type
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The Forthog DLC Is Cancelled: Long Live Forthog

We’re hopefully not going to be in the business of reporting news, but the Lord of the Rings: Shadow of War “Forthog Orc-Slayer” DLC has been effectively cancelled, with everyone getting refunds: “The DLC will be withdrawn from sale and will be a free download for owners of Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Anyone who has purchased the DLC will receive a full refund.” In an announcement, a WB Games community manager explains how the logistics of the project became insurmountable, and notes that In
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List of Games That No Longer Run on AMD Phenom

Note: I do have just enough self-awareness to file this story under our historical category, Time Machine. There is a tiny, though increasing, category of PC platform video game ports: Games that no longer run on AMD’s Phenom AM2/3 CPUs. There is a simple reason why, shared by all these games: They have been programmed to require CPU support for Intel’s SSE 4 (“Streaming SIMD Extensions 4”) instruction set, version 4.1 or higher. The Phenom CPUs, however, only support SSE up to 4.0. This is
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The Cuphead Runneth Over Dean

GamesBeat writer Dean Takahashi, @deantak, recently had some trouble playing Cuphead: This new video has, in many ways, brought back the game journalist competency debate that last reared its ugly head when Polygon’s Arthur Gies played Doom and didn’t do it very well. The emergent arguments and accusations levied at the person in question have been as various as they are dubious: That Mr. Takahashi’s specific position, as a video game journalist, requires him to be good at all games, or flat
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The Calculated Corporate Cynicism of Shadow of War’s Charity DLC

Note: For the purpose of this post, I have created a new category of post called “Contemporary Cynicism”. In this series, we are going to offer opinions that discuss the question of right and wrong in video games without adherence to common constraints set upon such public discourse. Since the video game companies of today often seem to be so beyond what we consider ethical behaviour, then maybe we should be, too. Several outlets are now reporting that Monolith is releasing a charity DLC, for
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G2A, Gearbox, and the Problem of Good and Evil

The recent Gearbox-G2A-TotalBiscuit debacle (reported on excellently at Vice’s Waypoint by Patrick Klepek over a series of news articles here, here and here) that was the result of a deal struck to officially distribute Bulletstorm via G2A, was in the offing for the longest time. It had to happen, because the legitimate online price-race (one that has now cooled, to be frank, after several online retailers have, or are in the process of, shutting down shop) drives a portion of consumers to find
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Stranded Review

Note: This review was written entirely sans PR materials and research; ordinarily, we pride ourselves on diligence and copious amounts of background research, but due to the game’s clear intentions and sensibilities, chose to approach this review differently. The single worst thing about adventure games – the one aspect that is also almost wholly unique to them – is being stuck. (Worse still, in fact, is knowing when you’re badly stuck.) For players, after all, adventure games are all about pro
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Don’t Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

United Front Games, best known for their atmospheric Hong Kong city brawler Sleeping Dogs (2012), is rumoured to be closing down. The weight of this rumour is not slight, and deserves all the extra attention we can bring to it – true or not, at this point in time we don’t yet know for sure – because, once again, the string of events that led us here reads like yet another example of Konami-like profound executive failure. But, to start from a beginning. According to United Front producer Dan
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Bioshock Remastered, Promise, and Emotional Torture

We’re all huge fans of the BioShock franchise here on The Slowdown, but we’ve also had our fair share of the game series. We awaited each game, lathering ourselves with collector’s editions (remember the original Big Daddy statue that would crack in half?), with nightly chats about lore and story, and even with articles written on the game here in the archives. They are some really good games. Some guy named John Lanchester once said somewhere that Bioshock “was the first game he played that had
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Quote of the Day: Satoru Iwata

</img> </img> </img> </img> </img><a href="http://www.slowdown.vg/2015/07/13/quote-of-the-day-satoru-iwata/" class='bbc_url' rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>
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Quote of the Day: Thimbleweed Park

</img> </img> </img> </img> </img><a href="http://www.slowdown.vg/2014/11/18/quote-of-the-day-thimbleweed-park/"class='bbc_url' rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>
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Quote of the Day: Ebb Software

</img> </img> </img> </img> </img><a href="http://www.slowdown.vg/2014/11/14/quote-of-the-day-ebb-software/"class='bbc_url' rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>
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Dear #gamergate

<p>Dear #gamergate,</p> <p>I don’t know if you’ll read this letter. I have not written to you before. We have not really spoken.</p> <p>While your message to us has, more often than not, taken either the form (and I do not mean to belittle you for it; the matter at hand is far more complex than any single person can handle alone) of the shouting of a rhetorical exercise, copy-pasted from a database of talking points, full of debate gymnastics, smoke and mirrors, r
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Harassment Is Not Okay

<p>Over the past two months, many video game developers and journalists have had to wake up and go to sleep bothered, pestered, insulted, and threatened – or worse: Phil Fish, and especially women like Brianna Wu, Zoe Quinn, and Anita Sarkeesian have had great reason to be fearful of their privacy, safety, and well-being, after being targeted with threats of death.</p> <p>This is <strong>wrong</strong> and needs to stop. Period.</p> <p>No matter what y
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On the Rise of Youtube

<p>Giggle!</p> <ol> <li>You watch Long Plays to experience a game without playing it</li> <li>You watch Let’s Plays to be entertained</li> <li>You watch video reviews to be spoiled</li> </ol> <p>Thesis: None of these three things are particularly conducive to actually selling a product.</p> <div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/slowdays/slowdown?a=P25Tgk43VPQ:MYdVoITMTXQ:D7DqB2pKEx
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On the Rise of Youtube

Giggle! You watch Long Plays to experience a game without playing it You watch Let’s Plays to be entertained You watch video reviews to be spoiled Thesis: None of these three things are particularly conducive to actually selling a product.
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The Samaritan Paradox Review

<p><b>The Samaritan Paradox</b>, a relatively new commercial AGS adventure game by <a href="http://faravidinteractive.wordpress.com/">Faravid Interactive</a>âs Peter Ljunkvist, published by <a href="http://www.screen7.co.uk/">Screen 7</a>, is a story about a story. A refreshingly Swedish one, too. The gameâs protagonist, Ord Salomon – âordâ is Swedish for âwordâ – is a shut-in PhD student of literature, rotting away at a failing thesis, with worried frie
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