General Gaming News and Discussion

Utnayan said:

I remember watching a show with my wife (She loves that Married at First sight show) and all of a sudden I got a pop up on the screen "Would you like to order the outfit they have on?" I was .. "WHAT THE FUCK?" and got to turning off some of that shit immediately. Too bad I couldn't block married at first sight too.

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Did you do a factory reset yet and then refuse to connect it to the network again? Might want to change the network password while you're at it, since Apple and Amazon have already been caught recording network passwords, like a decade or so ago. I also put all that streaming shit on it's own Virtual Network, so changing passwords is easier due to less devices to update.

Hateyou said:

If you watch anything on Amazon prime you get constant ‘buy now’ popups you can click and order shit. It’s gross.

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Set up a mini-pc/server connected to the TV with wireless mouse/keyboard/controller and watch everything through Firefox(with UBlock Origins) or Brave. No ads on anything but of course more of a hassle to use.

Checked my LG OLED and all the really egregious privacy violating stuff was turned off by default. Still shouldn't be there at all, and I'll never use the built-in WebOS shit, but at least they didn't turn it on with the updates too.

I don't get any weird/invasive popups on my Shield TV when I watch Prime Video either. Not sure if it's just not in the app or if it's being blocked by my pi-hole. I had to get rid of the Fire stick on my other TV though; they have completely ruined that with ads everywhere and no way to control the UI at all anymore. And that's an older Fire OS (Android) model, I can't even imagine what the newest Linux-based trash is like with zero ability to sideload at all. Kind of wild having to go back to built-in Roku because it's least enshittified option now.

What got me to buy an Xbox was KOTOR (I think that was exclusive at first) and the first Fable. I thought Gears was a lot better when it debuted on the 360.

I didn't have a xbox back in the day, and was always interested when my friends from school talked about how awesome this new Halo game was until I finally played it at someone's house. I was playing Doom 2, Quake, and a lot of Unreal Tournament at the time and Halo just felt like garbage especially vs UT. To this day I still don't get it.

Kajiimagi said:

Was going to reply just that. I didn't see the hype of Halo, still don't. IIRC the big thing about Halo was being able to network Xbox's together and do what PC gamers were doing for years? It did pretty much straighten out the console control for well every game since. The actual gameplay was just not my thing.

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This was pretty much it. We had a lot of lan parties where people brought 3 tvs, 3 consoles and everyone brought their own controllers. It was the first time my pleb friends could enjoy playing with more than 4 people.

Those tvs weighed hundreds of pounds back then, lol. It didn't stop us though. We would have huge groups turn up once word of mouth spread. Upwards of 25 people crammed into a small apartment with tvs and lan cables everywhere.