Why play expensive games when you can get addicted to Balatro
With how much Factorio I’ve played, I’m down to less than $0.10/hr with the Space Age expansion. I’m nowhere close to done.
I don’t get the Balatro addiction stuff. It’s a good game, but after you’ve played it a few times it gets boring. Sure, “number go up” but it’s like people have never played a video game before. There’s so many Skinner boxes that, at least for me personally, it becomes numbing. I also don’t easily get sucked into other manipulative addicting things in other games though, so maybe it’s just something wrong with me.
What makes you continue playing Balatro after you’ve “figured it out?”
Once I “figured it out”, I realized I was beating the decks using flushes. So I decided trying different styles like building a deck for playing straights, full houses, two pairs. I found out you can play a full house flush. It isn’t on the list of poker hands so that was fun to stumble upon.
Playing different Antes, Decks and Challenges has kept it fresh and interesting for me: forcing me out of my comfort zone to find new combinations and strategies that works. It might help to change the game speed to 4x so it’s not so showy with the jokers and you can iterate different strategies faster. Or it’s not your thing. Nothing wrong with that.
Me with a:
Ryzen 5 5800x, RTX 4060 TI, and 32GB RAM.
Plays: Factorio and Minecraft 😂
Me going back to hollow knight, celeste, modded minecraft, and dead cells instead of buying new games
What’s funny is that a new GPU alone will set ya back that amount already. I’m hopefully picking up the 5080 at launch for 1k
Not OP but my GPU is a decade old, would be nice to have the latest for once.
You might be better off with a 4000 series, unless you got a new motherboard that won’t be bottlenecked much by the pcie version jump.
Used graphics card prices aren’t that much better than new.
The 4090 still has a VRAM advantage over the 5080 so it’s probably going to continue to hold it’s value pretty well. Especially since there’s a massive voice in pricing between the $1k 5080 and the $2k 5090.
Unless the 24gb ARC GPU comes out (or AI crashes) I see the 4090 just not depreciating a substantial amount. And that’s the only option that would compare to the 5080 since AMD isn’t even trying to make high end.
I was just going to say my new PC was $5000 and $1,200 of that was the GPU.
I don’t see how a gaming only pc has $3800 of non-gpu costs. There has to be a threadripper equivalent cpu and/or a shit ton of storage/ram on there.
I feel like kinda the main reasons to pick up a latest gen gpu nowadays are energy efficiency and a warranty (although 5000 series doesn’t look all that energy efficient, we’ll see i guess)
otherwise you can definitely get something better on ebay for cheaper
but if you live somewhere where energy is expensive, the difference might be significant. 500w is kinda a lot lol, any difference in performance/watt will add up
prices are going to drop when the new gpus come out and people need to get rid of their old ones, but currently with a little bit of looking i could find a ‘buy it now’ 7900 xt for $640, a 3090 for $775, and a 3090 ti for $850
honestly these aren’t great deals you could probably find better ones
this failing isn’t on you though. AAA games is not what it used to be, I feel like between 2008 to 2014 game companies have all progressed and transitioned into something they didn’t use to be.
my $4k gaming PC at this point is a glorified FFXIV machine although, I do plan to play other things soon.
I mostly play indie games, but I sometimes play AAA games (Ghost of Tsushima right now) and I am glad that I have my rig that can get 90 fps @ 4k (with fsr).
It’s not because you don’t use it every single time that you play a game that it is a waste of money.
I feel like the last few years at least have had like one worthy game per year, which for someone with a lot of work to do and now a family, is plenty. I’ve yet to finish Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate III, and while I completed Cyberpunk, I never got around to the DLC.
I do certainly feel like between 2016 and 2021 or so, we barely got any good games. The biggest release of 2020 took a year or 2 to be decent and even then never lived up to its’ hype because what was promised was simply too much. 2021 the biggest release was Forza Horizon 5 which I loved, but a lot of gamers don’t really care for.
?
2016 we got Blood and Wine for Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 (which is a good game, just not a good Fallout game). Oh and we got Doom.
2017 wasn’t that great for AAA, except for Nintendo. But we still got great games like Breath of the wild, Prey, Nier Automata, Hellblade, Hollow Knight, Undertale to name a few.
2018 we got Red Dead Redemption 2, Monster Hunter World, God of War.
2019 we got Death Stranding, Divinity Original Sin 2, Sekiro, Resident Evil 2
2020 we got Final Fantasy 7 Remake, The last of us 2, Hades
2021 is kind of a dud because of covid.
So I’m terms of AAA only 2017 and 2021 can really be considered duds. But indies released some absolute bangers between 2016-2021. For example Disco Elysium, among us, outer wilds, Stardew valley, inscryption etc.
Okay fair enough, I kinda lumped in B&W with the main game which came out in 2015, ignored Nintendo altogether because I’ve never owned a console, forgot about God of War because I’ve never owned a console, forgot about RDR2 because while it was absolutely immersive at the time and I blew 40+ hours in a single week during my vacation on it… It was somehow completely forgettable after the fact. Never liked Death Stranding too much, TLoU2 didn’t affect me because… You get the gist.
Half the good AAA games that came out in that time period, I ignored because PS and Nintendo exclusives were out of reach to me as a PC-only gamer (at least Microsoft put their exclusives on Windows in that era - something Sony is now catching up on). Of the indie games - there’s no real marketing, I never have any idea when any particular game came out. I thought Stardew Valley has been going on for like at least a decade, but apparently it’s only been out since 2016. I never got around to playing Disco Elysium because it felt sorta time consuming and difficult to get into, though I certainly did hear a LOT about it because Kaur Kender apparently had something to do with it and he is… quite controversial, to say the least. Not to say him being involved is a bad thing - I enjoyed his books. The actual books, not the short story about kiddy diddling which got him into the hot mess he was in until it was declared that it was an exhibition of freedom of speech.
Also to be fair, 2018 also had Kingdom Come: Deliverance which was probably my favourite game between Witcher 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3, though not the only one I enjoyed obviously.
Maybe 2016-2021 wasn’t bad for games, but forgettable for me because my own life was, at the time, boring and ignorable.
