The Steam winter sales are here, up to the 4rth of January.

What game did you enjoy playing and want to share with the community, and why?

It's like a mini (or a bit larger) review for the people in the community to discover your loved game, and get it for a smaller price. Also remember to share a link to the store page to help people find the game.

The game must be on sale currently and must not be a free to play game, or what would be point of this post.

The release date doesn't matter. Neither the sale amount. If you enjoyed the game, it should be shared.

You can put the game type/tags at the beginning of your comment if you wish so, it may help other people.

Please a single game per comment if you post a review.

I'll start in the comments.

I recently reinstalled windows on my pc, and looked at pcmr on reddit to find a post of someone complaining about gsync, on nvidia systems, not beeing enabled by default everywhere.

That reminded me the pain it is to help someone enable it, with an ugly and hard to understand (for noobs) nvidia tutorial, and even worse with a freesync display.

On my system, with an amd card, and a freesync premium display, once the drivers were installed, freesync was enabled and no issues, nothing do fiddle with, it was just enabled automatically for all the system and windows to use.

Wonder why nvidia can't do that.

It even set automatically my display to 165hz (tho maybe that could have been because it already was at 165 before the reinstall?).

There is still the trick to lower the max fps 3/4fps lower than the max hz of the display to teach, for better smoothness. But that is just an easy to do trick.

Another article, much better and presents in more detail that Olvid was audited on an older version and chosen because it was French and they applied for it (French) https://www.numerama.com/tech/1575168-pourquoi-les-ministres-vont-devoir-renoncer-a-whatsapp-signal-et-telegram.html

Google translate link original post : https://www-lepoint-fr.translate.goog/high-tech-internet/les-ministres-francais-invites-a-desinstaller-whatsapp-signal-et-telegram-29-11-2023-2545099_47.php?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fr&_x_tr_pto=wapp

The translation has some mistakes but good enough to understand the context.

Here is a short summary :

Olvid passed a 35d intrusion test by Anssi (French cybersecurity state organisation) experts or designated experts, with code examination without finding any security breach. Which is not the case of all other 3 messaging apps (either because they didn't do any test, or because they didn't pass).

This makes WhatsApp, signal and telegram unreliable for state security.

And so government members and ministerial offices will have to use Olvid or Tchap (French state in house messaging app).

More detail in the article.

The article is about Kyutai, a French AI lab with an objective to compete with chatgpt and others with full open source (research papers, models, and training data).

They are aiming to also include the capability to use sound, image, etc... (according to this article (French) https://www.clubic.com/actualite-509350-intelligence-artificielle-xavier-niel-free-et-l-ancien-pdg-de-google-lancent-kyutai-un-concurrent-europeen-a-openai.html )

The post article also talks about some French context.

All of these Windows 11 changes are part of key tweaks that Microsoft has to make to its operating system to comply with the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act, which comes into effect in March 2024.

Alongside clearly marking which apps are system components in Windows 11, Microsoft is also responding by adding the ability to uninstall the following apps:

• Camera
• Cortana (already removable and thrown in the trash)
• Web Search from Microsoft Bing, in the EEA
• Microsoft Edge, in the EEA
• Photos

Only Windows 11 users in the EEA will be able to fully remove Microsoft Edge and the Bing-powered web search from Windows Search. Microsoft could easily extend this to all Windows 11 users, but it’s limiting this extra functionality to EEA markets to comply with the rules. “Windows uses the region chosen by the customer during device setup to identify if the PC is in the EEA,”

Microsoft will allow EEA machines to remove the Bing results, so Google could provide its own search results here and effectively become the default if a user has uninstalled Bing. “If the user has more than one search provider installed, Windows Search will show the last one used when opened,”

So possibly search engines like ddgo and others may be able to develop an integration to be able to be used in the windows search menu.

But no nice things for outside the EEA.

Now I hope that when uninstalling edge, it won't auto reinstall back like the f piece of s omen software which installs itself because I have an hp display.

Also what would happen if a user, who has no idea what they are doing, uninstalls edge without having another browser available?

Thanks to more than 100 civil society groups joined us in speaking out against this proposal. So did thousands of individuals who signed the petition demanding that the EU “Stop Scanning Me.”

The LIBE comity has changed it's stance towards the on device scanning and message scanning.

The text is not final, but scheduled to confirm the new agreement on the 13th of November.

(enough for highest quality at 4K) yes the game seems to have s* optimisation.

RT = Ray tracing PT = Path Tracing FG = Frame Generation

Source : https://www.techpowerup.com/review/alan-wake-2-performance-benchmark/

This one allows me to move, while beeing friendly, not like this one, who follows me "aggressively" for pets.

https://jlai.lu/post/1328045

It's in French. Here is a translation to help you understand :

This environmental impact is with the configuration shown in the picture :

• 50 mails/week from a pc, each with 1mb attachments
• 7 hours of 4k streaming (YouTube, Netflix, or whatever).
• 3 hours of HD video calls.

All through wifi.

In the impact and comparison below, you should be able to understand from the emojis :

The impact equates to

• 153km in a car, 5 t-shirts, 4.6 meals with beef.

The list under that is the calculated environmental impact : (1y, is with the amount per week, so one year in weeks).

• 1y email
• 1y video call
• 1y streaming
• 1 smartphone
• 1 touch pad
• 1 laptop
• 1 TV
• 1 PC

Source : https://impactco2.fr/usagenumerique You can play on the website to find your impact.

The website is from the French government, and created with the help of the ARCEP and ADEME through extensive studies https://www.arcep.fr/la-regulation/grands-dossiers-thematiques-transverses/lempreinte-environnementale-du-numerique.html

So next time when you get a proposition to clean your emails, think about this. The emails are dwarfed by everything else.

I watched a Warframe (game) YouTube video on the Steam integrated browser, without beeing connected to my account and Holly s* it was horrible.

In a 14 minutes video, I got 5 ads. 1 (or more skippable once) at the beginning, 1 during the first half of the video, 2 during the second half, and 1 at the end.

All were skippable after 5 sec.

2 were close together at about 1 min interval during the second half of the video.

But that is not the only issue. 4 of those ads (not the last one at the end), were Israeli hate/war anti-hamas propaganda.

I consider these ads horrible and they should not be allowed in my opinion.