Do you still have to buy some tier of gamepass to be able to play multiplayer games that you own online?

What temperature are you using?

Ugh, you’re right, Way to undermine my own point! There are no official third party wireless controllers.

8BitDo do make licensed controllers that work with Xbox though - for example: https://www.8bitdo.com/pro2-wired-controller-for-xbox/ and https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/controllers/ultimate-wired-controller-for-xbox

[Edit: and there are a bunch of wired third party controllers on Microsoft’s store from other manufacturers: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories?xr=shellnav]

8bitdo (and the other major 3rd party controller makers) have a license. Their controllers are even advertised on Microsoft’s site - e.g. https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/mobile-gaming/sn30-pro

[Edit: @ArugulaZ@kbin.social points out correctly that this controller does not with with Xbox - it’s for mobile. Oops. There are some that do though - see later replies!]

Yes, there’s a proprietary authentication mechanism. It’s been used in all controllers from the Xbox One, released in 2013, onward. At the moment, at least publicly, it remains uncracked. That’s actually quite impressive!

I think a lot of people are interpreting this news to mean that all third party Xbox controllers will stop working. Controllers from the likes of PowerA, Razer or 8bitdo. But they will still work. They are licensed by Microsoft and contain their proprietary authentication processors.

Some third party accessories like the Cronos Zen allow other controllers (Joysticks, wheels, PC gamepads, Playstation controllers etc.) to work with Xbox - and also often contain ‘cheat’ mechanisms (like automatic direction input to compensate for gun recoil in shooters). They require you to connect an authentic Xbox controller to them and hijack communication to do ‘authentication’ via the authentic controller. Perhaps Microsoft has worked out a way to detect this?

Lastly, there are some cheap third party controllers, often from Chinese manufacturers, that seem, at the moment, to ‘just work’ without being licensed by Microsoft. General online consensus seems to be that they’re using recycled authentication chips - but perhaps some contain cracked copies of the algorithm and Microsoft has figured out a way to tell?

It’s these last two categories that Microsoft is presumably cracking down on.

The idea is still around! Apple’s APFS file system (and HFS+in its later days) support sort-of transparent compression, and on all its platforms most system files - the ones that don’t change much - are compressed to save space for user files. There’s surprisingly little documentation about this.

There’s a third party tool you can use to compress files yourself: https://github.com/RJVB/afsctool

It looks like the technical details are in this pdf: https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Apple-File-System-Reference.pdf

Mass Effect Andromeda! I just played through the ‘Legendary Edition’ of the trilogy, and despite what I’d heard about Andromeda, I couldn’t resist it at under $4 at GameStop.

…and I’m actually enjoying it a lot!

I wonder if it might actually get better reviews if it were released today. We’re more used to open worlds, and it’s less expected that you’d try to finish every little quest line you are presented with (‘Oh, don’t do that - that’s just for people who really like collecting things!’), and more expected that you’d jump around between places and not ‘complete’ one area before going on to another.

I’m not really seeing the problem with facial animations that some reviewers complain very loudly about - and some people online say rendered the game ‘unplayable’. Maybe I’m just not attuned to see it? Or maybe they updated it after release?

4

Really don’t think that ‘playing the right way’ is a new phenomenon. I haven’t played an online FPS in 20 years, but I vividly remember controversy around camping when I was playing Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena way back then.

Or pause during cut scenes!

Was a sleeper - not sure it still counts, because it caught some good press, but Pentiment. Way more fun and engrossing than any short description makes it sound. And I feel like I even learned a bunch from it!