Far from standard, but some games on Steam offer their HD textures as a free DLC. Then you could choose not to install it. Way back when games still came on disks and DRM wasn't so invasive you could also mod games and replace the HD textures with lower res, but I don't think that is possible with today's game engines. If it weren't outright an option during the installation.
Jotunn
joined 2 years ago
I have about 4000 hours in Guild Wars 2, if my memory serves me right, I think it suffers from a big you had to be there problem. All of my friends that I have played any larger amount of time with were early adopters to the game. Everyone I have introduced afterwards have just gone around mildly entertained and not really seeing any point in continuing playing after maybe 10 hours.
Personally I think power and feature creep is a source to that problem. Back when I was new there were some challenges in the leveling areas, whacky balance in the relative end game zones meant a quick mistake could get you downed. Even the open world areas Orr were hard to move around in alone as a few enemy veterans quickly gang up on you. The smaller scope and lack of mounts also made running into other players a common occurrence. The updates often had hard or challenging content that the community could talk about together, even in the open world of the first expansion there were a bound of enemies keeping you on your toes.
But nowadays, even when I purposefully under gear and play bad builds those areas prove no danger at all. A recent example is a common, but still harder, enemy in the second expansion that a friend and I could finish so quickly that it hardly had time to make a move. That was a bit prideful and funny to us then, but now I could do that alone, with earlier mentioned bad build. Power creep, polishing rough edges and mounts have made the game uneventful and lacking in memorable moments. I get bored by the content, both new and old, and a bit sad when I breeze through some of the hard older stuff that used to challenge and entertain the whole group all on my own. So I really understand that someone without the nostalgia telling them how good or fun certain parts were just get whelmed by the experience.
Even if the big beautiful zones filled with the quirky events and stuff that pulled me to the game back in 2012 still remains, I consider it a snore fest to experience them today.
I'm not really sure EDF 6 is the best entry point to the series, as it's a direct sequel to EDF 5. I think it will get really confusing story- and missionwise, more so than it already is. EDF 5 was a soft reboot and is also a bit cheaper.
My friends and I really liked the WORLD BROTHERS 2 spinoff too, if someone is looking to play with a young player that might be a better starting point than the mainline games. The rest of the series spinoffs have not really done it for us.
I've switched to CalyxOS. It supports some more manufacturer and models than GrapheneOS. Got no idea how their user experience compares. It's a bit of tinkering to do, so it's not for the untechnically inclined. Also, make sure you got a way to log on to things without using an authenticator or make sure it won't get lost when the phone gets wiped.
Back then internet wasn't freely available. While I don't know the situation in Taiwan back then, but it getting it on a floppie might have been the easiest way. A physical thing that still cost money and time to write. Selling cheap to the pirates still made them some money, the pirates saved time spent writing drives, and they could make sure the customers got official boxes with correct contact information on.
Where I come from you went and bought PC magazines bundled with floppies and later CD that had a demos and shareware products on. The magazine was often not the interesting thing in the bundle. So calling it ripping off is a bit harsh, the pirates were providing a service. Even with access to the internet, surfing the web did not work the same as it do today. Without an address it could be hard to find pages.