The power grid does have a major point of failure, in that vital components are on backorder for years out so most places don’t have the spare parts to get back up and running if widespread attacks on the grid occur.

Burger King chicken nuggets from the 90s, before the recipe changed to crap. If I had to pick a flavor that I associate with my childhood, this would be it.

The Angus Mushroom & Swiss burger from McDonald’s. The Angus was the closest thing they ever had to a real burger, but they were too expensive for most people and were eventually discontinued. Fun fact: wages have stagnated yet their basic burgers now cost more than the Angus did.

Runza used to sell frozen dark chocolate-dipped cheesecake on a stick. They were delicious, and small enough that you wouldn’t feel guilty about ordering one.

It was also the only time I can recall them having a swiss and mushroom burger on the menu. It was delicious.

Ellison.

The suggestions for email addresses if yours was already taken used to include what you entered plus the last two digits of your birth year. I wonder how many people born in 1988 followed that advice and now deeply regret it.

My brother-in-law once put a slice of bread on my sleeping sister’s stomach, and when their dog (a very gluttonous beagle) started chowing down, woke her up by shaking her while shouting “the dog is eating your flesh!”

He’s great. There’s a reason he became my best friend after they married.

What are you talking about? Dragon Age already had two sequels.

They just called them Pillars of Eternity I and II for some reason…

There’s a Half-Life mod that brings it to PC, along with one that ports the Decay co-op expansion.

Spec Ops actually did have choices where you could be good (or at least less bad), but ironically people missed them because they didn’t think being good would work.

For example, at one point you’re being harassed by an angry mob of locals. A lot of players simply shot them because a lifetime of experience with shooters told them that no other input would be recognized. But in actuality, if you fired warning shots at the ground or over their heads the civilians would flee without incident.

You’re able to run MemTest? That’d suggest it’s not actually fried if it can still run things.

Check your BIOS/UEFI to see if Secure Boot was re-enabled. If your CMOS battery died and you didn’t notice, your machine config could have reset to its default values during the power loss.

I was still running a Q6600 (a 2.4 gHz quad core from 2007) until a few years ago. It ran most things acceptably for its entire life - it wasn’t until around the time of PS4 Pro/Xbox Whatever ports that it could no longer keep up, and even that was largely due to the other components I was restricted to on such an old motherboard.

That thing was also a tank. The CPU cooler was stock and the thermal paste had degraded and separated to the point it idled at 65c, but I never had a single hardware fault in nearly fifteen years of running it. I kind of miss it.

“In English, please?”

I believe you are correct. I had my MBR overwritten a few times back in the Windows XP days, but haven’t heard of it happening on modern UEFI setups outside of warnings like these.

I still segregate my system drives out of paranoia though.

Fun fact, that’s literally what the code does in Teslas. They shut off self driving if they sense an imminent impact in an attempt to shift legal culpability onto the driver.

You may enjoy Dungeon Keeper.

I liked how SimCopter actually used the same systems as SimCity 2000, with cop cars coming from police stations and fire trucks from the firefighters. Well thought out SimCity maps actually made your life easier, rather than being window dressing.

I wish someone would bring back the concept. There was a SimCopter mod for Cities: Skylines back when it first released, though I think it was abandoned. That would be the perfect game for it, since half of SimCopter was dealing with traffic and Skylines had an amazing traffic simulation.

Mostly, I just liked the Apache helicopter you could use to blow everything up

Until you hit a nuclear power plant and it wiped out half the city (and probably fried your copter too) once it burned down.

UFOs would also start spawning when an Apache was present on the map and start abducting civilians and blowing up buildings until you shot them down. I think that was the only other disaster the game simulated?

Both can be played on modern Windows with Krimsky’s patches. They’d probably work in Wine, but I’ve never tested them.

I believe the last pre-Paradox build is still available under Steam Betas.

It’s a damn shame what Paradox did to the game. It turned from a near-perfect sim with excellent optimization and stability into a laggy, buggy mess with loads of DLCs that both fixed and introduced more bugs. So the usual Paradox product, where stability is completely random based on which DLCs you own.

Hey, I just wanted to say I bought Lunacid right after your comment and finally got around to playing it. I’m only at the Catacombs, but so far it’s excellent and a great throwback to Kings Field (though I miss having armor; with only weapons and rings there’s far less exciting loot).

Thanks for the recommendation, my friend!

Just take the first panel, but the end of the parchment goes into a shredder.