X-Com was amazing, and Xcom2 also pretty good. I just checked, and there is an amazing mod and very active community around LwotC (Long war of the Chosen), with tons of fixed bugs and improvements, a decade or so after the game was released. [0]
I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3. I would guess the fan base is still huge.
I'm getting old and I don't play videogames anymore, but if I have a month of free time imprisoned in a cell with nothing else to do, I'd give xcom2 with LwotC a go. (and Master of Magic, and Master of Orion 2, etc).
There's also an open source reimplementation of the original Gollop designed game which has extensive modding support. There's quite a few total conversion mods for it
There's a bit of confusion because the first game was called "UFO: Enemy Unknown" in the UK and "X-COM: UFO Defense" in the US [1] but the one discussed in the article is the 1994 game:
X-COM: Enemy Unknown
Developer: Mythos Games
Publisher: MicroProse
Format: Amiga, PC
Release: 1994
That one unfortunately got caught up in publisher politics as they had a very successful kickstarter but then broke promises to backers because Epic offered them a lot of money for an exclusive. I think the game would’ve been more popular if it hadn’t had the distraction of many of their biggest fans feeling used.
I'd suspect a great deal of people are secretly benefiting from qemu when they do $(docker build --platform linux/{arm64,amd64}) courtesy of binfmt_misc and a static copy of qemu
and let me tell you from first-hand experience, that trying to swap in an updated version of the bundled qemu binary when the static version panics on some mis-emulated instruction is some whooooooo, boy
Mine is a rather prosaic example, but I'm sure it's not uncommon: Proxmox on leased bare metal servers make for wonderful (small scale, but impressively equipped at ~$100/mo) cheap dev hosting.
If you find yourself limited by the equivalent VPS expense, I discovered that for my use-case (mixed web hosting, dev services, self-hosting) I could squeeze a lot more out of an entry level bare-metal box with ~48GB of RAM, and everything just becomes a VM in Proxmox, and it's still trivially simple to scale/replicate, maintain backups, and tie together with other VPS or cloud services.
The only part that was a bit of a challenge is negotiating NAT for the virtual NICs so you don't need separate IPv4 addresses for each guest. But Proxmox's docs are pretty robust, and I'm sure there are dozens of tuts available now.
Correlation is not causation. All credibility is lost for this guy, in my view.
> We know from one study that people who played tennis a few times per week lived roughly 10 years longer than average. So we'll use that value going forward.
This is the study [0]. The study itself, in the conclusions, states that:
"Conclusion: Various sports are associated with markedly different improvements in life expectancy. Because this is an observational study, it remains uncertain whether this relationship is causal."
I met Saverin at a private event not long ago. I had high expectations, I came out deeply disappointed. He didn't share any interesting insight, and essentially avoided any confrontation or controversy in the discussion - even if it was completely private and non-recorded.
The "number" is always part of a big debate. There's no right or wrong.
Usually, they say that you can maintain your wealth (adjusted for inflation) indefinitely by using the so-called "safe withdrawal rate" [0], which people put between 1% and 4%.
So, say that you have $1M in wealth, and you pick your SWR at 2%. It means that you can use 2% of that, or $20,000, every year, knowing that your wealth will keep growing at least by the inflation rate, for a long time (30 years, or 100, or whatever).
If you have $10M, you can spend $200,000/year.
Clearly, it depends on your lifestyle how much you need to have saved in order to FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early).
All of this assumes that for the next 30, 40 years, we will not see any catastrophic or monumental changes in how the financial system works.
I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3. I would guess the fan base is still huge.
I'm getting old and I don't play videogames anymore, but if I have a month of free time imprisoned in a cell with nothing else to do, I'd give xcom2 with LwotC a go. (and Master of Magic, and Master of Orion 2, etc).
[0]: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Long_War_of_the_Chosen
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