Still up

In the FAQs they suggest they don’t know battery life yet because it’s not finished - but indicate “several days” in standby

An ODM is a type of company - although it’s very possible they paid the same ODM to make the phones, since they likely have the tooling ready to go.

Yes they are but they don’t make their phones anymore, they use ODMs in China and the article says the battery was made in the Philippines.

ODM is a type of company (Original Design Manufacturer) rather than a specific company. I do wonder who actually made it, but it’s likely a company no one’s ever heard of.

I live fairly close to the distillery - it’s a fun trip, even if you don’t drink. Like most gins they just use grain alcohol so all the flavour comes from the choice of botanicals and they seemed to care about the quality.

I prefer Hendricks myself but Bombay do a lot of very good special editions.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply!

Engine limitations I can excuse to a limited degree (it just says to me it wasn’t prioritised correctly) but not for saving any time - at least from the world map, or similar out of engagement situations. If I can save from a church (looking at you, Dragon Quest) I can save from an inn or a bridge or a bush.

I played a game where the cutscenes could only be skipped once loading was done, can’t remember which though - one of the Call of Duty games maybe? That would be a fair compromise.

Drawing maps out by hand is definitely a habit I am pleased not to have to do any more! Back in the days when a game lived in its big box next to my computer it wasn’t a big problem to keep paper in it but nowadays any written notes I made would get lost immediately! If the game designers allow an in game map it should have some basic features like zooming, annotations, and auto-population. I agree that marking every little detail can make a map unusable but it should be my choice as the player what I do with the map, even if that means recording somewhere I found a random horse I want to go back to.

Mostly your comment is making me want to go back to Pillars of Eternity so thank you for that! :)

Games that don’t act like they are games. Too many designers think they are making “high art”. Examples:

Not being able to save any time for any reason - I have a life, stuff happens. I need to be able to save and leave the game at any time - during gameplay, dungeons, cutscenes, any time. Make it a suspend state if it must - but respect reality.

Non-pausable cutscenes - you are not the most important part of my life so you need to be able to pause without losing content.

Non-skippable cutscenes - I might have seen this 10 times before, let me skip.

Dialogue history - if you let me skip dialogue then you must have a dialogue history. I might have hit the skip button by accident so let me see what I missed.

Indicate when there isn’t new dialogue - make the chat options change when there is new dialogue, making it so I have to interact with the NPC or object again just to see if there is new dialogue is infuriating.

Show when an activity will fail - don’t make me search barrels that are empty. Skyrim does this perfectly.

If you have a map let me annotate it - somehow a magicly populating map is allowed in your world but I don’t have a pencil to write “come back here with a shovel”?

Sounds similar to ATOL in the UK. That ensures you get somewhere to stay if your hotel is unavailable and a flight home if your airline fails. It saved me in 2019 when Thomas Cook went bust - my hotel let me stay for the rest of the holiday and I had a rescue flight home from EasyJet. Wherever possible I will always book my holidays in an ATOL wrapper.

Lots of laptops are actually made by Clevo - they are Taiwanese at least. ASUS and MSI are also Taiwanese.

Some manufacturers like CyberPowerPC are at least assembled in Europe - same with Chillblast. Likely a Clevo or Tongfang (Chinese) laptop underneath though.

Otherwise Nokia in Finland, Medion, SHIFT, Tuxedo, or Wortmann all from Germany spring to mind.

This always drives me crazy - reviews everywhere on the internet but all for brands that don’t exist or ship to the UK.

I’d like to see a community like this!

Here in the UK when the brand first appeared the press were saying it like Day-sea-er, but it fairly quickly changed to Dah-cha (like the start of satchel) and has stayed that way.