Shantae and the Pirate's Curse available for free on GOG.com right now

Here is yet another game that they're giving away for free, for whatever reason. (Assuming you can actually access the GOG.com site at the moment, of course, which I cannot at this particular moment as I type this, even though I was able to just a few minutes ago, when I claimed my own free copy.)

I played this one already, via Steam, along with Risky's Revenge (the prequel to Pirate's Curse) and Half-Genie Hero (the sequel to Pirate's Curse). They're pretty cool Metroidvania-ish type of games, i.e platformers that requires you to get various power-ups in order to access difficult-to-reach and/or hidden areas. They tend to be more level-based, rather than a single, continuous world like more traditional Metroidvania-style games are, though, but you'll still require the power-ups gained in one level (or in the hub area) in order to go back and access areas in earlier levels that you couldn't get to before. I guess that still counts as Metroidvania? *shrug*

I've never played the original Game Boy Color game (either legitimately or via emulation, at least not yet, though if I ever do play it, it will almost assuredly be via the latter option, outside of the unlikely event that it ever becomes available on Steam or wherever ¬_¬) in this series, nor have I yet bought and played the most recent Seven Sirens, but I can definitely recommend the others. It's not really necessary to have played the earlier games to enjoy the later games, though there are some plot points from earlier games that will be discussed/spoiled in the later games, such as the reason why Shantae doesn't have her genie powers in Pirate's Curse (hint: it's because of the events of Risky's Revenge). That said, the vast majority of the games is plotless, as it's mostly just Shantae running around doing platforming Metroidvania-y stuff.

Also, all of this is yet another case of "I thought for sure that I had already posted about this stuff, but apparently I didn't, because I couldn't find any previous posts that I thought I'd made but apparently never did, so oh well."

ARK: Survival Evolved is currently free-to-permanently-own via Steam right now

(As opposed to merely "free for a few days and then you have to pay" or whatever, which most of the "free" sales on Steam tend to be, and about which I almost never bother to post.)

Posting this for the sake of completeness, since Steam seems to be biting GOG's style as far as giving free games away now.

This game, though, is not a game that I've ever played, and more importantly, it is also a game that I likely never will play. That said, I went ahead and added it to my Steam library anyway, and I am also posting a link to it here just in case, because free is free. *shrug*

That said, it's apparently possible to play it singleplayer, despite it ostensibly being a MMO game, so maybe I might actually give it a try someday. No idea how truly viable it is to play singleplayer, though. *shrug again* Points in its favor is that it apparently even lets you play singleplayer OFFLINE (i.e. without requiring a connection to the Internet), which is better than some other piece of shit games can claim.

"I understand that blah blah blah..."

So, okay, like, why is it that when you look online for tech support type shit, when you find a page with someone asking a similar question to yours (or, you know, you ask a question yourself, which I almost never do anymore), or else when you submit a support ticket for something that's broken, and there is a response from an "official" tech support agent or whatever, the response invariably, invariably, invariably begins with the phrase "I understand that..."?

Like, "Hey, my shit's not working. How do I fix it?" Response: "I understand that your shit's not working. Have you tried this? <insert list of generic, braindead, useless advice such as "restart your computer" or whatever>"

I don't know, it just seems weird that that phrase is always, without fail, used to begin official tech support replies. Makes it seem like they're merely reading and copy/pasting from some generic form response thing, you know? Because, of course, that's almost assuredly what they're actually doing.

Here are a couple examples among a hojillion examples I could give. It's not just a Micro$hit thing, mind you, it's just that the two examples I was looking at happen to be from there, in this particular case.