So here we are! Mid August of 2026 🙂

After a long period of not posting, at least here on the personal blog, I would like to open up my gaming schedule until the end of 2026 and perhaps beyond.

Also, on the same topic, I would like to address my Twitch situation overall and some changes on my hardware compared to the post I made back in 2022.

Oh! And not forget Dune!

Let’s start with my hardware!

Includes a lil’ rant about GTA VI.

The hardware I currently own is:

• 1 PS5 1TB Digital Only.
• 1 Nintedon’t Switch 2.
• 1 Xbox One X 1TB – Project Scarlet Edition.
• 1 PS4 1TB.
• 1 MacBook Air M3 (2024).
• 1 Gaming Desktop PC listed below.
• 1 Steam Deck 512GB.
• 1 Mini PC with Intel N100 CPU and 4×2.5Gbps network ports (to sell).
• 1 Mini PC Intel NUC i5 10th gen running Proxmox for various VMs.
• 1 Mini PC Intel NUC i3 10th gen with Windows 11 Pro for work.
• 1 Mini PC ASRock DeskMeet B660 running Unraid OS.
• 1 Mini PC Lenovo i5 10th gen running my Home Assistant OS.
• 1 Mini PC Lenovo AMD Ryzen 7 6-core APU for CachyOS Dev Studio.
• 3 HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen 10 1U servers running Proxmox in a cluster.
• 1 HPE ProLiant ML350 Gen 10 4U (2×20-core/40-thread Xeon CPUs) trying to find a purpose.

Compared to 2022, my main PC also has a new CPU/Motherboard/RAM and NVMe.

My main PC now is:

• AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• Gigabyte X870E AORUS ELITE WIFI7
• NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti 12GB
• 64GB DDR5 RAM at 6000MHz
• 1×2TB Crucial T705 Gen 5.0 NVMe
• 2×2TB NVMe Kingston KC3000 PCI-E Gen 4.0
• 1×1TB Samsung 870 EVO SATA SSD
• 1×256GB SSD for the /tmp and cache folders (to minimize writes on my main drives)

This new system, which I have had since January of 2025 but forgot to write about, is a massive upgrade over the 5900X in almost every category. Even in my tasks, this 8c/16t chip outperforms the 12c/24t CPU, not by much but still!

Since Black Friday of 2025, I have the PS5. I bought this console only to play GTA VI.

I don’t care for other PS5 exclusives and most games that exist on other platforms. My PC runs them much better and without needing to pay for online.

Unfortunately, I see lots of people having issues with me buying this PS5 for myself, as if I took the funds for it from their wallets or something like that, which is insane!

Why do I have to explain myself about this? This baffles me very much.

• I am a PCMR gamer. GTA VI, a game I have been longing for many years, will be released on consoles first. The PS5 seems a better choice over Xbox Series X (S is out of the question anyway), so what is the problem with it? When the game releases on PC, I can sell my PS5 and buy the game on PC to continue where I left off with the story or online, the same way it was with GTA V back in the day when it came to PC. I moved my online character from PSN to PC.
• The other issue is: NO PHYSICAL, NO BUY! WHY DO YOU PREORDER MONTHS AHEAD? IS IT GOING TO RUN OUT OF COPIES?

Well, if people had more than 2 brain cells working at the same time, maybe this wouldn’t have to be an issue in the first place.

I have also written about this here, and I am also saying this in many discussions I have online about the same thing.

Brothers and sisters, I have a DIGITAL ONLY PS5, tell me, for the love of whatever imaginary deity you happen to have been born into and forced to believe in, HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO BUY THE GAME?

Next diamond question: Why did you pre-order months ahead? You haven’t even seen a game trailer!

Again, this is my wallet, my money. What’s up with it? Do I tell you why you buy cigarettes or energy drinks? No, so fuck off!

I have been working my ass off with my underpaying job for months in order to save up just for this game! Remember? I wrote about it earlier. I bought the PS5 on Black Friday just for GTA VI. I managed to buy 2 gift cards of 50€ each for like 39 to 40€ each, so in total I paid south of 80€ for 100€ in my PSN wallet, and I got the GTA 6 Ultimate Edition that costs 100€ for less than 80€.

I really do not understand why people want to manage my wallet. I am working a full-time job, I have started my own private company, and I am working like 20 out of 24 hours a day, as I have said in my post here,

I do not rely on donations or handouts. So, “WE” didn’t earn that money together, why do “WE” have to talk about it?

-You are killing physical media with your digital purchases!

Again, I have a digital-only PS5. Why does my purchase of the digital-only GTA VI kill the physical market and not, for example, if I buy digital FIFA?

And you know what? I used to be all supportive of physical media, even if I do not need it due to 1Gbps FTTH internet and a digital-only PS5, but screw it!

Do you know what physical is to me? I had a first-gen fat PS3, you know, the one with PS2 compatibility. This PS3, before its first year, stopped reading PS3 discs. It could read Blu-rays, DVDs and CDs, but no PS3 games, and I had a lot of them!

Sony wanted me to bring them my PS3 and they would give me a refurbished PS3, which was in worse condition than mine as far as the physical condition was concerned. Mine was like brand new; the one they had was scratched all over, AND they wanted 150€ for it!

I have a PS4 which can’t play the older-gen games. Fantastic, right? And on the PS4, I have spent minimal time reading discs and the drive makes noise. So thank you, but no, thank you with discs! I want my library to be digital. I won’t lose it by moving houses every 2-3 years, and it doesn’t get damaged or have a drive stop working for no reason.

The games are massive anyway and most, if not all, require a day-one patch that can be larger than the disc game itself.

I can understand collector’s editions. I am on the market for 2nd-hand collector’s editions of my favorite games myself. But you know what? I am not on the market for buying or selling 2nd-hand games at all (unless they are collector’s editions and in good condition). If I buy a game, it will be a game I want to have, so I will keep it. So I am not looking to recoup the cost of buying the game in the first place.

To me, it all goes to: Comfuzio, you bought before me a game I wanted but I can’t afford it, so I am going to act like a spoiled brat whining for attention.

To that I say: Don’t be an asshole. I worked my ass off and managed to gather the money for a PS5 two years before GTA VI. I then kept working my ass off for a few more months to get 100€ in my PSN wallet. It is not hard. If you want to play the game, there are many ways.

If you instead want to cry like a bitch, well, there ya go!

-Nintedon’t Switch 2

This is perhaps the only device I have bought that I regret buying.

When I was a kid, maybe until my late teens, I used to be a Ninty fanboy. I had a PC, of course I did, since the age of 7. I had an 80386 PC without even an HDD.

But consoles were the place to game. Fortunately, since then I grew up, developed other interests as I matured, and my interests in gaming matured with me. Nintendo, unfortunately, stayed in that era. They are releasing one Mario or Pokémon game after the other, but they all look and feel the same as they did on my last Ninty console, the N64.

People think that by improving the visuals somehow you can destroy the quality of the game. Those people are idiots and should be humiliated in public and ostracized by gamers and life in general.

NOTHING, literally NOTHING prevents a game from being great by having good visuals. But, as with everything in life, there have to be 2 poles to create division and flame wars.

One side wants a great story, the other great visuals. I want both, and I know I can get both. I have been getting both with Gears of War games, with Grand Theft Auto games, with Dune: Awakening, with historical Total War games.

But nope, those people insist: you can’t have both, it is either the one or the other…

So Switch 2… that thing is super expensive to begin with. When consoles hit the 500€ mark, they have to be judged for what they are. At the same price range, you get a real console, a PS5 or an Xbox Series X, that can play good-looking games and has other functionality as well. The freaking Switch 2 can’t even play YouTube videos for fuck’s sake!

The games of Switch 2 are super expensive as well. Oh boy! People started the hate with Rockstar for GTA VI’s prices… Hey morons? Have you looked at the prices of Pokémon Pokopia? It goes to around 115€ with the Expansion Pass. And what do you get for this insane amount of money? A Minecraft-like game without proper voice acting and sounds! Really? You are making so much fuss about an 80€ GTA VI that is a game for thousands of hours of game time, glorious cinematics, real voice casting, music and whatnot, but not a single fucking word about Pokopia? The selective ignorance is annoying.

All in all, the Switch 2 has a few “entertaining” games like Mario Kart, but that’s about it.

You can get a Steam Deck and load in it emulators to play most of those games (from Switch 1 currently), and with the Steam Deck you can use it as a regular PC and gain access to tons of PC games, some of them for free and most on sale for a fraction of what you pay for 1 S2 game.

Moving on from the consoles.

Since the last time I wrote about my hardware, I now have a few more mini PCs and 4 real servers, 3 of them in 1U form factor (think of it like a pizza box) and 1 of them that is 4U, a more massive server that you see in datacenters or in movies. I can’t go into details about them since they are being used in my personal company for professional reasons.

Okay, we talked about my hardware changes and we had a little rant about GTA VI and Switch 2, what are my gaming plans for the rest of 2026?

Well, frankly, until October 1st I will be spending most of my time playing Dune: Awakening.

Dune is going to have something like a rebirth on September 22nd, or at least Funcom and the community await it. Myself, I had really bad experiences with the community on Discord – not in-game – so I do not care much about it.

All I wanted was for the game to have a self-hosting option. They gave us this option, and I am running my own server for a few months now. You can contact me if you want to join my server, but the server is not open to everybody and rules and conditions do apply. For example, I have zero tolerance for griefing. The server has only 1 DD that is all PvP, BUT that doesn’t mean you can go there and start shooting at other people. If you do that, you are out permanently. Just to be clear, even from here.

This update will bring a conclusion to the story. Now, I haven’t understood if there will be more DLCs and more stories. They say this is the end of Book 1 and more will follow, but no details on what they mean by this.

Also, with this update we should expect the single-player version of the game. Now, this is something I do not care for at all. The game is online, but all the story of the game is being played completely solo anyway. The only “help” you can have in this game is if people give you better gear to do the story faster; they can’t join your story at all in any other way. So, completely offline single-player? I mean, it is welcome for those who want this mode. I am not going to deny this from anyone, but certainly not for me.

BUT!

But September 22nd is a day before the 23rd (no shit, Sherlock!), which is the day, or night better? that Blackbriar will be in Athens!

Thankfully, I have vacation days for 22-23-24th of September and I will be able to play the game, attend the music event with my special friend and still have time for moto rides on the weekend!

This brings us to October. In October, I will be having most likely Gears of War: E-Day. I have placed more of my vacation days from the 1st till the 9th, which is Friday, so basically I get back to work on Monday the 12th.

By then, I hope I will have completed the campaign both solo and co-op and, if possible, I hope to play some Horde.

Please read this article. I have spent 2 weekends so far playing the beta of Gears of War: E-Day, the Horde Siege mode. It left me so far cold. Don’t get me wrong, I am super happy for a new Gears game. We have been bombarded for the past 7 years with garbage games like Subnautica that are a pure insult to intelligence in general. Now it is time for some quality games!

But the impression I got from the game was that there would be the classical and beloved Horde mode plus this new Horde Siege mode that The Coalition is promoting so heavily.

But nope! For all it seems, they will be replacing entirely the Horde mode with the Siege Horde mode, which in my experience wasn’t fun, was full of bugs and glitches, and doesn’t hold any water compared to the original Horde modes.

For those that don’t know, Horde mode isn’t a static thing; it is changing in every Gears of War game. Gears 5 Horde was bad at launch and got improved too late, when all the people had left the game.

In principle, players make a team of 5 people, each with distinct roles, and they have to survive 50 waves of enemies. Some versions had normal enemies, some had every 10th wave (10, 20, 30, 40 and 50) as a boss wave, and some added the ability to build fortifications. In general, it was a fun way to play the game!

I loved the time I spent with my Xbox friends from all over the world playing this game!

Now, the new mode is an open map. There are 3 teams of 4 people each, each of the 4 classes are … lame … and the other teams can contribute to your team’s battle – if their objectives are crossing yours, that is – but they can steal your team’s energy (the currency you need in Horde) and, of course, you can steal theirs too. They can also just come and take your team’s drops if the loot box drops closer to them.

In general, it feels more like a battle vs the other teams than what a Horde should be.

And the other annoying thing: when you start Horde Siege, you have 3 options of what game you will have. Depending on the mode you pick, you will have either 1 or more main objectives.

Now, since this is an open world, people can and they DO roam around. They can then start some side missions. Now, where is the bad with this?

If those side missions are on the way to the main mission, no problem! But as I said, people roam around and can start side missions on the other side of the map, while you and 2 of the team (3/4) are heading, let’s say, North. The 4th can be heading South and trigger a side mission, which takes over the main mission, and you and your team have like 1 minute to get all the way back. Otherwise, if this 1 assh… player who triggered it dies, the side mission can fail.

I am sure they will fix this before the final product (I hope), but what they can’t fix is that the “Horde” mode inside the “Horde Siege” mode was really bad! No deployables, the team members were abandoning their posts, running off with other teams and other stupid shit like that.

So I am not very clear if I will buy the game or not. I had bought it, the 100€ version of it, and I had it refunded because of how bad the Horde Siege mode is.

The campaign I expect to be good, as all of the Gears of War campaigns are (the 5th is meh), but what keeps people in this game is the Horde and then the Versus. I don’t care for the Versus mode, I don’t play PvP games, but the Horde is something I care deeply about and this is executed really badly so far in this one.

Under normal conditions, I’d say this is a beta and they have time to change it, but nope, the time is almost up! The game has less than 1.5 months to launch for me, since the version I would buy gives me Early Access from October 1st. So no time to redesign it.

I am afraid we will get a good story and horrible Horde! Maybe they will fix it months later, but by then the game will be irrelevant!

Irrelevant it will be anyway on November 19th!

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the multiplayer of Gears of War: E-Day will be in the end because this game has an expiration date for me, November 19th that is GTA VI day!

I talked a lot at length in the start about it. I have done a digital pre-order of the Ultimate Edition on the launch day. I had the money in the PSN wallet for a couple of months by that point. I don’t understand the question people ask: “Why did you pre-order so early?” What do you suggest to do then? Just look at the game page with the pre-order button while I have added this amount of money for this specific reason? To what end? To satisfy your ideology?

I bought a PS5 digital-only for GTA VI. I added 100€ to my digital wallet for GTA VI. Why would I wait till the last day? Does the digital wallet money get interest if it stays idle in my PSN wallet? No.

I had the money in that wallet for 8 months the day I pressed pre-order. You know what? I had 100€ 8 months before that, I had 100€ the moment before I pressed the button. No interest from the PSN bank, unfortunately.

If that 100€ had become 300€, sure, I’d press the pre-order on the 18th of November. So STOP being an ID10T! Think first!

GTA VI is the game I have been waiting for the most for years now. Even if it turns out to be shit, it is my call and my call alone what I will do with my salary.

If for some reason you feel compelled to criticize people for their gaming purchasing choices, first I have to say: stop, look at your own.

I am pretty sure if I look in your Steam library I will find lots of trash that YOU PAID FOR (Subnautica). But I will give you games that are genuine trash besides Subnautica.

• Enshrouded … trash game, horrible visuals and retarded story. The multiplayer is retarded to the max! If other people do 1 quest without you, you can’t do the quest at all. FFS!
• LORT … I mean, c’mon, what the fuck is this thing? They took their five-year-old kids to the office and let them draw, then took the drawings and put them in a game? I am sorry, even if the gameplay is good, visually it is so unappealing! This is the Nolan’s Helen of Troy in a video game. Nobody wants that! And if YOU want that, please unfriend me. I understand that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but this—you must be blinded by shit to find it good.
• Big Walk … at this point it feels like a charity case for untalented developers. Please give those 10$/€ to an orphanage or another noble cause. Don’t support untalented developers. The more people give money to such trash projects, the more subpar quality we will have in our lives. Yes, not every studio can be AAA and not every AAA game is good. This is a fact. This doesn’t invalidate that there is no thought or care put into the project, not to talk about the absence of respect towards the consumers/gamers.

I told you that if you want to talk shit about my choice, I can talk more shit about your choices.

Twitch streams will return?

The thing is, now that I run my own company, I don’t have much free time and I am not sure if I want to stream the limited time I will have on Gears and GTA VI.

I mean, I got an HDMI capture device so I can capture my PS5’s audio/video and stream it… so we will see what my mood and time will be.

For now, I am just a viewer. I have a few good streamers open in a tab while I work or game.