At least they didn’t enshittify their existing properties with this crap.

The economics of consoles made more sense when computer power was expensive, and the choice was an underpowered home computer with so-so graphics and sound or a dedicated game machine optimised for drawing sprites and scrolling the screen responsively, with the extra costs subsidised by the price of (uncopyable) software. When PCs caught up, the consoles started looking internally like x86 PCs with souped-up GPUs (and, of course, draconian amounts of DRM baked in). Now with devices like the Steam Deck (and similar form-factor devices running Windows in game-console mode), there’s no real reason to buy a dedicated game-playing machine.

You’d think that, as a French company, they’d have expected this

Going by Apple’s transition from Intel to ARM, an ARM-based Steam Deck would be a no-brainer. They could make it a lot less bulky, ditch the cooling fans and still bump up performance.

ARM64 is already here (Apple have replaced Intel with it, and Windows PC vendors are following suit), it’s just, as William Gibson put it, not evenly distributed. Mainstream high-performance ARM devices are imminent in a way that RISC-V isn’t yet.

You can have reenactment of actual historical events with your character inserted as the hero, or you can have a vivid open world, but not both. AC 3 goes for the former and has the vibe of being embarrassed of being a lowly entertainment product and aspiring to be one of the worthy but dry educational “games” you’d get to play on the school computers.

The original one and the two Ezio games which followed are both worth playing. The American Revolution one ran on rails a bit too much to be fun.

Were they emulating the x86 code in realtime, or pre-translating it to RISC-V in the way that Apple’s Rosetta 2 does for ARM? If the former, that is indeed impressive performance.

Intel, the Boeing of silicon

Cosmic Combo, an iOS port of Johan Peitz’ PICO-8 game Cosmic Collapse, is good.

Isn’t that lousy with video ads now?

As Jamie Zawinski put it, it’s like a non-profit animal shelter setting up a sideline selling kitten meat to satisfy demands for hockey-stick growth. If somebody castigates them for it, they can point out that the demand for kitten deli slices didn’t going to go away, and if they didn’t sell them, someone else would step in and do it less humanely.

Soon we’ll hear about“graymers”

You won’t get the latter. The PLA will have dibs on fab capacity for military use, assuming they can stop the west from bricking the lithography machines.

The sliding keyboard looks like a nifty idea (though, of course, everything depends on the execution). Windows, however, is a dealbreaker.

It’s as if Stray was Untitled Goose Game, only on the set of Katamari Damacy.

They’re facing hundreds of millions in punitive damages. Fragments of their servers will be in trophy cases in copyright enforcement agencies’ lobbies.

Also, Arabic, the other well-known Semitic language.

Antisemitism

Katamari Damacy.

What could possibly go wrong?

+1 for Katamari Damacy and We ❤️ Katamari. If you haven’t played these, now’s your chance.

It’s partly owned by major record labels, so close enough