LainTrain
All aboard the LainTrain - We all love Lain!
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Honestly can’t imagine why I’d ever consider a new console anymore. Got a PS3 gifted recently and it’s been a blast, InFamous, Jak & Daxter HD Collection, Motorstorm og & Pacific Rift, Sonic Unleashed, original TLOU, Black Ops Zombies with couch co-op.
Even being beat up the thing looks sleek as ever, it’s a CECHK03, Piano Black with Silver trim, 80gb.
Chrome trim too gaudy, I said what I said smh.
It even streams game data straight from my home server (via PS3Netsrv in docker), no USB hard drive required, no FTP or file transfer, and it actually runs faster than off the internal HDD (for the same reason it ran faster off BDROMs).
The poor thing can even play videos off Jellyfin with DLNA and a lot of patience.
Set up a custom fan curve too. Wrote a custom bash script of curl requests to the webman API to simulate a YLOD to trigger panic attacks in visitors.
As far as modern games go, most games I play aren’t on any console at all, and I’ve no idea what exclusives (if any) the consoles have.
Buddhist nationalists do genocide all the same, like in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
You’re thinking of Gen Alpha. GenZ was born starting '97, most of us are closer to 30 than 13, they don’t play Roblox or know what that is. All they know is eat hot chip and twerk and cry for a world that never was yet feels was taken from us while watching old vine compilations and being able to recite them word for word with impressive if slightly concerning accuracy.
Just to add a contrasting perspective I feel like it’s been an absolute golden age of gaming for me lately personally:
No Man’s Sky still getting relatively fun updates. Cyberpunk 2077 was great on launch and arguably much better now.
The Last Of Us Part 2 on PC is incredible and I’m happy that the port exists so I could experience it. You haven’t really played the game till you replay it with both protagonists wearing their Hotline Miami shirts in all the cutscenes. PS4 Spider-Man on PC was prolly the best superhero game I’ve played.
MSFS2020 opened a whole new world of flight sims to me, especially when it comes to doing fun VOR2VOR navigation with littlenavmap charts printed to PDFs and attached in VR, and Assetto Corsa did the same for racing sims.
Speaking of VR, H3VR is stronger than ever. I have many fond memories of VRChat just a few years back.
Victoria 3 has a really fun thriving modding scene. Indie games like Sea Power, Flight of Nova, Stray, Ultrakill, World of Horror, Nuclear Option, Descenders and Crisis In The Kremlin: The Cold War have been a big timesink for me lately as well as classics of indie like Suzerain and actual art masterpiece DEFCON.
It’s also been great to go back and play old classics and PS3 emulation now that PC hardware is much cheaper after the crypto/scalper crises circa 2018.
Also, with Steam play and the steam deck, PC Gaming is easier than ever and just hassle-free.
I never played the popular junk so ig to me all this gacha mtx horse armor crap just doesn’t really relate.
Yeah, doesn’t change the fact though - it was Sony’s flagship from their oldest most well known first party studio and it effectively got cancelled and pawned off to HBO to be milked on a budget.
Most movie franchises wish they could be Star Wars but it doesn’t change the fact the sequel trilogy did immense and obvious damage to the brand due (primarily) to the controversy, though in that case those movies actually also sucked which I’m sure didn’t help things. TLOU Part 2 on the other hand was by no means as awful as any of the sequel trilogy SW flicks.
Care to elaborate? You play as the person who killed a beloved iconic video game character and last game’s protagonist for 13 straight hours - I don’t know if it’s good but I’d hardly call it anything resembling “normie writing”.
To me - normie writing is something like those new switch Zelda games or Yakuza games or those Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor dark souls clone games or something like Watch_Dogs 1 or hell insert any ubisoft game apart from FC2, WD2 here
Whether the writing was garbage or not isn’t relevant to be honest - because controversy was spun by people who only knew the game’s story through hearsay of the leaks before the game even came out, and majorly it was to do with accusations of “wokeness” and other brainrot - so yes clearly it was an issue, of course it was an issue.
It wasn’t really the substance of the game that the usual outrage grifters latched onto so it’s not relevant to the discussion of the controversy.
As for more women being protagonists - sure, idk how you can say that so confidently, I suppose you have a convenient framing for what counts as “big games” to support your point, but I think the quantity was never really an issue.
Honestly more men being protags in games is okay, what I take issue with is that whenever something interesting happens, like oh I dunno, a game makes a woman kinda buff and mean looking, people bitch about it like no tomorrow.
So of course it’s an issue. It always has been.
In 2013-ish, Anita Sarkessian made some exceedingly light feminist critiques of video games in and it was an issue. In 2014-ish, A woman made an indie game that’s honestly really good even to this day (Depression Quest) and it was an issue. In 2020, a game came out where a fictional character (Abby) had muscles and it was an issue.
Nowadays I guess the most famous example would be the “FUCKING GENDER AMBIGUITY” screaming guy who didn’t like Starfield’s pronoun selection screen or some such.
Then people went truly psychotic in a deranged hate campaign against some random inclusivity consultancy Sweet Baby Inc. over games they were reportedly never involved with because there was women, or something, somewhere.
Hopefully you get the idea.
It was precisely the issue that a woman was the main character in a video game but was not in fact “Metroid from Metroid 1986” but a buff, angry, unattractive, hateful and morally grey character who does shitty things, sorta like Joel - in other words - she was something a lot more like a real person in a mature story, not a single digit frame twist from 40 years ago that amounts to an Easter egg turned geek culture cringe factoid parroted by the kinds of people who wouldn’t understand RLM’s “Nerd Crew” show is satire.
You can see some of the worst examples here, cherry-picked as they are, juxtaposed with what actual critique is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVQcZa4O01A
You can also visit the steam store page and look at the negative reviews, or peruse the cesspit subreddit /r/TheLastOfUs2 posts the time of the game’s leaks and release to see people bitching about everything from pride flags in Seattle(!) to Abby being made too likeable to accusations of this or that character being le ebil transgender or whatever else that sounds like it came out of a /pol/-themed magic 8 ball.
Hell, there are utterly deranged people in the steam reviews for this game now bitching about the show - about the actress that plays Ellie and one guy even implies she is “down syndrome representation”.
Like, what the actual fuck?
As for the game, the game is ok, I’m playing it right now, it’s less boring than the first so I like it a lot more, the AI actually lives up to the bullshit promised in the first game’s trailer, but it’s too long and yeah the writing is too on the nose sometimes, though I do like the characters and the atmosphere a lot. Idk if I “love” it, but I do find it way more fun as a game and far more interesting from a story perspective.
What it definitely is though is controversial as fuck and that’s just reality. People made a whole subreddit just to hate on the game that’s active to this day and most of their issues aren’t even to do with the game - they even pretend to hate the TV show they haven’t seen too.
Killed so much that the game will never get a sequel it’s clearly meant to have, yes.
The remaster of the first game came out before Part 2. The subsequent remake of the first game is made using Part 2’s assets and mechanics as well as assets from the original and had much smaller production costs, it was clearly made to recoup the loss of IP value perceived by Sony, same with the relatively low budget HBO show, compared to making a game the caliber of TLOU it costs peanuts and if at all - that will be the only way the saga will see a conclusion sadly.
So yes absolutely TLOU was killed off by the controversy and they’re now working on a new IP that looks significantly more safe and uncontroversial in every way sans maybe featuring a black lady in it.
Can you blame them for not taking risks when these games get punished time and time again for doing so?
TLOU Part II had a mildly unlikeable character who gasp was a woman and it killed the entire franchise and sparked mass controversy so hard Naughty Dog now is making some bland and generic soulslike (but in space) GOTG ripoff slop with product placement in it.
Lmao so you include all the deals for the switch with your “mario kart upgrade”, but not the steam deck?
Ironically enough a steam deck with zero games on it is still a way more compelling device if we’re describing a generic gaming device, because all games on PC are free if you want them to be, and that’s a library of hundreds of thousands of games. Then you consider it’s also your laptop/main PC too…
Plus, if you must buy games, you’re only a few quid away from one, not £60 + online fees etc etc.
We can go in circles forever though, but over the long term of course a PC or any Steam Deck will win in terms of ownership cost due to cheaper/free games. The issue is that we can’t really calculate an objective metric of value there.
That also isn’t the point I was even disputing, it’s precisely that the ownership is more expensive because PC gamers buy more games, but either way you’re wrong.
But if we keep going, we’ll run into problems because of course it’s apples to oranges to compare the value because these are largely mutually exclusive target audiences I’d imagine.
you made up an argument that I never made
Original comment I’m responding to states:
so the total cost of ownership for a switch 2 probably still stays under the total cost of ownership for a handheld PC.
That point is incorrect. That is the point I’m disputing.
Maybe chill out bro it’s ok to be wrong on the internet, the world goes on.
Btw, these 9 titles would have cost a switch user just €540, if all of them were AAA games at full price. That too doesn’t factor in that the figure from Nintendo includes massively popular cheap indie titles or the fact that even Nintendo games sometimes go on sale.
Yes, I’m a heavy buyer of games, but those games cost £12 on average, not £60, nor anywhere near to that amount, even if it’s lower due to the few indie games that get console releases.
€540 for those 9 games is roughly more than half of what I spent in the last decade on 430-ish PC games. It’s literally why I even have more games in the first place.
So even though I have more games on paper, I don’t spend more paper, capische?
And I certainly don’t spend more per game than the switch user, which makes your claim misleading.
In fact the opposite is true and most PC gamers are notoriously stringent in spending on games.
Wait, what?
First of all, PC gamers don’t buy a ton of games.
PC is the number one piracy platform for starters, seeing as it requires no jailbreaks and the like.
Secondly, PC gamers tend to own a lot of games legitimately because our gaming library doesn’t expire with a console generation, and because our steam libraries consist of many many indie games that cost a few bucks each, not a few $50 AAA releases.
My steam library is about 435-ish games. But that’s since 2013.
The total value of the account per steamdb is like £1080, this is a vast over-estimate because I used to live in a country where the entire GTA series before 5 cost £0.20, but let’s go with £1080.
If I bought £1080 worth of standard £60 games, I’d only have 18 games. That’s actually less than I even had for the PS Vita, and most people would be surprised to know that platform even has that many games.
Between the online fees and subscriptions to PS Plus etc., lacking discounts compared to steam, and the inability to pirate even an extremely high end PC tends to be far, far cheaper in the long run than a console, especially since it also doubles as the TV, the music player, the work and hobby computer, etc etc.
You can spend more on mobile game mtx than a full triple A experience including the console and in fact most people do which is why the “core” is an ever shrinking slice of the pie that to GenA probably doesn’t even make any sense.
The price doesn’t really matter, my point is that you’re not buying a Nintendo switch to play GTA 6 and you’re not buying a steam deck to play Warioware Inc.
(Well, I am, because I’ve never given them any money nor plan to and think Nintendo peaked way back in either the SNES or the GBA era and I neither had nor knew what a Nintendo even was as a kid).
3.5 years old isn’t that old lol. My desktop CPU was almost 10 years old before I noticed any bottleneck in AAA games.
And speaking of AAA games from the last few years, all like, 2 of them, probably won’t be missed by most people.
The deck is a solid computer and it’s a good product that’s built well and is pleasant to handle and use and playing desktop games on that OLED with HDR support is a joy and on top of a decently polished UX (as polished as you can get in PC gaming really), the tinker potential is endless, you can do with it as you please because it’s yours and you own it - and it certainly feels like it. No adware, no enshittification etc.
Meh, I’d rather play at lower settings than upscale. DLSS just looks like muck and the rest of them are indistinguishable from just turning down the resolution to like 480p for funsies but also with added artifacts.
I don’t know any game my RTX 3090 can’t crush GPU wise at 1440p at decent settings. I even turned off path tracing in 2077 because I didn’t want to ever use DLSS until I found the mod that drops a few casts for enough performance to hit the mid 40 FPS mark.
But there is one situation where I support the brainrot and that’s on portables. Steam Deck did the right thing by having a nice OLED 1280x800 16:10 screen instead of chasing resolution, it looks great, but if they do up it as most g*mers seem to want them to for mostly nonsensical reasons, FSR could work there, and something like DL DSR could help for games with small details if they go for an 800p screen again which I certainly hope they do.
One thing I won’t miss for sure is TAA, fuck TAA so much all my homies hate that shit. DLAA is at least better but never forget they took SMAA and MSAA away from you for this absurd world where consoles advertise themselves as 4k, 8k while they run games at barely 720p via checkerboarding and what have you and have ray tracing comparisons that you’d swear are satire
Meh that sucks. There was a mod for ME3 that gave Miranda more of a role and it used the voice files from the game as source material for AI training for dialogue in the mod. Having that be hampered because of some DRM loicense so the Hollywood people can buy more mansions isn’t something I’d like to see.
I’m glad someone made it but it’s just not a great value proposition.
Even if it shipped to the EU where OLED devices have usually been more popular (less iPhones), it’s a crappy 16:9 shorter screen, it looks like a bit of a pain to install and it’s really expensive.
It’s kinda wild to me there ever was an LCD steam deck to begin with, even my last handheld - the Vita - had OLED, but I guess they wanted it to be as cheap as possible which is admirable.
Thought this was San Andreas from the thumbnail