LainTrain
All aboard the LainTrain - We all love Lain!
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Idk his render pipeline breakdown videos seem fairly in-depth. Is it just mumbo-jumbo? I saw some discussion where some devs seemed to acknowledge the perspective but say basically past 10 years of graphics make non-deferred render pipelines utterly unfeasible and thus MSAA, not to mention the issues that TAA “solves” like particularly fine geometry (see guitar strings in TLOUpt.2) or shimmering on stuff that can’t be optimized e.g. hair.
Frankly though I think in practice the difference between graphics in 2015 and 2025 is negligible compared to the difference between TAA (or DLAA/FSR/XeSS/FXAA/SMAA) and x4 MSAA. The only that comes even close is Path Tracing in CP2077.
I agree he seems like a sketchy af grifter, but I’ve not seen a single good rebuttal of his actual points, and even if he was a grifter, that doesn’t invalidate what he’s saying.
That Half-Life Alyx render in flatscreen with MSAA looks better than practically any game I’ve seen.
Ugh games of this era are gonna age like milk with this forced upscaling and blurry TAA smear shite.
More compression and upscaling… How about just better graphics? How about you make a console that can do path tracing that you can get going with a fairly cheap PC setup.
All these years and these consoles still run 720p30fps like the PS3, but it’s ok with some people because it’s using AI to be dishonest and not just lying like back in the good old days with fish AI.
Yeah but websites aren’t newspapers and don’t have the limitation of literal limited physical space.
Last time I looked at a newspaper up close was 2006 when I was like 8, and most of the content was ad space that distracted from the text which was condensed and often centered, or if it was a front page often in multiple columns to save on the limited physical space. Remove the ads and you’d have white space. Just like on the internet.
Yeah, happened to me. I tried to go to one of the bank locations but they not so subtly told me to fuck off and call their customer service instead if for some reason I couldn’t use the ‘in-app help menu’. The entire concept of me losing access to it seemed alien to them, as it I was born into the app or some shit, idk how much they pay those ghouls to stand there and gaslight folks like that but I sure hope it’s a lot.
To restore it I had to call them and turned out I needed to know some kind of extra hidden secret “telephone banking” password after fighting past 10 people who could barely speak English. I didn’t know it ofc and like an hour later I was able to prove who I was.
That’s crazy. Yeah in the rest of the world you can’t do shit on a bank website, it’s mostly just view only, and the rest is via the app. If it lets you do anything at all, it’ll require 2FA via the app.
You can transfer money from a savings account with one bank to another account with another bank just via tapping said bank account icon in the app, like you don’t even need the BIC/IBAN/AccNo/Name or any details, it knows where to go just because you have the app of the other bank, all you do is tap the icon.
I’m not even sure you can withdraw the money from the savings account without having the app of the target bank installed on the phone, signed into the target account.
Same way you can add a card to Google Pay by just tapping a button in the bank app, no details or anything required.
Frankly I don’t even know where any one of my bank cards are, I remember for a good while I had a credit card that I didn’t actually have physically because when you open the credit card account (which requires extra checks compared to what is default - debit cards) they don’t bother to ship the physical thing to you unless you explicitly ask for it (via an option in the app), since most people just use it only via Google Pay because everywhere is cashless and uses only NFC.
I didn’t realize at first but it meant that my “card” didn’t even have a PIN, because there was no way to physically have it, any large transactions are authorized in the app, everything else, including IRL is implicitly authorized by me unlocking my phone with my fingerprint, which is required to make NFC payments on Android. I think with Apple phones it’s required to open the app but for me since 2018 it’s been muscle memory to tap the fingerprint reader and slap the phone on the NFC reader on anything from the tube to the dodgy corner shop.
To get the actual card details it’s a relatively hidden submenu in the app, to add to Google pay is a giant button on the card icon in the app.
Convenient as hell but the sheer amount of privacy violations involved and info that must be gathered about the phone to do this in a compliant fashion makes me shudder.
Watch movies/shows/YouTube, gaming or pursue virtually any hobby: from photo editing to video production/editing to music production to creative or nonfiction/essay writing to programming to reading to research to studying.
Basically anything at all?
Idk bout you but the Phone is for phone calls and occasionally - IM.
The grand arch-sin of Ubisoft games is that they miss their own point almost entirely and are afraid to be fun.
The simple thing is that most of the game should be the most fun bit of the game.
E.g. if an FPS with good gunplay as a central element has 51% of game time spent in hacking mini games, that’s probably gonna get pretty irritating, right?
In the case of Far Cry 3-5: most fun bit is the outposts. Therefore most of the game should just be approaching, assaulting and solving various outpost combat sandboxes of increasing complexity.
Blood Dragon still has the best scope and scale in that respect, the whole design around a basic linear mission structure feels like it’s out of sync with the fact the fun is elsewhere, so you just end up in a situation like you already having liberated every single outpost, but technically you’re in the beginning of the game at like mission 2, it just doesn’t gel together.
Far Cry 5 has planes and helicopters and outpost-esque or adjacent activities and it’s the only game in the series where it’s those that actually move the story forward.
It’s the same shit with assassin’s creed. The most fun bit is y’know, stabbing people with the thing in historical settings. So it should be most of the game. Instead most of the game is anything and everything but that.
Heck, watch dogs legion even severely limited the amount and variety of hacking in the game when that’s like the whole thing and what made the second game in the series shine.
As for the upgrade and crafting systems I would honestly toss the whole thing out, RPG mechanics don’t belong in action games. A shop at most with all guns and everything unlocked at the start and money made through open world activities would fit Far Cry just right.
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.
Oh yeah for sure. I still go back and play the main story mode of Crash Team Racing every year as a ritual, on the other hand I’ve literally never played mario kart so the answer is obvious.