Super obvious AI signals:

• buttons and their colors make no sense and aren’t correlated to a real PS3 controller.
• there’s nine status lights and literally status lights on the disk drive.
• the text is spelled “PLAYSTA.TION”.

Yes, I’m aware AI can do “pixel art.” No, this doesn’t invalidate the specific examples and logic from my prior posts. I’ve been discussing this is good faith, but you are not, you’re just reiterating and increasing the volume and insults. Have a nice day.

Buddy, I’m not defending AI, and you making some conspiratorial allegation about my motivation is just weirdly aggressive. You and other people don’t seem to understand what happens with typical generational lossy compression and resizing. Randomly resize and save any image to jpeg 12 times, and see if you don’t see similar artifact noise patterns. That’s a technical literacy thing and not your fault, but the overconfidence here is. The exact thing you’ve marked above is very typical artifacting that occurs for non-AI reasons.

I also know enough to say that I can’t be 100% positive it was or wasn’t AI at some point in the chain. But I can confidently say nobody has identified credible evidence it is AI compared to a multi-generational lossy resize by a lazy designer (and no, posting a screenshot with a vague circle and “that’s obviously AI” is not great evidence - these are not twelve fingers or mush pseudo text, this is pixel level inconsistency).

The things you and others are pointing out here are very explainable without AI, and AI likely would not be reliable enough to create some of the details you see which survived the lossy compression.

Sorry…Again, what should I be taking from this?

What is “ChatGPT font”? ChatGPT and its image tool are distillation models that do not have fonts. They produce images based on per-pixel relational distillation, they are guessing what pixels should be next to each other and do not use fonts. Current models do produce text that can be indistinguishable from fonts, but there is no single “ChatGPT font.” If there is a generic font appearing here, that doesn’t tell us anything new.

For the PS1, I don’t understand what you are referring to. The blurriness and uneven lines happen from compression artifacting and/or resizing to a non-divisible fractional resolution. You can get the same effect now if you go into Photoshop, create a 32x32 pixel image, resize to nearest-neighbor 10x, then set an arbitrary similar but non-divisible resolution with a different resampler (e.g., 56x56 bicubic), and save as JPG at <40 quality. That’s extreme, but you get aliased artifacting, interpolated stepping, and so on.

If you’re taking some other features as evidence of AI, let me know.

Sorry again, I know I responded below and not trying to just fight for now reason, but pointing out these different things you’re identifying that actually strongly suggest these aren’t AI, or aren’t indicators of AI or not either way.

For example, Switch asymmetry. This is how Switch directional and gamepad buttons look. It should be asymmetrical, and AI probably wouldn’t get that right like it is in the graphic. You can even see the color-distorted remainder of the “-” and “+” symbols above them, blurred to hell from terrible resizing.

Things like proportions and whether controllers are depicted are just choices either a human or an AI could make.

Ok - Yes, Adobe does have insidiously integrated AI tools. But again, nothing you point to here is strongly indicative of AI, and again, just consistent with sloppy & lazy resizing (which you could just as likely see pre-2020, before AI). Adobe also has a very extensive stock library which may be where these came from.

There are some really hard to spot AI generated materials possible now, but the sloppy inconsistency here is - conversely - an indicator that they don’t care much what we do or don’t notice so wouldn’t be spending the time to generate something with all of the consistent details (see list above). Instead, the consistent details suggest human-created versions based on the real systems.

Sorry, none of this is a clear indicator of AI. The “latent noise” you refer to is perfectly consistent with compression and resizing artifacting and noise. Proportions are often off when making “chibi” icon-sized consoles, but notably, they are consistently or coherently off. Other features are strongly suggestive it isn’t AI. For example:

• All of the controllers have consistent layouts, including the correct number and orientation of buttons, player indicators, etc (e.g., the Wii controllers).
• Consistent diagonal step effects, even if blurred from poor resizing (see the PS4).
• Consistent text for all system indicators that is legible without AI artifacting, even if blurred from poor resizing.
• The fact that the 360 and PS3 (didn’t notice initially) are not even pixel art suggests they just grabbed random icons from the web, not ran them through AI generators.

Which is AI-generated? It looks to me like real pixel art (except the 360) very lazily resized in a non-nearest-neighbor fractional scale and anti-aliased to mush.

I do feel like even if they skipped Clair Obscur because of recent controversies, the author should have addressed it. I think it’s certainly deserving of being in the list, so saying nothing kinda seems contrarian at best.

I’m not an expert by any means and find this a little confusing too. The three possibilities seem like:

1. The business needed a cash influx and because CD Projekt and Michał Kiciński still seem to believe in GOG’s mission, “purchasing it” was a way of injecting money while setting a ceiling on risk for CD Projekt versus simply keeping it on the balance sheet and spending more on it.

2. They truly think that separate businesses will operate more efficiently and that the missions weren’t aligned enough to be in the same org structure. This seems possible but no way to really know.

3. They want to make GOG more appealing to developers who may not trust it if it’s tied so closely to CD Projekt. This seems unlikely, since Epic, Valve, etc all have self-published games by the platform owners on their storefronts.

Or some combination of the three… The timing seems to be to do it by end of calendar year to make a clean break on the books, at least.

That’s a great sign.

It’s interesting you are disappointed in the art style - it makes more sense, though, if you haven’t played HOMM3. Because the map art style and layout feels very HOMM3, moreso than the other 3D modernization attempt in HOMM5 (which I hated). My guess is you would have really enjoyed HOMM3, if this one plays how it looks.

Thanks for putting this on my radar, it really looks like a return to the HOMM gameplay I enjoyed.

Wow, thanks!

Thanks for sharing this review, it’s great to see your reviews and interviews here.

I’ve seen a similar recent DS-emulation system review and they were playing Rhythm Heaven, and what really looked like it would bother me is the emulation input latency (it appeared roughly 10-20ms). Have you played Rhythm Heaven or other latency-sensitive games and do you notice any input delay?

It’s exceptionally irrational at the moment. Everyone is not just gambling on an irrational self-valuation of the bet, they’re seeing each other’s bets, and that is adding an extra level of FOMO irrationality, increasing the bets even further.

With Trump’s acts of economic self-mutilation already weakening the economy, this is going to be a wild ride when the bubble pops.

Non-console pricing may make it overpriced, and it may be DOA, but the alternative here is worse. Console pricing will lead to a walled garden and enshittification.

If it’s priced like a console and subsidized so that Valve relies on game sales to profit, then they have a huge incentive to lock down the machine with DRM and restrict user ability to install third party launchers, games, etc.

This would not only contradict their Deck strategy, but be a repudiation of one of the last healthy and consumer-friendly open design and product philosophies left among the gaming platforms. So I hope they do not sell hardware at a loss in this case. Let it sink or swim on its merits.

Happiness is value, and value must only be captured by the IP holder.

I’m surprised Retroid Pocket 5 is a reliable Switch emulator - are there games that don’t run at native speed?

My understanding is you cannot do that without a full reinstall of Windows, wiping out all settings and installed programs. Glad if I’m wrong.

It’s just the invisible fist now.

Fade to black.

Ultra-slow fade-in: Directed by Peter Molyneux.

At this point I think the only thing that may save Google is Larry and Sergey firing Sundar and hitting the reset. Google has been consistently doing the wrong thing for a long time.

Don’t suppose there’s still a cheap trick to buying 3 years of vouchers for relatively cheap and upgrading to Ultimate? That worked great in 2022, but I’m guessing they shut it down.

That makes sense, thank you.

Here’s a dumb tech question: This happens for so many games, shaders compiling holding up the process. But after an initial compile, it seems like this is written to a file and doesn’t happen on every boot. So can they not simply include pre-compiled shaders?

Fantasy Empires was the one for me. Regular game played fine, but 5 minute battles that I could play at realtime on a 486DX-66 were over in 1/10th of a second on a PC 10 years later.

I think it’s genius. The machines are a dopamine bomb. Seeing the coins makes you think you can strategize, and the connection between action and winning is much more visceral and feels more controllable than a slot machine or other casino games. I have similar memories of seeing them in the arcade and thinking they were very tempting, but no way worth putting in real coins.

A game done well is going to be extremely addictive, but if done in the service of a full, fun, not-micro transaction-pushing format, I fully support it. I think it’s going to be huge.

Seems like a weird strategy to not compete out of fear of success.

I think those doomsayers will be partially vindicated in the coming months. You can go to Best Buy’s website and order a Switch 2 with no waiting line, no delay. The supply is outpacing demand. Because I think a huge part of the 6 million sold was pent up demand for a new console and the inevitable cumulative brand effect and population increase leading to a larger early-adopter pool.

Unless Nintendo somehow had the ability to increase supply in a way unheard of for launch consoles in the past, I think that they met that early demand, and now it’s going to slow down abruptly. Now they have to convince regular people in a bad economy to spend way more than normal for a Nintendo console, with no Mario or Zelda killer app.

Eventually it’ll be a great selling machine, but these early numbers are misleading.

Funnily enough I tried that too, still needed a code. Probably will be fine, I’ll try tomorrow,

Just FYI, they may be getting hammered. Tried this and it sent a 15-minute-expiration 2FA code, which took 3 hours to arrive.

You said “almost,” but seems like your linked video is a Steam Deck running it pretty well - what’s not working?

I’m in the same boat. The only reason I’m considering getting a Switch 2 now is because the first gen consoles always end up the easiest to hack.

Guess I’m an outlier. For me, games were the way to disconnect from the stress of relationships. I’ve been an introvert since the beginning, and so games’ positive associations for me are a safe place away from social pressures.

I also imagine every “retro” generation thinks its games are the best. Like, there was a meme post about joy at finding a PS2 torrent recently with strong implied nostalgia, and that’s ok. People usually experience video games at an age where the games teach them archetypical feelings of intellectual pleasure, the first time they experienced joy at solving complex problems for example. That becomes a core association through life.

So I think we’ll all have strong feelings linking the systems we played at our formative years. And again, that’s ok. That we can form such strong associations is an expression of the basic human value of video games, as an art and modern cultural necessity.

Tip in case I’m not the only one: If the captcha isn’t working in the app, log in via a browser and turn off ad blockers to check out.

Is this a thing? This seems like a very high learning curve.

Desktop pricing is its own dumpster fire, but when did laptop GPU pricing get so much worse?

Spending $1,100 to get a laptop with an entry-level x060 GPU feels insane, especially with AMD’s integrated GPU technology getting fairly competitive.

This may seem like a cheeky answer, but Limbo.

Sometimes it’s not about what you say, it’s about what you don’t.

Sure, I just mean, look how long BOTW has been sold - it will be a fraction of that length of time before Switches cease being sold. Mostly I was pointing to the system refresh as not only a chance to reissue BOTW, but to reset pricing expectations.

There will be a future where BOTW S2-edition is still being sold and the Switch is not. From them on, BOTW will be a $90 game, since it will be the only way to get it.

Pretty soon you won’t be able to buy a Switch, once manufacturing ceases.

Nintendo famously never discounts. But this is actually Nintendo’s way of not only never discounting, but increasing the price over time.

I had Breath of the Wild on Wii U with DLC and actually called Nintendo to try to get it transferred to the Switch or reimbursed. They outright refused, and said they were different products and I needed to buy it again.

My guess is they’ll demand we pay again.