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.

The same with Google’s recent Doom demo, this is just for headlines and nothing else. Non-deterministic AI generation is antithetical to what a game is, unless it’s an art game focused on the very fact it’s non-deterministic.

For example I played Super Mario Bros. and notice now if there’s even a 5ms delay in the controls. It’s instantly frustrating that my actions are non-deterministic in that small way. You need the game world to be persistent and reliable, and there is an extremely efficient way to do that right now, with code.

Making AI generate it is a parlor trick that is doubly worse - both unreliable and far more expensive to generate.

There are enemies in the demo. Like Superhot, they don’t attack until you move and the AI redraws.

It’s partially AI, but in all likelihood customers aren’t buying with AI as a high priority; instead, supply is constrained because most of the same production capacity is being used on AI-focused enterprise hardware.

Honestly looks like a lost 90s arcade game.

Final Fantasy 8 still getting no love, I see…

Pretty funny, hopefully no humans get caught up in it, though. It’s the kind of thing a serious stupid person could call the cops on.

The articles have been confusing - I guess they’re announcing a physical location, but also it’s a digital archive you can access on a website. Don’t know why they have a landing page that doesn’t clearly link to it: https://archive.gamehistory.org/

They may just have taken down the link because it’s getting hugged to death.

Unfortunately, maintaining hacked forked versions of specific apps is even more time consuming for devs than it is for us to just spoof our security environment on our phones. Popular apps like YouTube have such versions but that’s only because the userbase is there.

I’ve seen some XDA discussion on hacking apps but you’re actually just learning to become a programmer/hacker at that point. If you have a specific app, and you’re not able to hack it yourself, unfortunately spoofing via Magisk & Tricky Store is the only sustainable way.

There are three levels of security, and it depends on what your app will check for.

Basic: This is essentially unsecure at this point, and any app that checks for security will almost certainly check for a higher level. If you root your phone, you likely will just show “basic.” Netflix will be low quality and most banking apps will not work, even if you use the default root features to hide your root.

Device: This is considered the norm for security checks and current peak efficiency point for accessing secure apps. You can spoof this level of security with Magisk if you are rooted (optionally unlocked), plus Play Integrity Fix as a plugin to Magisk. Note that you have to keep it updated - it is based on spoofing a device fingerprint that is shared at the plugin-level, and which Google periodically blocks. You can also learn to find your own fingerprint if you are tech savvy, but it could still be blocked and can be time-consuming. This is the minimum level to use Google Wallet NFC payments and most banking apps. If done right, Netflix will stream high quality as well.

Strong: This is the highest level of security, which an app thinks will only be present if you have a fully locked bootloader and are unrooted. Some banking apps require this now, but a year from now, it likely will be the norm. A year ago, this wasn’t able to be spoofed, but now there is something called Tricky Store that can spoof this and show Strong security to apps even when unlocked and rooted. However, it is much more complicated to set up - be prepared to join sketchy Telegram groups and scrounge for elusive security files.

So they think that… All game code runs through the EA app? That these proprietary launchers are not just a glorified .bat file that runs another file?

It’s funny because the majority of voters thought voting for meat grinders means they’ll get the meat, not be the meat.

Jensen Huang said a few years ago in an interview that Moore’s law is effectively dead, and that they are focusing now on optimizations rather than transistor count.

I suppose that means optimizing their pricing structure for maximum profit, and optimizing ways to improve performance metrics without significantly improving actual performance, like these frame generation routines.

That’s been the elusive key to nostalgia that half of these remake projects (80s and 90s franchise revival movies in particular) don’t understand.

It’s about recreating the experience of doing that thing the first time that people want, not the experience of doing the exact same thing. To recreate that first time experience, you have to understand where your audience is now, and also give them a comparable “new” experience to what they had originally.

*FSR4

Oh, if so, then nevermind.

I assume it’s going to be a cloud connected screen that streams games. There’s no current way to get thermal and power requirements met for PS5 on a handheld. They’re just trying to remove the in-home PS5 requirement from the Portal.

Ah, I see. Yep, the Statute of Anne broke up the Shakespearean monopolies and after that brief high point, it was all downhill.

Are you referring to the DMCA? That was never to help the little guy.

Conjecture: I wouldn’t be surprised if the TeraLeak in question wasn’t planned out by Nintendo and Game Freak, to distract people from the fact that Nintendo is trying to harass a competitor out of the market and suing emulators back and right.

Sorry, but at its worst, Nintendo is lawful evil. There’s no way this is intentional.

I’m initially feeling, “Great, now do Apple.”

But I do wonder how some of this ruling will be implemented. Forcing Google Play to host other app stores seems like it may be excessive.

Let me download F-Droid or whatever, drop anti-competitive barriers to it, don’t prevent anyone from using their device how they want. But I am savvy to the risks. There are a lot of non-techie people for whom the Google Play walled garden more keeps out threats than keeps them imprisoned, if we’re being honest. It’s one thing for Google to host an app it can scan for malware and designate as safe. Hosting an app store is impossible to verify is safe, I think.

Good overall, but I think Google isn’t entirely acting in bad faith in promising to appeal.

Pan back to see line of visionary CEOs that can’t wait to fix those broken visions of the world with an innovative idea that makes them even more money.

Hmm, it’s been awhile since I set up my Switch. Yup, if the user must agree to this at Switch setup, then you’re right.

That said a good lawyer would argue every game purchase is by default covered by its own right-of-first-sale and backup copy case law foundation, so would require a click wrap agreement affirmation to contravene that. Definitely that is required for each new game. So I think Nintendo’s not on reliable legal ground at the very least.

Is there a Nintendo license agreement? I’m looking at a Switch game right now and see no “by opening you agree to TOS” language on the box. When I started the new Zelda a few days ago, there was no TOS acceptance.

While most software today has a license, and Nintendo’s online store is different, unless I’m missing something it looks like only basic rules of law apply to the carts.

Ah, I remember that timeline. The one where things got, what do you call it…better?