I’m not sure why any of this is surprising. The US was perfectly fine letting China manufacture all the things. That manufacturing know-how leads to design know-how. The desire by US corporations to keep wages low or eliminate US labor entirely to use outsourced manufacturing leads to this.

It isn’t just military hardware: it is products across entire industries. China is producing good ones, and even when they aren’t, they’re producing them at volumes the US could not dream of touching.

Hm, I may need to rewatch it myself. That also doesn’t match what the link above suggests about interpreting the ending: “Algren finds redemption through his newfound purpose and ultimately sacrifices his life for the cause he once opposed.”

Edit: I just checked the last scene. You’re right, he doesn’t actually die. Which means the link is also wrong.

Still, I think it’s a stretch to say he’s the last samurai, since he never really becomes a samurai. One important note is that samurai is “samurai” in the plural, too.

What did he save? Literally everyone but Meiji-backed forces dies at the end.

It is implied that Tom Cruise dies at the end. I think the confusion comes from a voice over, but you never see the character on screen again.

He also does not “become a samurai”. He fights alongside them, but at no point do they call him a samurai.

Edit: looks like that link is wrong. He doesn’t die at the end. I guess memory is a fickle beast.

The fun thing about The Last Samurai is that the title doesn’t refer to Tom Cruise. He does not play a samurai in the film. He plays an American officer.

He hangs with a group of samurai, who are collectively the last of their kind.

That said, plenty of people complained about it in its day.

It’s more expensive for a worse game than V or VI, both of which can be had for the price of dirt.

Not surprising.

It’s also way different from the goal of HL2. Downloading a launcher called Steam for free is not the same thing as buying specific hardware to play one game.

Sonic 2. It came bundled with a lot of Sega Genesis consoles.

A fantastic game that you can technically complete in a sitting.

That’s about what I paid for mine as well. Feels like I stole it for how it benchmarks. Last gen x3d is definitely overpriced in comparison.

I absolutely love my 9700x.

At the bone stock 65W TDP, it runs incredibly cool and is a nice performer. 105W TDP is now officially supported as well, which gives you even better performance and it still runs cooler than any major player from Team Blue.

At this point I’d rather have efficiency rather than push for those few extra frames with Intel and need hundreds of bucks more in cooling hardware and power draw.

I like the concept, but nothing except the folding screen is interesting here.

It’s true that this is one of the few places where folding the device actually may make some sense, given how long it is otherwise. But unless we’re talking about a folding Steam Deck or something very similar, the Samsung-ness of it all would make the end product very mediocre.

Refunded. Would have been a mediocre game 10-15 years ago. What a dead world.

Could totally be a negative change. Could be a positive. Only time will tell.

The fact that GTA V’s crowd system still stands out for feeling relatively “real” – a 12-year-old game – suggests to me that it’s more about design and execution than actually needing a lot of technological advancement.

Yes, there were big claims before and yes, everyone should be extremely cautious. Never preorder games. It will likely suck, and even then just from the general trend in AAA gaming.

BUT there is a big difference this time around, specifically: they’re no longer using their own engine. That does change the equation.

The value is getting you not to use competitors.

Free games are pure marketing. Don’t confuse it.

They can take them away at their whim.

Their sole purpose is to get you used to using Epic over other services.

Yeah I considered one. Wish it had 16GB VRAM.

That’s fair. I’m on an all AMD system with no need to change, tbh. 7800XT.

Cyberpunk with RT off still looks damn good.

Personally, if it’s between RT off and giving my money to a company normalizing lying to me, I’ll stick with RT off.

Yeah, unfortunately you’re probably right. Brand image is also still good, somehow

Vote with your wallets. DLSS and Ray Tracing aren’t worth it to support this garbage.

Need more of this. More pointing out the consequences which exist for anyone but the super rich. More pointing out how we are gaslighted to believe “it’s not a Nazi salute”.

This just in: rich people want to get richer by charging more for the same product.

Strange to hear Civ described as a Grand Strategy title. Usually that is reserved for things like Victoria or Crusader Kings, which are not turn based.

And the other side of that coin is: personally I’ll happily accept shimmering and moire effects if it means I don’t lock myself into yet one more corporate ecosystem.

FSR also combats those things, but can run on any GPU.

Replace every fine with executive jail time.

Watch the world change.

This may be a hot take downvoted to oblivion, but I think DLSS and all similar AI-dependent frame generation type stuff is a band-aid on a problem that won’t (or shouldn’t) exist for long, in the grand scheme of things.

If you have performance improvements, you ultimately don’t need such things once that performance reaches an acceptable level.

So two things may be happening:

1. Performance improvements are not possible anymore. That seems false, because we still see them. Costs are high, but they’re there.

2. Things like DLSS allow corps to give you less performance while still maintaining an illusion of a good experience. It ultimately reduces hardware costs, which the corpos ultimately just pocket.

I lean strongly towards 2 at the moment. Notice how nvidia also continues to push DLSS as an exclusive feature – notably different from FSR in that regard, while FSR is admitted to be a tech allowing for better framerate on lower-end hardware.

For nvidia, it’s a selling point, and it allows them to sell you less hardware with fewer actual improvements. It is the same snake that just wants you to (eventually) stream games instead of processing them locally, because it enhances corporate control.

Kind of funny that this kicks in the day before an inauguration.

PC is the way.

It would have saved an absolute mountain of bad press. And upset customers.

Super Contra for NES (sometimes just called Super C). Stupid shoot em up action done to perfection.

Metal Slug games are great in emulation; similar to above.

Have to disagree on the GPU part – I first played it with a 970, mostly on medium. It can be nearly maxxed out (no RT) on a 6600XT, which I used for my second playthrough (on Linux).

Because it’s a fantastic game.

It should never have come out for last gen consoles. That is a fact.

The fact that it’s immutable isn’t necessarily good for people new to Linux. If something does go wrong, or the user wants to change something significant, most of what they read online about how to do that will not work like many other distros.

For experienced users, sure, there probably isn’t much difference.

It used to be bad. In the last few years, it isn’t. We want other people to use Linux now.

Or literally any other distro.

Pop is probably much easier to be up and running vs. Bazzite.

I was probably 10 when my best friend (at the time) and I would play Super Contra on the NES for hours. We loved everything about it. We’d get as far as we could. We’d give each other lives. We could sing the soundtrack. When it was game over, we just restarted it.

Those days were simple and beautiful. I don’t think another game could give me anything like that experience, since it wasn’t really entirely about the game.

Well, they will. Two things drive the trend, in my view:

1. Lack of informed opinions. If you don’t know that other options exist, you’ll buy whatever because you think it is the baseline.

2. Convenience. This one is a killer. People regularly give up a lot – even rights – in the name of convenience.

Between those two factors, it’s a hard sell for the average consumer to not support this kind of corpo garbage. A nihilistic view, maybe, but I think it’s an accurate one.

In a similar vein, it’s pretty easy to show someone that consoles have these needlessly expensive proprietary links, plus games which are very expensive for the same reason. But it is very hard to convince someone that the cool thing they saw on TV isn’t, in fact, “cool” because of the aforementioned reasons. And ultimately, people like having cool things, even if that coolness is subjective.

Historically, it’s been a push-pull between groups, but everyone has had a different future. Now that things are being consolidated wholesale – e.g. physical media going out the window because so many are happy to stream and never own anything – it is more necessary than ever to call out #1 and #2, since the market itself is changing for the worse.

It is intentionally difficult, of course.

The real solution is not to buy the console.