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It’s interesting to see what people genuinely consider to be bad, or maybe they just missed that word? 😅
For me, it would have to be Under The Skin; a solid 6/10 game, in a world where 7/10 is considered average!
It’s not as much a “feel-good” story as comments who haven’t read beyond the headline might make you believe:
The PIF values its total investments at nearly $1 trillion in assets, but a significant percentage of these are hard-to-sell assets with no public valuation; as a result, the NYT reports that the PIF reps have told international investors that it is “unable to allocate” for the near future.
Despite this, a spokesperson for the PIF, Marwan Bakrali, told the newspaper that it had $60 billion in cash and “similar financial instruments”.
ETA: Its not as though they’ve lost a significant chunk of the fund, but rather that a sizeable portion of it is tied up in illiquid assets that can’t be readily sold, or valued and loaned against.
Though there is some mention of some of their investments being in “distress”, so there is at least some good news?
IP/trademarks/copyrights/etc.
This is likely going to be the main reason for the takedown notices, Sony will be exercising their legal rights in order to defend their trademarks & copyrights on Concord assets.
If a company doesn’t defend them vigorously, then any unlicensed works that are allowed to exist are then used as legal precedent moving forward to null/void such copyrights and trademarks.
As an aside, Sony is a global corporation and can likely choose to write down these losses in the most preferred region to maximise the tax offset - so likely either the US, or Ireland.
I’m not saying AI will go away, or not continue to improve - but we are very much at the tail end of the current mania phase, and we will see some market pullback as AI startups begin to go out of business when all of those lofty promises of AI fail to materialise.
Diminishing returns on ever increasing investment, circular investments based on speculative returns, these are all signs of the tail-end of a stock market bubble.
The best way to think of them is as cousins; they are similar - but not exactly the same.
They focus more on higher VRAM and CUDA cores compared to GPUs, while forgoing 3d acceleration capabilities.
But they both come out of the same factories; so when the demand for AI cards is as high as it is now - and Nvidia can sell as many as it produces with a higher margin than GPUs, there is little incentive for them to produce more GPUs and sell them at a competitive price.
So when the AI bubble bursts, demand for AI cards will crater - and there will be no financial incentive to mass produce them in such high quantities. This frees up production capacity at the TSMC factories, incentivising production of lower margin products like GPUs.
Economics is largely a game of supply & demand; when supply outstrips demand, prices fall as sellers search for buyers. When demand outstrips supply prices go up as buyers search for sellers.
Assuming the AI bubble bursts before then, we might actually see somewhat reasonable pricing for next-gen consoles.
A major reason why prices have remained so inflated for so long post-COVID is because data centres have been sucking up every bit of silicon that TSMC has been able to pump out for both Nvidia and AMD.
But that would be honestly a very small upside, compared to what would likely be the Mother of All Stockmarket Crashes. The market cap of the Top 10 AI-related stocks is greater than the current US national debt, they aren’t in a position to be able to reasonably bail out those companies when it all eventually goes to shit, like they do in 2008.
It’s more about the console’s lifecycle, rather than it remaining the ‘current generation’. They’re implying that they will continue to ‘support’ the PS5 for another 5 years, whatever they determine that to mean (likely just keeping the online store open, maybe also multiplayer servers, and whatever PlayStation Plus features ).
Oh, absolutely - but a lot of perpetual/evolving media has similar issues where previous canon ends up being recontextualised, reframed or outright retconned in order to better fit the overarching story currently being told.
Sometimes it’s for the better, others for the worse (cough, Shadowlands, cough).
Still, it doesn’t stop it from being an otherwise great example of world building - evident in part by just how many people actually care about the lore!
There is like a good chunk of an entire decade’s worth of games that can’t be played on PC legitimately due to either expired licenses for music (e.g. EA Trax) or lack of support for older, disc-based DRM (SecuROM etc.).
That’s before factoring older titles that no longer work due to arbitrary changes to DirectX and the Windows kernel, which break backwards compatibility.
We don’t even need to imagine, necessarily! The quality of games released towards the tail-end of its life cycle speaks volumes: Uncharted 2&3, The Last of Us, God of War 3, Metal Gear Solid 4 etc.
I don’t think there was anything actually wrong with the architecture per se, but rather just the lack of proper documentation and tools set potential developers back significantly.
It was definitely hubris on Sony’s part, thinking that they could do whatever they wanted given the prior success of both the PlayStation and PS2 consoles prior.
Those PS3 launch stumbles definitely were a wake-up call, however I do believe that because it was largely the US/Western arm of SCEI that lead the ‘rescue’ - they ended up wrestling control away from the JP arm, ultimately causing the PS4/5 to end up so risk adverse and largely unremarkable as a result.
Literal dictionary definition of a BIOS:
Note the part regarding enabling a computer to start the OS. But regardless, this point is largely moot as we are just arguing semantics.
No the PS4 doesn’t run a PC-style AMI/Phoenix BIOS, but instead a secure chain of Boot ROM to bootloaders - however, so do Macs, which are PCs.
Dumps of these console boot ROMs and loaders - at least in emulation circles - tend to be colloquially referred to as a BIOS, as it constitutes a System that handles Basic Input and Output.
It even putting this one point aside, it runs an AMD-designed x86-64 APU, that was available to purchase for PCs (AM1 socket) albeit with a reduced power GPU.
It runs GDDR5 unified memory like a modern iMac, or Steam Deck.
It natively runs a UNIX-derived OS, again like an iMac, or Linux on the Steam Deck.
Let’s just face facts, the PS4 & 5 are just iMacs in drag 😉
Every modern bootable device has a BIOS, as they are required for hardware initialisation before handover to an OS - which for the PS4 is called Orbis OS, and is based off FreeBSD 9. Which is a UNIX OS for desktop PCs.
While the PS4 does have a unified memory interface, which is very rare for common desktop PCs - they do exist, such as every single Apple Silicon Mac.
The PS4 and PS5 are just a very heavily locked down PCs, featuring AMD APUs not too dissimilar to what can be found in Ryzen notebooks, Steam Deck or ROG Ally, running proprietary operating systems with heavy encryption to try and prevent 1:1 emulation (think Hackintosh).
I think the primary reason for the GPU stagnation has been the AI / GPU compute bubble over the past 5 years.
So much on-die space has been diverted away from raw rasterisation power towards CUDA, that it has artificially held back GPU progress.
When we do see the current AI bubble burst (and it does feel like we’re fast approaching that point, due to all the recent incestuous business dealings), hopefully we can see some innovation return to the sector.
According to protondb.com the entire Final Fantasy catalogue is pretty much flagged as either Gold or Platinum so you shouldn’t have issues.
For what it’s worth, the console versions also run great through EmuDeck and RetroDeck on my Steam Deck too!
I need to get around to playing Clair Obscur - I’ve seen and heard great things about it, but with a 2yo running around the house - I just don’t have the bandwidth currently to invest in new games… 😅
To each their own, I suppose!
FF7 was my entry into the franchise, and I went back to play 4-6 after 8 left me disappointed. I ended up (regretfully) skipping 9 until revisiting it much later. I’m saying this specifically to point out that I am not biased because FFX was my first.
I skipped XI as MMORPGs didn’t hold any interest to me at the time - but WoW would change that, and cause me to skip XII altogether!
I didn’t like the combat of XIII, it was too much of a departure of what came before (variants of ATB and general turn-based combat) - and I did not find the plot engaging enough to persevere much beyond I think the ~10hr mark?
I haven’t bothered to revisit the newer entries since, even though I have added XII, XIII, XIII-2 & Lightning Returns to my retro collection. Perhaps one day?
I stopped (console) gaming right around the PS4 era - partially because side I was heavily invested in WoW and PC gaming in general - but also because I was livid over how Sony handled the Anniversary edition launch, where scalpers scooped up ~98% of available stock.
I feel like I lucked out opting to become a retro gamer around that time - there are just so many great games from the PS3 generation and earlier that I could dedicate (my diminishingly little) spare time towards and never run out of absolutely incredible content.
Hell, my PS2 version of Vice City runs just as it did when it was new - complete with Billie Jean being the first track on the radio; something that can’t be said for any current/PC versions I believe.
Beyond Good & Evil
Devil May Cry trilogy
If you liked God of War (and its PS2 sequels), another franchise well worth checking out!
Final Fantasy X. Hands down the best entry of the franchise (fight me), and one of the best introductions to the series.
Ico + Shadow of the Colossus
Literal works of art.
Killer7
Manhunt + Manhunt 2
If you like Bully & PS2-era GTA entries, this series is well worth exploring. Very dark and gory.
Need for Speed Underground + Underground 2
Some of the best racing OSTs ever, and the offline PS2-editions don’t lose tracks when licenses expire.
Prince of Persia - Sands of Time
Silent Hill 2
Viewtiful Joe + Viewtiful Joe 2
An incredible 2d beat-em up with a great vibe.
The Warriors
Rockstar’s love letter to a cult classic 70s film.
Zone of the Enders + Zone of the Enders 2nd Runner
Hideo Kojima just doing more of his thing outside of the MGS franchise.
The missus and I sat down about a year ago and tabulated up how much all of the various streaming subscriptions were costing us per year (it was close to $1,000 when including YouTube Premium).
We cancelled every single one, and put that money towards building a home NAS and filling that up with downloaded media. No more ads, stupidly low bitrates, or TV shows & movies disappearing because a license expired.
The server has more than paid for itself at this point, and every additional spare dollar is being put aside for our kids’ tuition.
ETA: Consider doing the same, your kid’ll likely thank you in the long run!
PS: Never too late to introduce them to all of your favourite classic games, either - though that one may be a bit harder to get them onboard 🤣
EA has basically been dead to me for a very long time, even though I know a couple of people who work there.
While the whole Saudi Arabia / Private Equity angle is terrible, part of me thinks/hopes/wishes that this is part of their whole sports-washing angle - and there is a slim but non-0 chance that there will be an improvement in the quality of their studio output over the next few years.
I’ll continue to avoid buying their games, but it would be nice to see those that still do not getting nickel-and-dimed as hard as they currently are.
Who knows, there is also the potential that this buyout backfires and Saudi’s human rights abuses become even more public knowledge as a result?
When times are as bad as they currently are, we have to hope.
Maybe not; but my bigger worry is that while this is good for indies initially, by guaranteeing a minimum fixed income for a project - the long-term effect will be that GamersTM may just begin to expect indie titles to be “free” via GamePass and won’t buy them otherwise.
This would pretty much monopolise those sorts of titles to XBox and leave developers dependent on Microsoft for their continued existence.
I played the hell out of the first Borderlands (including New Game+ across all expansions), but promptly bounced off 2 & Pre-Sequel because it literally just felt like more of the same and I was already sated.
BL3 and now BL4 are literally just more of the same, but with ever increasingly more egregious monetisation.
That’s definitely another workaround, for sure! I think our supermarkets here carry Steam gift cards - for example.
Though I imagine that those same payment processors could threaten to pull out of stores that carry Steam gift cards, and we’d be back to square one.
Additionally, it puts more burden on the end users to have to physically shop somewhere ahead of time - lowering convenience. Ultimately, as Valve themselves put it - piracy is a service problem. Any additional hurdles will deter some potential customers.
So in order for people to be able to spend their own money how they see fit, we need a new player in the field - either fiat (eg. via the EU) or reliable, low/no fee stable coin(s).
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To the best of my understanding, AMD/Nvidia/Intel each run their own forms of architecture (eg. AMDs RDNA) which are probably closest to RISC for simple instructions and SIMD/SIMT (single instruction, multiple data/threads) for more complex vector calculations.