I still like claiming the free games even if I don’t have any immediate intention of playing them, simply because I like the idea of developers getting paid, and Tim Sweeney losing money!

I want AI in games; Actual Innovation!

I’m in a similar situation with my wife not being particularly interested in games - I’ve had some success in playing LA Noire with her guiding the investigations and interrogations. The jazz soundtrack in particular helped convince her, funnily enough!

Not quite perhaps what you’re looking for, but may work for others with hesitant non-gamer partners.

Such a great game; doesn’t overstay its welcome and has just enough mechanics to keep things interesting.

I’ve replayed it every few years and it’s as good as I remembered it every time.

I feel similarly about Crysis and Far Cry 3 too - but am probably in the minority on those two.

Would you be able to DM me a link to whatever guide or resources you used to get that up and running?

I’d be keen for a similar single-player experience through MOP or Legion.

I thought they were Canadian, though? Weird…

Echo’ing the other reply, but the Assassin’s Creed franchise (at least up to, but not including Origins) scratches my alt-history itch like nothing else has been able to.

Likewise, both Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 5 (inc. expansions) were absolutely fantastic IMO - and are some of the rare few FPS games I would willingly revisit.

Don’t take the above to mean my opinion of Ubisoft as a publisher is particularly glowing - let’s be honest, most publishers are absolute dogshit, due to perverse Capitalist incentives - and Stephanie Sterling’s segments about them on the Jimquisition should have been the final nail in their coffins.

I’ve found that as I’ve gotten older and more curmudgeonly, I’ve also become more nostalgic for the “good ol’ days” of gaming in the up-to-and-including the PS3/X360/Wii era - so my money has stayed largely away from AAA-publisher bank accounts.

I think it mostly just didn’t feel like a Max Payne game because of the setting. Not New York? Not Max Payne.

Gameplay wise, it was definitely on the right track; and in a way - I remember it fondly as was the last time Rockstar seemingly experimented with game mechanics ahead of incorporating them into the next GTA game.

This is an interesting development, for sure - and not one we will be able to accurately gauge the net impact of for a while.

It does feel like CD Project want to move it off their financial documents (P&L, cashflow, balance sheets etc.), while Michael wants to double-down and focus on building out the historical catalog.

Success will really depend on if GOG can remain profitable through lean years without having to ultimately rely on compromising their morals; and whether they will continue to receive support from modern publishers to help fund the more niche projects.

It honestly feels like original and creative works are exclusively the domain of indie developers nowadays.

Given how bloated AAA budgets have become, publishers seemingly don’t want to risk taking a chance on some more whacky ideas - at least until an indie dev proves it out first.

We are at a point now that games from the PS3/X360 era still look and play well, so newer titles need to contribute something new in order to make an impact.

If a AAA-studio releases a 7/10 title in 2026, it’s not just competing with the 8s, 9s, and 10s also releasing the same year - but also every single such title from the past 20 years!

This will also only continue to get worse in coming years as the backlog of exceptional titles will continue to build.

The only franchises I will pre-order are:

• World of Warcraft Collector’s Editions : even though I stopped playing a few years ago now, I still buy the physical copy collector’s editions to add to my collection - I have every one going all the way back to vanilla.

• Grand Theft Auto 6 : I have both the PS3 Collector’s Editions for IV and V, feels like getting the same for 6 to finish off that ‘trilogy’ would be apropos.

This is a cursed list, but at least 2/3rds eventually lived up to their initial promise!

Data centres aren’t run by hardware manufacturers. When Nvidia/Micron/Samsung run out of enterprise corporations to bilge funds out of, they will return back to selling to consumers.

Does this mean that things will 100% return to how they were in the ‘Before Times’? No, let’s be real - the surplus of under-used data centres will definitely result in a push towards cloud gaming, online experiences and the like - but in an ideal scenario we would end up with more choice and not less.

But again, this all hinges on the current AI bubble bursting in the near future - followed by a pretty bad recession/depression.

The principal of supply and demand still applies, they will cut prices up until the point they either go out of business or they find a sufficient number of buyers.

Companies like Nvidia, Micron and Samsung are currently chasing massive profits off enterprise customers, but will come crawling back to consumers once the AI bubble bursts (assuming they survive the resulting market collapse).

As an example, if Nvidia can turn one TSMC wafter into one AI accelerator that they can sell for $40K, or into ~5 RTX 5090s they can sell for $2K/ea - they will sell as many of the $40K cards as they can, and only use failed wafers to try and satiate RTX 5090 demand.

But if there are no more AI customers, they will be forced to drop prices in order to shift more volume. If they can’t drop prices further due to wafer costs, then they will pass up wafer allocations from TSMC.

If TSMC sees too many wafers free up - they will be forced to drop prices to all customers (AMD, Apple etc.) to try and pick up the slack. They in turn will need to drop prices in order to try and increase sales volumes.

This will have a downwards pressure on prices and a “return to the mean” moment for tech prices. It will just be a painful couple of years until we get to that point, and honestly with the way things are currently going - it will be the least of our worries.

Prices won’t fall, not until the AI bubble bursts and the related industries shift focus back to consumer-level goods.

At best, you could hope prices remain steady for a few years and real-world incomes slowly rise to match this new normal.

That’s awesome, didn’t even think of how useful AirDrop could be in that situation!

How’s controller support? I have a Razer Kishi V2 I bought way back when to play the Rockstar games, that’s just otherwise gathering dust.

It’s nighttime here in Australia - will load up some files and test it out tomorrow morning! 😁

Thanks for bringing Delta to my attention! I use my Steam Deck for emulation - but now, I have another rabbit hole to go down for when I need to pack ultralight!

Any obvious iOS restrictions, assuming I’d be primarily interested in SNES gaming and have local access to any/every ROM file?

Waluigi numba wan!

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.

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?

It’s literally a laptop CPU with a laptop GPU.

Not trying to have a go at you, actually genuinely curious: Do you have a source to confirm this, or is it more of an educated guess on your part?

All I’ve seen so far is that it’s a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6c/12t CPU and RDNA 3 28 CU GPU.

…and the world was a better place for it.

You know, I’ve always thought of Metroidvanias as 2D experiences - but reading your comment and mulling it over, I have to agree: Arkham Asylum is very much a Metroidvania, and a great one at that!

Millionaires billionaires.

It’s a dick-measuring contest from more civilised times.

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.

Sabotaged by the stupid placement of the microphone and earpiece… I still remember the taco phone memes of the day. Shame, it could have been great!

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.

Absolutely; but you just know that Publishers will just push to outsource development to 3rd party “contractors” so that they won’t be eligible, or some other such bullshit.

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!

World of Warcraft; Azeroth (the planet) lore is quite detailed and fleshed out - building upon the foundations of the original RTS trilogy.

It’s a bit of a shame a lot of it gets swept under the rug every major expansion and patch cycle, so it’s hard for new(er) players to catch up.

Beyond Android phones, it should also be good for the emulation scene on macOS.

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.

I don’t want to contribute to the mountains of AI slip on the internet, so instead I’ll just prompt the reader’s brain to imagine a picture of Bugs Bunny in Arabian robes, eating a carrot nonchalantly, with the caption “eh, wahabi ‘doc?”