TwinIon

It is a bummer that Wolverine is so far out, I expected it in 24 or 25 at the latest given how quickly Insomniac moves.

I'm guessing that Venom is a Miles Morales size game. I'm kinda surprised that we haven't seen more of it in these leaks given that it's the next game to be released, but it also doesn't look like dev on it even started until recently.

That slide showing the distribution of dev resources is really interesting. At the beginning of this year they were working on two games at the same time. By 25 they'll be working on five! Most people will be working on only two of them, but still seems like quite a change. I think Insomniac is well run and will be able to handle it, but I hope that doesn't take a toll on the quality of their output.

I'm not really sure what to make of SM3 potentially being a two part game. If the result is that we basically get two Spider-man games where the skill trees and the story all flow from one to another, great. If the result is that we get two lesser games that each tell half a story, that's less appealing to me than just getting SM3 and SM4.

10 minutes ago, ort said:

My bet is that this is resolved before they get pulled from the shelves.

 

Another goofy thing about this is that Apple didn't actually issue a press release or statement about any of this. They announced it ONLY through a statement to 9to5mac, which is just a small independent enthusiast site.

Yeah, I agree that it gets resolved before they actually pull things from shelves. These kinds of things have happened before. Apple was probably holding out for a Presidential veto like they got when the ITC issued a ban on some iPhone and iPads. Now that the ITC has issued a final ruling and it's clear Biden won't step in, some hardcore negotiating will be taking place.

Apple's watch revenue during the holiday quarter will probably be something like 10x Masimo's total yearly revenue. Apple has been fighting this patent case for years now, now it's probably just a matter of how much they pay.

In Poor Things the distorted lens of Yorgos Lanthimos infects everything like a virus. From the physical to metaphysical, nothing is left unchallenged or unchanged. The music rings with an eerie off-key whine, the sky swirls with unnatural tint and texture, buildings and boats twist themselves into unexpected shapes and colors. Here nothing is sacred. Not friendships or families, not science or religion, and certainly not sex. Here the duck-dog barks and the dog-chicken quacks. The occasional fisheye views bring into question if we should even be allowed to watch what is on screen, but it is impossible to turn away.

Because it is glorious.

A coming of age tale in the most bizarre possible way, Poor Things is, despite its trappings, a story of hope. It's a story about wielding reason in an unreasonable world, of finding love and pleasure despite unreasonable cruelty. It is, in a quite literal sense, a story about beauty. It's also quite funny. Sometimes it's funny because laughter feels like the only possible reaction to the absurdity on screen, and sometimes it's just slapstick. For all it's complexities and oddities, Poor Things is not a subtle film. God is dead, sex feels good, don't suffer fools, and maybe we should just be kind to one another.

Picasso once said "it took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." While Yorgos Lanthimos has never tried to make films like anyone else, with Poor Things he has shed even the pretense and is operating with the freedom of a filmmaker unbound by formality, yet still with an unmistakable skill and craftsmanship. He's joined in that pursuit by Emma Stone, who provides a whirlwind performance that perfectly embodies and amplifies the distorted reality on display. Meanwhile, Mark Ruffalo is surprisingly effective as Bella's foppish paramour and Willem Dafoe is in his natural habitat as off-brand Frankenstein.

All told, Poor Things is a triumph. Decadent in its eccentricities but all the while captivating and entertaining. If you have any curiosity or wonder left in you, it's well worth checking out.

It really depends on what you're looking for and what you've already seen. The back catalog of HBO runs deep with great shows and WB has a bunch of great movies on there.

Recent shows that I'd highly recommend:

Scavengers Reign for some freaky alien sci-fi.

The Last of Us for the best video game adaptation to date.

Succession for the one of the best dramas of all time.

Chernobyl is depressing and captivating in equal measures.

Barry is darkly funny.

Station Eleven is one of the great post apocalypse stories.

The Rehearsal is Nathan Fielder getting crazy and meta with his unique brand of comedy.

How To With John Wilson is observational comedy unlike anything else.

Yikes. Nothing but pretty terrible reactions so far. There's a good chance I still watch it, but it's a shame this didn't work out.

Seems like it was probably the best choice for the studio and it’s the direction that I’d personally prefer them to take.

The thing that I find interesting is that they were able to make this decision as Sony has made a big deal about wanting to go towards live service games, but also after it’s revealed how much trouble Bungie has been having lately. I would love to know what the calculus with dealing with Sony was in this case. 

Naughty Dog is arguably the best single player dev in the business. I look forward to whatever games they end up making.

I know that viewer hours is what matters to Netflix, but it's not a number that normal people really understand, so I wanted to figure out how many people actually watched these shows. If you do what Netflix does for it's weekly top 10 and just take hours viewed divided by the runtime, that works out to ~88M viewers for The Night Agent, 76M for Wednesday, and 60M for Beef.

Then again, most people don't really finish shows all the way through, so you could probably increase those numbers by 50% or more to get an idea of how many people watched a good portion of the show.

Whatever gets us closer to Micro LED.

I'm going to stick to OLED for now, but it's nice to see the tech progressing.

Pretty fun, but for some reason my xbox controller's A button keeps bringing up the menu.

It is neat to run it at 1:1 and see the whole map.

I went to check this out last night and it's a bit funny and a bit sad, but I don't think it was weird enough. Cage is very good here as the straight man, a boring and unaccomplished professor that random people start dreaming about. It's a fun idea that toys with modern notions of fame and social media virality, but the real tragedy is that it ends up feeling more hollow than insightful or fun. It makes me wish that this premise had been explored by Spike Jonze or Ari Aster.

A friend of mine got to see it early and absolutely loved it. I've got my tickets for Thursday.

He'll be missed. He was a highlight in basically everything he was in.

I was rewatching Fringe when Lance Reddick passed, and I've been rewatching B99. Such a shame to see such talented actors pass so young.

I like Alex Garland, and that sequence with Jesse Plemons looks great, but selling that premise is going to be hard work.

I know trailers are chopped up and often provide incomplete or misleading context, but it sure seems like it's Texas and California against the rest of the US? That's an odd line to draw for a new civil war.

I'm pretty surprised by this outcome, and I agree that this being a Jury made a big difference in the outcome. I think Epic would have had a much better chance with a Jury against Apple. Google being more open is what doomed them with the jury. Google allows a lot more than Apple does, but because they allow so much more they strike all kinds of deals to maintain their advantage, and that doesn't look good. Apple doesn't really strike any deals, they just say no.

That said, I still think the biggest reason that Apple won and Google lost is thanks to market definitions. In the Apple case the judge decided that the market was "mobile game transactions." In the Google case, the markets in question were decided to be "Android app distribution" and "Android in-app billing". If Epic had gotten the Apple market defined as "iOS app distribution" and "iOS in-app payment solutions" like they wanted, I think it would have been very hard to argue Apple didn't have a monopoly. The reverse is true for this Google case. If the market was the same "mobile game transactions" that was used in the Apple case, then all of Google's deals now look like they're desperate plays for revenue in a market where they control the market share but not the profit share. Limited only to what is happening on Android, I agree that they're pretty clear monopolists.

It'll be very interesting to see what kinds of remedies the judge comes up with. He could limit the kinds of deals that Google is allowed to pursue. He could force Google to allow alternative payment systems on the Play store and/or to allow app stores in the Google Play store. With a lot of those kinds of deals, we actually already have some expectation of what Google could do to get around it thanks to Apple being forced to do the same. Sure, they'll allow you to use your own payment processor, but you still owe Google 27% of all digital transactions.

I've never upgraded storage space on consoles, I just don't jump between games often enough to justify keeping a bunch of games on them.

My PC is a different matter, and I've been running low lately. Currently have a 2TB primary drive along with 12TB of disk storage, mostly for photos, all in RAID and backed up to both my local NAS and the cloud.

Some are easier to remember, probably helped by many having already been mentioned:

Futurama - Luck of the Fryish, Jurassic Bark, The Devils Hands are Idle Playthings

Bojack - Free Churo, Time's Arrow

Cowboy Bebop - Ballad of Fallen Angels, The Real Folk Blues p2

The Simpsons - Cape Feare, Marge vs the Monorail, Homer's Enemy, probably at least a dozen others

There are other series that I'd put up with the best of TV animation, but it's harder to narrow down a single episode

Avatar, the last Airbender - Sozin's Comet p4

Neon Genesis Evangelion - Introjection

Arcane -  The Base Violence Necessary for Change

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood - Death of the Undying

Primal - Rage of the Ape Men

There are recent shows that I haven't re-watched yet, but might deserve to be up there:

Blue Eye Samurai - The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride

Scavengers Reign - The Fall

Invincible - We Need to Talk

6 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

To your point, D.I.C.E already does the "we're going to honour the developers" bit -- ~50k people watched the show on IGN's stream.

The VGAs trailer show got about 3M people.

I don't think it's impossible to do both. With the speech lengths they had, it wouldn't have been a much longer show if we got to acknowledge more of the winners.

Sometimes the Oscars do a thing where they show a clip real introducing of the Best Pic noms throughout the show. It would be great if they had did something like that. They don't need to be full on NoClip documentaries, but a couple minutes of a dev talking about how hard it was to get Alan Wake 2 approved or the new technology they built for it, or the daunting task of following up Breath of the Wild, or a taste of the underdog story of Larian Studios.

I don't have a hard and fast rule about subs or dubs, I can enjoy either if they're well done. The dub here is very well done.

The film is classic Miyazaki. Whimsical, inexplicable, magical, confounding, touching. I don't think it's his best, but it's a fitting finale for a legend.

I finally caught up with this over the weekend and it was amazing. Such a delightfully and frightfully alien world is presented.

My only qualm:

I really hope we get more of this show. I was getting some real Dune vibes at the end and I'd love to see this universe expanded on.

I don't really mind short speeches, but I really don't like completely skipping them and just listing who won what. I understand that the viewership is largely there to see new trailers and game announcements, but I think it's a real shame that we can't even get a YouTube live stream that takes the people behind games seriously and celebrates their accomplishments. I think it's fine to celebrate Kojima, but it's a shame that he's in such rarefied company as a game dev who people actually know. The Game Awards has the opportunity to elevate devs to known quantities, or at least be part of it.

Yeah, no one mentioned all the game devs who have lost their jobs this year, and part of that is the problem is is that it's so easy to ignore mass layoffs when we have no idea who makes our games.

I think it's fine for a game awards show to talk about what is coming next and get hyped about it, but if it's not just going to be a fancy E3 conference, it should actually elevate the creators. It's often not the most popular part of other awards shows, but I think having technical awards would be a real positive change, even if they get a bit side lined. DICE has pretty good categories that would work, just steal from them. Having a short montage of someone talking about animation or what game direction means would be a service.

I think it's difficult to read into exactly what he means. He says that he doesn't want to make a sequel to a sequel, not what form the next game will take. It could well be a BOTW/TOTK style game but without any continuity, new powers, new world, etc.

Personally, I really hope that they keep with the philosophy of powers that allow you to be creative to solve puzzles and approach situations. If they maintain that philosophy, I don't really care what the overall shape or story of the game ends up being.

1 hour ago, best3444 said:

I truly don't understand why anyone would say RDR2 is a big disappointment. I'm currently playing it and it's a complete an utter masterpiece. 10/10 kinda game and easily in my top 10 ever. GTA6 will be fuckin ridiculous. 

I haven't played it since launch, but my recollection is that RDR2 was more impressive than fun. If you're enjoying it, all the more power to you. It's an amazing experience in many respects, I just wish they'd put as much attention to gameplay and mechanics as they did into building the world.

I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense. They have an inflated stock price and a failing business. May as well count on other business to actually make money with your money.

With all the GTA 6 hype, I decided to install GTA 4 on my Steam Deck since I somehow I had it on Steam despite never having played it on PC.

I remember liking the game back in the day, but it doesn't feel great in 2023, and I don't mean the car handling. It starts so slowly and needy, having to go on dates and hang out and suffer incessant calls from Roman. The toll roads are a complete mistake, forcing you to either stop or have to out run police that can easily block the bridge. I also hate some of the "hidden" mechanics that pop up in GTA missions that I've run into a couple times, where guys are hard coded to stay ahead of you or are even invincible until they reach a destination. I also think that the dull faded colors and dour atmosphere just suit GTA poorly compared to the more laid back and fun settings of the other games. 

I'll probably put in a few more hours to see if I like it better once things kick into gear, but I'm not rushing to put in a full run.