TwinIon

Has anyone here beaten this? I'm curious if it's worthwhile to spend any time grinding materia or levels before the end?

After reading about the changes that Williams underwent over the summer, like moving away from tracking everything in Excel, it doesn't shock me that they didn't have a third chassis available. Watching the crash, I'm surprised it necessitated one, and it sucks for Logan that he doesn't get to race, but putting Albon in the car is probably still the right decision.

This game really cannot resist introducing a new gimmick. At every step of the game they just feel compelled to add something extra and ephemeral, and it is so infrequently worthwhile. Sometimes it's a mini game or a new mode of transportation or a new ability for the chocobo, or maybe it's a character ability that only works for this sub-chapter of the game. The chocobo ability in the canyon is interesting, but you can hardly steer it, it's hard to look down without going down (which makes it so fun to try and line things up), and all it really does is turn the map into a maze. Sure the thing you want is over there, but you have to figure out where the jump point begins. I actually really like the Chocobo power in ch 11 (with the water). It doesn't really make sense, but for the first time in the entire game it was actually kind of fun getting around.

I'm in chapter 11 and controlling Cait Sith is such a pain. Sure, he can run (roll), but if he bumps into something you stop, and while controlling the moogle you move incredibly slowly for no apparent reason. Also, you get to throw boxes at stuff with strangely convoluted controls. Maybe hitting a switch makes sense, but then you're throwing boxes to break boxes while Barrett is standing next to you with his gun arm in a game where you've already controlled Barrett and used his gun to break stuff from a distance, it's stretching the necessity of the gimmick too far.

I try to imagine this game if they had built it as an actual open world adventure where all these things you learn and do in the party were additive instead of one off gimmicks. See a box way up high? Great, pull out Barrett and blow it up. Going back to an earlier area in the game? Wonderful, now your chocobo has new abilities that make getting around a breeze!

Even if they didn't open up the design space to accommodate all that and they still wanted this eclectic mix of gameplay moments, they still could have cut half of them, polished the other half, and have a nice toy box of surprises instead of a junk drawer of functional but un-fun segments throughout an otherwise excellent game.

Sounds like a poorly managed mess. Credit to the designer, I didn't think it was thrown together, but I didn't come away impressed by the final mission either.

I don't know what to expect from this stock other than a wild ride.

A confounding number that seems to go against the conventional wisdom both old and new. If you thought that streaming was doomed and that old school media would remain valuable and profitable, you'd want to include CBS and the cable channels. If you thought streaming was the future, obviously you'd want the streaming units. I don't understand where they see the value in owning Paramount Pictures if you don't think there's money in either broadcast or streaming.

Given the inflated valuation and that they don't want to make money showing Paramount's content to consumers themselves, either they think they can be much more profitable making content and licensing it all out to whatever platforms want to pay for it, or they think they can carve up Paramount IP for parts. It makes me think someone read these recent reports about Disney's ROI on Marvel and Star Wars and decided that they could do that for Transformers, Star Trek, Top Gun, Mission Impossible, and whatever other random IP Paramount still owns.

The idea that they're offering what seems to be a crazy premium makes me think they have a plan that is probably unpalatable to Paramount, but with a sufficiently big number Paramount has to seriously consider the sale.

I would argue that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is primarily a character piece, rather than something pointless or without a plot, but I also think it's one of those films that is very much about the vibe. Tarrantino wants to revel in Hollywood 1969; he wants to show how the business, culture, and the very nature of fame and Hollywood were changing and highlight how different it was from what we have now. It's a bit of nostalgic escapism and a bit of wish fulfillment, and if nothing about that appeals to you, it's easy enough to see why you might bounce off it.

Personally, even as someone without Trantino's reverence for that moment in time, I found it a satisfying watch just by nature of how well each scene plays out. There isn't a driving force of plot to focus your attention, but watching Dalton's bewilderment at his young co-star or his self satisfaction at making her proud gives you so much insight into this man and the changing nature of his business. Booth's routine at home contrasting with Dalton's is such a wonderful bit of "show don't tell" character development while also planting seeds that will pay off later. The pressure cooker of Spahn Ranch is such a delightful slow build and a clever backdoor into the actual history the film plays with. The surprise callback of the flame-thrower is both comedic and the final relief in not seeing the terrible true history the film seemed to be building towards. It is a meandering movie that eases on by without a north star of necessity, but it's still a wonderfully constructed love letter by a man who desperately wants to celebrate movies and everything that goes into making them, and someone who knows how to make characters in film interesting and layered.

It's at 45% on RT so far, which makes it the worst rated Ghostbusters movie.

I watched Afterlife, which was fine. It's very much The Force Awakens, but Ghostbusters. It's kind of weird how it venerates everything Ghostbusters. It's not enough to have nostalgia, it has to be in awe of it's own nostalgia, which felt kind of weird for a comedy. Still, it was fun enough to not be a complete disaster. I might go see Frozen Empire just because there isn't much else out, but we'll see.

Nothing wrong with that trailer, but as with any of these long running franchises that won't die I remain skeptical.

Hey, it's not Skywalker Saga, that makes interested.

Star Wars has had plenty of hits and misses, if it sucks, it sucks, but I'm happy to see something at least slightly different.

Don Lemon has posted the Elon interview that got his X show canceled before it even started.

The Verge has a quick rundown, which is probably enough for me.

A tiny CPU clock bump, a good GPU upgrade, and frame gen feels very plausible for a passable but not exciting PS5 Pro. Its also a shame that the disc drive will be optional. If that is the shape of it, I'll need to see what the upgrades actually look like before shelling out.

I'm such an idiot. I completely didn't recognize that x2 mult was different from +2 mult. I my mind mult was already multiplicative, it didn't register that some cards actually multiply your multiple. I got my first legendary joker that required twenty something discards before it would give x5 and thought, wow, that's a high requirement for a measly 5 mult. Still, I didn't find anything better for a while and when it unlocked I realized how it worked and now I feel like a moron, but those crazy high scores now feel much more doable.

I kind of wish you could see some of the score before you play the hand. Obviously RNG elements shouldn't be taken into account, but having a base number would be nice. I have a simple excel sheet that I've started putting numbers into because I wasn't really sure what the play was. Like when I have the joker that duplicates another joker, not sure if I should duplicate the effect that gives me more chips or more mult. I understand why it isn't there, but I do feel silly whipping out excel to optimize this silly card game.

I don't know about you all, but my "endless" runs have all ended pretty abruptly not long after they start. I've had a few runs where I knew I could sail through and "win" after Ante 3 or 4, so I'd slow play every round trying to maximize everything. I just did the challenge where you start with jokers for "every card is a face card" and "every face card has a 1 in 2 chance of paying out 1 dollar", which translated to infinite money. By the time I won nearly every card in my ~65 card deck were enhanced hearts, with about 30 of them being foil (+50 chips) +4 mult aces (a bunch with red stickers), with another 10 foil kings and ~15 +30 chip cards. My jokers gave me continually rising mults for every flush and tarrot played and +30 chips for every face card (which was all of them thanks to the challenge). I was actually struggling to play worse hands in order to trigger more effects every round, because I could easily win every round with my opening draw every time. I bought everything in the shop every round, buffing my hand types and looking for any joker with higher potential than what I had.

All of that and I still maxed out at something over 100k per hand, which was guaranteed every hand. So when I got to the $1M boss blind, there was no chance. My other runs where I sailed through to the "win" screen similarly ended in that crazy 300k/500k/1M section.

I know people have gotten some crazy scores, so I'm guessing that I just haven't unlocked some jokers that really allow for more exponential progression, because my linearly scaling methods just don't seem to cut it. Those 1M hand and 100M hand achievements seem way out of reach with what I've seen in the game so far.

TL:DR - I'm enjoying trying to optimize this game. There is a beautiful mix of simplicity and depth that makes Balatro's success so well deserved.

26 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

All this talk of what they "deserve" is so idealistic and disconnected from reality. Netflix has raised their prices every year for ages and the quality of their offerings has only gone down. Top Ramen went from dirt cheap food for poor people to hilariously expensive for being waxed cardboard. EA has charged full price as they rerelease a slightly more broken version of [name any game they make here] for decades.

 

No one is "deserving" of anything in this regard, that's a borderline children's fantasy as a concept in the world of business. They have all the leverage and that's literally all that matters. It's not about deserving or what you offer or anything like that. You can bet your ass nothing EGS does is worth their 12% cut, not even close. Nothing MS or Sony does is "worth" the 30% cut and you can bet your ass every publisher under the sun would scoff at their "support" if it meant keeping that 30%.

Conflating idealistic wishes with actual business is so bizarre and it's really funny how everyone keeps making excuses for the console manufacturers when it's the exact same shit, lol.

 

Also I would not trade any of that for a Valve that focused solely on games again. I like Valve games, but getting one real good game every 4-6 years is not something I care too deeply about when I'm already inundated with leagues of amazing games every other month nowadays.

The business model for consoles is significantly different than it is for general computing platforms. There are very different market forces at work that do more to justify 30% take for a Switch game than a PC game. I feel like between the Epic v Apple case and all the discussion around the DMA in the EU that this has been litigated to death, but if you can't differentiate those models, that's on you.

I also never said that Valve should give up on their revenue, and I don't think that anyone has been suggesting that. However, it seems rather obvious that they are able to maintain that cut because they run an effective monopoly. Monopolies are not necessarily built from unfair conditions, so this not an indictment, just an observation that Valve now controls what is broadly considered to be a monopoly share of the PC gaming distribution market (70%+). It would take either a huge market shift or regulation to change that in the short run, but monopolies are considered bad for consumers for a reason, and to dismiss those effects here is silly.

This was the first thing I've watched on Prime that actually had regular ads spaced out in it. Not a fun change Amazon.

Show continues to be good though.

1 hour ago, legend said:

 

Yeah I'm not defending 30% being right, I'm more so defending the notion that it's cheaper for games that are expected to sell a lot. That or a policy that has the same effect seems appropriate.

Yeah, I agree with that. If you're bringing in more revenue, you have the leverage to make a better deal.

Apple based their 30% cut on the horrific carrier controlled app distribution of the early 00s and Valve based theirs off of the cost of physical distribution. At the time, neither was really a bad deal. Now that digital distribution has become the norm it's basically unjustifiable for that high of a cut to become standard and the only reason that fees have remained that high is monopoly control.

If you're selling a product outside of one of those monopolies, fees go down very quickly. Etsy runs a store, and their fee is 6.5%+payment processing, so call it 10%. On Squarespace once you're paying them more than $23/month the transaction fees go to zero and you're only paying the 3% payment processing fee. If you're only paying for their cheapest plan, then their fee is 10% (which includes payment processing). Those are imperfect comparisons and I'm well aware that Steam offers a bit more value than just a website, but it's not 27% more value.

Sweeney and Epic aren't saints and I'm not necessarily defending them, but these fees are way higher than they should be and I think it's bad for consumers that they've persisted for so long.

This game is perfect for the steam deck, though it seems like it would be great on the iPad as well.

My best and most fun runs so far have relied on the "+1 mult for every Tarrot card played" joker. In both runs I had that effect duplicated, and then I built up different ways to play as many as possible. Having a guaranteed 200x mult is pretty good, plus playing all those cards meant basically every card in my deck was enhanced. It's also just more fun to play as many cards as possible.

I just unlocked the challenges. Some of them look like a pretty good head start and some of them look pretty hard.

Overall the game is really great. It's simple and clever and seems like it'll have plenty of replay value.

3 minutes ago, stepee said:

I assume this is something devs need to program games around?

Sure sounds like it.

From the articles linked by the one in the OP:
 

Quote

 

    With the proliferation of GPU-driven rendering techniques – such as Nanite in Unreal Engine 5 – the role of the CPU is trending towards primarily resource management and hazard tracking, with only a fraction of time spent generating GPU commands. Prior to D3D12 Work Graphs, it was difficult to perform fine-grained memory management on the GPU, which meant it was practically impossible to support algorithms with dynamic work expansion. Even simple long chains of sequential compute work could result in a significant synchronization and memory overhead.

    GPU-driven rendering was accomplished by the CPU having to guess what temporary allocations were needed by the GPU, often over-allocating to the worst case, and using previous frame readback for refinement. Any workloads with dynamic expansion either meant issuing worst case dispatches from the CPU, having the GPU early out of unnecessary work, or non-portable techniques were used, like persistent threads.

    With Work Graphs, complex pipelines that are highly variable in terms of overall “shape” can now run efficiently on the GPU, with the scheduler taking care of synchronization and data flow. This is especially important for producer-consumer pipelines, which are very common in rendering algorithms. The programming model also becomes significantly simpler for developers, as complex resource and barrier management code is moved from the application into the Work Graph runtime.

    We have been advocating for something like this for a number of years, and it is very exciting to finally see the release of Work Graphs.

    — Graham Wihlidal, Epic Games

 

Quote

 

In June, Microsoft announced a major new D3D12 feature called Work Graphs. Have you looked into this preview yet? If so, what do you think about its potential applications in games?

Tatu Aalto, Lead Graphics Programmer, Remedy Entertainment: Work Graphs are the natural next step in moving heavy graphics work from CPU to GPU, and we are eagerly waiting for GPU-based work submission to be adapted on all the platforms we target. Communication between CPU and GPU has been a major performance cost in real-time applications like games for a long time already, and we saw a large performance gain in Alan Wake 2 when moving more computation to happen fully on GPU. Having more fine-grained control on GPU scheduling ensures that all the available GPU power can be wisely used. Exposing something like this is very fundamental and can be used in many algorithms we run in Northlight.

 

On 3/9/2024 at 6:43 AM, MarSolo said:

It’s not even that he got Superman and Batman wrong… he got Pa and Ma Kent wrong too!

 

Pa Kent telling him “eh, maybe let the kids die next time”… what the fuck???

Yeah, I'm almost compelled to agree with @Mercury33 about Man of Steel, but the Pa Kent stuff was such a cataclysmic miscalculation.

I'm looking at a BO total of $1.3B that suggests that plot is not necessary for a Mario movie and the sequel was inevitable.

Not a lot of surprises and a pretty meh show overall, not that I expected much from Jimmy. I enjoyed the Mulaney bit, Cena coming out naked was a good laugh, but it's hard to deny that "I'm Just Ken" was the highlight of the show.

I expected Lily Gladstone to win, but I think Emma Stone was a more deserving. Very happy for Nolan to win Picture and Director. He's great for cinema and Oppenheimer is as deserving a winner as any. I personally would have given the trophy to Spider-Verse, but the first one did win and I think there's a good chance at them winning with the next entry (though I didn't realize it was a different directing team). I just can't feel bad about Miyazaki winning, even if Boy and the Heron isn't my favorite of his.

I have never really grasped the metric that Visual Effects is judged on. I loved Godzilla Minus One, and the effects they were able to achieve with that budget are astounding. I can't feel bad about them winning an award, but they were not the most impressive of the year.

Also, it's BS that the Academy did a little clip show about stunt guys and how they risk their lives and how essential their work is in the same show where they bring up that the first new category in 20 years is "achievement in casting." I think casting is extremely important, and it might be a round about way for blockbusters to get some credit for their amazing casts. I can just imagine the casting director getting an Oscar for Iron Man while the performance goes unrecognized. Still, stunt guys should have been at the top of the list if they're adding categories. Not only that, but they should retroactively give out awards. Back up a dump truck of overdue statues for Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan and Tom Cruise, and all the guys whose names we don't know.

And they're unbanned thanks to the EU.

I'm open to the idea that Apple should ban Epic for deliberately breaking the rules, but Apple's decision made it seem like it was largely based on Epic's comments on Apple, which is not good at all.

Even if you're not a fan of Dragonball, it's hard not to recognize the incredible impact his work had.