TwinIon

Seems great and I hope to see it in a bunch of games, but I won't hold my breath for significant adoption anytime soon. It also requires an M.2 SSD, which is increasingly standard, but I'd guess far from universal. I'm curious as to how much of a hit this is to the GPU. Given how many games are GPU limited on the PC, I'd be slightly concerned that moving more work to the GPU would be less than ideal. During initial loads that's obviously not a problem. I don't think that was in danger of changing much either way. Games haven't exactly been great at optimizing for all the many threads that have been available for years now.

Chris Rock's joke was bad, but in no world should Will Smith have hit him. Coda is a fine movie, but far from an all time great. Troy Kotsur accepting his award was basically the only highlight of the night. The rest of the broadcast was generally terrible.

It’s quite the situation in Jeddah. There was a missile attack on an Aramco facility only a few miles away from the track during Free Practice 1. FP2 took place a few hours later, but then the teams and the drivers got together to discuss if they should race this weekend. Just recently, after the drivers meeting concluded at 2a.m. Local time, it was decided the GP will go ahead. Apparently there was a similar attack last week as well. It’s all a situation that the sport never should have been in to start. There never should have been a race in Saudi Arabia. Personally, I wouldn’t want to be at a GP sponsored by Aramco after two Aramco facilities were blown up in the same city in the last week. I don’t know much about the conflict, but it wouldn’t take all that many of these guys to decide they want to bring the world’s eye to the situation for things to go pretty poorly.

Just another reminder that the whole idea of appointing SCOTUS justices for life is a stupid idea.

I've long argued that emulation should be a core competency at Nintendo at this point. Given the rate at which they re-release games across platforms, and their penchant for building novel hardware that may not resemble past hardware in terms of architecture or capabilities, they should be the best in the world at putting their own games on whatever machine. The best of their back catalog should be playable anywhere and should always be the best versions of themselves. If you've got Nintendo hardware, it should never be a question as to if you can play your favorite old Zelda or Mario game. Then they should just be moving through their catalog making premium remakes like Link's Awakening. Instead it seems that every time Nintendo releases hardware, it's some mystery as to what they'll do with their old games and how much they'll cost and how the official version might be inferior to some pirated emulator. It seems like Nintendo understands the value of their catalog, but is only ever willing to put in the bare minimum effort to monetize them. Maybe the new subscription is a good way to do it, I haven't paid for it or heard many opinions on it, but it doesn't feel great to pay for a subscription to access games I've payed for multiple times already.

From that Eurogamer article: Yeesh. That makes the move to UE5 seem like a reasonable decision, especially if, as Eurogamer suggests, CDPR will be contributing their obvious expertise to the core of UE5. Nothing in that article made me think that moving to UE5 will necessary speed up development for this first game, but it could be a good long term investment.

The first episode is fine, and I’m hopeful it could get better as it goes on. The first episode spends a lot of time establishing the setting and all the players, arguably too much. I’m also not a fan how this show establishes Master Chief. Spoilers for episode 1: (also for Star Trek Discovery Episode 1+2)

The way Ars lays it out it sounds like Gamestop either didn't understand the terms or simply doesn't like them in retrospect, but I'd guess that BSG is likely to win. Maybe it's standard practice, but signing onto a variable fee based on projected improvements seems like an absolutely horrible idea. It makes sense for BSG. They can do a bunch of work, come up with some very nice ideas for how Gamestop is going to start making more money, and then get paid regardless of the actual outcome. So BSG is insulated from their client's failures, they're also effectively insulated from their own, which seems like BS, but also seems to be what Gamestop agreed to.

Google is going to allow Spotify to offer their own payment system alongside Google's. This is apparently a trial that is being built on the systems developed for South Korea (where they need to offer this by law). It's only going to be offered in a few countries to start with. Thus far Google has been pretty quiet about details, like what kind of deal Google is offering Spotify, but hopefully it's the start of something bigger.

As far as mistakes that actually cost Nintendo, the Sony partnership and every decision made with the Wii U have to be up there. Then there are the mistakes that it's not clear to me have really cost them, like their terrible strategy with online. It's plausible to me that they could have sunk a ton of money into building a first class online platform and that it wouldn't really have helped their bottom line at all. Then again, it's also plausible to me that their failure to invest could have long term implications and end up costing them more in the end. Same for how they've treated their back catalog. They've made a ton of money re-selling their games again and again, but it is possible that strategy will cost them long term fans. Lastly, there are the decisions that I wish they'd made differently but obviously haven't cost them. Chiefly among them, not waiting longer to launch the Switch and putting in a more powerful chip in there. I'd also argue that the overall design of the DS line is up there. Even though I owned many versions of the DS and the success of the various DS platforms is hard to argue with, I think those systems succeeded in spite of the dual screen gimmick. So few games actually made any kind of interesting use of the second screen, and I really think they could have made a better, more traditional handheld without it. I also think the success of the DS systems lead to the development of the Wii U, which amplified all the problems with the DS to the point they couldn't be overlooked anymore.

When I first saw the trailer I thought it was an interesting concept, but it wasn't until actually watching the show that I came to understand the actual implications of what severance would imply. It really is quite horrifying, but the show is very well done and worth a watch to anyone curious.

Impressive looking demo, but in isolation it's difficult to take away what kind leaps we can actually expect to see in Unity games anytime soon.

Moving to UE5 is interesting, but it's hard to say if its the kind of thing that will shorten or lengthen the dev cycle for a game like this. If nothing else it certainly signals an effort to change what the dev process looks like, hopefully to avoid the pitfalls of Cyberpunk. I hope that change allows them to make a smaller game. Just because they've made giant games in the past doesn't mean that every game needs to be bigger and filled with more systems and more complexity. Build a game that tells a good story and is fun to play and put less focus on building more more more.

I occasionally go out birding, which I suppose would be my least typical hobby.

Personally, I'm happy with darker mornings and sun later into the day. It's nice to be able go birding at sunrise and not have to wake up a 5am.

Eventually perhaps, but I wouldn't bet on it anytime soon. Skyrim has been selling on every platform under the sun for over a decade. It sold 30 million copies before it was released on Switch, VR, or the most recent console gen. So by this (obviously wanting) list it could well be in the top 15 selling games of all time, more than double the best selling game in the Halo franchise (which is apparently Halo 3, with ~15M sold). If Starfield is good enough to be appreciated and played for a decade, I think we'll all be happy.

Nothing hypes me up for a game more than NFT profile pictures.

Maybe it’s a long term goal of the Steam Deck platform to provide a console like experience, but I don’t really see that as being the case for this first iteration. Everything I’ve read suggests that this first machine is very much one that you’ll be tinkering with quite a lot to get the most out of it. With a Switch game (baring any patches), you’re all ready from the moment the game opens. With the Steam Deck, you’ll need to be sure that the game is compatible, that it has runs well enough, you might need to find the right control scheme, and you’ll probably need to configure the graphics options to get it running just right. Not that I’m saying all that is a bad thing. I’ve been a PC gamer for a long time and I like tinkering around with things, but in that respect the Steam Deck is very different from a console experience. Because of the limited hardware power, the OS, and the irregular control scheme, the Deck requires far more of that PC like tinkering than most people otherwise might have to put into a game.

I think of Windows support as essential to the goal of the Steamdeck, which I see as being able to play your entire library of PC games on a handheld. It is, and will remain, the case that some games will simply not work (or work well enough) on Linux. It greatly increases the value of the device to me if I know I can play PC gamepass games or games like Destiny that won't be playable on Linux. That said, it's clear that the Windows experience is far from complete for now. Until you can dual boot Steam OS and Windows and Windows itself is a better experience, it doesn't seem like Windows is a worthwhile option on the deck.

I continue to be extremely impressed by Apple's new computers. If I had any use for one at all I'd absolutely be looking to overspend on a studio right now.

Unfortunately it seems like they won't even be moving towards electric. Vice has a good article on the reasons.

Interesting talk, thanks for posting. He really goes hard at crypto, going so far as to basically say that the blockchain is an unworkable idea. More specifically that blockchains can't accomplish their goals and that the negative externalities are inherent to the system. He's certainly an expert in the field, and at first glance there isn't much I have to disagree with in his analysis. As pessimistic as I've been about crypto, I've held out some hope that there could be some genuinely useful tech in the stack somewhere waiting for the right use case. As billions in VC funding continue to pour in with basically nothing to show for it, I'm increasingly dubious as to there being any value in the tech.

I very much expected them to be working on new versions, the only question I have is if we'll see yearly releases like most PCs or if we'll see updates a bit off cadence with processor releases and get new Steam Decks more like every 18 or 24 months. Along with a spec boost, I wouldn't be surprised to see an updated deck get a VRR capable screen, and for some reason I expect Valve to mess with the controller layout, if only because they always seem to be.

I haven't been paying as much attention, but I wouldn't have thought disarmament was a plausible outcome while Putin was in power. Reductions maybe, given the high cost of upkeep, but I wouldn't have expected Putin to give up his weapons. I also don't think there's any chance that the US does as long as anyone else has nukes. Sure, polls like this show that people would rather there not be nuclear weapons, but if you asked people if we should give up our nukes before they've otherwise been eliminated and I'd guess the results would look quite different.

Yeah, that same think tank's initial analysis hypothesized about their lack of precision-guided munitions, and thought that while it's likely true, they didn't feel like it was sufficient explanation for the poor showing.