TwinIon

The last gameplay demo they showed didn't look like a "free" climbing system. It sure looked like that available grapples glowed yellow when scanned. Set climbing routes are one of my pet peeves in an open world game, so I really hope it's true. Nothing kills the sense of discovery like a specifically painted line of hand holds and ledges directing your every movement.

I was watching a few pages, but nothing came up. I was kind of hoping that some 3080s would become available at the same time and that maybe I could snag one. No such luck. If anything I'd guess that 3080s will become even harder to get, as it makes more sense for nVidia to make as many 3080Tis as they can.

I imagine there are some bells and whistles that might not exist on a PS5 game because it's cross gen, but I've long waited for a concrete example of an exciting gameplay mechanic that was killed off because of a cross gen or even multi-platform release. I also think it's really hard to tell the difference between the time period that devs are learning how to get the most out of a console generation and a game somehow held back by being cross gen. Even if you're only working on the PS5, if you release a game in the first year the platform exists, it's not going to look as good as the games that come later in its life.

I was interested in getting the first one remastered. I haven't revisited the other two since release, so maybe I'll just wait for this and play all three. Maybe I'll just wait until I get a new GPU. By then it should be pretty cheap.

To chime in further on this, just because it annoys me, I think there's a very good case for why press conferences are actually the worst kind of media we get from sports figures these days. Basically every answer is some canned response that gives you no insight into the person, the sport, or the game that was just played/about to be played. I don't want to hear how "they just outplayed us" or "we just wanted it more than they did" or "so and so just put in a great performance" or "we're just focused on the playoffs" or whatever. The poster boy for this is probably Bill Belichick. His press conferences are kinda funny because he's so predictable and terse (we're on to *insert next opponent*), but he's very much there only because he's required to be. His breakdown videos however, which I think the does after every game, are wonderful. They're obviously the product of him having had the time to review the film as he walks you through all the moves and countermoves that happened in a play or a drive or a game. You get a lot of "we saw that they were playing this defense" or "we were having a hard time covering player X" so "we changed our scheme" or "player Z caught on to that habit and exploited it" or whatever. They're wonderful videos as someone that wants to appreciate the game on the level it's being played. Those videos so clearly demonstrate the complexity of what is going on and are both informative and almost make Belichick seem like a real person. They're also clearly the kind of communication he prefers: prepared segments diving deep into every detail about football. They're so much better than the press conferences or any commentator's post game highlights.

I still put more hours into Destiny than it deserves. Hopefully this hiring, and their recent expansion, indicates they're going to put more content into the game. I really enjoy playing Destiny, but there needs to be much more stuff to do.

Looks pretty generic.

At this point in time, the requirement to do press conferences seems more necessary to the press themselves than to the sport or individual athlete. I can understand that a sport wants its' players to become celebrities. It brings in more attention and therefore more money to the sport. When TV interviews were the only or best way for the public to get to know players, I can understand why you'd mandate them, though exceptions should still be made. However, it's far from the case now that press conferences are the best or even most notable way for the public to bond with athletes. Social media allows them to (a certain extent) control their own celebrity and public facing image, independent of forced press conferences. Especially in an individual sport like tennis, the necessity of official press conferences feels dubious at best, except of course, for the press, who desperately need that time. The sport I follow most closely is Formula 1, and there are drivers (especially the young guys) that embrace Instagram/Twitter/YouTube/Twitch/etc. and those that avoid it entirely, not even having a managed account. I know they do very lengthy press conferences all the time, but they're very rarely interesting or worthwhile. If the eliminated them entirely I'd hardly notice.

Sounds good. Another card I won't be able to buy.

Not sure if it actually is safer, but the Canoo truck has a very different design that might be. I would expect better sight lines and looks like it might have a lower bumper height.

Is there any chance they've innovated on the gameplay loop at all, or do we all expect this to be rather by-the-numbers ubisoft openworld?

While I really want to see electric car makers do interesting things with the design of their vehicles, I think Ford probably did the right thing with the Lightning by keeping it in line with the rest of their trucks. It'll help convince a market segment that is probably rather wary of electrification, or at least prevent them from sticking out. Also, being able to leverage the huge scale of F-150 manufacturing as much as possible to keep the price down likely helps. Even if I do want to see more innovation in the shape of vehicles, I think Ford did a great job putting the space to work. The frunk, complete with power lift, 110 outlets, and a drain really seems quite useful. I drove a pickup in high school for a while, and having a real locking trunk space would have been great. With the bevy of outlets, bi-directional charging, and what not, I think Ford did a good job of making a case for the utility of an electric truck. Overall I think they've set down a very solid baseline. I expect this thing to sell really well, but I'm particularly interested in how the commercial side sells. My company runs a small fleet of pickups, but they haul a lot of stone around, so I'm not sure if the range with that weight would be sufficient. Still, I have to imagine there are plenty of commercial use cases where electric makes sense.

Watching some of it again in 4K and it's quite pretty. I even went so far as to load the original onto my PS5, but I'd really love some kind of PS5 patch. I'll hold out hope for a bit, hoping they do something before Forbidden West releases. Since we still don't have a release date, I have the feeling we could be in for a bit of a wait.

That gameplay segment did look more like a level from Uncharted than an open world game. I'm going to guess that they'll try to blend those two together, but who knows. I couldn't really tell from that clip if you even have the option of fighting the dinos before you go swimming. It seemed like she didn't have the weapons to kill them, but then a few minutes later she's successfully fighting the elephant thing. I'm going to mark it all up to them putting together a demo, and not necessarily representative of how the game plays.

At the same time, the GOP was arguing for keeping fossil fuel subsidies in the infrastructure bill, so at least they can rest assured that the American right will continue to advocate for giving them free money. Environmental impact aside, I've always marveled at the incredible machine that is the oil industry. The engineering and logistics that it takes to harvest oil from the bottom of the ocean or deep underground, then refine it, and transport it, and finally sell it so ubiquitously around the entire globe for such a low cost is crazy. When people talk about how high the hurdle is to build out an electric vehicle charging network I always think about how much easier that must be than what we already have. I'm not sure if those companies will be able to apply their significant expertise to a more beneficial industry, but if they can figure out how to extract and refine oil and sell it to me at a few bucks a gallon, surely they can tackle other large scale problems.

According to IGN, JJ Abrams has confirmed that a Portal movie by Warner Bros is currently being written and "finally on the rails." Basically nothing else was revealed, even the names of the writers, but you can be sure that Abrams is all about a movie involve literal puzzle boxes.

I think the biggest problem with these films was the timeline Disney set. Having overlapping directors and writers working on sequels to films that hadn't been finished yet and pushing aggressive timelines was a bad idea. Sure, let Rian Johnson start working on the second movie before Force Awakens is out, but if I recall he was deep into production before seeing TFA on screen. Then you had the whole mess with swapping directors on the last film, but still sticking to the timeline for release. What if JJ had the time to work with Johnson while planning out the second movie, and visa-versa? Maybe you end up in the same mess, but maybe things get more time to breathe and arcs get a chance to naturally flow from film to film. Yeah, the OG trilogy didn't have a complete plan from day one, but Lawrence Kasdan got to see Star Wars before writing Empire. Star Wars is basically the biggest media property there is. Why force an every other year release timing?

The structure of Far Cry 5 drove me crazy as well. Being kidnapped periodically really put a damper on things. I actually enjoyed New Dawn better. It had a nice progression system with upgrading the base and getting better vehicles/guns/maps/etc.

It makes sense to me to want to bring IP to mobile and other media, but I don't have much interest in it myself.

I don't think I've even touched my Switch in a year, but if BOTW2 looks much better on the Pro I'll probably end up buying one. Very interested in what kind of chip nVidia has cooked up for this thing. The original switch was seemingly thrown together with whatever old tech was available at that point. With the Switch now being a certified phenomenon, it could well be worthwhile to put some real effort into it this time.

When it comes to Apple, the biggest question I have is how long they will be ok with Apple TV not making money. I can imagine a possible future where Apple has spent billions on content but still never gotten mainstream traction with Apple TV, so they sell off the content and kill it. I can also imagine them running it nearly indefinitely regardless of how many people actually sign up.

As someone with a laptop that can take over 100W in through USB-C, it's nice that it'll be part of the spec. I wonder if that'll mean I could use a generic USB-C power brick with my laptop, or if it'll still only be Dell's docks that work. Probably just have to wait for my next laptop to support it. It does make me kind of wonder why we never saw a similar push with Displayport or HDMI. I imagine with HDMI in particular that they wouldn't want people to expect their TVs to be powered over HDMI, but what kept the Displayport folks from making it capable of powering most monitors? I also hope that increasing the power capabilities of USB-C doesn't further prevent more USB-C docks and hubs. I have all the USB-C things, but there are still so few hubs or docks that give you more USB-C ports. On my desk right now I have a USB-C phone, tablet, microphone, mouse, PS5 controller, laptop, camera, headphones, and a Raspberry Pi. It's great they all use the same port, but most of the time they're all using USB-C to USB-A cables, which is stupid.

I was pretty sure they said 4k, but after going back I think you're right. The wording they use in that top video is "quality approaching true native 4k at the cost of 1080p." That wording was in the temporal super resolution section, which what they refer to as their AA tech, but I guess it's more like DLSS. I wonder how TSR and DLSS will interact, or if TSR will even be an option in PC games. Regardless, what I was really getting at is that people should still expect many games to target 30fps on this new gen of consoles.

Very impressive stuff. If games can look even close to that good with this new gen of consoles it'll be a treat. Notable, but in no way surprising, that they target 4k @ 30 fps for the consoles.

Yeah, I don't have any interest in something like this. I would expect the hardware to either be expensive or under powered, likely both. If they could somehow put out a decent gadget for a reasonable price, you still have the problem that anyone that currently plays PC games probably has a much better way to play them. Thankfully, many PC games are now optimized for a controller, but many PC games are not optimized for a small screen. When I'm home (which is by far the place I play most games), if I really do want to play a game away from my PC, I'm probably better off streaming games to my iPad. Doing that I get a really high quality screen, get to use a full sized controller, and can have the graphics pumped up to the max. For me this would only potentially be worthwhile when I'm traveling, when I'm probably better off playing a native iPad game or using the switch.