TwinIon

I just watch in release order, though I think it'll be a while before I go through them all again.

Touche.

After FF7R I'm much more interested in a FF game than I had been in a long time. Of course, at this point having "Final Fantasy" in the title tells you so little about the game as to be meaningless, so I guess we'll just have to see what type of game this is, regardless of title.

I agree. I'd much rather they take their time and build a truly next gen Bethesda game. At this point they, of all people, should understand the potential for recurring revenue if they can make a great game. They can look forward to republishing Starfield on every possible platform for the next decade if they get it right.

I've been reading reporters' twitter threads as they've been sitting in the trial, and my own take away is that it's difficult for Apple to entirely defend their in-app purchases rules to this judge. That's a pretty wild assertion, founded on the idea that they're owed a commission for anything happening inside an app. But they're not really able to back it up. It seems like they have a fine argument for why they think their solution is good for the customer, but a poor answer for why they deserve a cut of every transaction that happens on the phone. Or later when the judge mentions banking apps, pointing out that Apple doesn't charge a fee when transacting with their bank. The more you break it down, the more arbitrary it seems that Apple claims an absolute right to money that changes hands on their platform, but only for very specific types of things. I don't know if that is enough for Epic to win, but I'm starting to think the judge will find a way to at least loosen some restrictions.

PSVR 2 Halo Infinite Horizon Forbidden West Any AAA single player games to be excited about, though bonus points for putting the PS5 to work.

I didn't really play Fallout 76, so I don't know what improvements were already present in that game, but pretty much all of this feels like table stakes. Having a big team to work on a custom engine is good, and I'm happy to hear reports they're working harder on it, so yeah. Material based rendering, photogrammetry support, and better shadows are all good good, but again, expected. Global illumination is good, but not designing for ray tracing seems like a bummer, but probably best they don't bite off more than they can chew. Most of this felt like it was just catching up to other modern engines. Reworking animation and pathfinding is a godsend if they get it right. Hopefully they put a lot of work into this, because they're two areas that make Bethesda games feel so jankey. I won't expect them to be up to Last of Us or Assassins Creed standards, but please be at least decent. After Cyberpunk, maybe I need to be more appreciative of their NPC AI. However, if anything this makes me a bit worried. I hadn't considered that Stanfield might require 3D movement in zero G, In animation they're pretty far behind the curve on a nice flat plane, expecting them to make a big leap in overall quality and make it work in 3D might be too much. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited for Starfield, and have been wowed by Bethesda's tech in the past, but at this point it's a rather distant past. Morrowind and Oblivion were marvels, but in the 15 years since, they haven't really impressed. I'd love for that to change with Starfield.

I recall Apple being rather clear that they didn't want to buy a catalog of old stuff for Apple TV, but it seems they may have changed their mind about a year ago, so they were likely in the bidding.

Current 3060s already have the LHR. Are those any easier to find right now compared to a 3070 or 3080? I've only been trying to get a 3080. I certainly don't mind them limiting the mining capabilities, but it's definitely not going to solve the problem by itself.

Amazon always seemed like the most likely buyer to me, and given every streaming services' desire to strengthen their catalogs, I figured it would get bid up quite a bit.

When it comes to straight up dollars and cents, maybe someone that understands M&A better can tell me who "wins" in this situation. So AT&T bought Warner for $85B, and they're only receiving $43B worth of stock from this spin off. However, AT&T shareholders will receive 71% of the new company. (A company that will begin it's life with $55B in debt, fyi). So is it just a straight $42B loss for AT&T? Does AT&T break even if the new company is worth $60B (making 71% worth the $42B), or does the new company have to be worth $120B (making the 71% equal to the original price of $85B)? Or is it just a different story for AT&T the company vs shareholders of AT&T? Or is all this just something we can't figure out given what has been released? (Some of these numbers are from The Verge, some are from The Post.)

They have tough competition. Even just this month another wireless carrier offloaded its' media business, with Verizion selling Yahoo/AOL for half of what they paid 6 years ago.

I find it kind of hilarious that AT&T spent $85 bilion and fought so hard in court to buy Warner Media with the idea that all that content would somehow boost the mobile division, restructured the entire media empire to become a competitor to Netflix, drove out most of the creative people who knew how to run HBO, and now they're spinning if off after less than three years.

I would be very surprised if we go from never having seen so much as a screenshot to the game actually releasing this year. I'm sure MS wants it to, but it just seems dubious to me. Xbox exclusivity on the other hand seems very plausible. It's probably the biggest game under the whole Bethesda umbrella that MS can use to boost their platform, it would be pretty strange if they put it out on the PS5. I'm probably in the minority, but I'm just really hoping that it isn't too much in the Fallout/Elder Scrolls lineage. Outer Worlds was fun, but it felt anachronistic. If Starfield can take the essence of those Bethesda RPGs but package it in a decidedly modern game, I'll be over the moon.

The thing that I don't get about all this is that it seems like such poor political calculus. Sure, I understand that during his presidency anything other than unwavering support for Trump seemed like political suicide. Now? He's the twice impeached one term President who lost you the Presidency and the Senate last election. Certainly there are some folk who are in deep Trump districts that need to show fealty, but certainly the entire party would be better off by distancing themselves.

I'd definitely rather have the black than the white one, but I don't think I'll need another PS5 controller anytime soon.

Maybe technically they're both just streaming video, but in terms of what role they play in the market they're very different. YouTube TV competes with Hulu Live TV, Sling, every other streaming TV service, as well as cable TV and even broadcast TV. Roku could do just fine selling boxes that don't work with YouTube TV because there are all sorts of options that their users could use instead to get the exact same content. In that way Google's negotiating position in regards to YouTube TV is even weaker than others that have had disputes like HBO or NBC, because much of their content can't be had elsewhere. YouTube itself is a whole different thing. It's a whole category near unto itself. Selling a box that does video but doesn't support YouTube would be a serious problem. Netflix is king of paid steaming, but as of July 2019, they estimated YouTube to be 7x their size (in terms of streaming hours). I'm not really on Roku's side here, but the nature of YouTube is what makes an unfair fight and a potential anti-trust issue.

I think the anti-trust issue is that YouTube itself is so dominant that while the YouTube TV / Google negotiations are pretty standard fare, Google is able to effectively sidestep the issue by putting YouTube TV into an app that Roku can't afford to ban. When it comes to YouTube TV, I think Google has every right to say "if you want our service on your platform, play by these rules," be that codec support, hardware minimums, or whatever. The natural position of Roku would be to respond, "well, we don't like those rules, and since competing services exist (Hulu TV, Sling, etc.), we just won't support your app." What makes this fight very different from the similar fights Roku was having with HBO, Peacock, and whoever else is the existence of YouTube and the way Google is using it here. As far as Roku as a company is concerned, I was all about them as a neutral platform provider, but their hard pivot to ad sales and the hard line they've taken with content providers makes their stuff far less desirable. No point in a neutral streaming device if I can't stream all my stuff, and their lack of desire to improve their UI makes their high end stuff far less interesting.

I'm glad a new season is coming, but I'm disappointed how little content there seems to be. I feel like with all the focus on "core activities" there shouldn't be a season that goes buy without a new Strike and maps for Gambit/Crucible. Last season we got three new strikes. I played VoG a couple times back in the day, but I hardly remember it, so that'll be a mostly new experience, even if it's largely the same. This last season I finished collecting all the exotics in the game, and if I'm geared up well enough to do GM nightfalls, I don't really feel like grinding for mildly better rolls on stuff I already have, so I expect my playtime will fall off considerably. I still enjoy my time in Destiny, but there's not much else for me to work towards at this point.

Played through a bit more and after my first completion the game feels significantly easier. One thing that I think contributes to that feeling is that I'm getting so much more stuff this time around. In your first runs there are all these areas that you can't reach, and they're generally not guarded, it's just free stuff for those who have gone through the game before. So I'm better at the game, making better decisions about what to pick up, the guns I find largely have better perks unlocked on them, and I'm getting more stuff per room I clear. I'm undecided if all that is a good or bad thing. I guess I don't want the game to be as hard as it was at first, but it does seem slightly off that I'm breezing through it so much easier now. Two questions for those that have made multiple full runs: -Is there a way to skip the third boss? -Is there a permanent upgrade that allows you to open the orange force fields?

Best part of all this for sure. A lot of it is stuff we already "knew" but could never be sure. Like Apple saying they didn't want to bring iMessage to Android for fear that parents would buy their kids Android phones or Microsoft saying they've never made money selling Xbox hardware. I'm also enjoying a lot of "how the sausage is made" kinda stuff around the App Store. Apple has this reputation as such a friendly company, but you don't get to be the most valuable company on the planet by being nice to everyone, and seeing how ruthlessly they ensure that they get their cut of every dollar that flows through the iPhone hammers that point home. Also, it's fun when a bunch of companies can just kind of air their grievances. Like MS not being able to put an Xcloud app on iOS or complaints about the App store review process. I've never expected Epic to win any real concessions in the end, but all these documents and details have been wonderful.

The best mobile SoC out there in both CPU and GPU performance is currently Apple's M1. Anandtech put's that a bit below a GTX 1650. If I'm reading this right, Tom's scores the 1650 at about half the 2080, which is probably the best comparison we have to a Series X, but slightly above the 1060, which is roughly PS4 Pro specs. This is all very rough equivalencies, but I think it's fair to say that a high end mobile chip could compete with a PS4 Pro or original Xbox One/PS4. Of course the cheapest M1 product is $800 and we haven't seen an updated nVidia ARM SoC that competes with that. The M1 also has a bunch of stuff that a gaming SoC wouldn't, like thunderbolt support, 16 cores of Neural Engine, and probably more CPU power than is necessary, so a gaming focused competitor might be able to compete at a lower price. If nVidia really wanted to, I think og Xbox One / PS4 like performance is possible, especially if they use some kind of DLSS like tech, but I'd guess we'll see something slightly below that.

The framing of it is pretty disingenuous. Sure, it was "CNN, MSNBC parent companies" that funded this fraud, which was done at the behest of Broadband for America, who counts among their members AT&T and Comcast, but also The Internet & Television Association, who's members include basically every cable channel or provider, including Fox.

After 23 hours total playtime I finally cleared the last boss. The later biomes went much more quickly for me. It took me a few tries to get to the third boss, but I cleared it in my first go, along with the fourth. That run I lost to an update, but my next run I was able to clear the final two biomes in my first shot. I had multiple revives and a bunch of healing stuff I didn't even end up needing. I think much of that was just finally getting the hang of things, both in combat and in what choices to make. I got better at dodging the enemies that get up close, was careful not to lose track of swarms of flying enemies, and made sure to use the environments to my advantage. I also was far more liberal with malfunctions. I picked up just about every infected (or whatever the word is) item, as long as I had fewer than two malfunctions going, and it never really hurt me too much, and I maxed out my health part way into the last biome. Finding guns with leeching shots helped big time, since I was generally able to refill health with that and then primarily use health items to increase my max. More that almost anything though it was just nice to have a run snowball. Finding a good gun let me clear more rooms to find more artifacts to become more powerful and take fewer hits, and on it goes. I barley scrapped past the second and third bosses, but after that by the time I was in a big fight I was almost overpowered. I was still quite stressed towards the end, feeling like the other shoe was going to drop any moment, but thankfully it all went pretty well. Given how much trouble I had to start, I'm kinda surprised I got through it. I'll probably play a bit more, but my desire to revisit has definitely lessened. Probably just need to take a short break. Still have plenty of stuff to unlock and new guns to try out.

I thought I turned off auto-update, but I woke up to find that an update had been applied and my game had been closed. Do you have to turn off auto-update on a per-game basis? Any tips on how to do so? Sucks because I was on a really good run. I'd decided I was going to focus on getting cubes and unlocking better artifacts in the first biome. I did that once, got to biome 3, and died right before the boss. Did it again, but got such a nice build together I was able to beat the third AND fourth bosses. Had just entered the fifth biome when I had to call it a night. I'll just say that I didn't expect what happens after beating the third boss and that I wish there as more variety in the boss arenas. I feel like the entire game is encouraging you to move and to use the environment to your advantage, and then you get to a boss and it's just an empty circle room and million orbs of death with nowhere to hide. The third boss mixes it up, but it still doesn't feel representative of the rest of the game.