I played a bit of Phantasy Star Portable, but my PSP’s battery is half dead and I’m waiting for a replacement so I didn’t play long. Seems like a fun game tho.
I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and I have a few thoughts about it.
The gameplay starts slow, too slow to be interesting, but after around 20 hours you unlock all the main systems and it gets really fun. It is however dragged down a bit by how bad the blade gacha and how grindy other secondary mechanics are (affinity charts and region development/mercenary missions).
The story was fine, it was pretty standard for a JRPG. I felt like the main characters were more interesting than the ones in the first game, but the overall plot and themes were a bit weak.
Various (minor) XC2 story spoilersI did find the theme of death and remembrance interesting in this setting, but I didn’t feel like it was explored deeply enough. Same for the ethical issues of using blades, which the story acknowledges, but never really deals with it. The blade gacha system also goes against what the story is trying to say, as it forces you to treat common blades as expendable or just workforce for mercenary missions.
The story feels overall a bit rushed towards the end (especially the ending comes abruptly, I was expecting it to be a fakeout) and weirdly unfocused before that, but still engaging enough.
I get a lot of good information from bad reviews, just by having a bit of introspection.
“This game is too easy!!”
Oh, that’s okay, I was looking for something easier.
“Two body types!!”
Oh, wow, so the only people that hate it are bigots.
“If you die once to the first boss, then it kneecaps your stats and you get no healing items for half the game.”
Wait, what…? But everyone else loves the game. Is this true?
“lol it’s fine, only scrubs die to the first boss, if you do just restart the 3-hour intro.”
Are these reviewers paid!? No thanks.
Way too much Dungeon Clawler on my Steam Deck. I think that and a little bit of Baba Is You are mostly the only non-mobile games I’ve really been playing over the past week.
I think my favorite moment in Hollow Knight was finding the City of Tears. I just sat on the bench next to Quirrel for a while, listening to the somber music and to the rain pattering against the windows.
Speaking of Talos, I have been continuing my quest to discover every Skyrim mod that adds big new locations to explore by playing The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal (10th anniversary edition which was released earlier this year.) I feel that over the years I have got to the point where I know a thing or two about Elder Scrolls lore and yet I have no idea what's up with the ancestral cheetahs, where they come from or whose ancestors they are.
I’ll say this: props to Fandom for realizing the right thing to do. I know there was really no other good solution for them, but that hasn’t stopped many companies from being so obstinate that they cut their nose off to spite their face.
But more seriously, good for those guys buying it. I hope it goes well for them.
I feel like they have a deal with Google/search engines to have independent wikis downranked. There’s no reason why UESP should show up below the TES fandom wiki.
I see Dan is there. He’s too uneducated and incurious American for my tastes. Bro doesn’t know shit about anything but wrestling. It’s play up for laughs but it’s just cringe to me.
Bakalar joined GB East 10 years ago. Jan’s been at GB for 7+ years, but as a producer so you wouldn’t have seen his face as much until the big shift when Jeff, Brad, Vinny and Alex left. Grubb only joined in 2022.
A good catch up, but I meant more like: are these people worth following? Because yeah I didn’t stick around once the east/west split happened to know these people.
Grubb’s got an excellent morning news show that he’ll be back to doing this coming week if you wanted to poke your head in and check it out. They’ve also got a number of shows that are a good laugh, like Blight Club, where they take turns playing awful video games all the way to credits.
Pretty much all MMOs or PVEs have you grinding for gear (helldivers 2 I don’t feel is grindy in comparison, but some do)
Survival games like ark, valheim, etc… Have you grinding for bases and the next section of the game
Pretty much all PvP games (CS2, valorant, apex, starcraft, Rocket league, etc…) have you grinding out muscle memory skills
The antithesis to these are instance-based games where at max you grind aesthetic gimmicks, but in single player games they don’t have those like REPO where you always reset and fall guys where it is minigame based
The problem with these games is since you don’t have a “reward for work” (grinding), people get bored of them.
honestly check out archipelago, it’s a framework that allows you to play a lot of different randomized games with your friends. you can play synchronously or asynchronously, and if you’re handy with code, you can even add any game you want to it
appendix"what’s a randomizer?" a randomizer is a method of scrambling the items in a video game, while keeping it solvable, to be able to re-experience the same game with a fresh sense of progression. an easy game to think about this with is something like metroid or zelda. you need powerups to unlock certain parts of the game, but what if you could find those powerups anywhere you found a missile expansion or a chest? that’s what a randomizer is “how does that work with multiple people?” now imagine that, between you and your friend’s randomized games, the items for both games could end up in either game. if we use the metroid/zelda idea from earlier, metroid might have zelda’s boomerang, while zelda might have metroid’s morph ball. the logic to ensure the games are solvable is still there, but you might be stuck waiting until your friend finds your key item. this is called “being in burger king” or 'being bk’d"
other vocabcheck: any spot you can collect an item in a randomizer (think all collectibles and powerups in metroid, for example) burger king: when you have run out of checks of your own and are waiting for someone else to send you a critical item you need to make any meaningful progress again. named after the first multiworld randomizer, where someone was stuck for so long, they were able to go to burger king for six hours and return only to still be in the same situation
I have both. So far the only advantage the Switch Lite has is that is lighter and pocketable. The Steam Deck is not just about gaming which it does so well, it has also become my main and only PC outside of work. I have it hocked up to my TV more often than use it in handheld mode.
In the end everything that is storage can also be used as memory. You could print it to paper and scan it back in when the cpu requires it (and write a memory interface to do so)… It would just be terribly slow if you don’t use something like DRAM
You can use a ramdisk to use memory as storage. And if it’s volatile memory just be sure to never power it down. Ignoring the applicability of it of course.
Are SD cards not still the standard storage for digital cameras? I can think of few things designed to produce more small writes than a digital camera.
This person is confusing me. I use SD cards for my cameras and drones and routinely move files and reformat them with no issue. I have several cards that are over 6 years old and used daily. SD is the standard for all current cameras and drones.
I’ve only heard about SD cards data getting corrupted when doing lots of small writes. This was something people talked about when the raspberry pi first came out I think. But, I’ve been using micro-sd cards for years for all sorts of things and never had a problem.
I’ve had an SD card in my dashcam for 6+ years now. Constantly writing and over writing from -20F (sometimes lower but it’s protected so I’ll stop at -20) to well over 110F when baking in the summer sun.
It’s got a battery so it continues to run for hours after I shut it off. Used to go 17 hours on the battery but that’s probably way less now.
My point being that the SD card has been rock solid in very extreme conditions for 6 years now. Sure I made sure to get the extreme use version, I but don’t buy this kind of thing on eBay or Craigslist and you’ll be fine. Maybe stay away from Amazon too.
A digital camera has several megabyte writes, every once in a while, filling up the SD card evenly. Even bad SD cards usually have many thousand write cycles before they degrade, so that’s not likely to be an issue. What is worse is if you have a log file, for example, that is stored in a fixed position on the card and gets updated several times a second
Hmm, for now only about the general fragility, due to simple controllers. But i think i have an article about this saved somewhere.
Btw, if you reformat an SD, I/O and lifetime will fall sharply, because of some block size parameters differing, above mentioned article goes in detail about this stuff.
they’re more reliable but they still wear out, but i don’t really think it’s a problem you need to worry about, just have in the back of your mind that you’ll want to make a backup after a while so you’re not sitting there with a dying sd card with all your data on it.
But also IIRC flash storage specifically fails to write data as it wears out, so it’s not like the data is gone.
Each write to a memory location wears out that location slightly degrading it’s oxide layer. Flash memories compensate for this by “wear-leveling” which spreads the writes around to different locations to make sure the device wears out evenly.
It will mark bad locations and stop using them. If you run with the device almost full then it cannot effectively wear level and the few open locations will be overused and wear out.
It’s not specifically small writes, it’s the number of writes to any one location. But of course it’s faster to do small writes so you end up with more if they are all small.
Also, there are flash memories optimized for performance that will wear out faster and others that are optimized for longevity that write slower.
Keeping the device cool will extend it’s life also.
For longest life, keep the device cool and mostly empty and minimize writes. In critical applications find a device that optimizes lifetime over performance.
Hold on, i think i now remember: this one was about SD usually having smaller block size, so each small write causing a multiple in blocks written, i think?
Can’t say for sure, because all are mixing high quality flash with recycled from the scrapyard quality. The big names only a bit less of the scrapyard.
Yes, this. I got a 1tb micro SD card a few years ago for my hacked Switch (Fuck Nintendo, especially now that they’ve went after emulation) and finding a LEGITIMATE SD card was very hard, especially since I wanted the high-capacity and they don’t just sell those at Wal-Mart. Be VERY careful about buying SD cards folks, lots of scammers out there in the markets now.
EDIT: forgot to add that I received TWO duds, fake SD cards that were NOT 1tb, when trying to get my SD card
Sounds like @MonkderVierte was saying it’s still a crapshoot even if it’s totally genuine. Like if you buy 10 for 10 different handhelds, maybe only half of them are still working after a couple years but the rest of them last two or three times longer… <speculating>
Endurance SD cards made for cctv cameras are the way to go. The Endurance versions are slower and slightly more expensive but they last a lot of writes.
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Aktywne