I buy physical because I don't trust Nintendo's online services, but I'm not even going to get physical if it comes with DRM. I'm buying it expressly to dump it and run in an emulator eventually.
Not to mention that the Switch is already showing its age, so any added burden is going to come with noticeably performance loss.
I don’t play Palworld, but still hate firms that behaves like this. Not buying Nintendo anymore 🥳 Emulators from here on :)
Patenting common stuff like this is just stupid! Think I read somewhere that Apple patented squares with rounded corners 😂 Hope Nintendo doesn’t use rounded corners in any of their in-game menus.
I though patents were ment to protect important original ideas. Stuff with impact.
To be able to say “our map is 100x100km!” The only games where it is worth it to have a huge map like that, is army simulators and RTS. Anything else could probably be better off with polish in some other place, rather than a huge map.
One of the notorious examples in PS3 gen era that’s now can’t be purchased at all. It’s a derpy offroad racing game in what looks like a procedurally generated world emptier than ash deserts in Morrowind.
Games / game engines use units which correspond to size IRL. It’s needed to keep scale consistent. The characters are usually around 1.8m tall for instance
Right? Sports games in general back in the aughts had the best soundtracks of any games, so much edgy rock, punk and metal. I don’t think anything nowadays can compare unfortunately.
I’m tired of games getting songs removed, so I am actually glad Rockstar and hopefully others are going the route of trying to only get songs that won’t end up having to be removed down the line. Not cool getting an update getting a song removed.
I’m not an expert on this by any means, but I think the issue is they would have to work out how to encode the audio for surround themselves, and then it would be up to all of the different AV receivers out there to decode it properly. Using Dolby just standardizes it to where if your receiver supports that format you know it’ll decode it properly.
Yes there are other formats such as DTS and Auro 3D. You can even do it with straight up LPCM if you want, but DD is one of the quickest ways to do it and iirc DTS has similar licensing requirements with their logo, and barely anyone has Auro. You could try to use LPCM but you’d need a multichannel output such as 6x analog connections or a digital source using bitstreamed output which many didn’t have at the time.
Longer answer, no. This was a GameCube game. It only supports stereo output. It would have needed Dolby Surround/Pro Logic II libraries to do surround sound encoding within the stereo signal. The use would have also needed a receiver with Pro Logic II support and surround speakers.
Honestly I’m glad we’ve moved from “Censor out anything that might be slightly objectionable” (Like they did with Sam & Max for example, and I believe the GTA Trilogy got hit with a bit of this), to “Look the game is old and from a different time, what society deems acceptable is always changing, deal with it or move on.”
I’m so beyond tired of being told I can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it. I actually bought this three pack solely because it didn’t censor Tomb Raider, a game I was very sure they were going to censor
Genuinely struggling to remember what that could even be about.
I mean, it’s been like 25 years since I played them, but I don’t recall any obviously bad things in there. It’s not like it was filled with old Jackie Chan film levels of cartoon racism.
The voice acting has quite a range of stereotyped accents. Nothing they say is overtly racist, but the over the top accents themselves are insensitive.
I haven’t played it but that doesn’t sound racist to me if the context is right. There are cannibal tribes today. They are black skinned. This is fact.
And is what they should do rather than trying to delete it.
Provide context so that future generations can enjoy what’s good about the media and acknowledge how parts of the content/media are problematic and not appropriate.
The good: WB development studios have been limited to making games off of only WB properties for so long. Developers would come up with a pitch or a prototype, but it wasn’t allowed to be an original IP, which was bad for them and Warner Bros., since it made it harder to sell off the video game division by itself. Maybe this will give those devs more freedom.
The bad: We’re rapidly approaching that Bojack Horseman joke where there are only four companies with extremely long hyphenated names, and Netflix doesn’t seem to know what they want to do in the video game space or how to do it. They have an incentive to lock games exclusively behind subscriptions, which is what everyone was afraid Game Pass would do but Nintendo and Netflix are doing this already right now.
What games to make would be such an easy decision. They had a plan to make a Magic The Gathering show at one point, right? Make a game instead. Use the Hogwarts Legacy engine as a base, and rebrand spell types as different colors of the color pie. Each NPC has 1-3 colors they are especially adept at. They could even keep the school theme and have Strixhaven be the hub world.
As it says in the article, it’ll be smaller and quieter, so less offensive for most people’s living rooms than a full-size desktop. It’s not meant to replace your existing PC if you have one, unless it was getting old and you were about to replace it anyway. If you don’t have a PC, or don’t have one in the living room, then it might be a better option than anyone else’s prebuilt.
it could become the new standard for industry benchmarking/testing
Exactly. We are already seeing game companies specifically mention the Steam Deck in patch notes. This will give them a standard item to validate compatibility against. Any game company that wants to make sure their game works well will have a Steam Machine on-hand to QA with.
And I fully agree with you on benchmarking. It will be a very standardized system to point to in game reviews.
I mean, it’s fine to do so, as long as you have PC hardware that meets your needs. Valve would be fine with it too. As long as it can run Steam, all good. For Valve, I expect that the Steam Machine is to provide an easy-to-set-up option a la consoles that let them move into the living room for people who have an issue with that. If you can already use/configure a PC and have one, then that option is gonna work too.
The biggest advantages it has over other PCs is CEC and Wake on USB(controller) enabled out of the box. Those are the two features I miss the most on my HTPC.
Standardized design, sure. I would argue you could get something more powerful at a comparable size for not too much more. My HTPC is about the size of a shoe box yet has a R7 7700X and a RX 6900 XT.
That’s a lot for someone who doesn’t understand computers beyond Windows and MacOS. People also don’t realise that since the PS4 and the Xbox One every console is just a X86-64 machine. So, I think it’s a good move from Valve. Also it will be easier to manage and optimise for Valve if all their hardware is the same, a bit like Apple.
There are people who exist between “I build, format and otherwise manage my own gaming rig,” and “I don’t need a PC for games.”
My partner is a perfect example. She has my old PC shell, with some $500 of GPU, internal memory, and accessories, hooked up to the TV. She uses it daily, almost exclusively for Steam games and streaming services that she finds more comfortable to navigate with a keyboard and mouse. A smaller, quieter, streamlined, “this more or less will do the things you want to do straight out of the box” product would have saved both her (and I, because that thing has had some troubleshooting) a lot of headache, while looking far more presentable to boot.
Maybe she’s the odd one out and the target audience is more niche than my bias’ recognize, but I guess we’ll see for sure when this thing releases.
At least for me, a Steam Machine would be the ideal use case for my brother, since the literal ONLY game he plays is CS2. He used to play Fortnite, but he hasn’t done that in years… and even then if he wanted we could just swap places between my current real computer and the Steam Machine. It’s also really small so it wouldn’t occupy much space on the other room of the house.
If its a decent price I’ll want it. I love the freedom PC gaming allows but sometimes I do miss the convenience of a console. It would be great for my kid as well. No fidling with the display, having the PC not wake properly from sleep, controllers not connecting, etc. It would just work. Our current setup inevitably something doesnt work right first try.
“on your machine” requires you to have a machine. This isn’t for people with computers already. This is for people who are already looking for a new machine, and this becomes the “ready out of the box” option.
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