Not free as in FOSS because it’s limited to non-commercial projects, but they’re Valve. Devs will probably be able to strike deals if their monetization schemes aren’t exploitative.
I am not in the market for a console (my last one was the Sega Mega Drive which was abandoned after we got a Pentium 1 PC and dialup), but I got to say, I love Nintendo’s pricing policy.
It’s almost as if they are taking the piss and want to see to what extent their fans are gluttons for punishment.
One possible complicating factor for those games? While they’re physical releases, they use Nintendo’s new Game-Key Card format, which attempts to split the difference between true physical copies of a game and download codes. Each cartridge includes a key for the game, but no actual game content—the game itself is downloaded to your system at first launch. But despite holding no game content, the key card must be inserted each time you launch the game, just like any other physical cartridge.
This is full on corporate regressiveness.
Nintendo will also use some Switch 2 Edition upgrades as a carrot to entice people to the more expensive $50-per-year tier of the Nintendo Switch Online service. The company has already announced that the upgrade packs for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom will be offered for free to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers. The list of extra benefits for that service now includes additional emulated consoles (Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64, and now Gamecube) and paid DLC for both Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Mario Kart 8.
Wait so you have to subscribe to get access to emulators (which are all open source I am assuming)? And you can’t just buy a retro game (ala GOG) and play it to your heart’s content? You need a sub to Nintendo online?
I think it kills game leaks before the street date. Even if the data isn’t in the cartridge (which is stupid), you would still be able to sell the cartage assuming the online service is still active.
Sucks for game preservation though. I’m personally hoping there’s some flaw in the gen 1 hardware that can be exploited for archive purchases.
Their emulators have always been proprietary. The waters were a little muddied by the NES/SNES Classic consoles using a Linux OS but the emulators were their own code.
Their FOSS code is made available when required and is published here:
The key card thing is seriously infuriating, both from a consumer standpoint and from a media conservation standpoint.
Basically you own a game cartridge, but as soon as Nintendo shuts down their servers for whatever reason it becomes a useless piece of plastic. They really don’t want us to own anything anymore.
I'm not sure that's how that works. The Switch already had both physical boxes with digital codes in them and cartridges that required mandatory downloads to run. This seems like a physical unlock key for a digital download, which depending on how it's implemented is actually easier to both resell and use offline than the Switch 1 solution to the same problem.
I don't recommend purchasing either, and I avoided both of those options on Switch 1, but I'm pretty sure this at least does not make things any worse.
I have major gripes with a number of pricing choices in this thing, but to the best of my current understanding this one is based on a misunderstanding.
It's also true of the partial download carts for Switch 1 that don't include a full playable version of the game in the cart.
Presumably the digital back-compat on the Switch 2 means the Switch will live a lot longer usual for Nintendo platforms, and we don't know if there will be a backwards compatible Switch 3.
But in practice, this is just an iteration of the Switch 1 version of the same thing. It's not great. I avoided both the mandatory download carts and will likely avoid these ones, but it's not a bigger deal than it has been for the past five years or so.
Oh wow, that cartridge thing is actually just the worst of both worlds. I’m similar to you, my last console was a Mega Drive but I did get a Switch for my wife and played a couple of games on it which was fun. Not really keen on giving Nintendo more money though.
So the Switch is essentially for rent. You can play it, as long as Nintendo decides you’re in its good graces.
You don’t own something to which somebody else has the master off-switch. And with their continued abuse of their own fans and other game developers through the courts, it’s a testament to FOMO and fandom that they are still in business.
Vote with your wallets, y’all. This kind of behavior only makes you the loser.
They’ve proven they can’t be trusted. The people who devised and attempted to enact this plan - the exec team - have not gone anywhere, and they aren’t going to. They have shown the industry who they are, and they clearly don’t give a shit about business ethics or even legality (the AppLovin shit smells an awful fucking lot like anticompetitive market interference). They will definitely try something similar in the future.
People’s use cases seem to be wildly different from mine. I mainly use it in TV mode as a couch gaming machine. For most modern 3d games you have to turn graphics quality down substantially that way.
Edit: A downvote does not constitute an answer or a counter argument.
The reality is, deck can handle most games out there in handheld mode. For the latest and greatest games, visual fidelity has to be sacrificed. While the deck has its uses on the TV, it’s not a good choice if that’s all you will be using it for.
My deck, TV docked experiences have been with Mario Kart wii, doom 3, cuphead, SOMA, Scorn, Stray and a bunch of older 2d and 3d titles. I think it handled these games well. Not so sure it would be the same with “AAA latest and greatest”.
Its a good machine for that but theres nothing unique about it (steam link on phones and natively on TVs as an app is theoretically free). I did play through the whole Days Gone (60 hrs to platinum) by streaming it from PS4 to deck in my bed. Good experience.
I’m by no means talking about AAA latest and greatest. I tried Everspace 2 and Visions of Mana. Both need considerable tuning down, after which Everspace manages a fluid experience, while VoM still stutters while looking horrible. I haven’t dared to even try the likes of Witcher 3 (which people are talking about playing on the deck). I’ll probably stick with pixel art etc for TV mode, and go back to the ps5 for more demanding things.
Titan is a place where methane and ethane rain from the sky and have a hydrologic cycle like the kind we’ve only ever seen before with water on Earth. These organics form rivers and flow into seas, carrying sediment with them. This mission will be going to the equatorial desert to understand that sediment.
Titan, like Europa, is an icy ocean moon. Titan is even larger, though. While Europa’s ocean is measured to have about twice the liquid volume of all of the earth’s oceans combined, Titan’s ocean (which possibly has significant quantities of ammonia and organics and alcohols mixed in) has five times the liquid volume of all of the earth’s oceans combined.
Sitting atop this ocean is a thick icy crust, upon which is a surface that looks more earth-like than any other planetoid surface in our solar system. Although it looks earth-like, the chemistry is in fact fundamentally different. It is based around organic solvents instead of water as the dominant driver of weather and erosion. The water on titan is stored in the bedrock!
And the sediment on top? Well, titan’s atmosphere is 5% methane. That methane gets hit by UV light and turns into more complex organics. Titan’s atmosphere is also rich in nitrogen and carbon monoxide, which add Nitrogen and Oxygen to these complex organics. These organics sediment out and coat the surface. Around the equator, they blow into large dunes in a desert biome. Precipitation falls and erodes the tar-covered landscape. These complex organics get mixed together as sediment in the rivers and dumped into the beds of the polar lakes and seas.
Dragonfly isn’t going to the seas. Too dangerous for the first mission here. We don’t know what we’ll find, and it’s hard to communicate with earth, and there is complex weather and clouds called the “polar hood” that might interfere. Dragonfly is going to the desert, to observe the complex organics falling from the sky and gathering on the ground to be blown into dunes. These are the ingredients that will get mixed together in the seas. There is also a cool crater there that calculations suggest melted the H2O bedrock and created a water-filled pool for the organics that has long-since frozen over. However, calculations suggest that this liquid water pool full of organics may have stayed partially liquid for hundreds of thousands of years in the subsurface. This is a location where we can study: “what happens if you take a bunch of complex organics and add water?” How far along the path to life could they get before the snapshot was frozen?
Humans are bad at probability, and that’s mostly why they gamble too.
Every wheel draw is supposed to be independent (it’s not totally so because computer “random” is really a pseudo-random algorithm, but close enough). So every time you draw, the odds are 1:4. Previous draws don’t matter.
On an infinitely large number of draws, you’d see a 1/4 success rate. This doesn’t mean you can’t fail a dozen times in a row (the probability of that is (3/4)^12, about 3%… It happens).
The anti woke gamers that can only see politics when it intersects their treats will be thrilled by this. But I don’t expect any self reflection or deep analysis by them.
I had completely forgotten about iPod games! I think there was one called Vortex that I liked a lot and there was also game version of the show LOST that I only played because I was a mega-fan of the show that was otherwise very frustrating.
Oh wow, I totally forgot about doing that as well! I think I spent the better part of a day getting it work, then “played” it for all of two or three minutes.
We’ve been up against the 5Ghz thermal wall for over a decade. We can keep adding cores but we need significantly improved design (less nanometers) for these gains - and these are now running up against another wall, namely quantum tunneling which begins being a problem at around the nanometer scale.
I assume only a radically different architecture (light instead of electricity?) will be able to smash these barriers.
Very long story short- Trump crashing oil prices in 2016/2017 more or less ‘killed’ GlobalFoundries and which left TSMC as the only leading edge pureplay foundry. (Intel isn’t pureplay, Samsung is no longer chasing leading edge)
arstechnica.com
Ważne