monotremata

monotremata, 6 godzin temu

The US population in 1980 was around 226 million, and in 2020 it was around 330 million. That’s an increase of about 50%. By comparison, the GDP in 1980 was about $2.75 trillion; in 2020 it was over $20 trillion, an increase of more than 600%.

The problem isn’t that we’re spreading out the same amount of money over too many people. It’s that we’re making much, much more money, but concentrating it in the hands of a tiny number of people and letting everyone else scramble for scraps.

monotremata, 4 godziny temu

Alright, how about the fact that the TFR in the US has been below replacement since the 1970’s, then. (It got close to 2.1 during the 2010s and then dropped again, and is currently around 1.6-1.7.) Is that relevant enough for you? Antinatalism is just as toxic as pronatalism these days. I swear, neither side is willing to actually look at facts.

fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINUSA

monotremata, 11 dni temu

Does it really? That’s batshit.

monotremata, 20 dni temu

Because being able to play your existing switch games with better performance is a big part of their sales pitch for this, but people were already starting to do that with the Steam Deck. At that point the comparison for the devices would look like:

Steam Deck: Cheaper, more ergonomic, can play more games, games cost less, games aren’t locked to the console, no charge for better performance if you upgrade to new hardware, can play any game from consoles up to some ps3 through emulation

Nintendo: Better battery life, 120Hz HDR screen, has a new Mario Kart and Donkey Kong game

In every other way it would lose the comparison.

With the emulator crackdown, people don’t perceive it that way, because they don’t think of emulation as an option for the switch. (I mean, some do, but even Retro Games Corps isn’t talking about that possibility anymore because of the strikes against his YouTube channel; they’ve greatly reduced the visibility of that as an option.)

For my part, I’m leaning towards sticking Moonlight on my existing Switch and just streaming from my desktop. It’s not elegant, but you can’t beat the price.

monotremata, 20 dni temu

That also! My sense is that for the switch it’s basically only limited by emulator compatibility, but for ps3 and xbox one it’s partially limited by the available cpu and gpu power. I may be mistaken about that though, I don’t own a Deck and haven’t tested this stuff myself.

monotremata, 20 dni temu

Definitely worth a try!

monotremata, 28 dni temu

Yeah. I’m 100% who Nintendo is trying to lure with this launch, and honestly I’m a little ticked off about it–I’ve really wanted Metroid Prime 4 for a long time, but now it’s coming out and I have to choose between playing an inferior version or shelling out over $500 to play the good version. ($450 for the system, $80 for the game, and compatible SD cards in sizes larger than the internal storage of the new system don’t even exist yet.) So I’m inclined to wait, and see if there are enough good games to justify the Switch 2 purchase eventually, but they’re going to count that as poor initial sales for Prime 4. It might kill the franchise. Replaying some of my switch titles with upgraded performance might have been enough to motivate me to make the move, but they’re also going to charge extra for that. That’s…not great. Nickle-and-diming on top of a much more expensive system with even more expensive games is just ugly.

It definitely has me thinking about getting a PC handheld instead. A lot of what I was picturing was second-screen gaming while watching TV or YouTube, and the Deck is definitely a competitor in that space. There are a bunch of people saying that “oh, the reason you buy a Nintendo system is to play Nintendo exclusives,” which, yeah, that is a selling point, but for the original switch, just being a portable system that played modern games was also a selling point. That second factor is absolutely going up against the Deck, and frankly losing, because Steam has everything. Switch 2 has to go all in on the exclusives, and that’s a much tougher sell, especially since they don’t have the gold mine of good games nobody had played that they had from the Wii U to pad the release schedule.

Maybe they’ll amaze me, but I see them being very unhappy with the revenue from this console in a couple of years, and casting about for stupid shit to blame. And I think they’re gonna blame Metroid. It’s not Metroid, guys. Metroid is great. It’s the pricing.

monotremata, miesiąc temu

I’m guessing en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

monotremata, miesiąc temu

It’s not unheard of, though. Modern Warfare 2 had only a 70MB file on its disc, basically a license, and required you to download the actual game.

Note I’m not defending this. It’s a nightmare for game preservation and pushes us ever further in the direction of never owning anything. I’m just saying Nintendo isn’t breaking new ground with this particular outrage.

monotremata, miesiąc temu

I never actually played Fable 2 (it never came to PC) but 1 was decent for its time, and yeah, 3 kind of fell apart. (You get to what seems like the halfway point, then the rest of the game plays out in a few minutes, entirely through menus, and is super boring.)

But mostly I’m finding it hard to imagine how a new take on this would stand out in today’s market. It’s, let’s see, a third-person action game with RPG elements tacked on. The setting is…generic western fairytale fantasy. I’m not saying the game couldn’t be good, but what would be distinctive about it? Having people call you “chicken chaser”? What is the contribution of the “Fable” pedigree here, apart from Molyneux baggage?