It’s also entirely possible that you can’t host any of the games. If the host owns the game, anyone else can play for free through a browser. It could just be access to the jackbox.tv website from the TV itself.
I’d say it’s still worth playing, but the story is way more predictable, and they made some things more grindy to upgrade than they were in the first one. Also they added robots that are even more of a slog to fight through.
Those giant turtles are bullshit and just not fun.
For Metroid, start with 2, then Super is a big step up in terms of feel and gameplay. The first one doesn’t explain anything at all, and compared to modern standards feels quite clunky and tedious (you have to find multiple secret passages to finish the game normally, for example.) It’s worth playing if you’re in the mood for NES-era retro gaming, but it can be frustrating trying to figure it out on your own.
For lore, Fusion is next, followed by Dread. I didn’t like Fusion, felt too hand-holdy for me, I would skip it but many seem to like it. Dread is worth playing on its own though. It’s a much faster pace, more action-oriented gameplay. Fusion added a horror element to the game, but for the most part it’s more for vibe than gameplay reasons. Dread took that scary vibe and moved it into the gameplay.
The Prime series I think is a separate canon story. They can definitely be played independently. They follow a storyline and are direct sequels to each other, but gameplay-wise they don’t require playing other games before. You don’t unlock any important knowledge relevant to one game from playing the previous one.
Currently, they don’t even give you that choice. They’re the ones making that decision. Sure, you can buy it, but you don’t get to decide if you want to play their game longer than they want you to.
But they’ve been selling mid-range and budget GPUs all this time. They’re not adding to the existing competition there, because they already have a share of that market. What they’re doing is pulling out of a segment where there was (a bit of) competition, leaving a monopoly behind. If they do that, we can only hope that Intel puts out high-end GPUs to compete in that market, otherwise it’s Nvidia or nothing.
Nvidia already had the biggest share of the high-end market, but now they’re the only player.
From personal experience, I’d say the end result for framegen is hit or miss. In some cases, you get a much smoother framerate without any noticeable downsides, and in others, your frame times are all over the place and it makes the game look choppy. For example, I couldn’t play CP2077 with franegen at all. I had more frames, but in reality it felt like I actually had fewer. With Ark Survival Ascended, I’m not seeing any downside and it basically doubled my framerate.
Upscaling, I’m generally sold on. If you try to upscale from 1080p to 4K, it’s usually pretty obvious, but you can render at 80% of the resolution and upscale the last 20% and get a pretty big framerate bump while getting better visuals than rendering at 100% with reduced settings.
That said, I would rather have better actual performance than just perceived performance.
Actually AMD has said they’re ditching their high end options
Which means there’s no more competition in the high-end range. AMD was lagging behind Nvidia in terms of pure performance, but the price/performance ratio was better. Now they’ve given up a segment of the market, and consumers lose out in the process.
As a matter of principle, I don’t save my credit card number anywhere. It’s a little more tedious when I make a purchase, but I’ve got my number memorized anyway, so it’s not a big deal, and it’s definitely more secure in that respect.
I would imagine that admitting fault is a bad look when it comes to fighting the lawsuit that inevitably comes after. Hard to claim you’re not liable when you’ve made a statement saying it’s your fault.