CDs and DVDs are digital media. There is no degradation of the content when you convert a fragile physical disk into a dumped ISO, and the dumped ISO can be stored on an arbitrarily large number of devices. Stuff like physical books or analog media (vinyl records, for example) are worth caring about physical degradation for, but a “physical copy” of a PC software disc is just a more fragile way to store the exact same ones and zeroes that can be stored on actually resilient media.
release installers DRM-free online. No need to bother pressing plastic and wrapping it in plastic and wrapping that plastic in thinner plastic and then putting it in a box full of plastic to ship around the globe on giant cargo ships, to be ferried from the docks by big-rig trucks, to be stacked on palettes that get wrapped in more plastic, to sit on store shelves or the shelves of some amazon warehouse where they’ll get wrapped in more plastic and shipped in more trucks, so that you can pay the middleman store instead of the developers, all so that you can install the files to your SSD anyway. And if this physical media is DRM-free you could just make backups instead of holding onto the plastic… or skip the part where the plastic exists in the first place, and download the files over the internet, right to your computer, without any trip to a gamestop or stop on an Amazon driver’s daily route! And if it’s not DRM-free what was even the point of all that plastic and gasoline that got it into your hands when you need to verify the purchase with an online key anyway?
GOG, Itch, and even Steam all have large catalogues of completely DRM-free games, to say nothing of developers that don’t distribute via a storefront platform. Once you download the game, provided you don’t delete it, your copy of the game will survive the distribution platform dying, the developer being bought out by EA, licenses expiring for content, the devs patching it to make it worse, or even (if you make backups) your house burning down.
Nintendo’s out here trying to justify $90 mario kart because of the “rising cost of developing games”, meanwhile probably more than half of the new mario kart’s sales are going to lose huge amounts of revenue because Nintendo has to pay manufacturers and shippers and storefronts to move and hold onto plastic and circuit boards that are just glorified read-only flashdrives for 32GB of media. It’s been a joke that digital games have been the same price as their physical counterparts ever since companies started selling digital copies in the first place.
As long as spellcasting is still good and spellcrafting is still in. Magic was a complete joke in Skyrim and not just because it was terrible DPS compared to swords and bows. The spells were all so boring.
Just not buying something isn’t a boycott. Don’t buy bad games, and it’s a good idea to include dark patterns in the criteria for what makes a game bad.
Or it’s actually running at 720p30 and being FSR/framegenned into a blurry shimmery mess. There’s no way Nintendo managed to cram a chip powerful enough to render its own Switch 1 games at true 1080p120 into a tablet.
Or it’s actually running at 720p30 and being FSR/framegenned into a blurry shimmery mess. There’s no way Nintendo managed to cram a chip powerful enough to render its own Switch 1 games at true 4k120 into a tablet.
I mean yeah. Game consoles are DRM-riddled computers shackled into being toys. Being able to crack one open and turn it into something that can be used in non-manufacturer-approved ways is a cool scene in its own right.
This is “hacked” in the console modding parlance. It’s not about gaining access to someone else’s Xbox to do something nefarious, it’s about running software that Microsoft doesn’t want you to run on your xbox, including pirated games. “Jailbreak” is a synonym for “hack” or “softmod” in this scene.
Tell that to the Gamecube and Wii U eras. Funny that those are also all-time peaks for game quality, Nintendo is better at making video games when they’re struggling.
There’s also just grammatical stuff that looks better in text. “In the future, it’s player driven” would conversationally flow perfectly well, but as written text the tense of “it’s” doesn’t line up with the statement being about the future. Hence the present tense being corrected to future tense.
Krafton seems to be attempting to diversify with this purchase and also the purchase of Unknown Worlds. We’ll see how many enshittification mandates they force on their studios when Subnautica 2 hits early access this year (it’s already confirmed to have online multiplayer so eyebrows are raised)
Native 4k output instead of a crappy upscaler or a RetroTink which costs more alone than this Analogue product. N64’s native composite is laggy and hideous on a flatscreen TV, you need something like this or a retrotink or a CRT to make the games look good. Even if the Analogue couldn’t play ROMs off an SD card (it can, if Analogue’s previous products are any indication), you could just stick a Summercart in it.
I personally am a ride-or-die CRT player for my retro consoles, but big CRTs are getting rarer and living rooms less accommodating. And N64’s library has a ton of absolutely killer party games that are best experienced on a big TV with your friends, not a dark retro cave on a 20" CRT the way SNES RPGs are. If someone I knew wanted to go a “step past” emulation, I’d absolutely recommended this thing as the second shopping list priority. In order (imo):
Real N64, Real CRT, Summercart/ED64X7 (most authentic, and also cheapest if and only if you can source a CRT that fits your needs)
Analogue 3D, HDTV they already have
Real N64, RetroTink, Summercart/ED64X7 (more expensive than option 2 even if they already have the console and summercart lol)
Real N64, RetroTink or CRT, buying real copies of games at jacked-up collector prices
Balatro Mobile Maker works because the game’s engine (LOVE 2D) is designed from the ground up to be multiplatform. It’s trivial to “port” compared to other engines.
Work required for ROA1 level of “workshop characters” is exponentially higher in the new art style and engine. When/if this game gets Steam Workshop, it’ll probably end up with more “tweaked/cloned” characters than totally new wacky MUGEN stuff like ROA1.