I’m shocked that RE4 got a GotY nomination. I thought there were rules against remakes or remasters getting Game Awards nominations; am I wrong, or did that change at some point?
The PS1 original was good, but it had some noticeable flaws. The book writing skill was more or less useless, side quests were often too well hidden from view (which was especially bad when most of them were time-limited), the accessories that gave you items were a bit in-your-face, there was no in-game mini-map, the invisible random encounters and lack of fast travel didn’t age well, and the voice acting… What were they thinking when they released this…
The remake fixes most of what went wrong in the original game, including re-casting the English voice actors, and even adds some new content (like fishing) that wasn’t in the original. I’m enjoying it a lot.
They are good enough for the vast majority of their customers. You have to remember that the vast majority of laptop users only use their laptops for email, social media, and occasionally word processing; they aren’t using Baldur’s Gate III or Final Cut Pro or some other app that needs the extra RAM. You don’t need more than 8GB of RAM for that.
I’m not sure why people are surprised by this. In a lot of ways, Apple was a pandemic darling that didn’t take as big a fall as the other pandemic darlings did when the pandemic ended. When the pandemic started, there was a big splurge in tech spending that benefitted Apple + the other pandemic darlings (Zoom, Fiverr) as the whole world was going remote.
But then the pandemic ended, and so tech sales went way down as everyone started to step outdoors again.
They released the first ARM Macs with the M1 chip during the pandemic, which were a big step up in performance and power efficiency over the Intel Macs they replaced. That further raised their sales as people upgraded their old laptops.
But the M2 and M3 had the majority of their work go into improving the GPU for apps used by hardcore gamers and creative pros; the non-graphics processing increases are not as substantial. The majority of their customers are not gamers or creative pros; they just use their computers for email, social media, and word processing or sometimes spreadsheet use.
So this is not surprising at all. Not when the pandemic ended, and the M1 was good enough for most of their users. I suspect their Mac sales will go up again in a few years when the M1 is obsoleted.
If you’re talking about the VESA mount, there was a lot of tech that went into that that explains the price, including sensors that auto-rotate the display when the display is rotated. It wasn’t just price gouging.
Just a heads up, I’m not an apple user, it never clicked with me but this might be the best spot to get an answer for my specific use case. What I do like was their old 3.5 mm jack earphones, but the playback controls never worked right on my android phone, probably because of the wiring layout or some DRM screwery. I’ve...
Yes, the volume controls on the USB-C EarPods work with Android.
The playback controls work as well, but they’re a little different on Android than they are on iOS. Holding in the middle button summons Google Assistant, for instance, instead of fast forwarding. But the all-important pause/resume control works the same way.
Here are some more good puzzle games that are not Portal/Portal 2:
Colossal Cave
The Entropy Centre
Hourglass
Myst
Obduction
Pneuma: Breath of Life
Quantum Conundrum (one of the original Portal developers was attached to this project)
Quern: Undying Thoughts
Riven (this is the sequel to Myst, but unlike Myst, it has never been remade since it first came out back in 1997, so you’ll have to excuse the old graphics and gameplay)
The Talos Principle (the sequel is coming out soon)
The Turing Test
The Witness
If you can only play one of the above, then as the other commentors have said, make it The Witness. The recent remake of Myst is also very good.
Looks like the new M3 chips are a significant upgrade from the M1 chips, a very significant upgrade from the Intel/Radeon chips, and a super significant upgrade from the Intel Macs with no discrete GPU. Except for 3D content creation, gaming with games that actually support Metal ray tracing, and video production, it’s not that significant an upgrade from the M2 chips.
And I see people on social media bashing it for the default configuration only having 8GB of RAM. It’s like they don’t realize Apple intentionally keeps a low end, compromised, and cheap configuration around for the large amount of MacBook users that just want a cheap-but-not-uselessly-so laptop for email, social media, and the occasional word processed document. The people bashing it on social media are free to buy a less compromised model; Apple does sell them.
The problem is, we must care if the game is to have any sequels, follow-ups, or lasting legacy. If the game is awesome, but doesn’t sell well, then it probably won’t get sequels, and will be forgotten to everyone except Wikipedia & Moby Games over enough time.
The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s...
Please ignore cloud; they have been posting inaccurate flamebait throughout this thread.
I would never not buy a laptop from Apple. Not only are they the last PC maker that hasn’t fallen to the Microsoft Monopoly Machine, but their laptops are well-built†, futuristic, and have incredible value and battery life for what you get. Especially since they migrated off of Intel.
† I know someone will inevitably come up with a counter-example, but the last time they had a widespread quality problem was a little more than ten years ago.
What a sad day for gamers. Microsoft now has all it needs to extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on consoles, just as they do on PCs already, and the regulators will give them a wink and a nudge.
But why? Disney has made several attempts before to break into gaming, none of which have worked out well. The best Disney games have all been licensed games by Square Enix, BioWare, Capcom, etc.
Also, Disney doesn’t have the cash to buy EA, so buying EA would involve them going deeply into debt. With today’s interest rates, that would be too risky.
Not really, unless the game code was written in X86-64 assembly language, does low-level VM allocation for some reason, or otherwise has special dependencies on Intel CPU-isms. With a few exceptions, C/C++/Objective-C code written for X86-64 can be easily recompiled for ARM64.
The PowerPC to X86 transition was much rougher, because of the byte order change + PPC allowing integer division by zero while X86 disallowed it.
I’ve brought various apps, bundles, and frameworks from PowerPC to Intel to 64-bit to ARM ever since macOS 10.0 first launched. Usually the most difficult parts were:
During the PPC to Intel transition, converting code that expected all data to be big-endian over to handling little-endian data, and catching integer division by zero before sending such operations to the CPU
During the 64-bit transition, switching from all the APIs Apple removed over to newer APIs, if not already done, and converting all code that expected integers and pointers to be 32-bit over to 64-bit
During the ARM transition, converting code that abused variadic functions to code that used them properly, and converting all code that expected long doubles to be 128-bit over to 64-bit (I know some developers were burned by the VM page size change, but that didn’t affect anything I did)
But yeah, usually the most difficult part of the transition is managing the dependencies. Whenever Apple transitions CPU architectures, if your app depends on a closed-source third-party library or kernel extension made by developers that went out of business years ago, you’re more or less screwed unless you can find or build a replacement.
The GPUs aren’t really a problem; the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra chips are much more powerful than Intel’s integrated GPUs, are very competitive with other mobile GPUs, and are competitive with all but the high end of desktop GPUs. The main thing holding them back is they consume less electricity, which is important in a laptop, but is not necessarily important in a desktop PC.
The problem is, game developers tend to pick the platforms that will make them the most money, and Microsoft has held an uncontested monopoly on the PC OS market for more than thirty years now. They have held onto their monopoly for so long because they have the high ground on GPUs (Apple has a grudge against Nvidia that probably won’t go away until Tim Cook retires), and they also hold a number of popular games that are exclusive to Windows (Call of Duty, FIFA, Madden, Final Fantasy, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, Diablo, Far Cry) whereas Apple’s highest profile exclusive macOS game at the moment is Hello Kitty.
It seems like each time Apple makes gains in the PC market (iPod/iPhone halo effect, keeping controversial UI changes to a minimum), Microsoft gains one and a half times that.
If it’s any consolation, the Windows version runs on macOS Sonoma, but you need to use Whisky to install Windows Steam & launch it from there. Also, you need to adjust some graphics settings that can only be adjusted using the command line, or the frame rate will be unplayably bad.
I feared that CS2 would use some kernel-level anti-cheat solution, which would prevent it from running on macOS, but it doesn’t.
Your understanding is not quite correct. The regulations are for App Store apps only, which wouldn’t affect CS2, and even if they did, they are not much different from other platforms’ store regulations (no strong adult content, no gambling aides, no games that encourage you to damage peoples’ hardware, you can’t make games that would put private citizens’ safety at risk, etc.). And the only money you have to pay is for a developer subscription, which gets you code signatures & anti-malware validation.
Multiplayer trophies are the worst, in general, except in multiplayer-only games. Once the servers go offline, those multiplayer trophies become unattainable. It’s especially a problem on PlayStation where, once the trophies become unattainable, so does the platinum.
Define “irony”: the company that got into their current position by pushing almost all of their competition to the sidelines now complains that someone else pushed them to the sidelines.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is certainly a surprise. I tried it on my Steam Deck, and not only could I not figure out how to make the graphics look decent on my monitor, but I had a problem where the game would eventually stop accepting mouse input, forcing me to quit and relaunch. I didn’t get far until I switched to the macOS version once it came out.
I do. The originals were locked behind an anti-consumer EULA once Disney got ahold of them. Since I won’t agree to their EULA, I was holding out hope for the remake.
That’s only true if you compare game sales to movie box office revenues, and music sales (which have shrunk considerably since they peaked in the 1990s). Once you account for home video sales, streaming, theme park revenues, and merchandise sales, the movie industry dwarfs the gaming industry. Once you account for artist tour and merchandise sales, the music industry dwarfs the gaming industry.
Ars Technica also has a pretty detailed write-up of the attack. That was pretty crazy.
And it’s also a reminder that, if you are running for some high-profile political office or are working for someone who is running for that office, you should enable lockdown mode on your iPhone/iPad/Mac. Lockdown mode wouldn’t have stopped what happened to John Podesta in 2016, but it would’ve stopped this attack.
I’ll give the console version a go. I just wished the console version supported the keyboard & mouse. The Windows version supports the keyboard and mouse, but the Windows version has a binding arbitration clause in its EULA that is not present in the console version, so I won’t buy the Windows version.
I only bought the Steam Deck so I could play Windows games without having to give money to Microsoft, or pirate Windows. I’d much rather play games on macOS, but unfortunately, there are way too many games that don’t run on macOS (or used to run, but don’t anymore).
Now that Apple has their own Windows compatibility layer in the form of the Game Porting Toolkit, I don’t use my Steam Deck as much as I did.
Whisky will allow you to run Windows apps, including most games, on a Mac without needing a VM or Boot Camp. It’s basically a front end to Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, which requires Sonoma, so Whisky also requires Sonoma.
And while most games work well, games with a launcher will most likely fail, as will games that use kernel-level anti-cheat or some other DRM on top of Steam’s. Steam works well with Whisky, but Epic’s store doesn’t work for some reason.
How would they plan to do that? Foreign investment in Japanese companies is heavily regulated, much more than it is regulated in the Americas or Europe.
It’s most likely licensing, plus the live service functionality. People are saying on Steam that the post-launch content won’t work without the live service functionality.
Stock in Japanese games giant Square Enix has dropped by 30 per cent since the launch of Final Fantasy 16. As reported by Bloomber g, around $2 billion has been shaved from the company's share pri...
FF XVI isn’t even an RPG; it’s an action-RPG; it’s like Stranger of Paradise, but it’s much easier.
And while the PS5 was supply-constrained for about two years, the chip shortage that constrained the supply ended a while back, so anyone can get a PS5 now without having to watch for drops or winning the PS Direct lottery.
All mobile phones use radios; if they didn’t, then they wouldn’t work as wireless phones. There are country-specific regulations on the power and radio frequencies used by these phones, so they don’t generate excessive heat or ionize, both of which (but especially ionization) would be bad.
Contrary to what the health influencers on Instagram say, commercially available mobile phones have zero effect on human health. That said, apparently the iPhone 12 was caught violating France’s limit on how much power its radio was using. How it took them years to notice is not mentioned anywhere.
Unless the developer opted out of allowing their iOS app(s) to run in macOS, which, unfortunately, many top games did. And of the games that were made available, there are those that only have touch controls, which are awkward at best and impossible at worst on macOS.
Why? They got so badly burned on OpenGL, with the committee dragging their feet & releasing compromised designs while Direct3D became a lot better, that they should’ve stuck with QuickDraw 3D back in the aughts.
I absolutely hate “smart” TVs! You can’t even buy a quality “dumb” panel anymore. I can’t convince the rest of my family and friends that the only things those smarts bring are built-in obsolescence, ads, and privacy issues....
Emulators: the tvOS App Store doesn’t allow them, but you can weasel around that if you have a Mac, and install the developer tools, so you can build and deploy apps directly to the TV. Emulators for iOS will also work on tvOS, unless they depend on WebKit to run.
Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1 (peertube.wtf)
Here Are The Nominees For The Game Awards 2023 - Game Informer (www.gameinformer.com)
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of November 12th
I definitely didn’t forget to do a new thread yesterday 👀...
Mac Sales are Down (www.theverge.com)
Mac sales are down....
Cities Skylines II is an absolutely beautiful game (vimeo.com)
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/5266864...
New EarPods question
Just a heads up, I’m not an apple user, it never clicked with me but this might be the best spot to get an answer for my specific use case. What I do like was their old 3.5 mm jack earphones, but the playback controls never worked right on my android phone, probably because of the wiring layout or some DRM screwery. I’ve...
Game Recommendation?
Edit...
Looks like the M3's are here… (www.macrumors.com)
(And in Space Black even!)
Spider-Man 2 fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game ever (www.eurogamer.net)
2.5m copies shifted on first day
Twitter's lost 13% of its daily users and its rebrand has failed (www.bigtechnology.com)
The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s...
It's official, Microsoft now owns ABK (news.xbox.com)
PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for October: Gotham Knights, Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes (blog.playstation.com)
Also included are Alien: Isolation, Dead Island Definitive Edition, Outlast 2, and more.
Disney's CEO Is Reportedly Being Urged to Consider Turning Company Into a 'Gaming Giant' [and buying EA] (me.ign.com)
Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is flooding social media. Here are the facts (apnews.com)
Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren't Enough Players on Mac to Justify It (www.macrumors.com)
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/10/valve-confirms-counter-strike-2-no-macos/
What's the most surprising facts about a game you've gleaned by reading a game's achievement/trophy acquisition percentage?
I’ll start with a few:...
Microsoft’s Nadella to Testify at Google Antitrust Trial Monday - Bloomberg (www.bloomberg.com)
cross-posted from !google...
KOTOR Remake feared cancelled after Sony quietly pulls tweets and videos (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
Capcom President Says ‘Game Prices Are Too Low’ (kotaku.com)
lol. lmao.
Counter-Strike 2 is officially released (www.counter-strike.net)
PREDATOR IN THE WIRES: Ahmed Eltantawy Targeted with Predator Spyware After Announcing Presidential Ambitions - The Citizen Lab (citizenlab.ca)
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Review Thread
Game Information...
[Discussion] How has the Steam Deck changed your habits with playing video games?
Do you play more than before you got your deck?...
Phil Spencer: "getting [acquiring] Nintendo would be a career moment for me"; Nintendo's future "exists off of their own hardware" (www.resetera.com)
Archive link: archive.ph/NF2r0...
Marvel's Avengers drops to $3.99 to make way for its delisting later this month (www.gamescensor.com)
Square Enix stock has dropped 30% since Final Fantasy 16 launch (www.pcgamesinsider.biz)
Stock in Japanese games giant Square Enix has dropped by 30 per cent since the launch of Final Fantasy 16. As reported by Bloomber g, around $2 billion has been shaved from the company's share pri...
France orders Apple to halt iPhone 12 sales due to high radiation levels (www.france24.com)
Apple's new iPhone 15 Pro getting Assassin's Creed Mirage, Resident Evil 4 Remake, more (www.eurogamer.net)
The smart(shit)ification of TVs pisses me off.
I absolutely hate “smart” TVs! You can’t even buy a quality “dumb” panel anymore. I can’t convince the rest of my family and friends that the only things those smarts bring are built-in obsolescence, ads, and privacy issues....