Spellforce 3, just picked it up today and it's pretty easy to learn for the most part. It's very much like warcraft 3 in gameplay style but looks great graphically. It's also on sale right now on steam.
So me not wanting to upgrade my pixel 6a to a pixel 8 because it works just fine is a problem for the global Smartphone economy? Fuck these guys. I want hardware that lasts and doesn't end up in a landfill. I don't give a shit if these executives can't buy a third yacht or another tennis court in their back yard, I'm going to stick with what works. The hypocrisy of these kinds of articles is disgusting at best and immoral at worst.
Loved this game, the focus on a more linear story was a good idea. The companions were great, the side quests were great, the combat was mediocre but it was salvageable, and the environments looked pretty unique. Overall a good game if you go in not expecting it to be the best scifi game ever made and just want a really well crafted RPG.
You don't want to be using any random USB-C charger for your switch. The Nintendo switch doesn't adhere to USB-C power delivery standards and using a different charger can cause problems. That's why all of those third party docks were burning up switches when the switch first came out.
The docks were standard USB-C docks, but since the switch doesn't follow proper USB-C standards because Nintendo, the docks were providing too much current and burning up switches. I will never use a third party charger for my switches, although if I did use one, the steam deck charger would be my first choice.
I'm sure the chance of anything happening is so low that it's probably insignificant, but I'd rather not take the chance, down votes be damned.
I went in to a GameStop to buy a new switch charger because my kids lost it on vacation. They told me you have to buy the right kind of charger, I was very confused because I thought Nintendo only sells one kind of charger for the switch. I told the guy I'm using it with a docking station and he pulled out some shitty GameStop branded charger and I said no thanks. The guy proceeded to tell me I would have to buy the charger directly from Nintendo...I went down the road to target and bought one off the shelf after like 5 minutes of looking. Fucking shameless GameStop...
Just to make sure I wasn't going insane, I looked at Nintendo's website, and sure enough they only sell one kind of charger for the Nintendo switch. There's some weird smaller charger they sell for accessories like the pokeball thing for let's go Pikachu but they very clearly spell that out when you purchase the charger.
Every vendor is guilty of doing this not just apple, even AMD. The fact is apple found a way to make desktop arm chips accessible and viable. If you've ever used an m1 or m2 Mac, you'll understand how big of an impact they've made. My m1 Mac mini 8gb could run several games above 60fps at 1440p at reasonable settings, examples being WoW (retail with upgraded graphics), LoL and DotA2, StarCraft 2, diablo 3, etc. It was and still is a very capable chip.
The thing is they're probably not wrong. Does it suck? Oh absolutely, but what I can say is that I have both gamepass and ps+, and the difference is pretty significant. PS+ has more quality titles, it may not have as many titles, but it has a more quality selection, gamepass however is very much quantity over quality. If all you play are Microsoft or EA games, then gamepass might be worth it, but I can definitely see how Sony might be struggling to compete because of how much gamepass has potentially diminished the value of console titles.
My guess is that it's a situation of publishers not wanting to put their games on ps plus because they've already put them on gamepass and lost a good chunk of revenue from gamepass. Now Sony has to make up the difference because they don't want to diminish the value of their own games and they really don't have any other markets to prop up ps plus like Microsoft does with their cloud services.
I do worry about Sony, they really feel like Sega was in the Saturn/Dreamcast days. Struggling to keep up with competition and sticking to their tried and true business practices. The main difference though is they seem willing to embrace change unlike Sega.
Says their game is feature complete then starts talking about new features they're adding and improving. Not sure these guys know what feature complete means.
Part of the issue is that the biggest smartphone manufacturers are all sister companies to each other. Oppo, OnePlus, xaiomi, they're all different companies under the same banner, so they're bound to share hardware specs and manufacturing.
Personally I think nothing phone is the only phone brand that's innovating on design with the candy bar style phone, but even that's hard to justify. Samsung has been repeating the folding phone designs and refining them year after year and Google has been pretty lazy with the pixel phones in regards to hardware.
It's a weird time for smartphones, can't push more power without destroying batteries, can't really innovate with batteries because we've hit a wall that only software can help mitigate. Not only that's we all apparently want bigger and bigger phones, and the only way to realistically get that is with folding display tech, which again chews up battery power.
LOL you think I'm a PCMR neckbeard? My PC is old, it's running a Vega56, not even in the last two generations of graphics cards, I'm fine with 30FPS when it makes sense but I'm talking sub-25FPS with shit frame times that make it feel like a damn slideshow. I prefer consoles, FFS I run a steam deck docked to my TV more than I use my gaming PC. Why do you think I use GeForce Now? So I can play games on high settings and not deal with settings that make my games look like they're running on an N64. You keep calling me a member of PCMR if you want but I'm not ever here riding Bethesda dick for a shitty game.
Starfield plays like shit, looks like shit (by today's standards) and the quests are shit. Neon is a lazy world that only ends up becoming one giant hallway with a few shops. Everywhere else feels lifeless and boring. Starfield was a flop, and while Elex isn't the best game out there, the fact that it can in fact in some situations stand toe to toe with Starfield on graphical fidelity is just an absolute disgrace. I was on a desert planet in Starfrield in the main story (can't remember the name) at night, on a balcony running on GeForce Now with an RTX 2080 and getting less than 24FPS, that's absolutely pathetic, game is just bad.
It's more than just being a certain demographic, I've caught myself numerous times just swiping through YouTube stories without thought. It's a way to gauge interest in topics quickly and frequently to sell advertising. It honestly freaks me out sometimes, how easily it is to just scroll and scroll without even noticing....
I'm not comparing Rosetta and proton...I'm just using them as examples of compatibility layers that make their products viable. I frankly don't give a shit about the inner workings of Rosetta or proton, but thanks for clarifying I guess.
I would never believe that in my entire life. Samsung batteries are the worst, they die quickly and have short lifespans, not to mention they expand and blow up of you don't use your device.
I understand proton isn't the same thing, it was just an example of a compatibility layer...and how would a bidirectional compatibility layer not be beneficial? X86 in servers may be going away and even that's debatable, but x86 isn't going anywhere in the consumer space. Graviton chips are great, but they're useless if there's no viable way to translate those x86 legacy applications over to ARM without breaking the bank until your business is ready to transition the workload to ARM.
Amazon was working on a compatibility layer specifically for this purpose, however I suspect they've given up because they've slowly added Intel and AMD chipsets back into their general purpose ec2 class for newer generations and there hasn't been a single word about compatibility with graviton other than just use arm based workloads.
You just can't move to ARM because it's cheaper, that's just not going to work. You need to make the effort to move away from x86 and adopt applications that are arm native before making that jump. With a compatibility layer it doesn't matter, that's where the money is, if I can build a compatibility layer that translates an x86 binary to an arm binary, then I can move those workloads to the cheaper and more efficient server class.
Whoever can make a compatibility layer that successfully translates x86/64 to arm and vice versa and make it widely available will be a major player in the market. Valve has already somewhat done something similar with proton and Apple with Rosetta 2.
Spellforce 3, just picked it up today and it's pretty easy to learn for the most part. It's very much like warcraft 3 in gameplay style but looks great graphically. It's also on sale right now on steam.