I find gyro on handhelds is tricky. When I’m lying on the couch or in bed in some weird way it’s more hindrance than help, and even when I’m sitting upright it’s kinda weird. I prefer to only use gyro if I have a separate screen, like with the PS5 or a docked switch.
The back buttons are great for their own things though.
God of War. I played 1,2, and 3 and they were all pretty much the same. I think a lot of the hype was from marketing and edge lords who were thrilled to have so much blood and some low-poly tits on the PS2. Once you get past the spectacle, the combat is a slog of mashing the Square button until the game decides to stop spawning HP sponges for you to hit. The puzzles are tedious and annoying. The platforming they try to force in just doesn’t work with the physics and controls. The music is bland and generic “epic symphony” stuff that may as well just be from a stock music library, with no Greek influence at all. The story is a generic and modern story with a thin vineer of Greek mythology. Kratos is less of a character and more of a reason to move the game along to the various locations. I know it’s not a completely fair comparison, but Hades used Greek instruments to create greek-influenced and interesting music that I still find myself humming and drumming to years later. Hades also did a way better job of using actual Greek mythology to create a narrative that would actually fit in that cannon.
I remember playing Knack 1&2 and thinking “wow, this is like if the old God of War games were fun”. Knack is far from perfect of course, but is largely a similar series that cares more about being fun than being mature.
I’m playing through the 2018 God of War now. Completely different, and honestly a few hours in I’m still not sure why they chose to make this a God of War game staring Kratos instead of just making it a fresh IP. Maybe more lore reasons will be revealed, but so far it seems it was just to capitalize on the brand for marketing reasons. The music is still not a strength, but it’s better. The environments are better. The combat is still pretty boring with way too many boring enemies with way too much health, but it’s better. This is the first game where I’m starting to get tired of the same UI and over-the-shoulder perspective that other Sony games have used lately (Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Horizon, Spiderman). GoW, like most of those games, has an unnecessarily complicated itemization and leveling system that just bogs the game down, and feels almost inspired by MMO’s or gacha mobile games.
It does a great job of characterization, with plenty of small, subtle, beautifully written moments that grant insight into personalities. The boy is annoying, but I can see that’s the point so I mostly don’t mind. It’s really annoying how the game won’t shut up- there’s always someone saying something, and if you even just stop moving for a second someone pipes up to remind you of what you should be doing. It doesn’t have space to breath. The puzzles are better than the prior games- they are an acceptable tool for pacing but aren’t great by themselves. The story seems a lot better, with much more attention given to original Norse mythology.
With Uncharted I could push last the mediocre puzzles and bullet sponge enemies because the cutscenes were really good and the stories were fun. For Ratchet and Clank I can ignore how the humor has gotten worse and more juvenile over time because it’s still fun to platform, dodge, cycle through weapons, and kill tons of enemies. For Horizon Zero Dawn… Actually I don’t have many complaints, that was a solid title. For GoW (2018) there’s just nothing pulling me back to it.
Twilight Princess is worth mentioning too. It was rated Teen, and had this scene (no gore or sex or anything, just weird surreal horror).
Zelda is such a diverse franchise it really depends on the game. I love Twilight Princess and Majora’s Mask, but didn’t like BotW or Windwaker at all. It’s almost like 2 or 3 different franchises crammed into one.
My personal theory is that a lot of the love for The Witcher 3 in particular stems from the fact that very early on it has a sex scene with full nudity, with a female character who is supernaturally hot according to the lore. There’s several women Geralt can seduce, and I suspect a lot of people who mostly play hentai games were in shock to play something with more exciting gameplay than match-3 grids or a jigsaw puzzle.
The Witcher 3 doesn’t seem like a bad game, but I’m similar to you in that I’ve bounced off it a couple times after a few hours. There’s nothing particularly bad about it, but nothing that really grabbed me and made me want to keep playing more either. I still plan on giving it another shot eventually.
I feel similar. After having tons of people tell me for years I need to get into them, I finally played Bloodborne, which multiple people have told me is their favorite.
I pushed through it on my own first. I actually didn’t die quite as much as I expected, though I definitely had to spend time watching YouTube videos and reading 3 different fan-made wiki’s to figure everything out. I managed to finish it, but I didn’t think it was worth it and would not have finished it if not for wanting to be able to talk about it with my friends.
Then I did another playthrough with a friend doing co-op. When it worked (ugh) it was a way better experience. Partly because of my previous experience - I had a better feel for how to build my character, I remembered most of the environments and enemy placement, and still had that muscle memory from my first run. Partly because it’s better as a cooperative experience. Having an ally makes the world feel less desolate. Having another player to take aggro so you can heal is huge- some bosses almost feel like they were designed for multiplayer. And it’s fun just cracking jokes and hanging out, making fun of how ridiculous some of the stuff is.
I still don’t have the love for it that other people do though. I agree 100% on the aesthetic: everything in Bloodborne is just dark and wet and looks the same. FromSoft makes a LOT of game design decisions that are different from most other developers in terms of what they prioritize. Which is fine, but there are aspects of design where they clearly cut corners and the fanbae seems to laud it as a desirable artistic choice. I shouldn’t need to spend hours watching YouTube and researching fan sites to learn how to play the game, and I would argue I shouldn’t have to do that to appreciate the story. They simply do not respect my time.
The multiplayer barely works. It’s restricted to bosses and the areas leading up to them, and costs Insight (a valuable and kind-of finite resource) to use. Simply connecting is a tedious pain. You can only play either completely online or offline, so if you want to play with a friend you have to accept your whole world cluttered with annoying and distracting messages from random players and the specters where other players died. And that also opens you up to having hostile players gank you. Like… Why can’t my friend and I just pair up and play through the whole game together without inviting the rest of the internet too? Why does it cost Insight? Why are the caps for stats never communicated to the player? Why does the Hunter’s Axe do primarily Blunt damage while the KirkHAMMER does almost no Blunt damage, and for that matter why aren’t the damage types explained anywhere? I’m still not sure why some gems increase Attack, others increase Physical Attack, and others increase Blunt or Thrust, plus there are hidden damage types.
The game feels like it was designed to really get good on your second playthrough and beyond. Especially NG+, although even starting a fresh file again is much better than the first playthrough. Kinda reminds me of how some MMO fans like to say “it gets good after the first 100 hours”. For most developers, the player onboarding experience is one of the most important parts to be developed, but FromSoft basically skills over that and outsources it to their community of hardcore fans.
This has:
And that’s before we get to the APU side of things, where other commenters here are expecting the Neo to outperform the Deck. Hard to say for sure until we have benchmarks, but it seems reasonable that this will be more powerful in general.
And what is the Neo missing compared to be Deck? The back buttons, which are nice on the Deck but I would not say are deal breakers. The ambient light sensor, which I didn’t even remember my Deck had until I looked at the specs just now. And apparently the Deck has 2 microphones while the Neo just has 1… Honestly I have had mine for 2 years and I wasn’t even sure it has a microphone at all. I don’t see that the Neo has capacitive sensors on the sticks, but I never find a good use for those on my Deck anyways.
Now, this thing is not close to making me want to upgrade from my Deck. Just looking at it- the control layout is wrong. The track pads look like you will have to awkwardly stretch your thumb to reach them- similar to where the Deck has the Steam and Quick Access buttons. While I can play a ton of mouse-based games on the Deck for hours with no problem, the Neo looks like it will only be good for games where you use the mouse occasionally. Should be fine for navigating menus, launch screens, and setting up emulators, but not for playing games.
The other question is build quality. This looks like cheaper plastic. The buttons look cheap. The grips look top shallow. I don’t know how easy this will be to upgrade or repair.
Imo this is a reasonable product at a reasonable price. Not perfect. But it has reasonable trade-offs compared to the Deck. If it can manage to be significantly more powerful than the Deck with similar battery life, I think we have a real competition.
Chowdhury has been great!
Gainey… Well, he hasn’t been the worst Pittsburgh mayor but there are reasons he just lost his primary.
I’ve been waiting for a product that makes sense.
I’m still waiting. I can keep waiting
I think you need to go back to middle school science to understand the importance of sample size. With a sample size of 1, it is not possible to isolate variables and determine a correlation, let alone causality. Was the driver under the influence of any substances? Was this on a section of road or intersection that was poorly designed or maintained? Were any parts of the bus or bike poorly designed or malfunctioning? And while I hate to blame victims, if the goal is to understand what happened and prevent future incidents, we need to understand the victim’s behavior and how that may have contributed as well. What a case study, particularly an individual death or injury CAN tell us is that we need to further study the situation to learn how it happened and how to prevent or mitigate it in the future.
And of course, I mentioned several other personal vehicles as options. Over 40k people die each year in the US alone from all motor vehicle collisions- we should also be looking at legislation to sedans, vans, busses, motorcycles, roads, and everything else safer. However, compared to busses personal vehicles are WAY more dangerous. To the point where it’s kind of silly to even display this data in a bar chart.
Here is a study looking at a larger sample size. Trucks and SUV’s are more likely to strike pedestrians and more likely to be fatal.
Or are you suggesting we should do nothing? Just accept the fact that manufacturers are allowed to design and market death traps, and individuals are allowed to rampage through the streets as they please? Maybe we should remove seatbelt requirements too while we are at it?
Why do they need to do it “better”, and how are we defining “better”?
Those vehicles are all much better at not running over pedestrians. They get better fuel mileage when not towing things, which is the vast majority of the time. They fit into parking spots better. We could go on and on arguing the pros and cons of these classes of vehicles and how good or bad they are at different things. And then we can dive further into specific models and how electric trucks might get better mileage or how kei trucks are much closer to vans than modern American trucks. Or even how small pickup trucks used to exist in America and we’re mostly fine. Or we could look at things like how all the biggest logistics companies in the world have put billions of dollars into developing their own vehicles and none of them have landed on pickup trucks.
Honestly I don’t really care how good a vehicle is at towing or hauling stuff. If it cannot do so without losing a ridiculous risk to pedestrians and property it shouldn’t exist. There are tons of products that have been banned despite being very effective at what they were designed to do because they also happened to be good at killing people.
Lol that’s silly. Even motorcycles can tow things. Sedans can tow things. RV’s, vans, station wagons.
Kirk has been diving too deep into Elder Scrolls lore
Tell me you did r read past the headline without telling me you didn’t read past the headline.
True wisdom is realizing that most sports games are just a sub-genre of RPG.
They describe the 5070 as “faster GPU for less money with new features should make this one of the best graphics cards, but we have some concerns”.
I’ve been out of the loop for the past few years and just started paying attention to PC parts again recently. Was Tons Hardware always this pro-NVIDIA and anti-AMD? This is the first article I’ve seen so far that isn’t raking NVIDIA over the coals for using AI to misrepresent performance and the MSRP basically being fake.
Meanwhile, TH here seems to be skeptical of the 9070’s performance and stock. Which is fair enough given AMD’s recent history, except that reports have been that AMD has been shipping units for months and was just trying to land on pricing before release. And the pricing that was announced seems pretty good, or at least better than what AMD has been doing the last couple generations. And AMD’s performance claims seem to match what consumer expectations for a generational improvement.
Do you honestly believe people from non-“Western” countries don’t complain about the weather?
If they did, how would you know that they do?
You also don’t know all of the battles that others are fighting. Just because you were born and live in a country that is relatively wealthy compared to other countries does not mean each individual is well-off. What might be “slightly cold” weather to you could cause debilitating joint pain for someone else. For people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, grocery prices are a huge deal. The fact that you consider them trivial speaks loudly to your privilege.
Wow the propaganda you’re consuming must be really, really effective. I can’t imagine believing that looking for ways to improve society is a “western” thing. Perhaps you need to look more closely at the news and media you are consuming and start asking yourself where potential biases or gaps in perspective could be.
Do you not think the people if Gaza are complaining right now? Or the Hong Kongers fighting for their autonomy and what’s left of their democracy? Or for that matter pretty much every country to the south east of China who is having their sovereignty infringed upon? Or within China, the Uyghurs and Tibetans and other ethnicities are being brutally repressed. Does Argentina count as western? Bcause they are talking about impeaching their recently elected Libertarian president already. What about the migrants to Qatar that are effectively indentured servants? For that matter, is Ukraine far enough east to count? Or the various other countries where Russia has been infringing upon borders, like Georgia and Kazakhstan and Moldova. I haven’t even touched upon Africa yet, but there’s another genocide happening in Sudan. India is still trying to modernize itself and get rid of the caste system.
I think this is a you problem.
Dishonored 2 was made by the Lyon studio, Prey was made by the Austin studio
Is there enough value in AI to justify burning down the planet for it?