I generally point to controllers first and foremost. It’s incredibly difficult to get good 3D movement without two analog sticks. The N64 only had 1. The Playstation’s were optional, so those games were in a weird spot where the sticks were ignored or treated as a bonus option (often with the D-Pad being mapped to the left stick and the right stick just not getting used at all).

But it’s not just that simple. I’m replaying the PS1 version of Spyro the Dragon, and while it’s not perfect the camera usually does a good job of following Spyro while he still feels great to control with either a D-Pad or a stick. I could map the shoulder buttons to the right stick and get camera controls that way, but for the most part it’s not necessary. According to legend they hired a guy who had previously worked on flight control systems for NASA to help with Spyro’s controls. Little things like the movement speed, camera height, and the distance from the player character make a huge difference, and Insomniac clearly put a lot of effort into those details that other devs didn’t.

Some games still managed to do a decent job in spite of these limitations, and the power of emulation can help a lot. A couple years ago I played throught the PS1 Armored Core games. I tried to play them as they were originally intended, with the movement and camera controls split out across the D-Pad and shoulder buttons. But after a while I gave up and re-mapped them to the sticks. But having my right thumb on the right stick makes it harder to use the face buttons, so I mapped those to the shoulder buttons. Once I got it all sorted out the games controlled wonderfully.

I’ve recently been playing through God of War (2018), and one of my biggest complaints is how bad the camera and movement is. Everything feels slow and clunky, and the camera never lets me see what I want to. It’s too close to Kratos and his thick ass takes up too much of the screen. The graphics and art direction are great but I can’t appreciate it because I can only move the camera in a very specific way, and often the game either softly guides the camera towards where it wants you to look it just full-on takes control away from you and it’s really annoying.

Another game I’ve been playing is Bloodborne. Once again they give you no control over the distance from your character and have a very limited vertical angle. One of the strengths of Bloodborne (and most FromSoft games) is the use of vertical space in both level design and combat design, but the limited vertical placement and angle of the camera makes it a pain in the ass to actually see what you need to.

Fair enough. Personally I’m old enough to remember when my parents upgraded the living room TV from a CRT to a flat screen (I think it was a plasma?) and the upgrade so so drastic I’ve never had any urge to go back.

I think part of it is that the only CRT’s left in existence are the ultra-high-end models that retro enthusiasts covet. Models that I never would have seen back in the late 90’s unless I had an ultra wealthy friend or visited a local TV station. The old console-style CRT with only a single coaxial input, with the faded phosphorus and the weird spots where someone got a magnet too close to the screen… I’m fine leaving that in the past lol.

Demo disc? I had (and still have) the whole game. My older sister beat it, but I never got around to it.

The last few years as I’ve gotten into emulation and retro gaming, I find this is a game I go back to more often than most. I have an RGB10MAX- a cheap Chinese handheld that has a 16:9 screen but is too weak to play modern HD systems.

Luckily there were somewhere around 44 PS1 games with widescreen modes. Unfortunately it looks like 27 of those are racing games (and some of those are only slightly different variants of basically the. Same game). 7 more are sports games, including soen annual entries. 4 are just a single Visual Novel series. 2 more are just 2D (Worms and Galaxian), and Bloody Roar is technically 3D but like… It’s a fighting game so it’s not very 3D.

So if you’re looking for a very videogame-ey videogame, that can run in a PS1 emulator, but still upscale nicely to a 16:9 screen, without using fan-made patches… You only have 4 options:

1. Codename/Lifeforce Tenka
2. Ghost in the Shell
3. Mrs. Pac-Man : Maze Madness
4. Pac-Man World

Tenka and GitS are both shooters, which aren’t really my thing (especially on the PS1 before analog sticks were ubiquitous). Mrs. Pac-Man is arguably more of a 2.5D game. So Pac-Man World somehow ended up as my go-to for testing out Widescreen on devices. I still go back to it occasionally on my Steam Deck and maybe one of these days I’ll finally finish it off.

I had picked it up on sale for $10, left it in my backlog until 2024 when I was looking for a little palate cleanser. I was expecting a quick little shooter, maybe 10-20 hours, something to occupy a couple of weekends. I ended up spending 100 hours to get it 100% complete, watching lore videos with my wife, and now we are going back and playing Alan Wake.

Still have no interest in a multiplayer live-service game though. These companies all convince themselves that THEY will be the next “big thing” and it usually fails.

Yeah Louis’s situation seems pretty unique. Not on the same level as someone like Epstein or Weinstein. He didn’t do anything with his own employees or underaged fans. Sarah Silverman has been a big supporter of him and confirmed that he was always like that going back to when there was not a power disparity in their early club days together. His apology statement is one of the best I’ve ever seen.

But… There’s still some red flags, including some in just discovering as I am refreshing myself on the details now. If the 5 accusers, it looks like the first 2 were from an incident in 2002 at a festival where they escalated to to event organizers… And nothing happened. Then Rebecca Corry in 2005 on a TV show set who declined and reported the incident… And nothing happened. I can’t find when the other incidents happened, but like… Surely after these first 2 cases someone would have communicated to Louis how this was bad, right?

And Dave Becky, Louis’s manager at the time, sent letters to the victims threatening them to try to silence them. He later apologized and dropped Louis as a client, and Louis later publicly supported Becky and apologized to him as well. I’m not sure what to make of the whole mess, but if Becky was threatening victims that kinda feels like it should be worth some jail time, and if Louis ordered him to do so… Yikes.

Also I don’t think there’s an objective answer as to whether he should have retired, or how long he should have stayed out of the spotlight before returning. If I were him I probably would have just retired, but at the very least I would have spent a few years out of the spotlight. The initial article with the accusations came out in November 2017, and his next public appearance was August 2018, not even a whole year. And there was no easing in with less controversial material - he jumped into School shootings. He has since released a special called “Sorry” where he didn’t apologize but instead kept getting more controversial and used the F slur.

He’s also very good friends with Dave Chappelle, a certified piece of shit, and Jerry Seinfeld, famous for dating 17 year-old high school girls. And I get it- he got his break early on by opening for Seinfeld, but ya know maybe just tone down how public that friendship is given the circumstances?

I don’t feel the need to break out the torches and pitchforks for Louis, or pretend like none of his earlier works ever existed, but i’m also not in some huge hurry to defend him and restore his career either.

I know Luis CK has gotten a bit problematic for other reasons, but I always liked his take on this in particular.

Apologies as I couldn’t find an original video, just this weird channel animating the original audio. But every time my wife and I are in a car and see someone cross multiple lanes to get to an exit they almost missed we look at each other and say “but that’s their FAVORITE way!”

Not just that, but they even get the sexism and racism wrong. It’s suburban, middle-class, straight white women who are supposed to be associated with $9 lattes.

It only takes 1 badly made mod to make Skyrim unstable. I’m not sure what information you would be looking to gain from that.

Is there enough value in AI to justify burning down the planet for it?

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:

• hall effect joysticks and triggers
• a slightly smaller screen, but the equivalent of 1080p instead of the Deck’s 720p(technically it’s 1200 vs 800 since they are both 16:10) -the screen is 120hz, compared to 60hz for the base Deck or 90hz for the OLED -Options for 16 or 32GB of RAM, while the Deck only has 16 -storage options range from 512GB-2TB, while the Deck goes 64GB-1TB
• this has an extra USB-C port, which is nice

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.