This is a slight historical re-write.

Blizzard’s parent company since ‘98 (Vivendi) was the larger of two companies at the time of the merger in ‘08, and put forward $2b towards the merger vs. Activision’s $1b.

Vivendi remained the majority shareholder of the new entity, and chose to appoint Bobby Kotick as the CEO.

Activision-Blizzard didn’t buy-out majority control until ‘13 - well after the enshittification began.

…and more importantly, what about NFTs?!

I want AI in games; Actual Innovation!

I’m in a similar situation with my wife not being particularly interested in games - I’ve had some success in playing LA Noire with her guiding the investigations and interrogations. The jazz soundtrack in particular helped convince her, funnily enough!

Not quite perhaps what you’re looking for, but may work for others with hesitant non-gamer partners.

I thought they were Canadian, though? Weird…

I think it mostly just didn’t feel like a Max Payne game because of the setting. Not New York? Not Max Payne.

Gameplay wise, it was definitely on the right track; and in a way - I remember it fondly as was the last time Rockstar seemingly experimented with game mechanics ahead of incorporating them into the next GTA game.

Started with the first GTA on the PlayStation; I used to rank Vice City as my absolute favourite entry in the series - but as I’ve matured over time, I’ve come to find GTA IV (or more specifically, The Ballad of Gay Tony expansion) has taken over the top spot - though VC is still a close second.

If you haven’t played TBOGT in a while, I highly recommend revisiting it - there are a lot of parallels to VC in terms of overall feel and the general “fun” tone.

This is an interesting development, for sure - and not one we will be able to accurately gauge the net impact of for a while.

It does feel like CD Project want to move it off their financial documents (P&L, cashflow, balance sheets etc.), while Michael wants to double-down and focus on building out the historical catalog.

Success will really depend on if GOG can remain profitable through lean years without having to ultimately rely on compromising their morals; and whether they will continue to receive support from modern publishers to help fund the more niche projects.

The only franchises I will pre-order are:

• World of Warcraft Collector’s Editions : even though I stopped playing a few years ago now, I still buy the physical copy collector’s editions to add to my collection - I have every one going all the way back to vanilla.

• Grand Theft Auto 6 : I have both the PS3 Collector’s Editions for IV and V, feels like getting the same for 6 to finish off that ‘trilogy’ would be apropos.

This is a cursed list, but at least 2/3rds eventually lived up to their initial promise!

Data centres aren’t run by hardware manufacturers. When Nvidia/Micron/Samsung run out of enterprise corporations to bilge funds out of, they will return back to selling to consumers.

Does this mean that things will 100% return to how they were in the ‘Before Times’? No, let’s be real - the surplus of under-used data centres will definitely result in a push towards cloud gaming, online experiences and the like - but in an ideal scenario we would end up with more choice and not less.

But again, this all hinges on the current AI bubble bursting in the near future - followed by a pretty bad recession/depression.

The principal of supply and demand still applies, they will cut prices up until the point they either go out of business or they find a sufficient number of buyers.

Companies like Nvidia, Micron and Samsung are currently chasing massive profits off enterprise customers, but will come crawling back to consumers once the AI bubble bursts (assuming they survive the resulting market collapse).

As an example, if Nvidia can turn one TSMC wafter into one AI accelerator that they can sell for $40K, or into ~5 RTX 5090s they can sell for $2K/ea - they will sell as many of the $40K cards as they can, and only use failed wafers to try and satiate RTX 5090 demand.

But if there are no more AI customers, they will be forced to drop prices in order to shift more volume. If they can’t drop prices further due to wafer costs, then they will pass up wafer allocations from TSMC.

If TSMC sees too many wafers free up - they will be forced to drop prices to all customers (AMD, Apple etc.) to try and pick up the slack. They in turn will need to drop prices in order to try and increase sales volumes.

This will have a downwards pressure on prices and a “return to the mean” moment for tech prices. It will just be a painful couple of years until we get to that point, and honestly with the way things are currently going - it will be the least of our worries.

Prices won’t fall, not until the AI bubble bursts and the related industries shift focus back to consumer-level goods.

At best, you could hope prices remain steady for a few years and real-world incomes slowly rise to match this new normal.

That’s awesome, didn’t even think of how useful AirDrop could be in that situation!

How’s controller support? I have a Razer Kishi V2 I bought way back when to play the Rockstar games, that’s just otherwise gathering dust.

It’s nighttime here in Australia - will load up some files and test it out tomorrow morning! 😁

Thanks for bringing Delta to my attention! I use my Steam Deck for emulation - but now, I have another rabbit hole to go down for when I need to pack ultralight!

Any obvious iOS restrictions, assuming I’d be primarily interested in SNES gaming and have local access to any/every ROM file?

Waluigi numba wan!

To the best of my understanding, AMD/Nvidia/Intel each run their own forms of architecture (eg. AMDs RDNA) which are probably closest to RISC for simple instructions and SIMD/SIMT (single instruction, multiple data/threads) for more complex vector calculations.

It’s interesting to see what people genuinely consider to be bad, or maybe they just missed that word? 😅

For me, it would have to be Under The Skin; a solid 6/10 game, in a world where 7/10 is considered average!

It’s not as much a “feel-good” story as comments who haven’t read beyond the headline might make you believe:

The PIF values its total investments at nearly $1 trillion in assets, but a significant percentage of these are hard-to-sell assets with no public valuation; as a result, the NYT reports that the PIF reps have told international investors that it is “unable to allocate” for the near future.

Despite this, a spokesperson for the PIF, Marwan Bakrali, told the newspaper that it had $60 billion in cash and “similar financial instruments”.

ETA: Its not as though they’ve lost a significant chunk of the fund, but rather that a sizeable portion of it is tied up in illiquid assets that can’t be readily sold, or valued and loaned against.

Though there is some mention of some of their investments being in “distress”, so there is at least some good news?

This, I think, is the big open secret about the push for consoles to move towards pure digital distribution.

It’s easier to not have to compete against your back catalog for gamer attention, if you cut off end-users ability to access it!

Rockstar already tried something like this, when they released the Definitive Defective Edition.

It failed successfully, in no small part to the remaster being absolute garbage, but for the AAA publishers, it’s merely a small setback that they will try again in the near future.