I think you’ll find most satanists like Carl Sagan just as much or even more than Satan.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/while-other-gaming-companies-talk-layoffs-capcom-is-raising-salaries/

Looks like none since 2018

Completely unrealistic. No cop in the USA would ever think you need a license to walk, or care about it.

Now if the cop accused OP of the terrible crime of jaywalking then I might believe it.

Microsoft becoming the next EA or Activision. Buying up studios only to run them into the ground.

Tough call between the Dualsense and the Dualshocks 1-3.

The Dualsense has great features, but is large enough and bulbous enough that I’m forced to use a full palm grip. That’s good some of the time, but sometimes I like a lighter finger grip that the earlier Dualshocks allowed for. I think of it similarly to claw vs palm grips on mice. A full palm grip on either can get too sweaty over time. The Dualshock 4 is a bulbous mess that fatigues my hands. On all of them, the plastic feels premium and sturdy and really fits well together. Plastic molding is an art, and they are good at it.

I have a few 8BitDo’s and they are all good too. The Pro-2, SN30 Pro, and Ultimate C (their naming conventions are flour of control). A bit cheaper feeling than the Sony offerings, but still pretty good.

The Xbox Series controller is… Fine. The plastic feels cheap, the face buttons feel cheap, it’s too big and requires a palm grip, the R1/L1 buttons feel cheap, the d-pad is one of the worst in history. The analog sticks almost feel great except they’re too tall.

Shout-out to the Steam Deck for feeling phenomenal. Also shout-out to the RetroBit Genesis controllers- they feel really good, but the lack of sticks and fewer buttons than most modern controllers makes it hard to use for modern games.

The JoyCons are awful. Most 3rd party options are better but I still haven’t found one that I really like.

The GameCube and N64 both feel kind of cheap. I think the plastic is a bit thin, and the sticks and buttons rattle around slightly.

What are you talking about?

Sony’s Japan studio’s own library was always gimmicky games that were basically tech demos- Ape Escape was for the Dual Analog controller, LocoRoco for the PSP, Gravity Rush for the Vita, Knack to be a pack-in for the PS4, and games for VR, Move Eye toy, etc. In fact it’s kind of hard to find games they did on their own because they’ve always been mostly a support studio even going back to the PS1’s launch lineup, and they are continuing that. There have been several studios that make original games that started as part of Sony Japan that have been spun off into separate teams too.

I’m struggling to think of many studios Sony has closed. Sony London studios was similar to Japan- mostly just games to go with hardware gimmicks like the EyeToy, SingStar, and Wonderbook. It’s even harder to find studios that Sony has purchased and then closed or turned into a support studio- I guess you could count that Psygnosis was purchased and merged into London studios back in the 90’s, but considering they went 20 years between that merger and closing I doubt there were many Psygnosis devs left there.

A quick search pulls up PixelOpus, a tiny studio Sony formed from 9 college grads with a couple of industry veterans to lead them They released 2 small games and were closed last year.

I don’t mean to be too defensive of Sony- they did close one of their own studios and laid off ~900 people this year. But it’s not really a comparison to Microsoft who now has a long history of buying 3rd party studios, mismanaging them, and closing them.

I’m also confused about your comment about Xbox making more single player games than Sony. First of all… I would expect that to generally be true. It looks like Sony owns 21 studios while Microsoft had 40 as of the Activision-Blizzard acquisition. And while a lot hasn’t been announcedwith release dates, we know of a handful of single player games Sony has in the works- Horizon 3, TLOU3, Ghosts of Tsushima 2, and new IP’s from Bend, Housemarq, and BluePoint. Plus Wolverine, and you could argue whether Physint should count or not since that’s a partnership between Kojima and Sony-owned Columbia Pictures. If you’re trying to imply that Sony is abandoning single-player games or something that’s pretty far from the truth.

I wonder how many promises Microsoft made to the FCC and other regulators about how their mergers and acquisitions wouldn’t result in layoffs?

Local pizza places are usually both cheaper and better than chains, at least in every neighborhood I’ve lived in. I think they are better than frozen pizzas, but also about 2x the cost. Both vary from place to place though.

Aldi’s pizzas are my go-to for value. Usually around $6 a pop now (they were $3.29 pre-pandemic). I add extra cheese and toppings to remind myself I’ve made it in life.

I use Steam Link on the Deck to do this often. Personally I just leave it in 16:9- the Deck just displays horizontal black bars to get from 16:10 to 16:9. For me that’s just part of the Deck experience because even a ton of games I play locally are 16:9 only, or even 4:3.

You can choose to match the resolution as well. On your host PC go to steam -> settings -> remote play -> [advanced host options] and look for something like “Match desktop resolution to client”.

It also depends on what you are doing. I find that more resource-intensive games are often better streaming- better battery life with less heat and fan noise on the Deck. So changing the individual game settings to 1200x800 works well.

I don’t use that just to access files though. I have several folders on my desktop set up as SMB shares and installed another file explorer (Nautilus) to access it. I mostly use it to move around PS2, GameCube, and Wii roms- everything else is either just permanently on my SD card or I’m able to regularly install via Steam.

For non-Steam game saves, I set up SyncThing to synchronize across devices.

I really miss front-facing speakers. It’s one of many features that phone manufacturers have removed from phones over the past decade.

Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: EA on-line activation and Origin client software installation and background use required.

I’m good thanks

Sony has been releasing their games on Steam. Microsoft gave up on exclusivity to their store ages ago and have even started releasing Xbox exclusives like Hi-Fi Rush on PlayStation.

For a lot of games, usually ones with Denuvo, I pick up the PlayStation version and either play it in my living room or stream to a PC or the Deck. Perhaps I’ll end up doing that with Wake 2. I’m kind of reluctant to give support to exclusivity at all though.

You can also do the opposite though. The Switch had 0 backwards compatibility. The GameCube, N64, and SNES had 0 backwards compatibility. Hopefully this article is legit.

You might want to take another look at this map

They tried banning alcohol. There was enough popular pushback they had no choice but to un-ban it.

There was less popular demand for marijuana. It seems like it’s moving in the same direction, just more slowly.

He started this process in 2022.

I’ve seen several articles whining about this patch over the past several weeks. They all have the same vague complaints, but the only real tangible and provable one seems to be that some mods break, and Fallout: London was delayed.

I’ve seen claims of crashes and FPS drops, but no actual data or testing to back that up. It seems like a classic case of the Internet circling around and making something into a much bigger deal than reality.

Everyone I’ve seen commenting who has actually tried it themselves seems to have positive feedback. I installed it briefly on the Deck myself to try it out and it seems fine, although I don’t care enough to put in hours of proper testing.

Yeah my first reaction to this meme was “well they had the Torah though”.

He claims they removed the ability to adjust graphics options. This is false- they just removed the launcher so it’s tucked away in the launch options instead. Unless you’re the kind of person who wants to change the settings every time you open the game I’d call this an improvement still.

He also claims that the FPS is lower than what the Deck is reporting and claims it feels bad. Fails to go into any methodology or even say if he tries to verify the FPS any other way. Maybe I’m just used to actual journalists doing actual research, but isn’t this the point where most competent people would look to install 3rd party monitoring tools? Maybe hook it up to a capture card or external monitor? Look at frame time graphs? Like, we have the technology to support these claims, but this is just one dude saying it “feels okay”. He makes references like “we tested” but doesn’t include any test results.

Not to mention… Go look at Valve’s publications about the Verified tag. I can’t find a single reference to the frame rate anywhere. So even if the frame rate is low, that’s not part of the testing process. What is or is not “playable” is incredibly subjective and variable. Some games are fine at 30, some need 60, some really benefit from >60, some games can even survive as playable at 15 FPS. Some games run mostly at 60 but dip occasionally. Some will be impacted by the performance settings on the Deck. Not to mention devs are constantly pushing updates and it’s not worth the time to re-test for Deck verification that often for a possible +/-1 FPS difference.

Then he mentions crashing. No solid data or anything, just mentions a crash. He doesn’t mention, but anytime I hear anyone complain about a Bethesda game crashing my first question is “are you using mods?”. It would be incredibly irresponsible to do “testing” with mods, but at this point I’m not sure whether the author is sharing real experiences or just parroting what he read on Reddit.

There may very well be valid concerns here, but it’s impossible to tell because of how bad this article is.

There was a C-tier PS2 game called Airblade that was basically that