Obligatory “fuck Notch” but I really liked the idea of 0x10c when it was announced.

You can’t gift, sell, share, or play that game on a new device once the servers shut down.

It lacks the main benefit of a digital game: not needing to keep the card with you.

It lacks the main benefit of a physical game: not needing an internet connection, which also means these fake cartridges will stop working once servers shut down

It captures the vibe of having a physical card, which I appreciate, but that’s about it. Otherwise it’s worthless.

I certainly won’t lol. I’m actually running a custom build of the mobile app with some tweaks.

Built on Moonlight! That’s what I use already lol.

Honestly $80 price tag on new game is not that bad. The $60 standard has not kept up with inflation.

Everything else though … paying to use the better performance of the new hardware for games like Zelda, paid advertisement demo app, lack of OLED on an HDR console, especially when the previous gen had OLED, same faulty joystick technology, dedicated subscription service ad button on the controller…

Huh? My actual GameCube controller works with all games on the Switch 1, although it doesn’t have all the buttons used by some games.

In particular it would be absurd if this new GameCube controller doesn’t work with Smash Ultimate.

Can confirm I did it like 3 times before I just started installing 3rd party Hall effect switches.

Nice hot take haha. Tbh I like being under-leveled in Pokemon because it’s way too easy most of the time. There definitely is some backtracking in Emerald, although I personally really liked the varied environments. I think it has a lot more variation than gens 1,2 and 4.

Do you use Steam?

Maybe the 50hrs is just to weed out scalpers attempting to make new accounts to buy multiple.

50hours of gameplay over the lifetime of a console is not that much. I have like 200 hours in BOTW alone.

My friends can all see how much I’ve played my Steam games and I don’t see anyone complaining about that.

Are you confusing CRF with CBR?

CRF is the video equivalent of VBR music. The music equivalent of two-pass video encoding is ABR music.

When tuned for a specific file, CRF and two-pass video will give similar results. They both result in a variable bitrate encoding.

When using the same config on different files, you might find that two-pass encoding produces unnecessarily large files for something with little movement like anime, or has quality issues for something with a lot of movement like a lot of shaky camera or film grain. Meanwhile the same CRF setting will work well in just about any scenario, using more bitrate for files that need it, and less bitrate for files that don’t.

lol if this happens to me it will be the straw that pushes me to uninstall Nvidia’s app and go back to manual driver installs

2 pass encoding is only to get the benefits of variable bit rate when targeting a specific file size. If you don’t have a specific file size in mind, that’s what CRF is for.

• a tool for backing up offline installers

This really should be something they offer for free, and there are already some FOSS options that do this, although they aren’t as good as I’d like.

• ability to install previous versions of a game

This is a feature they already have for free and there would (or at least should) be backlash if they were to lock that behind a subscription

• extra insight into the preservation work they’re doing.

Sure, neat.

• voting rights on games to bring into the preservation program.

Sure but said votes better have an actual impact.

Doesn’t address the main advantages physical games have over digital sharing. I’ll be interested once they have features that let me “switch cartridges” with a friend offline, or let me sell or gift my virtual cartridge to a stranger.

The Lost crown will be available to try for free, before the full game can be unlocked with a single in-app purchase.

Doesn’t sound like it thankfully.

Yeah the controls in the OG Mario Bros (and even the OG Super Mario Bros, to a bit of a lesser extent) are very clunky compared to modern entries. I’d say SMB3 holds up well though.

Ultimately how good a game looks is due a lot more to how much effort and how clever the artists were than it is due to the graphics technologies used.

I just started playing the new Indiana Jones game, which runs fine with RTX off but some scenes look much better with RTX on, but then the game runs very poorly. In both cases the game seems to be optimized for individual frames over how the actual animation looks - there are cases where the shadows blink between different results, where any result would look ok in a screenshot but as an animation it looks awful. Also despite all the fancy graphics features, most of the world and especially the people just look kinda plasticy.

Meanwhile take some games like Destiny 2 and Helldivers 2, which use “outdated” graphics techniques and yet both look and run great.