Played it today, it’s excellent!

Heroes of Science and Fiction

Oh, this looks great!

I’m more excited for this than I have been for a game in years. It looks like HOMM3 with modernized QOL updates and graphics. That’s really all I need.

You’re technically correct. The best kind of correct. Thanks.

Memory that is embedded in GPUs.

You’re sitting on a gold mine - first DDR6/HBM, then DDR5, then DDR4 got expensive. If trends continue, somewhere around 2028 you’ll be able to sell that desoldered 128KB of SNES RAM for a fortune.

I don’t know a single thing she’s done, and have been cynical about “content creators” as opportunists lowering the standard of entertainment/art.

But just now I decided, why hate? Seeing all our entertainment being produced by fewer and fewer billionaires every year… All the best luck and support to anyone who isn’t helping prop up that system.

To me, the problem is that this is effectively the Switch Pro, and they called it the Switch 2. The marketing psychology makes a big difference. Switch Pro would imply it coexists alongside Switch and is for those who want to pay for more performance. Switch 2 implies that it’s something worthy of abandoning the prior generation. I think the former is fine (even desirable) and the later is just a bad value proposition.

Also interesting there were leaks about a Switch Pro a year or so prior to the Switch 2 reveal. My guess is the Switch 2 IS the Switch Pro.

Yeah, this is the “tock” part of the “tick-tock” hardware cycle. People bought the Switch because it was refreshing and a new way to play. Now Nintendo is offering to let us pay again and more for nearly the same. It’s a little cynical but true.

They could have called it the SwitchU, but honestly that’s a disservice to the WiiU - its second screen had more innovation.

I think we’re being too quick to judgment on this. We’re forgetting that this is a vital step in Jensen Huang’s plan to make $1 trillion from selling AI accelerators to new data centers, which I think we can agree is what really matters to most gamers.

I thought I saw an earlier story that suggested they may try to bring the site back if hardware costs come down to earth, but I may have imagined it. Did anyone see that?

Love the article, nice work!

Well consider me better informed, thanks.

Have they…done that?

Final Fantasy IX. I was a religious FF player before IX, and loved VIII so much despite all its flaws, because it really went for it with new ideas and atmosphere and the draw junction system which was hackable and broken but really interesting. In many ways the most Final Fantasy of Final Fantasy, despite the widespread hate.

But the devs got so conservative for IX, might as well have been playing Dragon Quest. And the load times and frequency and lack of variety for random encounters was just insurmountably tedious.

Fascinating. Definitely still prefer the Go for retro futurism, though.

Beautiful! Love those billboards. Also reminds me to check out a PSP Go, I bet the slide-out design is cool in person.

PSP is peak retro tech. The disk drive mechanism is so satisfying to open and close, popping out the UMD cartridge…

But yes, Japan preserves their old tech, books and games by default. Used items are almost always immaculately kept and sent cleaned up. It’s pretty reliable to buy used in Japan.

PC costs certainly aren’t helping, but there’s an entire cross-section of income and age demographics whose only computing device is and has always only been their phones.

I was curious so I looked it up. This site suggests 1 in 7 households in the US “either lack a computer at home or rely solely on a smartphone for internet access”, heavily weighted to lower-income states like Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas and Louisiana: https://www.benton.org/blog/computer-ownership-and-digital-divide