Quoting: legluondunetThe gap between today's consoles and working emulators is narrowing. We had never known an emulator that emulates a console still on sale. I don't think it's ethical to publicly release an emulator of a console that's still on sale, in my view, developers should at least wait for the end of life of a console. Nintendo is an innovative company and produces user-friendly games, switch emulators must be costing them a lot of money.

I don't see how. My understanding of the business model for consoles is they lose money on the consoles but make it back on the games. If they can make money on the games without having to first sell a loss-leader console, then money-wise there is no downside.
I'm sure Nintendo are still very unhappy about it, but that's because they're Nintendo, not because it loses them money.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: CatKiller

QuoteIt does this with thanks to the DXVK translation layer, which NVIDIA now have their own fork of just for this.

This suggests to me that Nvidia internally prioritise Vulkan over Direct3D. They could have just done it in DXR, and stayed in the DirectX realm, but they've chosen to translate all those DirectX games into Vulkan instead.

Huh. So like, in a weird way Windows games on Windows will all be using Proton . . .

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Guestthe biggest downside for me is dynamic memory management in dxvk in torture scenarios

Have you considered just . . . not torturing people?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: jensAls far as I remember, there were four elephants between the giant turtle and the disc :)

But what about The Fifth Elephant?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: MohandevirIn my case, battery autonomy is make or break. If all this raw power is wasted because you need to cap everything to gain minutes of playtime... What are you getting? A little more powerful Steam Deck with less input options, unreadable 3rd party apps, crapy os interactions and still worse battery autonomy (the Steam Deck's autonomy is already to the limit)?

It occurs to me that this bad feature of the Ally would compound with a bad feature of the OS they're using--with little battery time it seems to me you'd really want to be able to easily suspend a game and stop using battery, but someone was saying with Windows it won't do that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedjeWonder how many people go into retail stores these days. I'm a terrible example, I don't go into retail stores very often anymore! Last time I did was for a Yoga laptop, and the dude at the shop was annoying me (it was Best Buy). Would you like Anti-virus? No, would you like Office? No. Would you like... piss off. :P

Interesting point. A lot of retail stores seem to be struggling these days. And I don't shop much period, but my wife is always complaining about stores having all kind of stuff she might want but would want to try on to be sure, only available on the web, not the physical store. It's like the stores are being eaten alive by their own web divisions. So maybe physical retail isn't as much of a deal as people think any more.

That said, even if Valve never does sell them in physical stores much, they could benefit from more online retail channels. Amazon being the obvious behemoth in the room. Or BestBuy itself, say, for the web visibility not the physical stores.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GroganIt's going to hurt the Steam Deck for sure.

Seems likely, yeah.

Quoting: GroganMoreover, I'd expect Steam Decks to start shipping with Windows configurations soon.

Why? It seems to be sucking.

Quoting: GroganAlso, it's no coincidence that Microsoft is buying up all the big game publishers. It also wouldn't surprise me if Asus was getting near free OS licensing from Microsoft as a carrot.

That also seems likely, yeah.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PhiladelphusIn its continuing quest to be every Paradox grand strategy game ever made (…in SPAAAACE!), Stellaris has taken more than a few pages out of Crusader King's playbook with its latest 'Gemini' update and DLC Galactic Paragons. This is huge. I played for an hour or so this evening, and wow does this update change the game.

Some updates/DLCs focus more on end-game stuff that you won't see for hours into a campaign (like becoming the crisis in Nemesis, or Colossi from Apocalypse). The leader and government changes in the Gemini update, in contrast, change your very first decisions of the game, and look likely to remain relevant all the way through the game. You now get to pick a trait for each leader when they level up, which instantly makes them 2000% more engaging; I had to unlearn my knee-jerk reaction of instantly dismissing the pop-up about a leader gaining a new level, because now they're actually interactive and interesting. Some traits are "council traits", which only give their effects when the leader is on your council, which makes choosing traits (and which leaders to put on the council) an interesting choice. Since leaders require more attention you'll also have fewer of them at once, at least in the early game before you increase your soft cap (no more 5+ exploring science ships in the first decade, and honestly, I don't think I'll miss it). It feels a bit more like an RPG, leveling up your party members to get better and better, and I quite enjoy it. I also like that you can further customize your starting leader with a trait (possibly more depending on starting choices?) and an optional biography if you want.

(As an aside, I love that they've gotten rid of scientists having two roles; they're only explorers now, save for whoever is your head of research, who acts as chief scientist for all three research branches simultaneously. The conflict between the two roles is much diminished now, since research-affecting traits are only council traits now from what I saw, meaning you only have to worry about one scientist dual-classing [and they can still command a science ship while being councilor].)

With the two additional tradition trees from Galactic Paragons (focused on producing better leaders, and the governing council specifically), I counted sixteen traditions tree to choose from in my game. For the first time since they were introduced all the way back in Utopia, I finally felt like I had to make hard choices about which ones to get, and I love it! Picking a new tradition tree shouldn't feel like a no-brainer, and there are enough now that I can actually feel like I'm giving something meaningful up by picking another one. The council has something new called Agendas which are empire-wide bonuses that take some time to enact, and different tradition trees (along with ethics, government type, etc.) give you different ones. It remains to be seen how well it works (they take long enough to enact that I only saw a handful in my time playing), but it seems like a decent system.

I didn't take the new origin, so I can't speak to it, though it sounds solid enough. (I have this weird habit of essentially playing the last expansion [or a least a previous one] whenever a new one comes out, hence my Ocean Paradise Angler Aquatics running a MegaCorps this time around. )

Um. I'm not sure what I think of that. I don't play 4X space games to be an RPG, I play them to explore the galaxy and manage economies and research mindboggling technologies.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EikeI had one game, cannot remember which one, that had some... brown-and-black maybe? booklet that was supposed to not by copyable with the photocopy devices of the same age. I always wondered if that was really true.

I remember some of the old D&D dungeons you could buy ("modules") had their maps in this pale blue that was supposed to not photocopy . . . related to "blueprints" maybe?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Wait . . . Did that trailer show the blobs building houses?!

View this comment - View article - View full comments