Redoing animations? To me, that's definitely more than a re-master. The musical equivalent would probably be something in the mixing phase- adding or adjusting effects, changing pan, level, EQ, automation, etc.

Technically it was never released on PS5. It was released on PS4 and later received an upgrade patch for the PS4 Pro.

But yeah it works with backwards compatibility on the PS5. I would expect the PS4 Pro patch to work but I haven't tried it myself.

That's over 7 years old. Roughly the length of a generation. I think re-mastering console games from 2017 is reasonable in general.

Not for HZD though. It was already one of the best-looking games on the PS4, and then they added a free upgrade for the PS4 Pro to get checkerboard 4k. Like... What's left to improve?

Maybe upgrade from checkerboard to full 4k? The FPS seemed fine for me playing on a base PS4, but perhaps there's room for improvement there. The initial load time to open the game is pretty bad, but if you don't switch between games often that's not really a problem. I haven't tried the PC version yet, but perhaps there were some UI improvements there they could apply to consoles?

My main complaints with the game that I'd like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term "remaster". The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they're good in the DLC and sequel. Also the itemization system was clunky and felt like it was trying to be similar to an online multiplayer experience for some reason.

Lol tech companies are going to be spewing bullshit about how they hired too much in 2022 for the next 50 years to try to excuse their labor exploitation.

This post doesn't include everything. There were a variety of hardware revisions and price cuts that you could add in. Plus the change of the price of games and accessories.

I waited until 2011 to get my PS3. It was $150 for a slim model, and I chose the Uncharted 3 bundle for $200. I think it ended up being a pretty good deal. You mentioned Blu-Ray and DVD, but it was also good for a lot of streaming services. The PS3 pre-dated the rise of smart TV's. I don't think there were even Android boxes back then- the NVIDIA Shield and Amazon Fire Stick were both released in 2014, and the Chromecast was 2013. Media PC's were a lot less common, and so were couch-friendly operating systems.

Unrelated- the Deck is amazing. With PS1 and PS2 it's really easy to rip your games on a PC and emulate them on the Deck. And with widescreen hacks, cheats, texture packs, save states, speed up, and slow down, plus the extra buttons to control it all, it's even better than original hardware. PS3 is doable too, though there's a lot more hoops to jump through and fewer emulation benefits. You can also use Chiaki to stream from your PS4/5, so it's pretty close to having the whole library in the palm of your hands.

Hasn't Twitter lost ~30 million active users, about 10%, since Musk bought it? Plus there's probably going to be a couple million more gone from the Brazil ban.

There's a lot of things where there used to be good software, but it has been ruined by megacorps.

Mint, for example. It started as a fantastic website to track your different financial accounts. It was simple and intuitive. Ad-supported, but not egregiously so. Then it got bought by Intuit. "Updates" removed features and previously available chart options to review your transactions. The ads got worse. I can't remember if the app released before or after the Intuit buyout, but it started off with less features than the website and slowly became the better option as the website got worse. Then the app started getting worse with updates too. Finally it was shutdown this year, with Intuit recommending people use their other, similar, subscription-based software. I still haven't found a proper replacement.

Sonos is a great concept with a few fundamental flaws. I received a couple of units several years ago as a gift from the in-laws. The biggest issue is that if I want to have TV audio (from videogames or video streaming services), the only way to do that is to use a physical cable, but not all of the units have an auxiliary input. The system was always buggy, with delay and a not particularly responsive app. They famously rolled out a new version of their app earlier this year that... Had a ton of bugs and removed a lot of features, leading to the CEO apologizing (but not rolling anything back, lol).

I remember when Adobe products used to be one-time purchases. There are of course alternatives today, but none of them are ever quite as good to actually use. Same thing with the Microsoft Office suite- I use it for work all the time, but for personal use I use LibreOffice. It gets the job done, but it's way clunkier that Microsoft's offering.

Music Production is similar. Luckily I still have some Cakewalk software from before they went bankrupt that works, but the servers to verify the product activation code are down so that will only last as long as my current desktop does. I've tried using other software like Reaper, but it's a big step down. I bought CakeWalk Sonar around 2013-2014-ish for ~$150 (which includes a large sample library). Pro-tools is a similarly featured program that does not seem to have an option to purchase, but instead has a $300/year annual subscription.

I used to have Duolingo, but uninstalled when they got caught harvesting data they said they weren't a few years ago.

I used to use LoseIt to track my meals and exercise, and it helped me lost weight. I got out of the habit and went a while without using it, only to find out it had been enshittified too. The name changed to "Calorie Counter by LoseIt", and the app has moved from a straightforward resource to trying to be a personal trainer. It wants to ask me questions about my emotional relationships with food and exercise. It's trying to gather as much data as possible from me and then tell me what to do, when all I want is to be able to scan some barcodes and keep track of my calories and macros for the day. The last time I logged in I think it wanted me to upgrade to premium to track macros.

Dark Skye was by far the best weather app. Until it got purchased by Apple so now I can't use it.

The UrbanSpoon was a fantastic app for finding nearby restaurants. Perhaps over time it would have faced the same issues that any other business-finding service faces: businesses are willing to pay for promotion, users leaving reviews for free is sketchy, bots and paid reviews exist, etc. Still, it was pretty good up until Zomayo bought it and shut it down.

Maybe not software, but StumbleUpon was one of my favorite websites back when it existed. Once again, got bought by a corporation who shut it down when they couldn't figure out how to monetize it properly. It feels like we just can't have nice things- everything needs to be lining the pockets of a billionaire or it isn't allowed to exist at all.

Coordinating RGB components from different manufacturers and across different devices sucks. Coordinating smart devices without some dedicated piece of hardware spying on your whole house like Alexa sucks. I think I've seen some open-source attempts at unification, but the last time I looked into it that was still janky and annoying to deal with.

Also why does every single business need its own app? I know the answer- it's to harvest data, push notifications to encourage spending, and push loyalty rewards programs. But if everyone is harvesting my same data, isn't that going to result in oversupply and devalue that in the market? Are these companies selling this data actually profitable? Apps, especially good ones, are expensive to make and maintain. Maybe that's why the my seem to have gotten so much worse. I have wondered if maybe the answer is for businesses to join together with joint apps. Especially brands that are already owned by one company, like KFC and Taco Bell. Slice is an interesting app for local pizza places, and I could see that model taking off.

It's really hard for me to think of new software I would want when there's so much old software that used to exist but has gotten ruined. I don't want to become an old man yelling at a cloud, but I feel like everything has just gone straight downhill for around a decade. I even remember back around 2013 being in college and talking with friends about how Google search results seemed to be getting worse, and that's gone downhill. Even the ideas I have, I am guessing probably already exist and have probably already been ruined.

Most of those ideas are similar to a lot of the above apps: make it easy to do data entry on a regular basis, maybe pull in some additional information from publicly available datasets, and maybe send a reminder. Homeowner stuff like cleaning out the bathroom sink trap, keeping track of when/where appliances were purchased/serviced, keeping PDF's of manuals together, looking out for recalls. Home inventory for tracking cleaning supplies,groceries, etc (although that might be too much data entry for me to ever want to do properly). I have a notebook where I keep track of the strings on our guitars that I would prefer to be digitized. A lot of stuff that could be handled with a generic calendar and/or spreadsheet, but could benefit from a dedicated application.

I thought these weirdos were pro-straws? Something about how putting more plastic in the ocean is actually good for the environment and how bans on plastic straws are a slippery slope to woke Marxist communism or something?

While I mostly agreed another good application would be survival/crafting games with limited inventory. Or even games like Skyrim where you can put almost every object into your inventory.

But yeah it's overused.

Even as late as the 2016 RNC debates he was still speaking clearly, responding to his opponents, and occasionally making a coherent point.

But only a small fraction of the plastic gets recycled.

If 9/10ths of the plastic ends up in a landfill or the Pacific garbage patch, having 1/10th of that plastic recycled into another bottle (which then will eventually have 9/10ths tossed in a landfill anyways) isn't doing much. It's better than not recycling at all, but it's green washing to say that it's "eco friendly", which Capri-Sun allegedly did at this trade show.

Those bottles in the image look like plastic. I can't find anything indicating they are using glass or stainless steel.

It also includes flavoring (of which the orange juice is one). They come in more flavors than just orange.

I invited myself because it's an interesting article, nothing to do with nostalgia.

"Sometimes" feels a bit generous. From a quick search I can find estimates that 5-9% of all plastic is recycled. It might be higher or lower depending on the specific kinds of plastic these bottles use, but most of it is probably ending up in a landfill anyways.

You think the bottles are going to be any better? They're going to end up in the ocean with all of the other plastic bottles from other drinks.

I see a ton of comments here hating on nostalgic people, with no actual nostalgic people in sight yet.

Personally I don't care if a pouched drink exists or not, but if they are no longer producing pouched drinks they should probably retire the brand.

Do you remember what a CapriSun tastes like? It's somewhere between an extremely-artificially flavored "juice" concentrate and a "fruit flavored" drink like Kool-Aid. The whole appeal was the packaging.

You cannot own love. You cannot own wonder. You cannot own joy. You cannot own the beauty of the universe.

Desire is suffering. Why would you want to own a train? To seek to prevent others from admiring it? Nay, I posture, better let them run wild, for all to enjoy. To live free and reproduce in their natural habitats. To live along side is, not contained within a tiny rail network in your backyard or basement.

1. I'm so fucking tired of pixel art games. And I've noticed recently that going back and playing actual 16 bit games with real pixels feels so much better. It's hard to say for sure what it is, but I have a few theories.

First, in old games that actually use pixels, everything has to snap to the grid. For these pixel art games running at 1080p or maybe higher, what is supposed to look like a pixel is actually a square made up of multiple pixels. In 16-bit games, a sprite can only move distances the same size as a pixel, but in these modern ones the "pixels" can move by fractions of their own size. It loses all the neat, discreet, visual appeal and becomes messy looking in my opinion.

Second, the color pallet is too large. Old games had a limited selection of colors, and often in order to make the most of them the colors used would be significantly different from each other, while still all being part of a cohesive pallet. We are used to millions of colors, but consoles like the GameBoy Color and SNES only had ~32,000 to pick from total. The GameBoy Color also has a software limitation to only have 56 colors on-screen at once. Using a full, modern color pallet without those limitations allows for colors that are close to each other to be used. That's great for 3D models where we are thing to mimic reality, but for pixel art it just makes everything look messy and sloppy. There needs to be a sharp, distinct contrast for pixels to be satisfying.

Third, there's just too much stuff happening. This I could probably adapt to, but I just have this expectation that pixel games should just be a few moving sprites and maybe a couple of background layers.

2. The name "Arco" tells me absolutely nothing. It's not memorable. It's a complete blank slate that gets washed away. I'm not even certain if that's just a proper noun from the game or if that's just a different language word.

3. A hybrid turn-based/real time strategy game? My instinct is that sounds like the worst of both worlds. It has been successful before- Transistor and Paper Mario come to mind. But in general, if in playing a turn-based game it's because I want the chill, low-pressure experience. I probably want to be less than sober. And introducing real-time elements means that those games get pushed into the real-time category when I choose what I want to play and when. And if in playing a tacts game, 99% of the time in going to choose a turn-based one and get lit.

4. As many others here have said, I've never heard of this game. I think this is a legitimate problem facing a lot industries, especially digital products. Doing some quick searching I found someone estimating that Spotify sees about 55 days worth of new audio uploaded every day. Everyone is creating and we don't have enough to line to consume.

Personally, I suspect that if I went through the exercise of looking at my Steam library and trying to project when I would be able to play through all of the games I currently own, it would probably exceed my life expectancy. Definitely if you add in all of my console game collection.

There's not a great solution. Corporations try to punch through the noise with marketing. One of the most important pieces of Steam as a platform is their ability to promote games. There are whole networks of influencers- streamers, video creators, podcasters, bloggers, magazine writers, etc all trying to help sort out the games worth playing.

But the problem persists - there are too many games being made. And I don't want to just say to put up more barriers to entry, because indie development is important for getting fresh new talent and ideas into the industry. Some of the best experiences I've had have been indie games, and some of the worst offenders for cranking out banal, mediocre time sucks have been huge corporations with giant marketing budgets.

The only solution I can think of is more "platforms" rather than games. Minecraft, GTA V, Skyrim. Especially with mods, you can get a unique and interesting experience without having to invest into learning and understanding a whole new game.

That might work, but I'm not sure all of the tradeoffs would line up there.

At $350-$400 you're competing with the Steam Deck. I think that's asking for failure. Sony might allow Linux on it (like the PS2 and PS3), but I would expect the main gaming OS to be fairly locked down with DRM. The Deck is a couple years old so maybe they could beat them on price/performance/battery life, but not by a huge amount of we are talking about the power to play PS4 games. They would have a miniscule fraction of the library, and probably not the track pads and key software to allow the Deck to play M&KB games.

And then there is the Switch. The regular version is $270, the OLED is $330. Huge install library already. Plus you get the versatility of handheld and home use, plus the JoyCons (which there would be legal hurdles to try to copy). And the Switch 2 is right around the corner. I would bet (and I think Sony would too) that the Switch 2 is going to be a similar price and competitive performance/battery life. I don't think you're proposing would compete.

And you'd still have the problem of splitting the dev base. I could be wrong, but I thought Sony announced they are no longer publishing for the PS4 (the last game would have been Lost Soul, but the PS4 version was canceled so the last game they published was MLB 2023) and expect 3rd parties to end in 2025. Heck, a PS5 Pro has been rumored for a while now. So it seems Sony is trying to get away from PS4 development.

Don't get me wrong- I like your idea. But i think something like that would be a sudden reversal of the direction Sony has been signalling they want to go for a few years now.

I see two unrelated articles that it hink address similar problems.

For handhelds, Sony is good at making hardware, but has generally failed to develop a good library of 1st party games. In order to be successful, a platform needs enough hardware sales to be an enticing platform for 3rd party developers, but you need a game library to drive hardware sales. That's where 1st party support comes in, and where Nintendo has generally been great with their handhelds. Sony tried to have a more even split, but ended up focusing on their home consoles when they were pushed.

The second is emulation. Sony has a significant library of old games, and even more if you count 3rd party titles for Sony's old consoles. Really popular games often merit full re-makes. Slightly less popular games get re-released or remastered, sometimes in collections. A lot of games aren't popular enough for that, but if you could find a way to charge people anywhere from $1-$10 to play through the original version it would probably sell (and having a platform the 3rd party publishers to also sell their old PlayStation Roms would probably let Sony take a % for almost no additional work). The problem is... The Shadow of the Colossus remake released for $40 initially and is still $20 initially today. If we were able to pay $5 or $10 for the PS2 version back in 2018, would the remake have even been possible?

Beyond that, does would a greater emphasis on releasing older games on emulators possibly cannibalize new game sales? Are there going to be people who, when GTA 6 releases for $70+micro transactions, would eye up Vice City or San Andreas for $5 or $10 and no micro transactions instead?

I think they could address both issues with a retro handheld. Cheap Chinese retro handhelds have been really popular the past few years- imagine one with the build quality, controls, support, legitimacy, and increased price tag of being from Sony? If it could play PS1, PS2, And PSP games that a gigantic library available that's mostly sitting idle right now. You could probably get by with a 480p screen too, although if Sony wanted a more premium feel 720p would still be fine. I'm also not sure if they would go 4:3, or expand to 16:9 to allow for the games that did support widescreen to use it, and for the PSP. Vita and PS3 would be cool, but I'll assume they aren't realistic for now.

From my experience with the Steam Deck- having dedicated extra buttons for save states and fast forward/slow down/pause/rewind breathes tons of new life into old games. Not enough check points? Really long unskippabke cutscenes or load times? The classic "unskippabke cutscenes before a long and challenging boss fight that makes you rewatch the cutscene every time you die"? All solved with save states and fast forwarding. It also helps with these games being designed for longer play sessions than would be typical for a handheld.

What I'm not certain of is- would this be differentiated enough to not cannibalize any new game sales? I suspect confining it to a separate, handheld platform would help to make it make sense. Maybe the dark horse candidate is Sony releasing a PC app on Steam as well, but I think cannibalization would be a different concern there.

Amazing. One of the best purchases I've ever made.

It's rare for me to see games in my library that are not supported, although there are a few. But there is a difference between running and running well. Demanding games will get maybe an hour of battery life and the fans will be pretty loud the whole time. Some games (especially strategy games) really work better with a full keyboard and a higher resolution screen. Some games I just would not want to play on a handheld. But most of the time the games that I want to play work well.

One trick I use to get better battery life and performance is streaming. I use Chiaki to stream from my PS4, and Steam Link (as a non-steam app lol) to stream from my desktop. It's often worth it for the fan noise reduction alone.

It's even better at emulation. It's a great machine for PS2 and GameCube games- I have the back buttons and track pads mapped to speed up, pause, slow, and rewind gameplay and to control save states. I have not dialed it in yet, but I think with some tweaking you could probably use the gyro and/or track pads to do some good Wii emulation. 3DS and DS are great too, mostly because of the track pads. Anything older emulates fine, but isn't as impressive.

I have gotten PS3 and Switch emulation to work, but the fans go on and the battery life goes down, so I don't really use it for that. Plus storage is a bit tight and PS3 games are huge.

It does feel like Valve was just a little too early. I wish the screen was 1080p.

The 2230 SSD's that it uses were kind of uncommon when it released. The weird size made them more expensive and they had lower capacities. I managed to get a 512GB one, but I wish I could have gotten like 2TB. It seems like that's changing now though. Similarly, I wish microSD cards came in larger capacities. Storage just seems to get used up so fast these days.

I might be out of the loop here. I know Nintendo is constantly swinging their lawyers around and Microsoft has put some barriers in front of running emulators on Xboxes. I'm trying to remember the last time I heard any Sony news about emulation though.

Last I can think of is whenever they removed the PS3 support for Linux in the name of "security" and had to pay out a class action settlement, but even that wasn't directly about piracy.

I have dumb TV's still with the same problem. It's to communicate that it's plugged in and receiving power. If the TV isn't working properly, that's easy to verify rather than having to worry about the surge protector, outlet, circuit breaker, etc.

The fact that TV's are "smart" is a whole other issue I could get curmudgeonly about.

No, but they had a very close relationship. Morrowind was an Xbox exclusive. Oblivion was a timed Xbox exclusive that was supposed to be a 360 launch title that got delayed (the Horse Armor fiasco happened in 2006, while Oblivion didn't release on PS3 until 2007).

"...The price point, at the time, was the issue. We felt, it's probably worth this," he said. "I won't say who at Microsoft said, 'Well, that's less than we sell a theme for; a wallpaper is more than that. You should charge this; you can always lower it'"

Even the horse armor, allegedly, was heavily influenced by Microsoft.

Horse armor came out in 2006. Micro transactions started in 2002 with Maple Story. Plenty of other games had micro transactions by then. Horse armor was a peak when Microsoft drove too hard and consumers pushed back- it was far from the start.

But how would you ever know the TV was turned off if it didn't have a light to tell you?

Reminder that "porn addiction" is NOT a recognized condition in the DSM. The only academic studies that have found porn to be addictive whatsoever all happen to come from religious institutions.

Porn can be habit forming but is not physiologically addictive. Lay people are easily influenced by the anti-porn conservatives when they hear phrases like "porn addiction" tossed around casually to the point where they believe it actually exists.

Should have done this within a few days of the terrible app release. It's months too late now.

RGB

Time zones are aligned to population centers as much as they are political boundaries.

For example, this methodology would probably cut major US cities in half. It's hard to tell exactly, but some cities would be Phoenix, the whole metropolitan corridor of Oklahoma City to San Antonio, Salt Lake City, and Detroit. In Canada, Edmonton and Calgary stand out.

In unrelated news, Boeing has revealed they will be entering the video streaming industry

Maybe this is just me, but in the past two decades in which I've been politically active, and in what I've studied of the past, I have never seen anyone ever support a strategy of trying to move already-elected politicians further left.

If anything, the discourse is usually about how presidents look more conservative than they are because conservatives have had control of Congress for all but a few months of the past 40 years.

Biden ended up being further left than I thought he would be, but I don't remember anyone suggesting pre-election that he could be pushed further left.

The president can't unilaterally decide whether tips are taxed or not either.

This article is not discussing an action Harris can or will take. This is discussing policies she supports- she can use political influence to help get it through and past Congress.

This applies to like 95% of all political discourse by the way. People want to blame the president because it's easier to blame one name and face than to try to pick out one of the hundreds in Congress.

This might've been the reality of playing PS2 in, like, 2014?

Nowadays, if you still are using PS2 hardware, aren't most people booting games other ways? I've seen USB loading (although there are some issues with bandwidth there) and of course using the HDD expansion. I thought I saw something about an Optical Drive Emulator a while back though maybe that was just a rumor. My favorite is loading over a network with an SMB share though.

"Commie mommy" Oh damn there's a lot of meme potential there. Doesn't even have to have anything to do with Kamala.

I also have a gaming PC (and I stream to every screen in the house) and a Steam Deck, so from that perspective it's even fewer exclusive games.

I do really prefer physical games, but even that is going away. Some games just don't release physically, or even if they have a physical version it's basically just a different kind of DRM. I recently bought Gran Turismo 7 physically and was incredibly disappointed that it had to install 128GB to the PS5 to even open, then it took a while downloading ever more updates and data once I opened it.

I traditionally loved Naughty Dog and Insomniac franchises, but Naughty Dog has only re-released games on the PS5 so far. Insomniac... Rift Apart is decent. I don't really like Marvel or superhero stuff though. I tried Spiderman and it's... Fine., but it really makes me wish I was just playing Sunset Overdrive instead. I'm in the process of playing through the older God of War games for the first time- so far they aren't bad but they seem overrated considering how hyped they were back in the day.

There's no killer Hideo Kojima game yet. Gran Turismo is a micro transaction, always online, multiplayer-focused shell of what used to be a great series. There isn't any equivalent to creative games like Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, Katamari Damacy, etc. Stray was really good- my PC kind of struggled with it so I might pick up the PS5 version if I ever see a physical copy on sale.

I don't know that it's just PlayStation either. Looking at my Steam library by release date, the last big AAA games I have are Yakuza 6 (2021, still haven't played it yet), Control (2020- although I think that's because I have the complete edition. The base game was from 2019), and Horizon Zero Dawn (similarly listed as 2020, but the base game would have been 2017). It seems like more and more studios are closing, more games being released are just "meh".

I bought it in the fall of 2022, when the shortages were just starting to end, expecting it would get more games. I wanted to get one before they did a mid-gen refresh that removed stuff like backwards compatibility, the disc drive, etc.

It's been really disappointing so far. I still think I've put more time into PS4 games than PS5 games. Astro's Playroom was fantastic, but unfortunately it is still probably the best game for the console.

"XXXXX Al" Yankovic in shambles