tebbit

@efesell: well ok, lol. That’s very generous of you.

@efesell: I feel like (not to assume which country you’re from) you’re massively understating the impact of the Queen’s death on countries in the Commonwealth. She has literally been one of the few constants in most people’s lives, a stabilising force in a changing world.

It is a huge change, and an important cultural moment. Let people feel sad if they want to.

(Obviously it’s also ok to joke about it. Moments like this are ripe for satire - I just think it’s silly to take a stance like “the people who care about this are wrong”.)

In a similar vein to my previous comment, I could not stand the art style of Armoured Core 4.

The Armoured Core series is a great example of graphics getting technically better, but artistically worse. AC1 was big, blocky, and relatively colourful (in an industrial way), with a really vivid UI.

Each subsequent game in the series became more detailed, rounder, and greyer. And with the advent of AC4, bloom was finally technically viable. There are approximately 4 colours used in AC4: grey, brown, blue-grey, and blue-brown. Everything is washed out, then blown out further by excessive bloom, and even the UI is muddy. I'll never understand why anyone thought this style looks good - I suspect the intended effect was "gritty and stark".

The PS3/360 generation is littered with similarly styled games, so I suspect at least some of this proliferation of ugliness was a result of technical limitations.

I'm with you on this one. I'm not a big Souls guy so the gameplay I could take or leave, but the visuals are a major turn-off for me. I think its the combination of the drab colour palette, cartoon art style, and the bloom that looks like someone smeared vasaline on the screen.

It reminds me of the bad old days of flash animation in the mid-2000s. I will say that Salt and Sacrifice has at least gone for a much prettier colour palette.

(I know the game was made by a tiny team. It's certainly impressive for what it is, just not my taste at all).

Any Souls-like game. I want to love them, (I even imported the original Demons Souls from Japan before it was available overseas).

I have capacity to be methodical and consistent, which works great for some games, but the style of gameplay in Souls-likes marries this with a requirement to react quickly for long periods of time.

I just don't have the energy to zero in on something that intensely for that long - I tend to self-sabotage and relent my focus, which is almost always a run-ending move. The fluster overtakes me and I get kicked down a hole or crushed by a giant boot. I can do it in short bursts, as I've found myself doing in Returnal's boss fights, but the Souls's's / Sekiros of the world just ask too much of my nervous system.

@claude: @sweep: @biffmcblumpkin: nice to see y’all still around. This is like a weird online high school reunion. I had completely forgotten about these works of art.

I’ve been here since before the beginning (and stretching all the way back to Gamespot in the late 90’s). I love video games, and have visited thousands of sites in pursuit of them, and read or watched hundreds of different approaches to the medium.

I can genuinely say that nobody has done it better than these guys. Giant Bomb was a perfect storm of personalities. Just the right mix of enthusiasm, cynicism, passion, humour, and heart. Thoughtful, articulate criticism, juxtaposed against banana cream pies clogging a corporate toilet. Being brought to tears by the beauty of a moment. That one time Vinny said c**t. Knife vs Bat. The Giant Bomb experience is just so sincere, even in its insincerity.

Brad, Vinny and Alex, thank you for putting yourselves out here for all this time. You have each made a truly positive impact on my life. In weird and particular ways, I saw little bits of myself in you, and it made me feel like a part of something, if only by proxy. And looking at the rest of this thread, it’s obvious that this was not an isolated incident. You monsters. Love you all.

@corvak said:

Bingo, DirectStorage is the thing to wait for (same concept as the Series X / PS5 solid state architecture, but for Windows).

For those commenting that there is very little difference going from an SSD to a PCIe4 m2 card, you're absolutely correct. I've done that exact migration because I needed a bigger hard-drive for my OS and figured hey, why not future-proof myself by going to PCIe4. The difference in general performance and load / boot times is pretty negligable. There was a non-zero improvement, because I had a fairly old SSD, but it wasn't a gamechanger.

@vaiz: brb finding hat to eat.

Every rumor about the PS5 has indicated it's gonna be more expensive. I believe Sony is going to try to be the "premium" console experience, coming off the success of the PS4, just as they did with the PS3 (but with better marketing). I could be wrong, but I just can't see them sucking the number of eggs required to match (let alone beat) Microsoft's pricing.

EDIT: But I could see them matching Microsoft with the diskless version. In fact, they kinda have to.