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Cake day: February 18th, 2024

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  • Yeah, there’s a reason any movie attempting 3D CG with any budget at all has used path tracing for years. It’s objectively massively higher quality.

    You don’t need upscaling or denoising (the “AI” they’re talking about) to do raster stuff, but realistic lighting does a hugely better job, regardless of the art style you’re talking about. It’s not just photorealism, either. Look at all Disney’s animated stuff. Stuff like Moana and Elemental aren’t photorealistic and aren’t trying to be, but they’re still massively enhanced visually by improving the realism of the behavior of light, because that’s what our eyes understand. It takes a lot of math to handle all those volumetric shots through water and glass in a way that looks good.







  • I love my Steam deck, and bounce between how heavily I use it vs the switch* or PS5 depending on the games I’m into at the moment. But misrepresenting its utility as a modern living room PC (like the OP) doesn’t help anyone and is just going to leave people disappointed.

    The PS5 is probably my smallest library (and mostly PS4 games, a lot of which were before I had a PC), but it’s definitely plenty capable and I don’t regret the purchase at all. (The controller is also the coolest non graphics addition to gaming I’ve experienced in a long time).

    *The switch desperately needs a 3rd party replacement for the controllers, though, because the joycons are bad brand new.




  • If I’m playing modern games on a TV? PS5 easy. But still the pro over the deck.

    I love my deck. As the handheld it’s intended to be. It’s not powerful enough for an acceptable experience running a AAA 3D game on a TV screen. You can ignore the resolution and artifacts and just generally low visual quality and poor frame rate on a small screen, because playing the games portably at all is a huge step up. You can’t ignore any part of it on a TV. It’s fine for indie games, older games, 2D stuff, etc.

    But it doesn’t have the performance for a good living room experience if you’re looking to play modern AAA games. (Ignoring all their bullshit rootkits on PC that block a lot of multiplayer games out completely, which are the games you have to pay for on PS. You just can’t play most of them on Linux at all.)





  • The point (well, not his, which is about the absurdity of publishers using it as an actual official measuring stick) is that different people like different things. For some people a visual novel or walking simulator can be a 10/10 “game” for the story. For me, it will never be better than a 0, because I cannot enjoy a game without compelling gameplay mechanics. That’s an extreme example, but the point that different people put massively different value on different elements, many of which many players literally don’t care even a little bit about.

    An 8/10 isn’t objectively a worse game than a 9.5/10. It’s the average of a small handful of opinions, mostly from people who played the game at surface level and not like an actual player would, that’s heavily and inconsistently influenced by a variety of practices by publishers trying to get their grades pumped up. Game reviewers are almost never actual journalists with journalistic ethical standards. They’re not being “less than honest”, but they’re inherently influenced in ways outside their awareness that break the core premise of a score.

    Most reviews (including games) shouldn’t include scores at all. They should break down the different elements of a product, the strengths and weaknesses of each part, and let people draw their own conclusions.