Agreed

Not a battery but sure, that’s what I was suggesting.

So what other kind of battery would a pager be using that might explode if not lithium? Hydrogen cell?

Exactly. I remember early days of smartphones before a lot of the safety precautions we have today were implemented, where we saw tons of videos of batteries spontaneously combusting. They expand, there’s a pop, and then a small burst of flame that will ignite anything it touches, like your pants, tables they’re sitting on while charging, etc. You can get pretty badly burned if this happens while it’s in your pocket.

It’s just that the videos that have come out of these pagers shows an actual explosion, as if they had been packed with C4. Enough to instantly kill some people with them on their person and harm adjacent passerbys.

Seems more like globalism is to blame. They were from a Taiwanese company but manufactured in Hungary.

Guessing the source of the pagers didn’t matter at all and Israel probably intercepted a shipment to plant bombs in them themselves. Lithium batteries can ignite, but they don’t just explode like that. There were bombs put in those pagers, be it by Israel or whoever else, coordinated as a targeted operation.

Ahhh, so they “mischaracterized” it. That makes it okay, then.

During Cerny’s presentation, he specifically talked about the compromise between 60fps performance mode and 30fps graphics modes, so it’s to get 60 fps that people are typically enabling performance mode for.

Chasing the “best version” is a fool’s errand, though. Unless you’re buying top-of-the-line hardware every cycle, you’ll never have the best. And even then, there are games that seem to target future hardware by having settings so high not even top-end PCs can max them out comfortably, and other games that are just so badly optimized they’ll randomly decide they hate some feature of your setup and tank the performance, too.

Everyone has their threshold for what looks good enough, and they upgrade when they reach that point. I used my last PC for 10 years before finally upgrading to a newer build, and I’m hoping to use my current one as long as well.

But just based on the displayed difference in performance between the base PS5 and the PS5 Pro, it doesn’t seem like a good investment for what benefits you get. It’s like paying Apple prices for marginally better hardware, and with overpriced wheels disc drive sold separately.

Now that’s a hot take.

Trying to be the Adobe of game engines is fine, but their online service is the line in the sand?

My memory may be hazy, but I recall the mainstream acceptance of the digital distribution model on PC as more of an early 2010’s thing. People hated Steam at launch, having yet another launcher you had to download which was basically just DRM for Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike.

It wasn’t until their marketplace opened up and they offered very attractive sales that people came around to it eventually.

The side-by-sides are definitely diminished returns compared to earlier gens where hardware bumps had very noticeable gains.

I am sure the performance is measurably better than the base PS5, but I don’t think it’s $200-plus-separate-disc-drive better.

I also found the game choices they used for some of these comparisons to be odd picks. Sure you have “Made for PS5” exclusives like the new Ratchet and Clank, Returnal, and Spider-Man 2, but they also heavily showcased:

• The Last of Us Part 2

• God of War: Ragnarok

• Ghost of Tsushima

• Horizon: Forbidden West

• Control

All of those are last-gen games that received PS5 enhancements. Being on a base PS5, I already feel like I am getting the “better” experience compared to the default for those games, so why upgrade?

I’d say Mario Kart 8 deserves recognition, but agree with the other ones.

The DNA example might be a bad comparison to make, though, when hereditary illnesses are also a comparison you could make to an engine that has the same flaws as it’s predecessors.

Hopefully whatever they do next with their engine moves away from the cells and worldspaces model of their previous engines. After all of Starfield’s criticisms, they need to move away from loadscreen triggers as much as possible.

None of their games are as good as Morrowind, yet that hasn’t stopped them from selling like hotcakes.

RIP this dev team, they can join Campo Santo in the “doing shit all” club.

I think there is some merit to using it in a critical sense, just based on what happened that one time it was used.

To me, AAAA means a game that was given way too much budget for its scope, to its own detriment. Take what should be a niche, mid-budget game and pump it full of cash. The game becomes too big to fail and needs to use every “play it safe” strategy the MBAs demand in order to recoup its budget. So it aims for broad appeal, which makes it fail at being the niche game it was supposed to be, and it ends up flopping.

They want to pay less than they were to whoever was in that spot before.

That or it’s one of the essential positions they didn’t want to downsize but the previous person left for other reasons.

To me that just looks like adulthood.

Because every step of the way, they need a flock of MBAs to figure out the answer to the question “How do we make money off of this?”

I don’t think it’s a texture bug, I think they just took the same model they use for the enemy unit, put them in poses, and then stuck a burn shader on there.