legend

I'm afraid to hear the answer, but does Battle Aces still have unit building? Because I kind of hate unit building.

Space shooter rogue-like peaks my interest.

PowerRangers coop could be fun.

MechaBreak might be cool.

I guess he got the memo that people didn't like how cavalier the GotY awards were to layoffs.

Oooh gotcha. Yeah that makes less sense

I did QA testing for the original 2002 game!

You guys mean when he turned it on in the cave? Pretty sure he was using it as a flashlight/lantern. It just looks funny because the scene was far more over lit than it was supposed to be.

I enjoyed it on its own, but supporting couch coop with my wife raises it to the next level.

Yeah I'll pick this one up soon.

It was certainly primarily IBM. I'm pretty sure Sony was involved in the design, but I honestly don't remember the details as well I used to know them. Either way, that's exactly what I mean by it being more complicated with other company involvement. EDIT: Wikipedia at least indicates that it was a joint design effort, also with Toshiba. Cell (processor) - Wikipedia EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG

Oh and I can't forget one of my favorite childhood scenes: when Luke beats Vader. Great fucking music to capture the emotion.

If the OT feels more serious, I'd wager that 90% of that vibe is because John Williams rocks. The music for the double sunset, and when Yoda is dishing out wise words makes it all feel much more important. E.g.,

I'm not sure Sony could have justifiably funded it at the time. It's a huge financial effort to push novel parallel architectures, and it's complicated when you're also forced with to work with various other companies (e.g., IBM for Cell). Nvidia had an existing business model for their chips that were already usable in standard PCs (which was critical to capture the AI market) and it was fortuitous that that existing business model worked well for accelerating AI. That allowed them organically and sustainably grow into it. Sony's main business model that would have supported it was PS, but as we both agree, you couldn't have really justified it there making it nothing more than a cost they'd have to bear. Even in retrospect knowing that AI blew up, it's unclear that there would have been a viable business model for Sony to go from where things were to being a big player in the AI hardware space. The only good alternative candidate where in retrospect you could easily justify it is AMD and perhaps Intel. Both of them had more clear organic paths to it in the same way Nvidia did.

I'm not sure how much I would conclude that from the statement, but I do see what you're worried about. I'm worried in general just because Bioware isn't the same place anymore.

What is it about that statement that makes you feel that way? Seems like it could be said of any Bioware RPG except maybe BG1.

Not all that much. Crazy architectures mean more work because there are less standards and libraries that can be applied. The cost of that outweighs the benefits. For example, back in the day I took a class on programming for the Cell processor and did a simple ML application. I got the cell version to scale really well with SPUs and it blew out of the water standard CPUs. I even posted about it on the IGN boards! But the work was enormous in comparison and game dev would only be harder given time constraints and human bandwidth. So the exotic architectures are not really worth it in that regard. For the PlayStations, the fact that AMD isn’t competing with Nvidia on AI isn't as bad either. GPUs are kind of already good out of the box for model inference. Yes, tensor cores are nice and give a bump, but the disparity for inference in terms of raw compute isn’t that great in the grand scheme of things. Especially not since on a fixed platform you can hyper optimize if you need to. The real disparity is on the training hardware with data center GPUs for AI and the accelerated libraries for training. This doesn’t matter much for the PlayStation itself since you’re not going to use the PSs for training.

I am begging AMD to compete on AI.

Yeah, CG trailers suck and mean next to nothing. They're forgivable only when they're accompanied by non-CG trailers. Plausibly some of the trailer did include some "gameplay," but if it did, it comes across as still highly curated and not indicative of gameplay.

My wife is going to be so pissed if they don't show anything on Fable.

Never seen either of them, but the "we are venom" bit got a chuckle from me!

This has got to be one of the creepiest gifs I've ever seen. Whoever did this is a master.

Do the side quests and gather lore pieces that have to do with Mother Sphere. That's pretty much the formula. Whenever you do one of those quests or get one of those items, you'll see the level for Lilly appear in the top right corner of the screen. And if its already max it will just be a star or something, rather than a bar (I forget now). They really ought to have just shown her meter all the time whenever you talk to her like the other characters. I'm surprised that hasn't been patched in.