TheMightyEthan

Oh yeah, when I said diminishing returns I didn't mean it was a bad purchase, I definitely think it makes a very noticeable difference. I was talking about how you mentioned some people claim it's pointless at that size, and meant that you have to increase resolution more at each step to get the same benefit, which is why 4k looks about as much better than 1080p as 1080p does compared to 720p, but still the jump is very noticeable.

That's a whole lotta RPG gaming you've got ahead of you...

Can't wait for my robot butler. Hell yeah!

Yeah, there's diminishing returns, but it's not nothing. In my estimation the subjective image quality improvement between 1080p and 4k is about the same as the subjective improvement between 720p and 1080p.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim was on sale at GameStop for $30 new. I keep hearing how it's the greatest PlayStation game no one played this year, so I've been looking for a sale, and here it is. The GameStop sale also had a thing where if you buy a new game for $29.99 or more you get 30% off a used game, and I've been wanting to go back to Death Stranding to finish all the side stuff I left undone. Since I was going to buy 13 Sentinels at that price anyway, I figured I might was well take advantage of the extra deal. I also expect my PS5 won't sound like a jet engine during cutscenes the way my PS4 Pro did.

Yeah, but it's billed as a console, which to me means TV, which mostly means HDMI. It just being a custom case for an existing mini-PC makes sense though.

Concrete Genie This game is just lovely. You play as a kid with a magic paintbrush, and you use it to restore light and beauty to this rundown industrial area where you used to live by painting magical monsters that help you with light puzzles, as well as various scenes to clear away the darkness. It's thematically a lot like Flower, even though the gameplay isn't at all the same. It's just so nice. 5/5

From what I've heard the game runs smoothly in terms of framerate on PS5, but the new console doesn't make the PS4 code inherently more stable, so it still has the crashes.

I'm guessing FLD is right and it's the parts you were doing, because no one else has said any of the updates have made it playable on base consoles.

Glad it's working out for you so far. My plan is to wait until the PS5 upgrade comes out, then pick up a used PS4 copy on the cheap and take advantage of the free next-gen upgrade.

It says it supports 4k 240Hz, that's not even part of the HDMI spec, it is absolutely a joke. ?

@TheFlyingGerbil ! You're back!

I wouldn't hold my breath...

I forget, did you get a PS5? Or are you at least on a Pro?

Yeah, I keep thinking about that quote where they said it runs "surprisingly well" on last-gen. That might technically be true, in that it shouldn't be able to run at all, and the fact that they were able to get it to even kind of work is surprising, but the standards for public statements that might influence investors isn't "is this true?" it's "is this misleading?", and saying it runs "surprisingly well" is definitely misleading, even if it isn't strictly false.

Do you have any links for that? I've never heard a reviewer say they've ever been scared of being cut off if they're too harsh, every time I've seen one address the issue they've always said they've never been worried about that.

Yeah, just because reviewers aren't paid for good scores doesn't mean reviews aren't part of marketing. If they weren't marketing then no one would send out pre-release review codes.

Immortals Fenyx Rising This game was so good. It obviously has its roots in the recent Assassin's Creed games, particularly the combat, but it doesn't feel like an Assassin's Creed game, it feels like its own thing. It was really nice playing a AAA game with a lighthearted tone that wasn't from Nintendo (even though BotW was obviously another big influence). It's honestly like BotW and AC had a baby that somehow wasn't a deformed monstrosity. The exploration has a real sense of discovery, the towers only revealing the actual terrain, not ask the activities in it, you have to find those yourself. A lot of them can be marked on the map by looking at them through a telescope type view, but you have to look at them directly, and not every activity shows up that way. Even when I felt like I had pretty thoroughly scouted a region I would still stumble across puzzles and things just traveling through it. The world also managed to have that huge, empty feeling that BotW had, without ever feeling like there wasn't enough to do. There are far fewer quests than an AC game, and I think it benefits tremendously from that, there's a ton of stuff to do but the map doesn't feel cluttered. I beat the game but I still have stuff left to do, and I'm definitely in the mood to keep doing it. I can't wait for the Chinese mythology expansion. 5/5

Yeah, I'm super interested in that game.

How do you control the size of your save?

Wow, it's been a while since I posted in here... This is the promised crescent Venus photo: Not a lot to say about it, it was taken on April 10. After this it got too close to the sun for me to be able to observe it, and then it was rising in the morning, and I don't have a good view of the eastern skies. This is Mars taken on October 10, a few days before Mars' closest approach to Earth for the next 15 years, so it was unusually big in the sky. I was hoping I'd be able to see the polar caps, but no dice. The fact that I can see any surface features at all though is exciting. I took this tonight. A great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is on Monday, but the sky was clear tonight so I wanted to look at them in case it's cloudy on Monday. They're already close enough to get in a single telescope field, and they're going to get even closer over the next two days. I also lucked out and 5 of Jupiter's moons were lined up perfectly (the fifth one is super faint in the top left). This picture is a quick and dirty cleanup job I did, I'm hoping I can get something better after I do more work on some videos I took, but even if I can't this is pretty cool.

If I was naming the game that most exemplified gaming this year I would pick Animal Crossing, but as far as how good a game it was I would just rank it as okay. @Mal I don't really understand what 13 Sentinels is, but the art caught my eye. What is it and why is it great?

This is correct, the next gen consoles are just running the last-gen versions in backwards compatibility mode. It runs so much better just because they bring so much more raw horsepower to bear on it.

I think it's because those are settings that hit the GPU hard (especially depth of field), but the consoles aren't GPU limited, they're CPU limited, so freeing up GPU resources doesn't help.