Both lasted for around seven years. Not great, not terrible.

I’ve still got a Samsung Odyssey+, which is a WMR headset, a standard from Microsoft that they have unfortunately sunseted (update 24H2 drops support), which is why I can’t recommend it. I’m sticking with 23H2, which should give me until November of next year to find an alternative. It’s a shame, really, because these headsets are cheap, easy to use, work with most games and all have rather excellent screens. Controllers aren’t the best, but still good enough even for demanding games.

The best light gun shooter I’ve ever played is a small VR game: Space Pirate Trainer. You’re just standing on a landing pad shooting down waves of robots, but it’s incredibly well balanced, has an ingenious dual-wielding system allowing you to prioritize protection or various kinds of firepower. You’ll leap around, duck and throw yourself to the ground trying to evade the merciless onslaught. It’s a ton of fun and a surprisingly good workout at the same time.

I’m mentioning this game, because I think that VR shooters are the modern-day successors to light gun shooters. Many players are so fully immersed in the latter already that they are instinctively ducking and evading enemy fire with their bodies, even though it has no actual effect on these games. In VR however, it does and the way you are aiming and firing is identical, albeit not limited by a static screen.

Why not ditch soda altogether?

I’m sure ChatGPT worked hard on regurgitating decades of existing corporate speak for this nonsense.

I should have mentioned that these tokens are one time only.

That’s just the reality of doing business on the Internet. This is by far the best way of doing it right now, not that this information appears to have made it down under so far.

While Australia’s new legislation is ham-fisted and poorly thought out, the intent isn’t wrong and there’s broad consensus for it (77% approval in Australia). We need to do something about the uncontrolled exploitation, manipulation and endangerment of minors by social media services. Corporations are clearly not interested in protecting them and parents are obviously incapable of it as well (although I could have told you the same thing 20 years ago). That’s precisely the kind of issue where the government is supposed to step in with regulation of some sort.

There are existing systems that use a digital token created with the ID document. Only this token that confirms the user’s age is sent to the social media site, which means its minimally privacy invasive. Unfortunately, it seems like nothing like this is planned to be used in Australia.

Unlike in the past, current-day teenagers are less technologically competent than older people. The vast majority will not be able to figure it out, especially those who were using TikTok as a search engine (I wish I was making this up).

I had given up all hope, but we have a winner nine days late!

Can we do the same with CEOs and politicians, please?

It’s also worth noting that the German state of Lower Saxony is holding a significant portion of the group’s shares (11.8% - but they have 20% of voting rights, granting them a blocking minority). This means that anything the company is doing is always under additional public scrutiny, at least within Germany.

The relevant patents expired a long time ago. MPEG codecs were not free and the research society did sue those who used them without acquiring licenses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing,_ownership,_and_legislation

In response to these licensing costs, ogg Vorbis was developed as a free alternative. However, Fraunhofer also co-developed AAC, which is open source (although patents still protect it and require licensing for redistribution). You may have heard of it if you’re into watching movies.

Not that any of this matters, because as you can read in the excerpt above, Teuken-7B is released as both a research version and a version under the Apache 2.0 license, which permits commercial use and redistribution without any payments to the society.

Black Flag came out in 2013, so this tracks.

Although, having said that, they have released at least a few interesting things since then, good games and ideas that somehow made it through their corporate nonsense (which developers have made fun of themselves, like in the present day sequences in Black Flag) and might motivate someone to hold their nose and play them regardless, like for example their charming “Indie-like” games made by small teams within their oversized studios (Rayman Legends/Origins, Grow Home/Up, Valiant Hearts, various 2D Prince of Persias, etc.), neat VR experiments (e.g. Star Trek Bridge Crew), educational modes/spin-offs based on the Assassin’s Creed games that cut out all of the slop and allow users to explore these game worlds freely - and Ghost Recon Wildlands, which on one hand is a hugely expensive AAA game with all of the typical trappings, from massive production values to godawful writing, but it also has a charming amount of jank and somehow really fun power fantasy squad command gameplay - but only after removing the awful launcher and DRM that makes you feel like the company hates you for buying their games.

Except that it was proven that slaves were providing labor to VW, at the very least indirectly through suppliers.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/05/27/volkswagen-address-uyghur-forced-labor

This game has a few technical issues. Widescreen is broken by default and the maximum horizontal resolution is limited:

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dark_Sector

There are also stability issues, especially on modern hardware. It’s not a particularly great game anyway, not even by the standards of AA games from the 360 era. I would only recommend it to die-hard fans of Warframe who want to see some early versions of assets and designs they are used to. IIRC, some assets are even identical. At least it’s very short.

That’s not how autocratic regimes are operating. Small communities are never safe. In fact, they are convenient targets to make an example of.

They can also be infiltrated with sockpuppets far more easily, like Russia has been doing for a long time now.

You could easily keep the same resolution, whilst dropping things like particles, shadow effects, etc

This would require per-game adjustments, which is not something you can ask of devs mid-gen, especially not retroactively. Developers already hate that they have to optimize for Xbox Series S - and that console was available from the start. This portable PS5 can only be a success if it “just works” and the only way to do that is by having the exact amount of CPU power as the home console and reducing the output resolution automatically, perhaps with the help of PSSR. Until there is an efficient APU that can pull this off, the console can’t be released.

Doing this before the last election would have been thinking ahead. Now they are just reacting.

The Vita was a 3DS competitor, not a DS competitor. They kind of tried to outgimmick Nintendo with this one, unsuccessfully, I might add, because they didn’t build the system around these features, but slapped them on in such a way that developers and players could just ignore them.

The PS5 controller is somewhat of a descendant of this device, although its features are a bit better supported - and it would be trivially easy to integrate them into a handheld.

As for processing power, they need to find a way to get the same CPU power as a base PS5 and enough GPU power for somewhere around 1080p (since going any lower would render many games designed for the home console unplayable) into a cost-, heat, space- and power-efficient package. Most of this work is on AMD, Sony just has to package it. Maybe they can get away with a system that simply forces a lower output resolution for existing games so that less GPU power is needed - or they wait long enough for it to be possible to miniaturize a full-fat PS5 into a portable device. I think the latter is unlikely though, at least within a time frame that would allow for a PS5P to coexist with the PS5 instead of the PS6.