majestic

You know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and art is subjective, but prefering this Beamdog travesty over the original is probably as close to being objectively wrong about aesthetics as you can get.

Well, the difference in efficiency provided by TSMC's 5N process node compared to Intel 7 cannot fully be made up by tuning, and even though you can do more for better effect on an Intel system by undervolting and setting power limits, physics gonna physic... If I were GREG I'd complain about them primarily using 7-zip for productivity efficiency under power restraints. The Ryzen CPUs are really far ahead in this particular workload, while it is much closer (or the other way around) in others. Limiting the CPUs to 95W and performing the Chromium compilation test would probably yield more favorable results for Intel - or at least results that aren't as much in favor of the AMD CPUs for efficiency. I posted about that before, but Der8auer made some tests back when the 13900K released, and locked to 95W it roughly performed the same in his benchmarks as a 7950X in Eco mode (i.e. a 95W power limit). GREG should really get the feeling that Steve picked the 7-zip test primarily to make a point because that is the single one of his productivity benchmark suite that will very clearly be in favor of AMD in terms of efficiency even if you'd lock both CPUs to the same power limit. That was very much a forgone conclusion. Well, GREG set himself up for it by saying all workloads, so sucks to be GREG. The argument that you could beat the larger 3rd level cache in gaming by power limits was also not very well thought out, to put it mildly. The 7800X3D performs exceptionally well even with its artificially crippled clock speeds (well, crippled might be a strong word, but at least compared to the other Zen 4 X3D CPUs, they are) due to having much less cache misses. The gap between the 7950X3D and the 7800X3D in games that do not have scheduling issues is so small that really proves how little the X3D's performance is reliant on clock speeds. That is how the 5800X3D is still sitting very close to the top of the charts in spite of having an older architecture, and the 7800X3D can be that efficient in gaming. That will only change if we either start running into a meaningful performance gain reduction for larger 3rd level caches (technically we're already looking it at, what with the difference between the regular Zen 4 parts and the X3D ones being less than the difference in Zen 3, but the scaling is still more than great) or when Intel just does the same with their new packaging and interconnection technology. The latter will come eventually, if all goes well, the former may or may not happen depending on cache sizes, game development and increasing memory bandwidth, or physical restrictions due to SRAM no longer scaling with node shrinks.

Well, the actual man-worm is in God Emperor of Dune, and that is book 4. I mean, yeah, technically Leto II fuses with larval stage sandworms in book 3, but the inhuman sand-worm is in the fourth one, set like ten thousand years after the first three books.

I actually started watching Diamond is Unbreakable a couple of days before you mentioned it, Netflix recently added it to the library (before there was only Phantom Blood, Battle Tendency, Stardust Crusaders and Stone Ocean). Don't know exactly what it is with JoJo's, but every time I am watching an episode I am having a blast with it, and wonder why I don't go through it at a faster pace, and then I just don't... dunno, I only watch like an episode or two a week, for some reason. The episode with THE LOCK was the first one in a while that I really did not like. The last time that happened was in Phantom Blood which had a bit of a rough start in my opinion. Eh, well, can't keep it up all the time, huh?

Only if you apply a very loose defintion of worth playing.

Whatever it is, it has Udo Kier, which is all that really needs to be said. Not gaming related, but this also has Udo Kier... singing.

やれやれだぜ。

So, with Lies of P done, and my interest in playing games sated for the time being, I went back to my long-ass list of shows and animes that I need to finish. I decided on watching the remaining elven episodes of kemurikusa. (that peroid is part of the name, but it is often omitted), or ケムリクサ - which just really spells out kemurikusa, a combination of smoke and plant. The characters and introduction I already posted two years ago, in case anyone's interested: This was my conclusion from the first episode: After watching the entire series, that changed from "I am happy that this is only twelve episodes" to being somewhat annoyed that it only has twelve episodes. The first episode aside, this is actually a fun, shortish sci-fi show, even if Ritsu's constant nyan-ing is highly annoying. In the second episode, the troupe of girls and Wakaba decide to go on a journey to a different island, to look for water. The world is covered in a strange, red mist, which they call red smoke (akakemuri, 赤煙), prolonged exposure is apparently deadly. There are also mechanical entities they call bugs, that I mentioned before. The red ones were corrupted by the red mist and seemingly attack the girls and Wakaba for no reason. Much of the episodes is spent on them traversing the post-apocalyptic wasteland the world has become, talking about this and that and nothing in particular. Whenever there's action, it usually makes sense, and in the middle there's a teamworking payoff action sequence where they combine their abilities to take down a giant enemy robot that they never managed to fight off before. When they finally find some more water, they end up realizing that things are much, much more dire than they ever imagined... Never thought I would like this, but the characters grew on me, even Ritsu and her stupid nyan-ing. As for the plot: There is not much of it, but that is not a bad thing - it means the anime has much more time to spend on the group just walking about and talking while overcoming hurdles along the way. I'd even give this a tacit recommendation*. Color me surprised. *Keep in mind that I consider myself compromised by prolonged exposure to nuTrek. I am uncertain if I can tell "this is okay to likable" from "well, at least it is not nuTrek level bad" at the moment.

Was my first reaction too, actually already had the post typed up saying "Looks like Intel recruited AMD's marketing team", but then decided against it. Kinda reminds me of Microsoft's early 2000 anti-Linux marketing campaign. That was a major facepalm moment too. The maximum die size in newer process nodes is going to go down drastically, as High-NA EUV lithography will basically shrink the maximum die size achievable down to 429mm², and to make matters worse, I/O is scaling poorly with new process nodes and SRAM has all but stopped scaling, but at the same time caches are getting larger and larger, and processors need more and more I/O. Not like Intel did not realize that at the time, but... actually, since Foveros is different enough, that's not actually the really stupid part about saying that AMD is gluing their CPUs together. The Pentium D series was just that. Two Pentium 4 CPUs glued together. Intel did it first, and pretty poorly at that. I actually had a Pentium D based system back then. That was, uhm, yeah. Pretty bad. I mean, it worked, and it was stable, but it required a ginormous copper block with a high RMP fan to cool it down, and the mainboards had to be designed to allow for massive bending due to the weight of the coolers. Netburst also turned out to be a dead end idea. Intel kept saying that the Netburst architecture will pay off once software is written specifically for it, but that never materialized. AMD would go on to copy the marketing idea when all they had were more cores on their Bulldozer CPUs, well, we have more cores, they're going to pay off eventually. Sure they did, just not within the lifespan of that architecture. Things to seem a bit cyclical, although Intel is not as far behind in performance as they were back before the Core 2 and later the Core series came out.

Jokes aside, it is doubly strange to make slides like that just shortly before the Meteor Lake laptops come out. Meteor Lake is going to be similar to the AMD 7520U insofar as they are going to have Raptor Cove cores on a smaller node they call "Redwood Cove", much like the 7250U has Zen 2 cores on a smaller process node. It is the whole reason there are internal slides and leaks showing the MTL CPUs being at best a boost in 5% in ST performance, with a larger multithread performance boost due to moving to Crestmont for the e-cores. Steve also said it in the video, Intel does have a point about the confusing naming schemes, but stones and glass houses and whatnot.

Congratulations Intel, after re-releasing Raptor Lake on desktop as "new" generation, complaining about AMD's laptop naming scheme is really, really pathetic. Never mind the refreshes of the past, and the confusing naming schemes of the past... uhm... fire whoever made this immediately. Edit: anyone wanna bet whether an intern made these slides or if they tried their new AI accelerators on a marketing AI? Can't have been someone with more than two brain cells or at least semi-familiarity with the current tech landscape.

Done with lies of P: NG+ optional final boss sure is something. Actually, the optional final boss is still the only one where I feel I have not really gotten a decent grasp on how to play against, but I've defeated it twice now (need to play through all the three endings for the achievements, and you need to fight it in two of them) by playing just well enough to get it down within a handful of tries. The other two non-optional bosses before it, well, they were pushovers in NG+. Anyone playing and struggling, well, don't sleep on throwables. There's a shop in the Malum District that carries an unlimited supply for all of them, at a fairly cheap price to boot (this should alleviate any concern about having to horde consumables), and they do pack a punch, inflict status effects and a large amount of stagger. If you can get any boss down to half their health there's a decent chance you can just throw stuff at them until they die. Adding extra belt slots and increasing your throwable carrying capacity through the upgrade system is very much worth it. The summoning system where you can get an NPC specter to help you fight bosses on the other hand is really hit and miss. I played though the entire game without using it, only trying it here and there on the later runs. In theory it is a good idea because the specter sometimes has aggro from the boss and you can freely wail at their backside, however, many boss attacks and abilities hit in very wide angles, or even cover 360°, making them more of a curse then a blessing. They also don't stop the boss from just switching to you in a sequence of attacks that is patently hard to read from behind them. Probably the least interesting aspect of the combat system. Could use some work. Looking forward to the teased Wizard of Oz game from Neowiz.

Look, Joe liked Lies of P enough to release his first video in a year: Bit on the short side, but I'll take it.

I always leave my car on the sidewalk. Gouranga.

Let me take a moment to revel in the genious design decision to have a record collection in Lies of P. As you are playing Pinocchio, it should be no surprise - and not a great spoiler - to say that by the end of the game, you can become a real boy. To do so one needs to make the right choice at a certain point in the game and to participate in certain game activities to increase a hidden humanity counter, basically behaving like a human, including lying your sweet butt off (including a growing nose, even if it is not on Pinocchio himself) and the aforementioned record collection. To score humanity points, you can listen to the records you find on a gramophone. However, you can only get the points after listening to each record in full, and as they're regular music pieces, their runtime is somewhere between two and four minutes. This process cannot be sped up, and make no mistake, what a mistake speeding up the process would be, otherwise why else would you be forced to take a break to appreciate the game's soundtrack to unlock the best ending. Have you ever experienced a better, more interactive way to appreciate a game soundtrack than to stop the game dead in its tracks, forcing the player to pause and take in everything they experienced? To put a soundttrack in front and center in game mechanics, even, is such a stroke of genius, that I find myself unable to express it in words befitting the idea, and that is before appreciating the genre of music you can collect, as it is perfectly fitting music for a Belle Epoque game. Not the usual grand, orchestral pieces with a choir, no, but intellectual music: jazzy pieces often including a bandoneon. How can it possibly get any better than that?

Hey, Pinocchio is a silent protagonist. Well, jokes aside, it is okay for characters to have motivations that the player needs to come up with, but in such instances the games surrounding that decision need to support that. I am uncertain if I can come up with a video game example, but since I played D&D with friends in the past, well, while there is a DM that prepares an overall game to go through, everything else is player driven. That is fine with me, really. It does not have to be much, I was fine with IWD's character motivation. You're an adventurer and there's money to be made, then you just stumble into the game's story - although I did not really enjoy the game too much, as having no connection to any of the characters in my party was not a very enjoyable experience for me. Having to come up with something on my own in a world and/or scenario that does not support it at all just makes my mind go . That is different from being shown something that needs a whole lot of personal interpretation, for instance, something like Utena is acceptable as long as all the other elements are good enough (which in Utena they were not). See, I almost quit playing Dark Souls right after the tutorial area because nothing about it made sense, and then it got worse, because not only are you the chosen one, you're the "chosen one" for a reason that is entirely for your own to come up with. What? It is a good tutorial area to explain the gameplay, but it does such a poor job at explaining the whats and whys of anything else that I just had no desire to continue, although the biggest reason I continue to talk about Dark Souls whenever such a topic comes up is because there's an army of fanboys telling everyone what a great story the game has. Insofar, yes, I'll take a poor explanation and attempt at giving me motivation and a plot to follow than none. I find it easier to deal with (slightly) worse gameplay when there's an attempt at storytelling, than vice versa, i.e. the absence of sense and motivation weighs worse than anything else in a game, and that extends to a whole lot of games, not just ARPGs. Sins of a Solar Empire was the biggest disappointment ever, in spite of being an otherwise enjoyable game with fantastic presentation (well, for the time). Way, way back my fellow students in high school all raved about how great Total Annihilation was, so I checked it out, and... never got beyond the third mission or so. The game's just a collection of skirmish maps. Thanks, but no thanks. I finished the ludicrously terrible Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, where every single element is horrible, from the gameplay to the storyline where it is revealed that Kane is in fact the biblical Cain, and an alien that got stranded on Earth thousands of years ago. I dropped Total Annihilation like a hot potato, because the game allowed me to, and because I did not like it. Hey, perhaps you do have a point. The absence of anything that drives my need to finish something might really be a good thing, after all. Well, still beats playing the chosen undead who is chosen for no reason, locked up for no reason, and freed for no reason just so the game can begin in a tutorial prison. Although, well, I don't think Lies of P is a game that you would enjoy. It might not lock you into one particular playstyle like Sekiro, but it shares some other elements that you heavily criticised. Next to having a group of uncanny valley characters, justified since they are puppets or not, there's still the issue of exploration being absolutely limited and not really worthwhile.

Amazon made me a really good offer on one of their Fire TV sticks recently, so I bought one for cheap. Currently setting it up so it can replace my PS4 - the only reason I turn on the console is to stream videos, after all, and not only does it draw way too much power for that, resulting in it sounding like a jet turbine after a couple of minutes. Having an actual remote vs. a PS4 controller is also a major usability win.

Well, you know what I think of Dark Souls fabled "story", although that is probably the fandumb's fault. For years before I actually tried the game I just heard two things about it, one is how hard it is, and two just how great the story of the game is. Imagine how disappointed I ended up being when the game was neither very difficult nor did it have an actual plot, the game is worse than Mass Effect 2 in that regard, and that is hard to achieve. It does have great world building and interesting (and bizarre) lore, yes, but story? Now, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed playing Dark Souls a lot in spite of my expectations not being met (which is a testament to how good the game really is), but the protagonist does not even have any motivation to do anything in the game. It starts with you locked in a cell with no explanation how you got there, someone throwing you a key telling you to get out, and that's it. In light of that experience, a Soulslike trying actual storytelling is all well and good in my book. Even if it is bad, it still beats Dark Souls because they at least tried. Hell, Hellpoint, for all its flaws, tried both, as you just spawn into the world moments after a disaster and try to figure out what the hell happened and fulfill your purpose, after all, an AI made your body for you to collect that information for it. Eh. Time to step down from the soapbox. Edit: I guess part of the issue is that I feel like the setting of Dark Souls was creative and unique, and it feels a little wasted on the game it houses. I don't really know if the second or third game improve on that aspect, but somehow I doubt it. Edit 2: Pinocchio being very uncanny valley is part of the game. He looks like he looks. Eh. Well, most of the time, you just see his back anyway.

Lies of P, just got the Rise of P ending. If you like Soulslikes and are not someone who needs exploration with any sort of depth or great rewards, this is definitely one to try out. The game is fairly linear, i.e. at best you have a secondary path with some loot or two along the way, which is a clear break from the usual From Software style. There are plenty of arcane stats and mechanics, although nowhere near as bad as they were in Dark Souls. Combat wise it is a hybrid between Sekiro and Bloodborne, but different enough to be its own thing. The game is a lot more rewarding - and probably easier - to play if you remove preconceptions from earlier Soulslikes. Perfect guarding (the term for parry in Lies of P) attacks can stagger enemies, but dodging has a definite place in the combat system too. Dodging a slow, sweeping attack that would knock you back even with a perfect guard gets you close to the enemie and lets you attack them, for instance. The weapon system is fun, being able to freely switch between movesets and special attacks by combining different handles with different weapon blades, but in one of the more arcane design choices combining handles with blades that were not meant for their combat style results in doing less damage than usual, and this is only inidicated by an easily missable and small double down-arrow on the weapon assembly screen. Guess it makes sense, putting a giant wrench head blunt weapon on a dagger handle is possible and gives you fast attacks, but it will not be optimal for damage. Might still be a good combination though. One of the patches along the way changed the behaviour of the combined weapon parts, so more options became viable, apparently. Never played before 1.3, so no first hand experience. A lot of things are straight up taken from the Souls series, like special boss weapons and boss souls ergo that you can trade in for special items. Anyway, as I never played it before the patches, I cannot comment on the difficulty of the game too much. I did not get stuck anywhere, and even the final three bosses, arguably the hardest in of the game, took only a handful of tries to defeat. They're all definitely easier if you're used to Sekiro-style parrying though, so maybe keep that in mind if you want to check it out. Oh, lest I forget, unlike the Souls series, this one has actual storytelling, which is always a great plus in my book. The Belle Epoque steampunk setting is also pretty neat.

Look on the bright side, now we can all spec Ember in a much more lore appropriate enchantment/conjuration build without feeling like wasting the potential of a boss deleting godess of death and destruction.

Can always get Cyberpunk for some eye candy. 's 50% off on GOG. Caveat: Have not paid any attention to the gaming threads in a long while, so if you have it already, ignore the post.

I don't watch the anime or read the manga, and even I know the main story is about Anya making faces.

I'm glad I finished my Unfair run while all these were still an option. My Angel Oracle run heavily relied on all of these, and it was still an annoying slog more than anything.