fuzzywombat

Damn. This sucks. I've been buying Crucial ram sticks as long as I can remember. They've been the reliable go to brand for me. First it was EVGA and now Crucial. How depressing.

Memory prices are crazy. I bought 96GB of DDR5 6400Mhz sticks for $320 back in February. Now it's $750.

Unfortunately no pricing has been announced. I think that will determine if this hardware is worth the money. The design is pretty cool though. The big downside is 8GB VRAM and GPU is AMD's RDNA3 which is bit old. Otherwise it's an interesting concept.

Not all kernel level anti-cheat are the same. Riot's Vanguard and whatever Battlefield 6 uses requires TPM and SecureBoot and they quite invasive. I believe Vanguard just runs in the background even when you're not running the game which is awful. Arc Raiders devs made some pragmatic concessions to allows the game to run on Proton and Steam Deck which is pretty good.

IGN put out a first preview video of Arc Raiders couple months ago and it was borderline hit piece. The quality of the video was unbelievably bad. They made the game look muddy, dated, and choppy. This wasn't IGN trying to showcase the game on some realistic typical gaming hardware. In reality the game is well optimized and visually really good on moderate level hardware. I hear the game looks fantastic on consoles. Maybe they'll do a full review now that the game is finally released but I question the journalistic integrity of IGN.

This guy will get tons of flak and maybe even death treats for criticizing Valve. For whatever reason there is a rabid cult like following for Valve and Gabe Newell. I remember several years ago I said something like "Valve is still a company that's out to make money at the end of the day" and several of my gaming friends instantly were no longer friends. It's quite hilarious for me to just think about that even today.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2025/summary/

The Nobel Peace Prize 2025 was awarded to Maria Corina Machado "for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy."

Last few words are almost like they're thumbing the nose of one specific person.

I can see Trump threatening Norway with a tariff if he doesn't get the Peace Prize. He is so petty and shameless he would actually do it.

Raising the price of hardware twice since May and now raising the price of game pass by 50% is not something a company would do if they're interested in competing against Sony or Nintendo. Clearly Microsoft has thrown in the towel on XBOX. Only thing left for Microsoft to do is announce cancellation of next gen console altogether and do layoffs. I don't know when that will happen but it's inevitable at this point.

50% price hike means Microsoft is basically betting that less than 1/3 of the current subscribers will cancel. Microsoft is also betting that some will not cancel but just downgrade to lower tier instead. If more than 2/3 of the subscriber remain a subscriber then Microsoft will come out ahead.

At one time XBOX fanbase were so desperate to play games like Halo and Gears of War that they were wrapping their dead XBOX 360 in a towel and putting it in an oven to resurrect it. That sounds so insane but it actually happened. Fast forward to now, Microsoft has raised hardware prices twice since May and now raising price of their game pass by 50%. Clearly they're no longer interested in increasing XBOX market share or even retaining it. They've pivoted their strategy to milk their current XBOX fans as much money as they can until the brand is completely dead.

We already have a large cult/religion that started out with an author and a book so I can definitely see another one forming from some guy and a video game.