I want to first say that if it was 2005, hi-fi was expensive. Today hi-fi is cheap and you quickly run into diminishing returns at like ~$300 for around ear headphones but IEMs are cost effective and you get good quality starting at like $20. The gist of the history is that ChiFi changed the whole audio market for quality at affordable prices

Any bluetooth headset will work from what I’ve tried. You don’t have to spend a lot. You can use the Anker brand Soundcore bluetooth noise cancelling headsets

https://www.amazon.com/Soundcore-Cancelling-Headphones-Comfortable-Bluetooth/dp/B08HMWZBXC

https://www.amazon.com/Soundcore-Adaptive-Active-Cancelling-Headphones/dp/B0B5VHRX7F

Not sure if anything beats the Q30 at its price point but bumping up to the Q45 is an increase in build quality so even though my Q30 are multiple years old, I’ve heard from others who are more abusive of their gear it breaking. You can also use wireless TWS earphones. Like I have moondrop and earfun brand TWS (category of earphones that Airpods are). They’re cheap and are adequate at low prices though you can jump to the higher priced ones they have and get better mic quality. Examples such as

https://www.amazon.com/EarFun-Canceling-Snapdragon-Bluetooth-Detection/dp/B0D5M9SH1X

https://www.amazon.com/Moondrop-Space-Travel-Noise-Canceling-Low-Latency/dp/B0FGDBP2ZZ

The IEM market is insanely competitive. You can google best IEM’s for $30 and see dozens of brands you’ve never heard of but if you aren’t deep in the placebo, you’ll probably find any of them pretty good

I have no cadence. Unless whatever software you’re using is unstable, you probably won’t notice updates. I update on a whim which is often because it’s habit. Though sometimes it can be weeks between when I run the update

After Mattrick, they probably shouldn’t have promoted internally from the executive class that went along with the pivot of internal studios to kinect and home theater media center. They needed leadership that knew how to deliver quality games on time. Saw Sony hit its stride mid-PS3 era with the advent of the AAA narrative action adventure game and could never adjust to that. I know American company, but maybe they should have looked to Sega, Capcom, Koei Tecmo to lead Xbox game studios and someone else to lead hardware and services. Xbox was at its best when it was paying for timed exclusives in the 360 era from third parties and funding 2nd party exclusives. Their internal studio production has been weak for like 20 years. Halo, Gears, Forza Motorsport, Fable has fallen to all of them in the doldrums and Forza Horizon being their only high tier Xbox associated IP now. I’d take someone from Square Enix today to lead Xbox studios today. The last decade they’ve churned out games even though mostly not AAA, they’re mostly solid games and satisfy a lot of niches like Dragon Quest Monsters. Square Enix games are oddly experimental and creative for such a large publisher. Something Xbox sorely lacks. Master Chief is barely surviving as a console mascot and that’s practically all they have at this point. Conker and Banjo are irrelevant with how they’ve handled those IPs

Now with MGSIV PC announced, mainly care for God of War Ascension and Eternal Sonata. Eternal Sonata you can get through but you’ll have to change settings at different parts in the games that crash or when it crashes, you run the game again and successfully get past the part it crashed at. I tried a little bit of White Knight Chronicles and that worked. Just haven’t tried to get far. RPCS3 is incredible. I remember like a decade ago people were saying it’s design was a dead end and they’d have to start over. Good to see those people were proven wrong

I religiously watched Toy Story 1 and 2 as a kid and day one for 3 and 4. Not a fan of Woody going back to a family with the rest of the toys. Seemed a fitting end/new direction to become independent and pretty much live out a commune life with other abandoned toys. In this case it’s Disney that won’t grow up and move on

I’m sure they’re well aware that the biggest knock on Starfield are its forgettable plot and universe and too much loading screens. It’ll be less of a problem in an Elder Scrolls game as it’s building on a great lore foundation and it’s a region rather than a bunch of planets. I’m sure in the 7+ years later I expect to actually play the game, loading screens won’t be much of a problem. Improved graphics will be a given. It won’t set the world on fire but it’ll look firmly like it belongs in the PS5 generation which is good enough for me

Crazy. They could have at least put them on a new remake project. I don’t understand closing studios that are provenly productive. Replace leadership. Replace directors/leads if they’re not proving to lead well or their ideas aren’t panning out commercially but don’t shutter the whole studio. Like 343 Halo games aren’t critical success but they deliver products. Obsidian games aren’t selling great currently but they ship products on the regular. Bluepoint could be making smaller games like Twisted Metal. More remakes. Jak and Daxter remakes or sequels. Square Enix get’s a lot of flak like every mega publisher but I think they’re great for making a bunch of smaller AA games along with big games like Final Fantasy

I agree. It’s the same to me with how people get mad at yearly phone releases. There are people upgrading every year. It could be after 3 years 5 years. It’s best that they have the best that is possible that day then buying 3 year old hardware because some people think release cycles should mirror their upgrade cycles

Plus hardware progression pushes the low end higher which is a great thing. The Steam Deck 4 years ago was an awesome thing. It was cheap for the time. Sub $400 for access to nearly the whole PC library. A successor would make more higher end games that have released since more accessible especially if pricing didn’t become so wonky since. Plus older games could then be played at 4-10w TDP settings meaning longer battery life on older games

Same with the Steam Machine. Could have been a great cheap Valve supported mini-PC gaming console that was multiple times stronger than a Steam Deck. It’s was something that can push forward open platforms (Linux) in multiple ways. It would have in the box a gamepad. It would be a play for the living room. Maybe services like Crunchyroll and Netflix would have interest in releasing apps onto Steam or Flathub for it. It could grow to be a strong competitor to Android TV and fully proprietary walled gardens like Apple TV and Roku. Any delay delays the ecosystem developing

Delaying the PS6 is unlikely to mean an upgrade in its capabilities. It’s waiting for manufacturing prices to drop, not for engineering to complete. Upgrades require further funding for engineering redesigns. Really a PS6 delay is only good for the continued viability of the Switch 2 and Steam Deck for new releases

Poor optimization is also a result of the democratization of video game development. You don’t need to be a wiz at assembly, C, and C++ anymore. You don’t need to be a wiz at shader programming, GPGPU programming. You don’t have to learn the nuances of the underlying hardwares architecture. Not it’s GPU, CPU, memory design, etc. Most devs aren’t engine developers and I’m most games people enjoy today would not be made today if it wasn’t for the streamlined development that video game engines like Unreal, Godot, Unity, Creation, Source, etc enable. Even with source available, only a limited number of developers would modify Unreal Engine for optimizations (I wouldn’t do that for Epic. It’s not a free engine. That’s their job). Most won’t modify Godot or O3DE

If someone doesn’t like Mozilla, use a Firefox fork rather than a chromium one. Brave and other chromium forks to get away from Google surveillance and dominance of web standards makes no sense to me

You can use this to connect your TV to bookshelf speakers through an optical cable. Just need some speaker wire or banana plug cables to go with it

https://a.co/d/06KEUx7E

This one has HDMI ARC which most sound bars use for connection along with optical

https://a.co/d/0cKQrMAZ

Then offerup/craigslist/marketplace for used bookshelf speakers. Practically anything will be far better than your TV. Like $50 used polk, klipsch, and sony speakers are real common on the second hand market. They may be old but speakers last a real long time if you’re not blasting them at super high volumes. Go for speakers that have 5.25"-6.5" woofers. You’ll appreciate them for music too

There’s a bunch of brands and you really can’t go wrong compared to TV speakers. Edifer powered speakers don’t require a separate amplifier. Other major brands like ELAC, Kef, wharfdale, paradigm, …

Usually when I hear someone swear by lossless audio one service provides compared to another, I swear the reality is either placebo or one service is just using a better masterering of an album compared to another. The service that has on their service the better version album mix and mastering. Like they could serve it as 192kbps MP3 and sound better than a lossless encoded album version with the non ideal mix and mastered release

I’ve been in the audio enthusiast community for like 17 years now. When I was fresh, the internet commentators had me thinking there was some audio heaven in the high end compared to the mid range priced gear. Now I know better and the gear community is not so high end price evangelicals like it used to be. I feel like there was a before and after the $30 Monoprice DJ headphones and the wave of headphones since. Then especially IEMs. Once ChiFi really got rolling with IEMs and amplifiers and DACs, $1000+ snake oil salespeople got to deal in a way more competitive market

Same with speakers. Internet changed everything. No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys. Now you got the whole worlds amount of speaker brands at a click of a finger plus craigslist/offerup. Also again ChiFi amplifiers and DACs. Also improvements in audio codecs whether for wireless or not. Bluetooth audio was awful until it stopped being awful as standards improved

These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys. Headphone and speaker communities these days seem a lot more self aware and steeped in self-deprecating humor over the cost, diminishing returns, placebo, snake oil they live in today compared to 17 years ago. I want my digital audio cables endpoints plated with the highest quality diamonds to preserve the zeros and ones. No lab diamonds. Must be natural providing the warmth only blood diamonds that excel in removing negative ions. I treat my room with the finest pink himalayan salt sound absorbent wall panels to deal with the most problematic materials used by homebuilders. Authentic himalayan salt has been shown to be some of the highest quality material in filtering unwanted noise and echos while leaving clean pure audio bliss

There are levels of paranoia that gets to the point of excessive time spent managing your footprint that could be better used elsewhere as I would imagine especially if you’re not a high value target. I am not a high value target

In my group of friends I describe what I feel related to this as, obsession with youth/fear of aging, and consumerism/tourism rebranded as spirituality/wellness/experiences

Definitely felt like everyone had one. Nintendogs, Cooking Mama, just something basic PictoChat were all super popular. I felt like Diamond and Pearl were really hyped up. The power of casual games and local multiplayer made the DS so much more popular than hardcore home console and PC gamers ever recognized. I imagine the Switch being the only console to be as much of a menace in the classroom for teachers as the DS was

I’ve had Super Bomberman R on the Switch since sometime 2017. There are probably Bomberman connoisseurs out there but for me, R is all I’ll ever need for playing with friends on occasion

The main thing is if you like or can stomach the combat. The games stories are connected but work fine standalone. I like XC 3 the most. They’re long games. The second games story takes a good while to really get going and the it’s entertaining the rest of the way. The environments are big, annoyingly big in my opinion, but I play the games for the real sincere passionate teenager saving the universe type story in a convoluted mess of a universe. It’s cheesy teenage scifi fantasy fun

My guess on Veilguard is that after the original creator left, now it was up to remaining writers to maintain passion in lore that they didn’t formulate. So Veilguard, it all gets watered down and anticlimactically rolled out and the focus ended up being relationship drama which still sucked.

A Dragon Age game that wants to be Lifetime channel medieval teenage fantasy romance but the characters are all seasoned combat veteran adults so it’s very weird for them to behaving so childish and unprofessional or even blase about the world ending/faith shattering reveals in the story. They are weirdly archetypal high school students placed in the wrong story

I played DA1-3 a bunch of times. Veilguard just sucks. ME1-3 I never liked like KOTOR 1and 2 but good enough. Andromeda, it’s not interesting. Dropped maybe halfway through. Good gunplay and movement but overly big uninteresting worlds. I don’t remember what any character wanted. At least Inquisition, the different areas were visually memorable

Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, Mass Effect Andromeda, Dragon Age Veilguard - each one of these games were touted for their improved combat, at least improved movement. That’s not to say any are great, just that they’re not as clunky as previous games. They are not standout in that regard. So for Bioware and Obsidian, it is still the case that their draw is writing in a higher budget RPG than the startup indie scene. Pretty much where Owlcat is now getting to with Warhammer and the Expanse licensed games, that’s where Bioware and Obsidian were 20-25 years ago. Narrative games

Bioware and Obsidian games aren’t so fun to play to appeal with mediocre writing. I think like an 80+% reduction of irony, snark, sarcasm, eye rolls, modern slang, knods to modern culture would do wonders for their games writing. Don’t have to get rid of all of it. Just have them be more fun finds in a dialog tree that make them memorable and each high quality while the rest of the narrative takes itself seriously. I’ll 5 great jokes over 100, “ehh I get it. I guess that’s funny.”

PC gaming should head towards 21:9 for ubiquitous support in games. 1680x720, 1920x800, 2560x1080, 3440x1440, …

Also OLED or higher density dimming zones. Full coverage DCI-P3. Then color reproduction and brightness highlights will also be hitting a point of diminishing returns. Then it’ll be onto VR/head mounted displays where density and brightness/contrasts will better show off

I early adopted 3840x2160 way back and recently went with a no name $200 3440x1440 monitor in 2024 and that was a way better upgrade than 1080p to 2160p. I’d take 2560x1080 over 3840x2160. 8k has no relevance until it’s the best value for up to $1000 for a 65" TV