Agreed. Some emulators do have the option for haptic feedback via the vibrations. Which still isnt ideal but i found it quite useable for certain types of games.

Or you just buy a bt/usb controller for 20-50 bucks. A few phones even have usb-c dp alt mode and you can enjoy the games on the big screen.

You can emulate tons of consoles and games on your phone though

I used xp-Antispy to cut off the telemetry back in the day.

Thing is NFS kinda also died because they couldnt perfect the mechanics around driving in over a decade. Heat was good and enjoyable enough but far from perfect. Then Unbound straight regressed in that department. Driving physics are very hard to get right.

But even then you have track design, balancing, AI opponents, career structure, lobby systems for online play, rewarding clean drivers etc.

Especially ai drivers and a good multiplayer component are IMHO still unsolved problems.

Like Forza Horizon has pretty much the driving physics figured out since 15 years. For all intends and purposes they are near perfect for the subgenre of realism they chose to occupie. But the track design was pretty mediocre and only got a lot better with FH6 this year. Drivatars on the other hand are less engaging and more annoying they ever were. Careerstructure is still worse than the first entry in the series. Online is still a mess with huge possible improvements.

Wreckfest is a game with really good driving physics, rock solid netcode, dedicated community servers, interesting risk and reward mechanics because of the ecouraged crashing and dirty driving. But it has a narrow focus on fictional and a bit over the top folk racing. With the ground work they laid out with that engine they could have pivoted to eg rallying or touring cars to achieve pretty different gameplay. Instead we got more of the same again with Wreckfest 2 in early access with drip fed new content. Its still a good succesor with tons of improvements.

But the indie scene also shows that there is still tons of innovation possible. Inertial Drift with the two stick drifting mechanics which got copied rather midly by Screamer this year. Yelloe Taxi goes Vroom showed us that you can have a car based 3D platformer.

Idk, the original Doom with a modern engine port with mouselook still is relevant and a really good game but new FPS games with fresh mechanics release every year since then even though you mostly walk around and shoot enemies in the face with light puzzles sprinkled in.

You forgot Undercover, which is understandable. But that game is worse than The Run.

I played every mainline nfs and thats a bit unfair. The golden era certainly started to end with Most Wanted. But they really tried to have some kind of new spin or gimmick in almost every title.

• Carbon: Autosculpt, Canyonraces, fast paced drifting
• Prostreet invented the festival racer for better or worse. Top speed runs are still insane and werent matched ever since by any game
• Shift 1 & 2 were Gran Turismo/Forza at home but atleast avaivable on PCs.
• The Run was framed as a race through the entire country and had those enviromental desasters.
• the criterion games were a weird burnout/nfs mix.
• Payback introduced offroad races and story missions
• Heats campaign with seperate incentives at day or night

I’m not saying all of these games or features were bangers. But you cant deny that NFS underwent constant changes.

Sad to see the franchise go. With NFS gone the big budget AAA arcade racing genre is almost dead. Forza Horizon still exists but its the same game with a different map for over a decade now. Mildly hyped for Clutch in the next year though. It could be something fresh again after a long time.

After the mild desaster of Unbound they invited tons of youtubers and tried to listen to the community. It could have gone really well for the next entry. But tbh i rather see NFS dead than suffering through yet another entire decade with only mediocre releases.
I loved Heat despite all its issues. But that was 7 years ago… And the only nfs title i really enjoyed since 2011(?).

The best NFS game in recent years was the Prostreet Pepega Mod. Yeah, its a meme mod but the gameplay additions were fire and its just so much fun.

Goodbye NFS. Its probably for the better

I feel like it is in human nature. Its in most of us. But basically all of us encounter this only with video games. Like incremental games were the numbers most go up and it is deeply satisfying even though a lot of them have a deeply disturbing meta-subplot going on while you progress through absurd numbers. Had the same feeling with the ye old Sim City titles. At the start you might roleplay as a “good” virtual mayor but at some point you probably reach the point where you are going to plane entire neighborhoods to build high-rises with fake water-access to min-max your economy on the limited space you are given. The games are already abstract to begin with but with time the abstraction layer gets to the point where you try to game the given rules of the designer.

I’m no expert. But i feel like Zuckerberg managed to reach that point in real life. Basically unchecked by the rules of society he does whatever the fuck he wants to play a perverted meta-progression of life.

As cute as it is but that is AI. Right? :(

The dim 400nit 720p lcd screen is the biggest no-go for me. Especially on a 6,6" device. I had a budget 5" 720p phone many years ago and it just sucked even back then. The brightness wars got a bit silly recently with screens with claimed peaks up to 3000nits. But having ~1000nits is pretty neat under direct bright sun light.

The SOC is pretty mid. I’m sure it will do normal phone stuff adequately but a phone i had seven years ago had better and higher clocked prime cores and it was 50 bucks cheaper back then. Mediatek devices tend to have practically no custom rom support which also isnt great. But tbh the custom rom scene isnt in a great spot atm either way. It isnt a negative in my book but also doesnt tip the scale to the positive.

8GB of ram is okay at that price and the current market conditions. 256gb of storage is pretty good. But no mention at all what kind of storage? So in the best case UFS 2.1 which would be okay or at worst EMMC which would just suck.

Idgf about selfies. But if you do that front camera will look like ass. That secondary 2mp macro at the back is just utterly useless and a waste of space and ressources. 50mp on the mainshooter doesnt sound to bad but look at that tiny lens. With that the sensor must be tiny too. Combined with a shitty camera app of a tiny manufacturer i predict the pictures will look like they were taken in the last decade.

Most people dont give a shit but i do: USB 2.0 in 2026 should be illegal.

Headphone jack: exists, which is good.

In regards to the software: idk, man. Over the years i’ve seen a lot of big privacy claims by niche companies. The privacy focus was IMHO almost always just a marketing device. The actual implementation was either lackluster or straight up misleading. Yeah, and just reading the usual marketing blurbs doesnt give me any confidence its different this time. Especially if they claim their rom is completly degoogled but Aurora Store is preinstalled. Technically correct but you wont believe which service owned by google Aurora accesses. :D

For 350 bucks i rather buy yet another used Pixel and put Graphene/Lineage(if its older and unsupported by Graphene). The hardware on Pixel devices isnt even that great considering their flagship pricing on new phones. But even a Pixel 6 runs circles around that Brax3.

its a bluetooth audio codec

I dont even remember when i was last excited about a new android version. Material You and 12 felt kinda exciting at first. But atleast for me the redesign was a mixed bag and it was the release where google seriously started to lock things down because of the childr… security.

Last year i booted up an old Android 8 phone of mine and it felt just alright. Super snappy, less bloat, nothing was missing, the old swipe down menu still feels better to me after all this years.

Thanks, very thoughtful reply!

Agreed, VR is pretty awesome and owning a Pico 4 i can confirm its a pretty good headset on the budget side. With a bit of criminal energy even most of the quest exclusives like RE4 VR work on the Pico. With WiVRn it works even on Linux for PCVR which is pretty awesome. But atm i use it mostly for watching movies. I’m playing VR since 2019 and kinda seen almost every wortwhile game. Especially PCVR is imho in a pretty sad state nowadays when it comes to new titles. Meta bankrolled a few exclusive bangers in the last few years but even that seems to have come to an end sadly.

Last fall/winter i had a pretty good run with https://retroachievements.org/ and played through 6-8 classics. Titles are pretty well tagged so its easy to find something which speaks to you and they can be added to your “want to play” list. Never was a big fan of achievements but for this retro stuff it gave me the sometimes needed additional carrot on a stick. What helped me is to order the games to average completion times(not mastering times) and find games which take 5-10 hours. Having bit sized experiences felt less like a big commitment.

Tbh, recommendations algos never really worked for me. Even before everything got enshittified. I always just used brute force and the filtering options which were given to me. But even the steam store page started to actively discourage my approach for discovery with ui/ux changes a few years back.

But my backlog grows and the time for gaming melts away as i get older. Sometimes i miss skimming through hundreds of games to find a hidden gem. But currently i’m not even in the mood for gaming since a half a year. I havent finished a single game i was excited about. Just stopped after playing them for 2-3 hours.

Would i use an algorithm which actually recommends games i like? Sure.

Its High-purity polyphenylene ether resin and the issue is the orange dickhead causing the strait of hormuz to close.

/eeew, techspot uses ai generated pictures of pcbs. gross

craaaawwwling in my fuuuuuur

These hounds, they will all squeal

Fear is how I Brrrrrrr

Confusing when is meal

idgf about anything world cup.

this is going to be my first and last interaction with this facsist shitshow.

Probably the least controversial take on the threadiverse but i stumpled upon Ed Zitrons Blog like maybe two years ago. I’ve read a few posts of him since then and i just watch the shitshow unfold tbh. Its not that i 100% believe in his predictions. But he has made his point. I’m just an average fuck. I dont know shit. But it was so far the most believable and backed up assessment of the current AI situation.

I make barely enough money to afford my rent in bumfuck europe. How the fuck am i more informed about AI then some CEO? WTF.

https://wiki.vronlinux.org/

idk if you are aware but the rift s is also supported by envision. idk how well though. my standalone headset with wivrn is a pretty solid experience though and i havent booted into windows for vr since almost a year.

I’m mostly interested in the Frame as a standalone headheld mobile computing device running Linux for virtual flatscreen shenanigans. But at the current market conditions i dont see how i can justify the price for an enthusiast toy to fuck around with.

I already own a Pico4. Its android 10 and has for todays standards a pretty underpowered SOC. But otherwise it comes awfully close to a poor mans Frame. Its good enough and cost me 300(!) bucks 2 years ago.

The low latency foveated streaming is cool and all. But i havent played a single VR title since january. High quality VR games are so rare now and some of the best/better studios are just closing left and right. The main selling point for this device is super uncompelling for me tbh. Even if Valve shadowdrops HL3 alongside the Frame… I wont buy another headset for >1000$ for a single game if i already have one which can play it just fine.