and twist it to benefit publishers and services at the expense of the consumer.

then piracy would be all but impossible.

I could be completely wrong. I'm sure there are details I'm not accounting for, and of course as the RAM shortage shows, this stuff can be wildly unpredictable. But I think we're at a unique point where companies could mess with a previously open system

There will become a point where aging computers will be holding game development back enough that focus will have to shift to making games for cloud-based systems. And this would be a boon to game developers even more than the shift to digital purchases has been--if cloud gaming became dominant

fresher visuals and higher fidelity that they can't get at home. It's easy to say that PC gaming will never die, but I think PC gaming is going to face challenges it has never faced before in the coming years. Game devs will have to get better at optimization, but that only goes so far.

Even if manufacturing does catch up to the demands of AI companies, the manufacturers will spend so much money doing that that RAM prices won't go down for a long time either way. Home PCs will continue to age, and cloud gaming will become a more acceptable way to play games for people who want

I think that RAM manufacturers have no incentive to produce RAM for PC builders--why mess around with retail when you can just sell your entire stock in bulk to one or two clients (Nvidia, Open AI, Meta, etc)? I think that RAM and GPUs will become even more of a luxury item than they have been.

This sounds like Minnesota. We are who we are!

oh, microsoft is actively in the process of doing exactly this

to be fair, it did come out two months ago. I'm way behind on this one, as I was finishing other games first. So I'm not surprised people aren't playing it anymore. I'm more just surprised that more people in my circle haven't played it.

And I just don't know if it's me or the game. I got to the end of Sekiro and then stopped playing before the boss for some stupid reason. I beat Owl and the dual Guardian Apes. I know how to parry in a video game. I can't figure out the parry timing, but some part of me knows the parry timing.

With all that said, I'm currently stuck on the second battle against this character, and I've come within a hair's breadth of defeating him three times. Sometimes, I have the parry timing for him absolutely dialed in, I have his number. And then other times, it's like I'm parrying for the first time

Musashi is a provably real person, but a lot of this stuff came from the 1935 novel Musashi by Yoshikawa Eiji. But whether it's real or not, it's a fun little set of references to the legends around this character.

In the final showdown between Musashi and Kojiro, Musashi is said to have used a boat oar, having not brought his trademark dual swords to the fight. When you fight Takezo for the first time, he wields a boat oar along with a katana.

There are some fun details if you're familiar with the legends around the figure. Before choosing the name we know, he was Shinmen Takezo. Musashi had a long rivalry with another swordsman named Sasaki Kojiro; your first battle takes place at Sasaki's Cove.

the combat isn't my favorite, and I'm largely happy that I've been playing with the combat set to Story difficulty and Puzzles on Hard. I want to raise the latter to Lost in Fog on my next playthrough, but the puzzles have been fun so far, especially the Scarecrow puzzle as a standout.

this dude is calming as fuck to watch