But they can’t just patch out always-online DRM! Think of all the no more money they’d lose!

Imagine a crab.

Tom Cardy with the musical version.

Deus Ex, if you ignore that it really is ugly as sin. Sounds amazing! Plays beautifully! But yeesh, Unreal Engine 1 humans.

Most immersive sims are arguably in the same boat. The people involved had enormous ideas. As commercial products, they were woefully underappreciated, until years later. And quite frankly they do look like shit compared to much simpler contemporaries. Some NoClip documentary about Looking Glass could show a major artist had muscular dystrophy that makes his shoulders work wrong, and I’d be like, oh, that explains things.

Yeah sometimes that neuron hasn’t fired in a while.

There’s an Ahoy video about tracker music, and when it played the first three notes of “Foregone Destruction,” that fucker released aaall the good chemicals.

Wackiki Wabbit. Set on Humuhumunukunukuapua’a’a’a Island.

We had the second Care Bears movie on the same VHS tape as A Wish For Wings That Work, the Bloom County adaptation briefly featuring Robin Williams as “Sudy Nim.”

Dark Heart might’ve been a bisexual awakening.

Calm down, Roko.

To include standing there, menacingly.

To see how far rasterization has been stretched, and how that holds back development - Path of Exile 2 has a tech talk about their bare minimum settings. Artists weren’t allowed to rely on anything that could be turned off. They begged the programmers for specific gimmicks, and turned that cheap nonsense into a million blades of grass, raymarched cracks in translucent ice, and soft shadows with no Peter Panning.

Or, picking one specific trick: ambient occlusion was half of why Crysis humbled $5,000 PCs. There’s a slide deck for how a superior version of the same effect was achieved in Toy Story 3 on the Wii.

Real-time raytracing was unobtanium for decades because we kept moving the goalposts. The entire 3D games industry is built on cheating around simple parallel techniques being too expensive. By the time hardware catches up to where doing something the simple way is feasible, complex software has faked a wild variety of other effects. Meanwhile: games are designed to rely on what’s available. All of the tells for proper path-traced lighting have either been faked or avoided. Games don’t even do mirrors, anymore.

There’s a reason RTX shows off games from the late 1900s.

Careful with that, it’s an antique.

/b/ was never good.

rs.4chan.org was fucking awesome, though.

Yeah that’s plainly worse than everything that’s happened because of this.

That’s just what he does.

If you’re still explaining this after a century and a half - pick better words, already.

This is woosh limbo.

You had to crawl to let this point miss you.

Three Jaffa warriors meet on a neutral planet.

… I hope you keep good backups, if you think it takes a hammer-blow to kill a hard drive. The heads float half a dick-hair above spinning metal. They’re good at pulling away when it seems like they might get bumped together - but all it takes is one miss.

Absolutely no reason to put one in a new laptop.

But not all computers are new.

What, like the head crashed by sheer coincidence, after eight hours of rattling?