MudMan

This doesn’t look great for 3DS, frankly. You probably would have better luck with an ultrawide display on landscape mode.

Besides vertically oriented arcade games, as someone else points out, this seems to be an Android thing, so there will be a bunch of games meant for this orientation. How many need physical controls to the sides is a different question. And… well, the DS is a huge library. If people are out there doing GB-only FPGA devices this must also make sense.

But the thing for me is that this seems like it’d be a less versatile version of just finding a phone controller that can hold a vertical phone. Which is fine. It’s a good way to play DS stuff. I just don’t know that it mimics the clamshell comfort of the DS so much better that I’d go with a dedicated device for it. If I’m going for a dedicated thing I want a clamshell and I want a precise stylus that I can use with no fear of scratches. That’s what modern emulation doesn’t get me.

“Pioneer” is a bit of a stretch, DS emulation is pretty mature and has solid touchscreen support on a range of devices. I’m all for messing with tate mode for a bit, though.

Yeah, EU prices seem nuts. A glance at Romania’s biggest retailer shows them at the equivalent of 750 to 900 across the 9070 and XT variants. Unlike the prices you report in Spain that’s still less than the 5070 Ti on the same outlet (somehow), but it still fundamentally changes the value proposition here.

I haven’t checked France and Germany, but I expect it’ll be a similar story.

Did you… want to?

There are some gaps in a collection that serve as a show of sanity, not shame.

Yeah, I don’t know what they did, how or from what source material.

You can get less artifacty AI upscaling in real time on a mid-size PC these days.

This is an interesting option that I’m surprised hasn’t made the jump from games to other media.

Admittedly they are different challenges. Games were half-res but progressive scan, video was interlaced. But hey, in the gaming world we’re at the point of adding high refresh support to emulate the CRT scan flicker. I can see a world where you create this high res 120Hz picture to simulate a shadow mask and interlaced output on modern TVs. Probably alongside a raw pixel option and an upscaled option, no reason to do just one other than storage space.

See, I draw the same line at Tactics.

The year one was born may have some influence here.

Bit of a problem there, yeah. This hostage taker needs to define both “imperialist” and “country”, or I’m shoving his ass into 2006-founded Montenegro and accepting zero complaints about it.

Sure, I’m not saying you specifically, but you sure sound plugged into the franchise enough to remember that frustration existing. If not in the more hardcore fanbase, such as it is, definitely in the larger gaming space.

This made me go back to check press reviews of the time and, man, they are funny. There are open requests for everything from “a nice long epic that makes the GameBoy series wish it could compete” to this one guy outright claiming they want it turned into an MMO (so of the time), a bunch of requests for voice acting and lots and lots of “fans will enjoy it, everyone else stay away”. I miss the 2000s.

In any case, I’m sure a bunch of those reviewers are firmly in “no, not like that” territory today.

Yeah, that’s a very reasonable stance right now. I don’t even particularly disagree, although I’m not a huge Pokemon fan in the first place.

But at the time? When they just kept pumping marginally better looking top down handheld games in a market that didn’t give a crap about handhelds and Nintendo home consoles kept not getting mainline AAA Pokemon games? People were pissed.

Careful what you wish for, I suppose.

Myeeeeeh, I don’t know about that. Pokemon is deceptively late, given how rudimentary it looks due to being a GB exclusive. Blue and Red are 1996 games originally. Shin Megami Tensei had been doing monster capture and collection dungeon crawlers for a decade and six games by that point. Final Fantasy VII was less than a year away. Dragon Quest V and VI had done monster capturing and VI had “trainer battles” in an arena.

Pokemon was first to break big in the West and the idea of monster capturing as deck building is executed in a very particular way, but it was definitely pulling very directly from existing sources.

Pokémon has always been weirdly behind the curve in terms of presentation. People were frustrated by how late they went full 3D and how long they were reusing sprites and sounds, and rightfully so.

I think some of why the GBA games are more fondly remembered is because the one time their visual ambitions and their underlying hardware lined up at all, short of the original games.

I’ve never heard a reasonable explanation for this, honestly. I’m hesitant to say it’s just greed or laziness. I bet the answers are way more interesting.

Man, since you want me at 35% serious I’ll come clean and say that when I poked at Americans I genuinely didn’t think the response would be “greentext isn’t real and she didn’t exist but also she is my cousin and I know for a fact she was disabled and she NEEDS that bus”. I don’t know if I should own the trolling and not acknowledge that the only part of it that worked was the splash zone and not the direct impact.

But also, the OP explicitly says the distance was one mile. I know the US is big, but I didn’t realize it was big because universal expansion had made one mile larger than it is elsewhere. I guess that explains a lot.

It also explains a lot that “a bike chain” is “upkeep, storage and security” and that a ten minute walk is wasted sleep time that makes you stinky.

Alright, alright, let me get back to being somewhat real for a second. I’ve been to the US a bunch and I don’t have a driver’s license, so I walk everywhere and it’s genuinely shocking to me both how poor walking infrastructure is, but also to what degree Americans consider anything not directly next door to be “not walking distance”. I get that it’s cultural, but it’s also deceptively soul crushing. I refuse to leave the house unless it’s on fire and I still find spending time in many areas of the US physically distressing. And Canada, too, don’t think that having competent health care and a few extra busses means it’s different over there.

Fair point. But hey, at least I have less of it to go and better social security.

I walk up the escalator.

Or, if it’s so busy that you can’t comfortably do that I take the stairs.

I also take the stairs instead of the elevator at home because it’s only a handful of floors and man, I am already old, decaying and extremely out of shape. My knees would fuse solid otherwise.

Definitely not. Both of the cards I tested have more than enough, but their behavior is completely different. The game does report on both consumption and requirements for VRAM based on visual settings and claims to have plenty on both.

Plus if that was the case you’d see performance changes when choosing lower settings for texture size, texture filtering and shadow quality, and that’s not happening. Digital Foundry ran a check after I posted originally and noticed the issues seem to happen more noticeably when moving the camera quickly, which again points to texture streaming or decompression. That’d make some sense, and it would also explain why the one setting that has a significant impact on performance for me is switching to ultrawide letterboxed but lowering the resolution or increasing upscaling doesn’t have the same effect: wider FOV means less streaming less often. Plus it’s the first one of these that is fully open world (somehow), so that would also fit.

It may not be that, though. Games are hard, and if they shipped this way it’s probably not trivial or hard to fix. We’ll see. They dropped a patch today, but it doesn’t seem to be targeting this, just some progression bugs.

It’s a shame, the game itself is great if you have a PC that plays it well.

This thread is giving me tons of excuses to take the bus for a ten minute walk and not a lot of spirited strutting.

I’ll check my chauvinism, though, from the dialectalism alone, there’s clearly plenty of lazy young people to go around worldwide.

Oh, man, the last time I had some of that was in 1997. I’d trade you posting on Lemmy for another go at that.

In 1997. Screw being a teenager in the 21st century.

Oh, you go around telling kids about the tooth fairy, too? Get in the spirit.

Fair point.