Whether you agree with them or not is not my point ( and yes in this particular case they visibly dislike the game designer’s politics and this eats up a large part of the article) - just that it’s expected .

The fact they look like reviews is very confusing though ( I looked around the website this one is under ‘impressions’ not ‘reviews’ though ) unless you consider politics should be an integral part of reviews but that’s a complicated discussion.

While the numbers might differ , I know this is technically possible from my experience in corporate environments buying links to minimize latency. Basically your isp might optimize for a different function ( cost, etc ) than Nvidia ( who wants to make make players happy and subscribe ).

My isp used to throttle Netflix or YouTube ( I don’t remember ), and gfn users occasionally report better performance when using a vpn ( it’s usually throughput not latency though ).

Your article is 6 years old(!) , cloud gaming has gone a long way. If anything , try it first.

Now, I played the remake recently - the game is actually excellent ! It’s just that at the time ( to me at least ) the original art was so ugly as to ruin the game / break immersion. This is an issue I’ve never had with 2D games, pixelated or not.

What I’m saying is that there was a time ( which lasted for a while ) when 3d games experiences were worse than 2D games, and it took a while for 3d games to catch up.

Surprisingly enough ( to me at least) games evolved in the right direction (immersive games with stories and good gameplay and not just more empty technical demos ) when the industry might have gone wrong instead.

I’ve been busy catching up with what I’ve missed ( which is extremely enjoyable since time is a very good way to find out what’s good ), and it feels like things got better around 2010-2015 so 15 years after it stopped being interesting.

You’re right - 3d improved the game. However outside of examples such as this one , I feel that it generally took a while (15 years maybe ?) for game designers and coders to eventually find a middle ground , as in use the latest technical fad, but still make a game that is pleasant to play and better than without the technical fad.

I started playing again during lockdown, and that was a bit of a shock - modern games are gorgeous, use 3d properly, and often enough have brilliant stories. I still play pixel art games - as you say, it’s timeless .

It’s exceedingly frustrating, and you either get an awful lot of exposure ( say you stop reading in English , only read in Norwegian and read 10k pages a year ) or you grind and learn word lists.

The good news is that word lists are now much easier to learn thanks to SRS systems.

I assume I’ll get used to it, but my mental model of what’s possible hasn’t been fully rewired yet.

I expect the following from such a system : I set a time limit per app/set of apps,and the phone locks said apps once the limit is reached. In theory, this is what it does, in practice it almost never works : it doesn’t lock, gets broken whenever you upgrade the os, gets broken whenever your child upgrades the os, can be trivially bypassed by a kid, cannot be unlocked when you want it to unlock remotely etc I’ve also seen trivially bad data ( phone usage when it was in my pocket ). It’s worth noting you also need an Idevice to set it remotely - if your significant other has an android device he or she is out of luck.

I was very surprised at how appallingly bad it was - just try it for a few weeks and you’ll immediately notice it’s badly broken but somehow doesn’t fix it.

Contrast this to google’s system which, well, works.

Edit : it’s so mind bogglingly bad that I’m genuinely curious to talk to someone who works at apple about this.