|IlI|lIIl|IlIll|Il|IllI|

  • 0 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 16th, 2023
  • |IlI|lIIl|IlIll|Il|IllI|@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Used EV sales spike alongside gas pricesEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    We had been waiting for a while just because there was no reason to replace our car-payment-free household with a car payment before one of the vehicles crapped out…

    …But to be honest we’d wanted an EV for almost a decade at this point.

    I test drove my first EV back in maybe 2015… but couldn’t justify the price tag at the time to buy a new one, so we went with a cheap used car with high MPG and relatively low mileage overall.

    It’s just now that for the first time, it makes sense - not just from a “gas is expensive” standpoint, but from a “this might be cheaper than maintaining an older car (100k+ miles, 15+ years old)…” and also a “gas might not just be expensive but unavailable at some point given the supply shock currently wreaking havoc in other places besides the US” standpoint…

    We like to plan for contingencies whenever it makes sense to do so.

    We just bought our first ever EV - a used 2021 model with <50k miles for less than half the price of a brand new model… and it’s amazing.

    Already calculated that just in the few times we’ve charged it since buying - with gas being almost $4/gal… we have spent <$5 in electricity with just a little 120v (thanks @jjj4211) wall adapter (level 1) at only 70% efficiency to add roughly 250 miles of range.

    That equates to roughly $40 in gas… even with the high-MPG car.

    On top of that, being able to start it in a parking lot or even an indoor garage to cool it down in the summer or warm it in the winter before having to get in or worry about filling an enclosed space with carbon monoxide, a quieter drive, and just more modern conveniences and safety features thanks to it just being a decade newer than our last vehicle made it seem like a somewhat sensible purchase for us, if not perhaps a little “overly pro-active.”

  • |IlI|lIIl|IlIll|Il|IllI|@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world•Did anyone really think the Final Fantasy 7 remake was better than the original PS1 version?English
    61·
    2 months ago

    The original Final Fantasy VII was a “lightning-in-a-bottle” moment in gaming history.

    FFVII came at a point when Nintendo’s most beloved 3rd party partners had felt wronged by Nintendo’s semi-monopoly / greed - in that Nintendo had continued to charge a massive premium on cartridge production for anyone who wanted to sell a cart to run on their systems (think Apple pre-USB-C where everyone who wanted to make “Lightning Port” accessories basically had to pay Apple a premium every time they built any iPhone / iPad accessory), and this had only worsened with the N64 due to the increase in hardware costs (some SNES games like Chrono Trigger were already $80-$85 in the mid-1990s which was VERY expensive for the time). So 3rd party partners were willing to pivot to take a risk with SONY who was relatively unproven in video games (and who also had a very big chip on their shoulders thanks to Nintendo backing out of a hardware deal with SONY at the last second so they literally set up shop to poach 3rd party partners to bring exclusively to their new PlayStation project).

    FFVII also came out at a point when there was excitement and a rush to produce new “3D” (polygonal mesh-driven assets) visuals as opposed to “2D” (traditional sprite sheet-driven assets) visuals, and the amount SquareSoft (before they merged with the Dragon Quest “Enix” guys) was willing to spend to invest in making these kinds of assets for a video game - at least at the scale they were attempting - was unheard of at the time.

    Hironobu Sakaguchi had been at the helm of the Final Fantasy JRPG series for more than a decade, and had lost his mother in recent years. FFVI was already a masterpiece in storytelling (which is the main thing that JRPGs brought to the table in gaming), but he and his team had decided to try and tell a story around “life” that might resonate upon players with the same sort of feelings he had in losing his mother.

    All that combined :

    • the first new big SquareSoft JRPG for the “32-bit” era
    • launching on MULTIPLE CDs (also a somewhat new and novel concept) instead of a cartridge
    • the first to do some 3D graphics instead of 2D sprites for visuals (though backgrounds were still pre-rendered sprites)
    • the first to incorporate SOME real orchestration as opposed to pure MIDI-style instrumentation
    • Sakaguchi’s loss inspiring him to add that aspect to the story - which lead to one of gaming’s most impactful moments of all time at that time in an era when “storytelling” still had not evolved much… we had yet to get cinematic games like Metal Gear Solid yet - which kind of was the first truly movie-like experience with full voice performances and advanced emotive animations from character bodies, and camera actions designed to mimic cinema.

    So any remake would NEVER live up to the original, because even the original cannot live up to itself anymore - because the original’s story relied on how voices played in your head, rather than some actor maybe not being up to snuff, the graphics not aging very well b/c of how early-on it was in the creation of polygonal assets and animations - which simple emotes were used to represent deeply moving emotions in some cases that you had to “imagine” as being more detailed than they really were (like with how characters may have sounded in your mind), and how there wasn’t really anything of equivalent cinematic awe in gaming that had been released yet to compete with the story-telling of JRPGs like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger, and Earthbound (Mother 2).

    I think taking on the challenge of remaking it is interesting, but I always would rather an effort be made to make something new, rather than rehash anything - even things that I grew up loving… because nostalgia is always chasing a ghost… and ghosts never live up to your hopes and expectations.

    All that being said, the thing I had the biggest issue with was the “style” of the characters in the remake. They are inherently very stylized in the original, and there seems to have been zero effort to maintain any of that “style” from the original, because it seems the modern interpretation was to toss out any possible “style” arbitrarily in exchange for more “realism” in the character designs… think “Disney live action remake” adaptations of characters vs their original animated character styles.

    Here’s what I mean… I wanted Barret to look like THIS :

    …instead of this :

  • |IlI|lIIl|IlIll|Il|IllI|@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world•Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games)English
    41·
    4 months ago

    Agreed on the “shifting focus” part for vignetting specifically - but everything else… outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular “aesthetic” I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.

    I agree that highly stylized games like “Bodycam…”

    …use things like a specific kind of grain, noise, distortion, aberration, etc. to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.

    The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you’re emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.