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Cake day: April 12th, 2024

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  • As someone who stupidly spent the last 20 or so years chasing the bleeding edge of TVs and A/V equipment, GOOD.

    High end A/V is an absolute shitshow. No matter how much you spend on a TV, receiver, or projector, it will always have some stupid gotcha, terrible software, ad-laden interface, HDMI handshaking issue, HDR color problem, HFR sync problem or CEC fight. Every new standard (HDR10 vs HDR10+, Dolby Vision vs Dolby Vision 2) inherently comes with its own set of problems and issues and its own set of “time to get a new HDMI cable that looks exactly like the old one but works differently, if it works as advertised at all”.

    I miss the 90s when the answer was “buy big chonky square CRT, plug in with component cables, be happy”.

    Now you can buy a $15,000 4k VRR/HFR HDR TV, an $8,000 4k VRR/HFR/HDR receiver, and still somehow have them fight with each other all the fucking time and never work.

    8K was a solution in search of a problem. Even when I was 20 and still had good eyesight, sitting 6 inches from a 90 inch TV I’m certain the difference between 4k and 8k would be barely noticeable.



  • I’m curious what it really was. They got a lot of shit for having a single mission with Jabba locked behind DLC (there were many, many other missions with Jabba that weren’t locked behind DLC), but I feel that was no different than many other games that add DLC – any game set in this time period would likely have missions with characters that were from the original trilogy, for Ubisoft to ensure that none of those missions were DLC missions doesn’t necessarily seem like it’s reasonable if they want the DLC to be of any value.

    In any case, having beat it and the DLC, I would totally recommend that people who like that kind of gameplay loop grab it if it’s on sale, it was a lot of fun.


  • I really can’t understand all the hate people had for the game.

    Yes, it’s a typical Ubisoft formulatic exploration/stealth game, very much like Assassin’s Creed and Horizon. Yes, it had a digital deluxe edition with a bunch of DLC and an early access window. No, it didn’t really break any new ground, but it was a fun game with a good amount of content to do in a reasonably realized game world (even if they really shrunk some locations like Tatooine down to fit into the game). The story was pretty good, the characters were interesting, and the overall gameplay loop was fun.

    It deseved better than to be panned by a lot of people complaining the game was woke because the lead was a female who wasn’t a 10/10 bombshell in the looks department.








  • The problem is that the DMCA is a flawed piece of legislature that hamstrings fair use in a couple of really key ways.

    Obligatory IANAL, but my read on the (admittedly very legalese) section 1201 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201) is that it lists a very few exemptions for what is allowable under the DMCA with regard to bypassing copyright protection mechanisms, and archival copies of personal media are not in that list of exemptions. Archival use of computer programs is covered under section 117 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117) and it allows you to make a bit-by-bit copy of your media for archiving it. It doesn’t allow you to bypass copyright protection mechanisms that exist on that content.

    So, you’d be protected if you were making a 1:1 exact cloned (and therefore, encrypted) copy of your switch game. Any action to decrypt that switch game (because the encryption is explicitly a copyright protection mechanism) would be a violation, whether it be you doing it manually with a tool, or an emulator doing it on your behalf. If you move that violation outside of the emulator, I would think that based on how the law is written they’d have to find some other way you were violating the DMCA with the emulator specifically in order to target it.

    Ultimately, I think the reason it’s illegal is because the DMCA is corpo crap that has been bastardized several times over to reduce consumer rights, but the lawyers seem to wield section 1201 as the silver bullet.


  • Emulation is legal but emulators that circumvent the DMCA in order to function are not. Yuzu and Ryujinx both decrypt encrypted Switch content using prod keys and title keys in order to execute it. The act of decrypting switch games in real-time using those keys is a violation of DMCA and is illegal (in countries that care about the DMCA anyhow). Having code in your emulator that CAN decrypt the Switch content can be viewed as a DMCA violation as well, even if it also supports unencrypted content.

    Based on that, it seems like all we need is for Ryujinx/Yuzu/some other switch emulator that hasn’t yet been sued by Nintendo to be built in a way that it requires decrypted copies of the software and they could then argue that the person who violated the DMCA was the person who released the decryption tool or the teams that release decrypted versions of switch software.

    Seems like if the developers remove the need for the emulator to use prod keys or title keys and they can remove the primary DMCA violation that is being weaponized against these emulators.