My great uncle (who was 12 at the end of WW2) had to hide from the Soviets for years, caught pneumonia and almost died before he managed to escape over the Iron Curtain. He suffered from serious health complications for the rest of his life. His mother was murdered on the spot, his teenage sister abducted into the Gulag system. She died somewhere in the Ural mountains, never to be heard of or seen again.

You on the other hand feel smug and smart about yourself by using entry level college vocabulary on a topic you know less than nothing about. There are few people on this planet I detest more than those who are, for whatever reason, carrying water for authoritarians and authoritarian systems.

Swing and miss. I’m not even American. I am from a country that suffered under real-world Communism for decades though.

I was in a different camp back then. Our CRT TV was high quality and produced a very sharp image, especially with the 3D consoles of the '90s hooked up to it through SCART. Similarly, the first CRT monitor I ever owned was an excellent Sony Trinitron with a flat image, no blur, no perceivable scanlines (I used it for a decade, because I was unable to find flat screen displays that came close). That’s why I felt absolutely no love for those scanline filters and didn’t get their appeal until many years later, when I realized that the art of most '80s and '90s games was intended for highly flawed CRTs. By that point, those simple filters had evolved into complex shaders that are much more accurate too.

A couple of years ago, I configured PS1 emulator DuckStation into what a fictional (and entirely impossible) “PS1 Pro”. Extremely high rendering resolution in the 6K range to remove any hint of jagged edges, with a scanline shader and some carefully tuned bloom on top to simulate the phosphor glow. I kept textures unfiltered, but enabled settings that fix the console’s unstable geometry and texture distortion. I then got a modified version of Gran Turismo 2 with enhanced draw distance (and some bug fixes). The effect is remarkable: The original art is preserved, but enhanced, there’s remarkable clarity, yet the scanlines and bloom still create the illusion of a high res CRT. It looks amazing.

Exception: Old pixel art that was meant to be smoothed out by blurry CRT monitors and TVs. Yes, I know those are not algorithms, but still.

This could end up working better than foldable devices. No creases to worry about.

Correct. It’s the one game in the series that pushed Xbox One and PS4 a bit too far, but has, for the same reason, aged rather nicely.

A PS5 port might come later. Microsoft execs have repeatedly (including recently) talked about bringing Xbox games to PlayStation - and it’s not just talk: Grounded, Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves were eventually ported over after some timed exclusivity. This doesn’t guarantee a port and there is no official word on this game yet, but still.

It might take a year though - or longer. The upshot is that by that point, most serious bugs should have been fixed. The downside is that you’ll miss out on the PC modding scene. Older games in the series have one of the best modding communities out there and I hope they’ll refine and expand this game as well.

Until then, you might want to take a look at Chernobylite. It’s a smaller title, but clearly inspired by the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games.

Not quite. Take a closer look at the icons.

Do you mean Skraper?

https://www.skraper.net/

Could be a DRM issue. Maybe this site is using some sort of DRM that’s not working on Linux, similar to streaming sites. I’m just speculating however. Have you tried a fresh install of Firefox instead of your current configuration?

Let’s play “guess the Ubisoft game”:

DLSS seems to be virtually immune to these issues, unlike all of the alternatives. I’ve been an obsessive pixel peeper for decades and am having a hard time finding any faults with it. In fact, it usually improves image clarity and stability.

Every acronym should be run past a bunch of ten year olds. No idea how they thought this was a good idea, but then again, they greenlit Concord at about the same time.

Firefox works, on Windows and Android. Seems like you misconfigured it in some way.

Noclip works, just remove the double tilde from your link.

Happy to help! Did you find a headset that is attractive to you?

Consider reading the article.

Huh, I must have missed this release. Maybe you’re right.

If you are interested in another hard (but doable) shmup that not too many people have heard of, take a look at Jets’n’Guns Gold. Fantastic soundtrack, pure carnage, an absolutely insane story, astonishing creativity and variety and an excellent upgrade system. It’s filled with clever ideas from the first minute to the last and controls absolutely perfectly with every input method. I’ve been playing it every once in a while ever since the original version came out 20 years ago and it has lost none of its appeal since.

The class with the flamethrower is so much fun in Halls of Torment.