I'm going to get another X for my co-worker if it kills me, or some innocent bystanders. They trickle into stock it seems.
The S is trivial to get, everyone has 'em so no wonder they sell so well.
I know it’s been mentioned in here before, but seriously, download the HotStock app, spend $5 on the premium service for a month (earlier notifications), and you should be able to get one. Worked for me and a few others here I believe.
I finally finished The Ascent and got all the achievements in the process, that was a neat game. I would love to get a sequel or an expansion at some point.
Notifications aren't popping when I unlock an achievement in the XBOX app on PC and I can't find the setting to turn them on.
Make sure your Windows notifications are turned on and it's allowed to submit Notifications. If you're on Windows 11 I'm not sure what to say or do to fix it though... I'm on Windows 10.
Notifications aren't popping when I unlock an achievement in the XBOX app on PC and I can't find the setting to turn them on.
Also bring up the Game Bar (Win+G by default) and make sure you're signed in (you'll see achievement tracking too, unless you closed it). Lately it's been logging out a lot recently, even though I can sign into Xbox Live in the app or any number of other things (I've had to restart my PC periodically to get signed back in, or I get a error).
I’m kinda surprised. Not that it did well, but that it did well enough to get past the Switch.
Honestly, the whole article kinda reads like an ad. I know this is anecdotal, but the S sits on the shelf. It can take days to sell through a shipment of S consoles, when the same size or bigger shipment of X would sell out in an hour or two. When you tell people that you only have the S and not the X, the look of disappointment on their faces is palpable.
I know my store sold more Series S than anything else on black Friday. On that day specifically. Because the black Friday Switch bundle was available on Sunday, and all 40+ were gone by Monday. Meanwhile, we got a half dozen Series S on Tuesday, and still had a few left on Friday.
I predict that when stock (eventually) catches up with demand, Series S sales will fall off a cliff. People want the X.
I think the issue is that with everything going on we're still kind of in early-adopter mode with the new consoles. And of course most early-adopters want the more powerful thing. The Series S is the mass market machine, so it doing well makes sense because Black Friday is all about the mass market.
Also, I'd bet money the S will eventually outsell the X because the S is the one that's going to get price dropped to $199 in a couple years and that's when they'll really fly. I doubt the X ever gets below $399.
I finished another Gamepass one, "Unpacking", today. I think the game really improves around the 2010 mark. The basic mechanics kind of bugged me in the first couple of settings, but something interesting happens as you keep going. You get to know the tastes of the person you're unpacking for, which means more complex rooms are actually easier to do, late in the game. I do heavily recommend doing no more than 2 rooms in a single sitting, it changes from passively enjoyable to tedious the more you do in a row.
Some things I would have liked to have seen:
-A "decluttering" level where you have to fill trash bags or bins to a certain level.
-A level where you get stuff in shifts (as most moves occur) and you have to rework around a very stupid arrival order. The college level would have actually been ideal for this.
-Even more gags with VERY LARGE stuff deep into boxes to mess with you.
-Everything was a living space, unpacking for a professional space would have been interesting.
Beat the Gamepass game "Haven" this evening. It's a game about some young lovers on the run from an oppressive space government, with some interesting ideas to freshen up ATB based RPGs. Including full co-op playable the entire game. It states that "this is not a difficult game" right at the start, which is very true. I've had this one downloaded for a long time out of casual interest, but finally got going on it since they're taking it off Gamepass on Nov. 30. Regarding my feelings on it:
Liked: -"Levels" being tied to doing stuff together as a couple (battle, eating together, clearing important story hurdles) was a nice idea. It's neat that you earn new moves and get tougher through that system, encouraging you to see more of those interactions.
-A lot of the dialogue and scenes are very charming, there's a lot of work put into having tons of different dialogue and skits. Both characters are fairly well sketched out and differentiated.
-The game is horny in a way that feels appropriate to the themes of the story (love overcoming all). At one point, the game's rating actually got increased, I'm wondering if new scenes came in a patch or if the ESRB just wasn't paying close attention? This is not horny in the way a typical game would be, with the female characters being underdressed or perved on by the camera constantly. Instead, it's just the characters being very attracted to each other all the time, and that being a topic of conversation very often.
-The music was well done, kind of a "low-fi tracks to explore a pretty planet to" set.
-The combat does a lot of different things with very few options. I didn't get to try it in co-op mode, but I imagine that would be pretty interesting and fun (at least for a while).
-The story isn't overlong, you could probably beat this fairly quickly if you knew what to do.
-The extra things you can find are fun and add a lot of good interactions to the game.
Disliked: -I was max "level" a little under halfway through the game. I didn't love the progression stalling out near completely so early on.
-I'm totally fine with the game being easy to encourage couples to play the game together, but there REALLY should have been a final boss to earn the ending. There are a few tough bosses, but you kind of have to scour the game to find them. To make sure all the players could see the ending, optional even easier mode (as many potions as you want, for example) would make sense to me vs just having the ending of the game be no pressure platforming.
You're in a zone where the corruption force is the strongest on the entire planet, fighting some kind of GIANT monster to get by would have been entirely appropriate.
-Too few twists and turns. There's a section where the couple actually argues fiercely for once, but that ends very quickly. There was a chance to alter the gameplay a bit more for a while at that part.
-There's a way to reverse course by pressing back on the analog stick, it is OBNOXIOUSLY overtuned. I had this happen to me all the time when I did not intend it to.
-The hunger penalty is kind of broken levels of bad, especially with their whole "easy game" ethos.
-There's ONE optional thing you find that unlocks a new move, but the whole bit feels underdeveloped. I would have liked it if various of the hidden things gave the characters more powerups. It's meant to be an easy game, let us become OP!
-Kind of feels like they were aiming for a sequel with several details, but I don't think this is likely to get one (unless the studio is very determined). Without one, some parts feel underdeveloped or cut off.
-
There's a bad ending choice and I'm... not sure why? It's actually mega dark but also extremely abrupt compared to the main/canon ending which has a playable section exclusive to it, then an epilogue with some extra content to play around with. The good ending also doesn't deal with some stuff that I found important like... them kind of destroying the basic function of their universe solely to benefit themselves? Again, maybe that was intended for a sequel.
Procrastination sibling! I too finally got around to finishing the game in the past week, motivated by the same deadline. There's some stuff I didn't get to, (achievements, exploring some islands, etc.), but the story seems over, so I'm content. Overall a very enjoyable, laid-back experience. I was annoyed with how coy they were about the setting, but I guess they went with a 'less is more' mentality regarding lore, and I can respect that. Begrudgingly.
I didn't actually know there was a hunger penalty until a fair ways in; I thought the penalty was just Yu complaining about being hungry. But then, I did not play properly at all. For example, for most of the game I just used a single person to block while the other focused on damage, then used the healing hug after the battle to patch them up to full health. I definitely abused that mechanic, though there were times they didn't want to make out and I had to fuss over their positioning for a bit to make it happen.
Regarding the last part of your spoiler:
During the main ending, there's a scene in outer space where it shows the flow bridge on both sides of Source disappearing, but the red orb closest to Source (presumably another planet) still has a bridge connecting it to the next in the line. So I think it was just the bridges to Source that was destroyed, not all planetary flow bridges. Basic function of the universe still intact! Mostly, anyway.
Despite the planet's name, Source was not literally the source of all flow and flow bridges. It was only colonized decades ago, while the Apiary is at least centuries old, likely older. And according to one of the dialogues, it was explained that all the planets in this setting have flow below the crust. I think it's only called Source because of the decision to make it an 'external colony' for mining flow, thus making its primary feature for the Apiary that of being a flow source. With other planets having simple names like Top, Truth, and Beauty, that would seem fitting.
That said, planetary flow bridges do imply that some planets might be important junctions connecting sections of the Apiary. If Source was one such junction, then yeah, some planets might be screwed (or freed from totalitarian rule, depending on their view). And things certainly don't bode well for Ozias, whose ship may have been on a Source-adjacent flow bridge when it collapsed. Can't say I'll feel bad about that part, though.
Beat the Gamepass game "Haven" this evening. It's a game about some young lovers on the run from an oppressive space government, with some interesting ideas to freshen up ATB based RPGs. Including full co-op playable the entire game. It states that "this is not a difficult game" right at the start, which is very true. I've had this one downloaded for a long time out of casual interest, but finally got going on it since they're taking it off Gamepass on Nov. 30. Regarding my feelings on it:
Liked: -"Levels" being tied to doing stuff together as a couple (battle, eating together, clearing important story hurdles) was a nice idea. It's neat that you earn new moves and get tougher through that system, encouraging you to see more of those interactions.
-A lot of the dialogue and scenes are very charming, there's a lot of work put into having tons of different dialogue and skits. Both characters are fairly well sketched out and differentiated.
-The game is horny in a way that feels appropriate to the themes of the story (love overcoming all). At one point, the game's rating actually got increased, I'm wondering if new scenes came in a patch or if the ESRB just wasn't paying close attention? This is not horny in the way a typical game would be, with the female characters being underdressed or perved on by the camera constantly. Instead, it's just the characters being very attracted to each other all the time, and that being a topic of conversation very often.
-The music was well done, kind of a "low-fi tracks to explore a pretty planet to" set.
-The combat does a lot of different things with very few options. I didn't get to try it in co-op mode, but I imagine that would be pretty interesting and fun (at least for a while).
-The story isn't overlong, you could probably beat this fairly quickly if you knew what to do.
-The extra things you can find are fun and add a lot of good interactions to the game.
Disliked: -I was max "level" a little under halfway through the game. I didn't love the progression stalling out near completely so early on.
-I'm totally fine with the game being easy to encourage couples to play the game together, but there REALLY should have been a final boss to earn the ending. There are a few tough bosses, but you kind of have to scour the game to find them. To make sure all the players could see the ending, optional even easier mode (as many potions as you want, for example) would make sense to me vs just having the ending of the game be no pressure platforming.
You're in a zone where the corruption force is the strongest on the entire planet, fighting some kind of GIANT monster to get by would have been entirely appropriate.
-Too few twists and turns. There's a section where the couple actually argues fiercely for once, but that ends very quickly. There was a chance to alter the gameplay a bit more for a while at that part.
-There's a way to reverse course by pressing back on the analog stick, it is OBNOXIOUSLY overtuned. I had this happen to me all the time when I did not intend it to.
-The hunger penalty is kind of broken levels of bad, especially with their whole "easy game" ethos.
-There's ONE optional thing you find that unlocks a new move, but the whole bit feels underdeveloped. I would have liked it if various of the hidden things gave the characters more powerups. It's meant to be an easy game, let us become OP!
-Kind of feels like they were aiming for a sequel with several details, but I don't think this is likely to get one (unless the studio is very determined). Without one, some parts feel underdeveloped or cut off.
-
There's a bad ending choice and I'm... not sure why? It's actually mega dark but also extremely abrupt compared to the main/canon ending which has a playable section exclusive to it, then an epilogue with some extra content to play around with. The good ending also doesn't deal with some stuff that I found important like... them kind of destroying the basic function of their universe solely to benefit themselves? Again, maybe that was intended for a sequel.
Procrastination sibling! I too finally got around to finishing the game in the past week, motivated by the same deadline. There's some stuff I didn't get to, (achievements, exploring some islands, etc.), but the story seems over, so I'm content. Overall a very enjoyable, laid-back experience. I was annoyed with how coy they were about the setting, but I guess they went with a 'less is more' mentality regarding lore, and I can respect that. Begrudgingly.
I didn't actually know there was a hunger penalty until a fair ways in; I thought the penalty was just Yu complaining about being hungry. But then, I did not play properly at all. For example, for most of the game I just used a single person to block while the other focused on damage, then used the healing hug after the battle to patch them up to full health. I definitely abused that mechanic, though there were times they didn't want to make out and I had to fuss over their positioning for a bit to make it happen.
Regarding the last part of your spoiler:
During the main ending, there's a scene in outer space where it shows the flow bridge on both sides of Source disappearing, but the red orb closest to Source (presumably another planet) still has a bridge connecting it to the next in the line. So I think it was just the bridges to Source that was destroyed, not all planetary flow bridges. Basic function of the universe still intact! Mostly, anyway.
Despite the planet's name, Source was not literally the source of all flow and flow bridges. It was only colonized decades ago, while the Apiary is at least centuries old, likely older. And according to one of the dialogues, it was explained that all the planets in this setting have flow below the crust. I think it's only called Source because of the decision to make it an 'external colony' for mining flow, thus making its primary feature for the Apiary that of being a flow source. With other planets having simple names like Top, Truth, and Beauty, that would seem fitting.
That said, planetary flow bridges do imply that some planets might be important junctions connecting sections of the Apiary. If Source was one such junction, then yeah, some planets might be screwed (or freed from totalitarian rule, depending on their view). And things certainly don't bode well for Ozias, whose ship may have been on a Source-adjacent flow bridge when it collapsed. Can't say I'll feel bad about that part, though.
Haven plot discussion:
I wasn't thinking it was the Source of all Flow, I just meant in the sense that planets are made of Flow, space travel is based on Flow, and Flow presumably does a lot of other things we don't even know about. And they basically take ALL of that down forever to benefit their own lives. It's... hard to overstate what a massive decision that is, kind of egotistical in a galactic sense. Not that it doesn't make sense for their own benefit, it's just incalculably selfish in a very real way. As a parallel, imagine if a love story set on Earth ended with people destroying a river for their own benefit but like... times 1 million.
But yeah, the good ending epilogue has the couple figuring out that Haven's orbit is "drifting" which is a horrifying sentence. It could drift into another planet or moon, drift out of being in a habitable orbit with the nearest sun, etc. It does seem from the ending animation that they somehow ONLY opted out of being part of the Flow Bridge system, but I would be shocked if this didn't have dire consequences for the rest of the known galaxy. If this was to be a series, it's a hell of a plot hook.
On an unrelated note, I was weirded out by one of them (is it always Yu or is it just the player character at that moment?) getting Rusted. Considering the entire game involves scrubbing the Rust off of critters non-lethally. They don't even state why the method that works for every other organism on the planet won't work for a human, they just take it as given that it's permanent. Heck, Oink actually gets derusted twice! Kind of took that as a sequel hook (that person getting infected by alien thoughts or gaining super powers perhaps), and tried to let it go.
How's the One X (not series) perform in backwards compatibility? I've got a hankerin' to play some of my 360 discs that I still have and they're getting reasonable for used on Ebay. And I'll be fucked if I buy any of these "remasters" that look worse than the originals (looking at you Ezio trilogy and GTA "Definitive")
How's the One X (not series) perform in backwards compatibility? I've got a hankerin' to play some of my 360 discs that I still have and they're getting reasonable for used on Ebay. And I'll be fucked if I buy any of these "remasters" that look worse than the originals (looking at you Ezio trilogy and GTA "Definitive")
How's the One X (not series) perform in backwards compatibility? I've got a hankerin' to play some of my 360 discs that I still have and they're getting reasonable for used on Ebay. And I'll be fucked if I buy any of these "remasters" that look worse than the originals (looking at you Ezio trilogy and GTA "Definitive")
How's the One X (not series) perform in backwards compatibility? I've got a hankerin' to play some of my 360 discs that I still have and they're getting reasonable for used on Ebay. And I'll be fucked if I buy any of these "remasters" that look worse than the originals (looking at you Ezio trilogy and GTA "Definitive")
How's the One X (not series) perform in backwards compatibility? I've got a hankerin' to play some of my 360 discs that I still have and they're getting reasonable for used on Ebay. And I'll be fucked if I buy any of these "remasters" that look worse than the originals (looking at you Ezio trilogy and GTA "Definitive")
How's the One X (not series) perform in backwards compatibility? I've got a hankerin' to play some of my 360 discs that I still have and they're getting reasonable for used on Ebay. And I'll be fucked if I buy any of these "remasters" that look worse than the originals (looking at you Ezio trilogy and GTA "Definitive")
Right, I know there's a lot of games, but I'm curious as to folks' experience using the One X specifically.
It varies from game to game. Are there specific games you want to hear about?
Mostly da ezio's and Arkham origins... Also whether it's a good skyrim box for the updated version
I had a One X as my primary before I got my Series X. It does BC fine. Not as well as a Series X due to the amount of upscaling and frame rate boosting the Series X does, but it works 100%.
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Forever Zefirocloaked in the midnight glory of an event horizonRegistered Userregular
So heads-up, Skyrim Anniversary bundle is $39.99 with Gamepass, but currently Skyrim Special Edition is part of the Black Friday sale (and it’s on Gamepass but if you wanted to own it if it leaves GP) for like $13.50, and then you can buy the Anniversary upgrade for like $17.50 with Gamepass, so you can save $10 by buying them separately
XBL - Foreverender | 3DS FC - 1418 6696 1012 | Steam ID | LoL
How's the One X (not series) perform in backwards compatibility? I've got a hankerin' to play some of my 360 discs that I still have and they're getting reasonable for used on Ebay. And I'll be fucked if I buy any of these "remasters" that look worse than the originals (looking at you Ezio trilogy and GTA "Definitive")
Right, I know there's a lot of games, but I'm curious as to folks' experience using the One X specifically.
It varies from game to game. Are there specific games you want to hear about?
Mostly da ezio's and Arkham origins... Also whether it's a good skyrim box for the updated version
I had a One X as my primary before I got my Series X. It does BC fine. Not as well as a Series X due to the amount of upscaling and frame rate boosting the Series X does, but it works 100%.
Upscaling I think is similar? It can certainly take OG Xbox games to 4K. It misses out on framerate boost though.
I've got no complaints about how it does BC. One X is still my primary and daily driver.
How's the One X (not series) perform in backwards compatibility? I've got a hankerin' to play some of my 360 discs that I still have and they're getting reasonable for used on Ebay. And I'll be fucked if I buy any of these "remasters" that look worse than the originals (looking at you Ezio trilogy and GTA "Definitive")
Right, I know there's a lot of games, but I'm curious as to folks' experience using the One X specifically.
It varies from game to game. Are there specific games you want to hear about?
Mostly da ezio's and Arkham origins... Also whether it's a good skyrim box for the updated version
I had a One X as my primary before I got my Series X. It does BC fine. Not as well as a Series X due to the amount of upscaling and frame rate boosting the Series X does, but it works 100%.
Upscaling I think is similar? It can certainly take OG Xbox games to 4K. It misses out on framerate boost though.
I've got no complaints about how it does BC. One X is still my primary and daily driver.
"Microsoft has confirmed that the Xbox Series S will not run Xbox One X Enhanced versions of backwards compatible games, and will instead run the Xbox One S versions of Xbox One and Xbox 360 titles with other beneficial features.
As reported by VGC, while the Xbox Series S won't run the Xbox One X Enhanced versions of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games, it will still be a step above the Xbox One S with "improved texture filtering, higher and more consistent frame rates, faster load times, and Auto HDR.""
Here's a first world question for you folks, even by this thread's ultra high definition standards:
I've got a new TV, and a new soundbar. Is anyone else running their Series X to their TV via their sound bar's HDMI eARC? I ended up just plugging my soundbar into my TV via HDMI (eARC) to try and get Dolby Atmos (and losing an HDMI port, which is one of the reasons I always kind of thought HDMI ARC was dumb). And it works just fine, HDMI CEC works and everything, but I noticed bad latency (delay) when using Dolby Atmos. Dolby Digital is not as bad, and Uncompressed Stereo and 5.1 are basically fine (but this is a 3.1.2 soundbar).
This seems to be a longstanding issue, at least with LG soundbars: Dolby Atmos has bad delay (though not in movies, it would seem; just gaming). In theory, using the soundbar as the receiver and a bridge to the TV can fix the audio delay. But of course, it wouldn't be remotely surprising if you paid a price in terms of the video, whether latency or something else, even with the soundbar having HDCP 2.2 (2.3?) support.
In the end of the day, I might just want to wait for LG and Xbox to patch this out (if they ever do), or accept I won't get Dolby Atmos without unacceptable levels of delay (or buy a cheaper soundbar if all I'm getting is Stereo Uncompressed), but I wanted to see if anyone else ran into this.
One thing to watch for is whether the TV is trying to decode Atmos before sending audio to the soundbar. You want to make sure it is just doing a passthrough of your xbox to the soundbar, the setting might be called "Bitstream" versus "PCM" for example, and where that option is depends on your TV.
If the TV is doing the atmos decoding slowly, it may also be delaying visuals on non-game-mode inputs to sync up with its slow decoding, which could explain why movies look fine.
One thing to watch for is whether the TV is trying to decode Atmos before sending audio to the soundbar. You want to make sure it is just doing a passthrough of your xbox to the soundbar, the setting might be called "Bitstream" versus "PCM" for example, and where that option is depends on your TV.
If the TV is doing the atmos decoding slowly, it may also be delaying visuals on non-game-mode inputs to sync up with its slow decoding, which could explain why movies look fine.
Thanks. I browsed Reddit (ugh) and while you can play around with the settings, the results are not very much improvement sadly (or at least it seems to be the case). I have everything set to Bitstream as is (and Passthrough is on).
So you're saying Console -> Soundbar -> TV is not the remedy to the problem then? (Which I kind of suspect too.)
How's the One X (not series) perform in backwards compatibility? I've got a hankerin' to play some of my 360 discs that I still have and they're getting reasonable for used on Ebay. And I'll be fucked if I buy any of these "remasters" that look worse than the originals (looking at you Ezio trilogy and GTA "Definitive")
Right, I know there's a lot of games, but I'm curious as to folks' experience using the One X specifically.
It varies from game to game. Are there specific games you want to hear about?
Mostly da ezio's and Arkham origins... Also whether it's a good skyrim box for the updated version
I had a One X as my primary before I got my Series X. It does BC fine. Not as well as a Series X due to the amount of upscaling and frame rate boosting the Series X does, but it works 100%.
Upscaling I think is similar? It can certainly take OG Xbox games to 4K. It misses out on framerate boost though.
I've got no complaints about how it does BC. One X is still my primary and daily driver.
"Microsoft has confirmed that the Xbox Series S will not run Xbox One X Enhanced versions of backwards compatible games, and will instead run the Xbox One S versions of Xbox One and Xbox 360 titles with other beneficial features.
As reported by VGC, while the Xbox Series S won't run the Xbox One X Enhanced versions of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games, it will still be a step above the Xbox One S with "improved texture filtering, higher and more consistent frame rates, faster load times, and Auto HDR.""
Yeah, good point worth noting. The disparity seems to come about by the Series S having a lower-powered GPU (and slightly less RAM) than the One X, although CPU-wise it's much more powerful. Series S was specifically designed not to be a 4K machine; One X, though older, was designed to be a 4K machine.
The S and X suffixes do a lot of heavy lifting. Series S is the successor to the One S (well, the One S All-Digital really); Series X is more the successor to the One X.
(And I'm reminded here of just how much Xbox's naming conventions over the years have sucked!)
I think the Xbox Series X/S is somehow more obnoxious than Xbox One. Are they just called the Xbox Series? Do you abbreviate it XSX/S? At least with Xbox One you could just call it the Xbone and call it good and differentiating it with the original Xbox wasn't too bad.
I think the Xbox Series X/S is somehow more obnoxious than Xbox One. Are they just called the Xbox Series? Do you abbreviate it XSX/S? At least with Xbox One you could just call it the Xbone and call it good and differentiating it with the original Xbox wasn't too bad.
The Xbox One was a far more dire situation. There was the launch version (just called Xbox One) which had some lesser stats than the Xbox One S (but most would consider the Xbox One and Xbox One S to be mostly identical), both of which were underpowered compared to the Xbox One X.
Vs The good one (Xbox Series X) and the cheaper one (Xbox Series S).
Which paragraph makes your head hurt more? Keep in mind, the first paragraph even ignores the different models of the S, since there were several revisions...
Should've gone with the original proposed name: New Xbox One XL and 2XL.
Regardless of which company you wanna fanboy over, I think we can all agree that Nintendo and Sony have done a better job at product naming. Outside of Nintendo's missteps with "New" and "U", it's very clear what's what. Considering all the XLs are literally just the exact same thing but bigger, that really can't be any clearer. Sony kept it pretty basic. 1-5. Sure, they don't get any points for originality, but it makes it easy. But it's a year in and I still find myself explaining to people that the One S and the Series S are not the same thing. I still have to resort to the phonetic alphabet when talking to people about the Series X and the Series S, because they couldn't be arsed to pick letters that don't sound similar. And I'm pretty sure it's all because they didn't want to seem like "less" by having an Xbox 2 up against a PlayStation 3.
I mean, it's not that confusing for people who actually pay attention. It is confusing for say, mom's on Christmas who have a shitload of things going on and trying to figure out which game box is which can be tough.
But alas, for the last two years it has mattered not because nobody can buy any of them anyways so *shrug*
Should've gone with the original proposed name: New Xbox One XL and 2XL.
Regardless of which company you wanna fanboy over, I think we can all agree that Nintendo and Sony have done a better job at product naming. Outside of Nintendo's missteps with "New" and "U", it's very clear what's what. Considering all the XLs are literally just the exact same thing but bigger, that really can't be any clearer. Sony kept it pretty basic. 1-5. Sure, they don't get any points for originality, but it makes it easy. But it's a year in and I still find myself explaining to people that the One S and the Series S are not the same thing. I still have to resort to the phonetic alphabet when talking to people about the Series X and the Series S, because they couldn't be arsed to pick letters that don't sound similar. And I'm pretty sure it's all because they didn't want to seem like "less" by having an Xbox 2 up against a PlayStation 3.
Nintendo deserves zero credit, are you joking with this? They are the ONLY one to conceive of a name so bad it actually killed an entire console. And you want to say "well aside from the only actually catastrophic outcome, they're good!" And they're not, is the thing! DSi was a mess of a name and concept. The worse model of the Wii didn't get a unique name, which made it harder for customers to detect. The Switch with increased battery life didn't get a unique name either, with another outcome that's annoying to customers. GBA SP meant that it added light, while the DS Lite meant "better version", the names are reversed there. Nintendo 2DS implies a second version of the original DS instead of a feature downgrade to the 3DS. The Switch "Lite" is a downgraded Switch, which is laughable when Lite meant Upgraded the last time they used it!
Tl;dr inside of all Nintendo marketing is two wolves. One wolf makes some of the most popular electronic devices in the world that it markets to nearly every demographic with massive success, the other wolf conceives of some of the most stupid on their face naming schemes of all time and is checked or countered by no one, ever.
I'm at a point where I've been recommending the Series S to people that ask me what they should get for their kids. That with Game Pass is just such a tremendous deal and although people like us probably care about the Series X or PS5 benefits I think for a casual user that Series S is just a tremendous machine.
I replaced our launch Xbox One with a Series S for my kids, and they've been able to do split-screen with no slowdown and all that in a number of games that on the Xbox One they were using would just chug and be nearly unplayable.
One thing to watch for is whether the TV is trying to decode Atmos before sending audio to the soundbar. You want to make sure it is just doing a passthrough of your xbox to the soundbar, the setting might be called "Bitstream" versus "PCM" for example, and where that option is depends on your TV.
If the TV is doing the atmos decoding slowly, it may also be delaying visuals on non-game-mode inputs to sync up with its slow decoding, which could explain why movies look fine.
Thanks. I browsed Reddit (ugh) and while you can play around with the settings, the results are not very much improvement sadly (or at least it seems to be the case). I have everything set to Bitstream as is (and Passthrough is on).
So you're saying Console -> Soundbar -> TV is not the remedy to the problem then? (Which I kind of suspect too.)
I don't really know, it was just one thing to try. It could be the Atmos is passing through directly and the soundbar is just too slow at decoding. It could be that the Xbox itself is slow at encoding Atmos in realtime, which is something movies never have to worry about. If I were you I would experiment with every combination to narrow it down. (including going direct to the TV speakers with no soundbar if possible, would narrow down whether the soundbar itself is to blame.)
Should've gone with the original proposed name: New Xbox One XL and 2XL.
Regardless of which company you wanna fanboy over, I think we can all agree that Nintendo and Sony have done a better job at product naming.
I know I don't agree with that, but I'm not going to assume I know how others feel.
In the meantime, the 3DS was a massively important part of Nintendo's technological legacy, literally the last standalone handheld before they merged their console and handheld hardware lines. But the naming conventions for it are, to put it kindly, terrible. They're terrible because, just to start, Nintendo thought it was a good idea to name a successive hardware product, "New", which manages to be worse than naming a subsequent redesign that came later with a lower number (at least they were trying to be informative for that), which resulted in widespread complaints distinguishing the DS and 2DS.
I could never prove it, but I think this is just reflecting the fact that Nintendo's cultural cache "lets" them do this, because it's "cute". Because if Microsoft had done this...
In an eight year window, we would never let them hear the end of it. That's probably being too generous, to be honest.
This isn't a weigh in on the clearly important brand designation of the "DS" hardware. I don't think "Switch" is a good name, because I don't think it's a good idea to name something after a technological keystone so widespread it's found in literally every home, office, and automobile (something you can't say about the words "Revolution" "or "Genesis"), but that's personal disposition--I also think "Wii" is a bad name for completely different reasons, though largely because Nintendo wanted to exploit a homonym and not because it sounds like pet names for genitals (that's rather a regional dialect issue even within English, as far as I know). Neither was impeded commercially by it, clearly. Perhaps more importantly, Nintendo wasn't stupid enough to release the New Switch and the New Switch OLED (and they never ran into the same problem with the Wii...though not so much what replaced it). They took the least egregious part of that table, the "Lite" designation, and used that. Good on them. Those names above spun-off from the original product are just exceptionally badly thought out, and they have to stand alongside the 3DS technically being the worst selling Nintendo handheld device despite having the largest potential audience (though it still sold a lot, unlike the Wii U).
But on the other hand, I'm also one of those people who thinks console names, like appearances, aren't hugely important characteristics. Doing them badly isn't something I get really upset, putting aside that Sony did manage to match the familiar "Xbone" in sheer hilarity with the "PSFro" (which was roundly mocked when it was announced too). I could easily be in the minority on that argument too.
One thing to watch for is whether the TV is trying to decode Atmos before sending audio to the soundbar. You want to make sure it is just doing a passthrough of your xbox to the soundbar, the setting might be called "Bitstream" versus "PCM" for example, and where that option is depends on your TV.
If the TV is doing the atmos decoding slowly, it may also be delaying visuals on non-game-mode inputs to sync up with its slow decoding, which could explain why movies look fine.
Thanks. I browsed Reddit (ugh) and while you can play around with the settings, the results are not very much improvement sadly (or at least it seems to be the case). I have everything set to Bitstream as is (and Passthrough is on).
So you're saying Console -> Soundbar -> TV is not the remedy to the problem then? (Which I kind of suspect too.)
I don't really know, it was just one thing to try. It could be the Atmos is passing through directly and the soundbar is just too slow at decoding. It could be that the Xbox itself is slow at encoding Atmos in realtime, which is something movies never have to worry about. If I were you I would experiment with every combination to narrow it down. (including going direct to the TV speakers with no soundbar if possible, would narrow down whether the soundbar itself is to blame.)
Honestly, I'm just glad everything works with HDMI CEC as seemlessly as it did with my Samsung QLED and Vizio soundbar. That's kind of a shock still after my current run of luck.
I'm prepared for the possibility that, short of investing in hugely expensive A/V receiving equipment on top of everything else, Dolby Atmos might be something that's just not viable for gaming until the powers that be patch that (it just happens, unlike Dolby Vision, there's no zero discussion about the need to patch them).
Also it's a bit anticlimactic after all this to find out that enabling "emulated" Dolby Vision for gameplay--since there's little Dolby Vision movie content and literally zero video games currently--actually looks worse than properly calibrated HDR10 (it's too "warm" on the color spectrum to start, with excessive yellow rather than blue).
I want to play around with plugging my console into my soundbar because, hey, it's a novel thing, but it sounds like you'd only do that if you're willing to take a hit on video quality. If I were really upset, I could just return the soundbar and get a much cheaper one, but Dolby Atmos in movies would be nice.
I mean, I'm speaking anecdotally as someone who's been working retail for years now. The WiiU was the only one I constantly had to explain to customers. The only reason New really bothers me is because it's impossible to search for 3DS systems online (Is it a "New 3DS" or an unused regular 3DS?).
I mean, I'm speaking anecdotally as someone who's been working retail for years now. The WiiU was the only one I constantly had to explain to customers. The only reason New really bothers me is because it's impossible to search for 3DS systems online (Is it a "New 3DS" or an unused regular 3DS?).
Anecdotally, I'm "old" enough to remember the huge amount of retail confusion over successive 3DS/2DS, which utterly dwarfed the "Wii U" dilemma. There's a "Wii" and a "Wii U", and they look similar. That's troublesome. Meanwhile, there's a "3DS", a "2DS", "New" versions of both, and "XL" versions of both of those and almost all of them look the same. That's absurd bordering on disturbing. I am not the only person who thought, in complete seriousness, the Nintendo New 2DS XL Lite was an actual commercial product, and just one that people only purchased as a last resort. Maybe it is.
Thank goodness the DS had already sunset in that market region; it would've been worse.
Then again, I know at 35 I'm not nearly the oldest regular in this thread by far, though I may be the only one of that age to take English S.L..
Posts
I know it’s been mentioned in here before, but seriously, download the HotStock app, spend $5 on the premium service for a month (earlier notifications), and you should be able to get one. Worked for me and a few others here I believe.
Make sure your Windows notifications are turned on and it's allowed to submit Notifications. If you're on Windows 11 I'm not sure what to say or do to fix it though... I'm on Windows 10.
Also bring up the Game Bar (Win+G by default) and make sure you're signed in (you'll see achievement tracking too, unless you closed it). Lately it's been logging out a lot recently, even though I can sign into Xbox Live in the app or any number of other things (I've had to restart my PC periodically to get signed back in, or I get a error).
Also, I'd bet money the S will eventually outsell the X because the S is the one that's going to get price dropped to $199 in a couple years and that's when they'll really fly. I doubt the X ever gets below $399.
Some things I would have liked to have seen:
-A "decluttering" level where you have to fill trash bags or bins to a certain level.
-A level where you get stuff in shifts (as most moves occur) and you have to rework around a very stupid arrival order. The college level would have actually been ideal for this.
-Even more gags with VERY LARGE stuff deep into boxes to mess with you.
-Everything was a living space, unpacking for a professional space would have been interesting.
Procrastination sibling! I too finally got around to finishing the game in the past week, motivated by the same deadline. There's some stuff I didn't get to, (achievements, exploring some islands, etc.), but the story seems over, so I'm content. Overall a very enjoyable, laid-back experience. I was annoyed with how coy they were about the setting, but I guess they went with a 'less is more' mentality regarding lore, and I can respect that. Begrudgingly.
I didn't actually know there was a hunger penalty until a fair ways in; I thought the penalty was just Yu complaining about being hungry. But then, I did not play properly at all. For example, for most of the game I just used a single person to block while the other focused on damage, then used the healing hug after the battle to patch them up to full health. I definitely abused that mechanic, though there were times they didn't want to make out and I had to fuss over their positioning for a bit to make it happen.
Regarding the last part of your spoiler:
Despite the planet's name, Source was not literally the source of all flow and flow bridges. It was only colonized decades ago, while the Apiary is at least centuries old, likely older. And according to one of the dialogues, it was explained that all the planets in this setting have flow below the crust. I think it's only called Source because of the decision to make it an 'external colony' for mining flow, thus making its primary feature for the Apiary that of being a flow source. With other planets having simple names like Top, Truth, and Beauty, that would seem fitting.
That said, planetary flow bridges do imply that some planets might be important junctions connecting sections of the Apiary. If Source was one such junction, then yeah, some planets might be screwed (or freed from totalitarian rule, depending on their view). And things certainly don't bode well for Ozias, whose ship may have been on a Source-adjacent flow bridge when it collapsed. Can't say I'll feel bad about that part, though.
Haven plot discussion:
But yeah, the good ending epilogue has the couple figuring out that Haven's orbit is "drifting" which is a horrifying sentence. It could drift into another planet or moon, drift out of being in a habitable orbit with the nearest sun, etc. It does seem from the ending animation that they somehow ONLY opted out of being part of the Flow Bridge system, but I would be shocked if this didn't have dire consequences for the rest of the known galaxy. If this was to be a series, it's a hell of a plot hook.
On an unrelated note, I was weirded out by one of them (is it always Yu or is it just the player character at that moment?) getting Rusted. Considering the entire game involves scrubbing the Rust off of critters non-lethally. They don't even state why the method that works for every other organism on the planet won't work for a human, they just take it as given that it's permanent. Heck, Oink actually gets derusted twice! Kind of took that as a sequel hook (that person getting infected by alien thoughts or gaining super powers perhaps), and tried to let it go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_games_for_Xbox_One_and_Series_X/S#List_of_compatible_titles_from_Xbox_360
Right, I know there's a lot of games, but I'm curious as to folks' experience using the One X specifically.
It varies from game to game. Are there specific games you want to hear about?
Mostly da ezio's and Arkham origins... Also whether it's a good skyrim box for the updated version
I had a One X as my primary before I got my Series X. It does BC fine. Not as well as a Series X due to the amount of upscaling and frame rate boosting the Series X does, but it works 100%.
XBL - Foreverender | 3DS FC - 1418 6696 1012 | Steam ID | LoL
Not surprised at all.
1. It was much easier to procure
2. Loads of places were doing trade ins for older consoles (a deal I used).
It's a great bang for buck console. There are some obvious compromises but I do not regret getting mine at all.
Upscaling I think is similar? It can certainly take OG Xbox games to 4K. It misses out on framerate boost though.
I've got no complaints about how it does BC. One X is still my primary and daily driver.
Steam | XBL
Just a heads up on details - https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/xbox-series-s-likely-wont-be-able-to-run-xbox-one-x-content-its-claimed/
"Microsoft has confirmed that the Xbox Series S will not run Xbox One X Enhanced versions of backwards compatible games, and will instead run the Xbox One S versions of Xbox One and Xbox 360 titles with other beneficial features.
As reported by VGC, while the Xbox Series S won't run the Xbox One X Enhanced versions of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games, it will still be a step above the Xbox One S with "improved texture filtering, higher and more consistent frame rates, faster load times, and Auto HDR.""
Does some stuff, not others. DF did a video early on about it -
I've got a new TV, and a new soundbar. Is anyone else running their Series X to their TV via their sound bar's HDMI eARC? I ended up just plugging my soundbar into my TV via HDMI (eARC) to try and get Dolby Atmos (and losing an HDMI port, which is one of the reasons I always kind of thought HDMI ARC was dumb). And it works just fine, HDMI CEC works and everything, but I noticed bad latency (delay) when using Dolby Atmos. Dolby Digital is not as bad, and Uncompressed Stereo and 5.1 are basically fine (but this is a 3.1.2 soundbar).
This seems to be a longstanding issue, at least with LG soundbars: Dolby Atmos has bad delay (though not in movies, it would seem; just gaming). In theory, using the soundbar as the receiver and a bridge to the TV can fix the audio delay. But of course, it wouldn't be remotely surprising if you paid a price in terms of the video, whether latency or something else, even with the soundbar having HDCP 2.2 (2.3?) support.
In the end of the day, I might just want to wait for LG and Xbox to patch this out (if they ever do), or accept I won't get Dolby Atmos without unacceptable levels of delay (or buy a cheaper soundbar if all I'm getting is Stereo Uncompressed), but I wanted to see if anyone else ran into this.
If the TV is doing the atmos decoding slowly, it may also be delaying visuals on non-game-mode inputs to sync up with its slow decoding, which could explain why movies look fine.
Thanks. I browsed Reddit (ugh) and while you can play around with the settings, the results are not very much improvement sadly (or at least it seems to be the case). I have everything set to Bitstream as is (and Passthrough is on).
So you're saying Console -> Soundbar -> TV is not the remedy to the problem then? (Which I kind of suspect too.)
Yeah, good point worth noting. The disparity seems to come about by the Series S having a lower-powered GPU (and slightly less RAM) than the One X, although CPU-wise it's much more powerful. Series S was specifically designed not to be a 4K machine; One X, though older, was designed to be a 4K machine.
The S and X suffixes do a lot of heavy lifting. Series S is the successor to the One S (well, the One S All-Digital really); Series X is more the successor to the One X.
(And I'm reminded here of just how much Xbox's naming conventions over the years have sucked!)
Steam | XBL
Yeah, they are.
Should've gone with the original proposed name: New Xbox One XL and 2XL.
The Xbox One was a far more dire situation. There was the launch version (just called Xbox One) which had some lesser stats than the Xbox One S (but most would consider the Xbox One and Xbox One S to be mostly identical), both of which were underpowered compared to the Xbox One X.
Vs The good one (Xbox Series X) and the cheaper one (Xbox Series S).
Which paragraph makes your head hurt more? Keep in mind, the first paragraph even ignores the different models of the S, since there were several revisions...
Regardless of which company you wanna fanboy over, I think we can all agree that Nintendo and Sony have done a better job at product naming. Outside of Nintendo's missteps with "New" and "U", it's very clear what's what. Considering all the XLs are literally just the exact same thing but bigger, that really can't be any clearer. Sony kept it pretty basic. 1-5. Sure, they don't get any points for originality, but it makes it easy. But it's a year in and I still find myself explaining to people that the One S and the Series S are not the same thing. I still have to resort to the phonetic alphabet when talking to people about the Series X and the Series S, because they couldn't be arsed to pick letters that don't sound similar. And I'm pretty sure it's all because they didn't want to seem like "less" by having an Xbox 2 up against a PlayStation 3.
But alas, for the last two years it has mattered not because nobody can buy any of them anyways so *shrug*
Nintendo deserves zero credit, are you joking with this? They are the ONLY one to conceive of a name so bad it actually killed an entire console. And you want to say "well aside from the only actually catastrophic outcome, they're good!" And they're not, is the thing! DSi was a mess of a name and concept. The worse model of the Wii didn't get a unique name, which made it harder for customers to detect. The Switch with increased battery life didn't get a unique name either, with another outcome that's annoying to customers. GBA SP meant that it added light, while the DS Lite meant "better version", the names are reversed there. Nintendo 2DS implies a second version of the original DS instead of a feature downgrade to the 3DS. The Switch "Lite" is a downgraded Switch, which is laughable when Lite meant Upgraded the last time they used it!
Tl;dr inside of all Nintendo marketing is two wolves. One wolf makes some of the most popular electronic devices in the world that it markets to nearly every demographic with massive success, the other wolf conceives of some of the most stupid on their face naming schemes of all time and is checked or countered by no one, ever.
I replaced our launch Xbox One with a Series S for my kids, and they've been able to do split-screen with no slowdown and all that in a number of games that on the Xbox One they were using would just chug and be nearly unplayable.
I don't really know, it was just one thing to try. It could be the Atmos is passing through directly and the soundbar is just too slow at decoding. It could be that the Xbox itself is slow at encoding Atmos in realtime, which is something movies never have to worry about. If I were you I would experiment with every combination to narrow it down. (including going direct to the TV speakers with no soundbar if possible, would narrow down whether the soundbar itself is to blame.)
I know I don't agree with that, but I'm not going to assume I know how others feel.
In the meantime, the 3DS was a massively important part of Nintendo's technological legacy, literally the last standalone handheld before they merged their console and handheld hardware lines. But the naming conventions for it are, to put it kindly, terrible. They're terrible because, just to start, Nintendo thought it was a good idea to name a successive hardware product, "New", which manages to be worse than naming a subsequent redesign that came later with a lower number (at least they were trying to be informative for that), which resulted in widespread complaints distinguishing the DS and 2DS.
I could never prove it, but I think this is just reflecting the fact that Nintendo's cultural cache "lets" them do this, because it's "cute". Because if Microsoft had done this...
In an eight year window, we would never let them hear the end of it. That's probably being too generous, to be honest.
This isn't a weigh in on the clearly important brand designation of the "DS" hardware. I don't think "Switch" is a good name, because I don't think it's a good idea to name something after a technological keystone so widespread it's found in literally every home, office, and automobile (something you can't say about the words "Revolution" "or "Genesis"), but that's personal disposition--I also think "Wii" is a bad name for completely different reasons, though largely because Nintendo wanted to exploit a homonym and not because it sounds like pet names for genitals (that's rather a regional dialect issue even within English, as far as I know). Neither was impeded commercially by it, clearly. Perhaps more importantly, Nintendo wasn't stupid enough to release the New Switch and the New Switch OLED (and they never ran into the same problem with the Wii...though not so much what replaced it). They took the least egregious part of that table, the "Lite" designation, and used that. Good on them. Those names above spun-off from the original product are just exceptionally badly thought out, and they have to stand alongside the 3DS technically being the worst selling Nintendo handheld device despite having the largest potential audience (though it still sold a lot, unlike the Wii U).
But on the other hand, I'm also one of those people who thinks console names, like appearances, aren't hugely important characteristics. Doing them badly isn't something I get really upset, putting aside that Sony did manage to match the familiar "Xbone" in sheer hilarity with the "PSFro" (which was roundly mocked when it was announced too). I could easily be in the minority on that argument too.
Also, pet names for genitals, because why not.
Honestly, I'm just glad everything works with HDMI CEC as seemlessly as it did with my Samsung QLED and Vizio soundbar. That's kind of a shock still after my current run of luck.
I'm prepared for the possibility that, short of investing in hugely expensive A/V receiving equipment on top of everything else, Dolby Atmos might be something that's just not viable for gaming until the powers that be patch that (it just happens, unlike Dolby Vision, there's no zero discussion about the need to patch them).
Also it's a bit anticlimactic after all this to find out that enabling "emulated" Dolby Vision for gameplay--since there's little Dolby Vision movie content and literally zero video games currently--actually looks worse than properly calibrated HDR10 (it's too "warm" on the color spectrum to start, with excessive yellow rather than blue).
I want to play around with plugging my console into my soundbar because, hey, it's a novel thing, but it sounds like you'd only do that if you're willing to take a hit on video quality. If I were really upset, I could just return the soundbar and get a much cheaper one, but Dolby Atmos in movies would be nice.
SONY may, more or less, have the naming convention down, but they more than make up for it in bad hardware design choices.
Nobody is perfect here.
Anecdotally, I'm "old" enough to remember the huge amount of retail confusion over successive 3DS/2DS, which utterly dwarfed the "Wii U" dilemma. There's a "Wii" and a "Wii U", and they look similar. That's troublesome. Meanwhile, there's a "3DS", a "2DS", "New" versions of both, and "XL" versions of both of those and almost all of them look the same. That's absurd bordering on disturbing. I am not the only person who thought, in complete seriousness, the Nintendo New 2DS XL Lite was an actual commercial product, and just one that people only purchased as a last resort. Maybe it is.
Thank goodness the DS had already sunset in that market region; it would've been worse.
Then again, I know at 35 I'm not nearly the oldest regular in this thread by far, though I may be the only one of that age to take English S.L..
Sony names their consoles like Rocky.
MS names their consoles like Rambo.
I had $90 worth of kids gifts in my cart at Gamestop, so I threw GotG in to crack the $100 limit to get $10 off. so $17 GotG seems like a steal.
Steam ID: Good Life