A lot of people here are missing the "actual" point of this app. It's not about any dopamine of petting an animal, it's literally about the trophies.

PlayStation has a trophy system that they use as their achievements. These trophies are categorized by bronze, silver, gold, and platinum, with the platinum trophy usually being the "you got all the other trophies" trophy. People brag about how many games they "have Platinumed" and look for games that are "easy to plat"

So, $4 for a platinum trophy you can get in less than 30 minutes is a bargain. Sure beats having to spend 80+ hours "getting good" in a game to get a platinum.

One of the overlooked reasons people buy physical is because of the state of their internet and the size of AAA games nowadays. I like buying physical versions of games because of my monthly data cap - I have a 1.2TB/mo data cap from the only provider to my address. (My provider is most likely the one you're thinking of.) A game the size of Call of Duty would eat up 1/10th of my monthly allotment, and since both me and my wife work from home and she watches a lot of streaming TV, downloading that much puts us at risk at going over, especially if there are multiple good AAA titles I want that month.

That being said, even that benefit doesn't work out much anymore. Thanks to "Smart Delivery" on Xbox, the disc only contains the base Xbox One code. If I put it in my Xbox Series X, it just goes out to the internet and downloads the XSX version of the game instead of patching the Xbox One version with what needs updated. And if I try to put the disc in while my Xbox is unplugged from the internet, it will install but won't actually play because the disc told the console it needs an update.

Or, by the time I get the game, there has been a huge day one patch that magically needs to redownload the entire game so buying the physical disc is useless other than to act as a hardware key to unlock the game.

Smaller filesize games I have no problem downloading digitally, it's just the huge behemoths with huge behemoth patches that worry me. It's also why I resisted Game Pass for the first few years. What I've had to settle for now is I look at my remaining data cap on the last night of the month and start mass downloading Game Pass games with whatever room I have left.

They eliminated the data cap for a few months in 2020, and service didn't suffer for me during that time, so obviously my local infrastructure doesn't NEED data caps...

(I had originally replaced the S in that last word with the symbol that you get when you hit shift-4 but the filter said it looked too much like ascii art so it wouldn't let me post it.)

Yes, we can get surround or even DTS directly to our speakers (5.1 or 7.1) however the games do not take advantage of any atmospheric speakers, such as my 5.1.2 setup where I have two speakers in the ceiling.

Playing a 4K Blu-Ray on PS5 does has a passthrough audio setting so movies with Atmos do get sent correctly to the entire system as just raw data. The PS5 has been able to do this since launch day - but we'd love to have all of our speakers used during gameplay - which is something even the Xbox One X did.

I just paid $213.88 for the privilege of owning an EV in Georgia for another year. (This is mandatory and separate from the optional $55 Alternative Fuel License Plate fee that allows me to use a small number of our HOV lanes.)

Taking into account my driving habits and converting them into MPG for the Mustang I had before my EV, I calculated my annual gas tax to be about $75.

Recently, yes. A lot of the sports games nowadays feature a career mode that plays out like an RPG with your specific player that include conversations between games that affect stats. Madden features a full-blown narrative taking you from college up to the pros complete with fully-voiced characters and cutscenes chronicling your journey.

They're not flagged in the US because the US won't allow them to be flagged in the US. In order to have a cruise ship flagged in the US, it must be built in the US and have 75% of its onboard crew staffed by US citizens. Unfortunately, there's no shipyard large enough to build a cruise ship in the US, and it turns out a lot of US citizens don't like the idea of doing a 6-8 month tour on a boat just to be a cabin steward.

So, they register in "flag of convenience" countries that don't have those strict standards like the Bahamas.

One cruise line did attempt to build two ships in America. Half way through construction of the first ship in Mississippi, the company went bankrupt. NCL bought the partially finished ship and towed it to Germany where it was outfitted and then sent to Hawaii. NCL now operates the Pride of America as a US flagged ship (since the hull was built in the US) with a mostly American crew. Its sister ship was never built. That shipyard in Mississippi went back to only doing military projects for the US Navy and never looked at making a passenger ship again.

They leaked the addresses and phone numbers of people with media credentials. A number of gamers don't like what these people who get media credentials say about games on the internet, so these gamers were able to give those with media credentials a piece of their mind directly, and try to convince them to not say such things in the future, "or else".

I bought in EV in 2015, just before Georgia phased out their tax credits. They replaced those tax credits with a $200+/year charge during yearly registration. The politician who introduced this admitted he pulled the $200 figure out of thin air, expecting it to be refined in committee - but nobody challenged him on it and it passed without debate. For the past few years, EV owners have been trying to get this knocked down to $100 (closer to what we paid in gas taxes in our old ICE cars) but THAT gets challenged and removed in committee due to the lost tax revenue.

In one month, Georgia went from being one of the most friendly states towards EV's to one of the most hostile.

One thing to realize is that Notch really never had any plans of making a VR port of Minecraft. In the past, he has stated that because of the JAVA technology used in Minecraft, it was too difficult to do it right, and they were having a problem making the UI work. They weren't very thrilled with the way the Minecrift mod did it, and wanted to do it better, but it just wasn't possible.

(In fact, the Minecrift mod doesn't even work with anything higher than 1.6, which means you can only use it in singleplayer or on servers that never upgraded. This is because of how much things have changed in the code between 1.6 and 1.7.)

So, Notch actually abandoned the effort sometime last year.

Last year: "We aren't making a Rift port because it's just too difficult with our current codebase."
Yesterday: "We aren't making a Rift port because Facebook."

To me, it sounds like a convenient excuse to cover up the fact that their codebase is really messy and can't do as much as they wish it could. We can blame it on Zuck now!

Except Tiny Tower plays differently and has different game mechanics than SimTower. But you're right, they LOOK the same. But that's about it.

I am going to make the assumption that you are living in the US (based on your other posts.)

Considering that the summary says that "UK Physicists" are researching this, my guess is that neither you nor I are paying for this as a US taxpayer.

I imagine publishers that make their living selling downloadable games on PSN suffered from this outage in a highly economic way.

Nope, you can't RETURN from a GOTO. The RETURN command only works with a GOSUB, where it stores the line you came from - so you can execute the same block of code at different areas.

...They GOSUB and don't RETURN.