u/LaCaipirinha

Living in Australia btw.

About 3 weeks ago I had an episode of sudden onset sensorineural hearing loss, treated immediately with steroids and hyperbaric and per audiograms this pretty much fully resolved but there was some high frequency hearing loss on the right, and I recalled noticing that my hearing seemed a little reduced on that side prior to this. 100% speech recognition.

Had an MRI today and the radiographer (not radiologist) clearly had seen something and asked me to come back soon for a contrast scan. Being a health care professional I asked her to level with me and she said she saw something "pressing on the nerve", that is looked benign and probably an acoustic neuroma. I know what they are due to my profession but I have never really deep dived if I'm honest.

Anyway so now I'm in the terror phase, no idea what to expect or how to process this, awaiting the contrast scan tomorrow and then I guess a specialist review in a week.

Any words of wisdom or things to keep in mind at this stage would be very welcome. I am asking ChatGPT to find my posts by people who are, regardless offering outcomes etc., living life happily years later - that kind of thing would be nice.

Also I have quite intense sinus and eustachian tube symptoms on the same side (crackling, popping, fullness that comes and goes, post nasal drip, crazy sinus pressure, boominess to loud noises when that ear is crackling and blocked feeling) which really throws me off and constantly make me worried for my ear, although it seems very intermittent, most of the time the ear feels basically fine and hearing fine other than pre-existing tinnitus flaring lately.

Do we know if any other retailers will be doing pre-orders for the 30th Celebration set prior to launching in September? Or generally speaking is it a one and done affair with EB etc.

I would love to be able to pop out my SD card on my SS1 and put it into a handheld and continue playing. I know there are FPGA handhelds that can handle up to SNES etc. but is covering all the systems an SS1 can feasible?

I've heard it referred to but not been able to find the source itself that says Sony are planning to double down on live services despite their endless failures in the space - does anyone know where this leak/news/rumour comes from?

I was sure they would be re-evaulating after everything, especially now Marathon is circling the drain, I mean that is a level of failure not many companies are lucky enough to survive. If they keep it up for another generation I'm not sure the Playstation business will survive, at least not in it's current form, that is almost a guaranteed loss of multiple billions plus the opportunity cost of not making games that, you know.. people actually want.

I suppose it fits with the digital only push though, given that single player first party games actually have had close to a 50% physical/digital sales split and the 80% number the company keep citing is actually when you factor in all of their cuts on microtransactions for Fornite etc.

I'm not really super into Pokemon cards but I tried to collect master sets of 151 and DR due to the nostalgia factor and liking the art. With 151 I found that it was quite readily available even months and months after launch at Kmart and Target etc., eventually would have to drive a bit further to find a store with stock but nothing too insane, and then eventually it dried up. I had enough time to get everything I wanted.

I expected Destined Rivals to be similar but after launch, here in fairly central Melbourne, I could not find ETBs anywhere and never managed to get a single one, and I think I had about 2-3 weeks where booster packs would randomly appear in Kmarts until they too were gone, and then absolutely nothing.

I remember hearing that previously in demand sets would usually come back into circulation in stores at RRP after a big reprint 6-12 months later but it seems this doesn't happen anymore?

Was Destined Rivals just a lot less printed or a lot more in demand? Should I pretty much assume that if I am only willing to pay RRP, this set is done?

Both in terms of interest in revisiting backlogs and new audiences looking into retro games, as well as the direct of prices (not an investor, hoping they don't go upagain) - do we see the demand and interest in retro gaming increasing or decreasing as this plays out?

Sony is still making money, PS5 has sold well (at least until the recent price hikes) and the brand is obviously strong, but the issue is that the current AAA model looks increasingly unsustainable and first party studios looks to have lost any hundreds of millions of dollars, at a time when hardware costs are also rising rapidly. A crash for the whole industry is on the horizon unless things change radically.

5-7 dev cycles, $200m-$300m budgets (minimum), giant teams and still a game can underperform if it only sells a few million copies. That is not healthy for Sony, devs or us and eventually will break if these conditions continue.

From the leaks and from what Cerny has been talking about, Sony does seem to be aiming in the right technical direction for the PS6. It looks to me like its hardware is being designed specifically around reducing dev costs, mainly through:

**1. AI upscaling/other ML based optimisation tools**

PSSR on PS5 Pro already points this way and Cerny’s Project Amethyst talk with AMD was heavily focused on ML reconstruction and AI assisted graphics.

For PS6 this should will likely become a proper system wide toolset for devs to quickly and cheaply solve upscaling, anti-aliasing, denoising and maybe frame gen where appropriate. If it’s built into the metal and standardised, it will shave a lot of dev time off the optimisation process to getting a game to launch.

**2. Better RT / lighting hardware**

Cerny has also been talking a lot about ray tracing, path tracing, neural rendering and bandwidth efficiency.
Lighting modern AAA games is insanely labour intensive, so if the PS6 can make high quality global illumination, reflections and denoising as close to being an automatic biproduct of the general level design process, it will also shave many many hours from development.

Tbf there is a danger is that studios just spend the savings on even more visual excess, but if they are disciplined this could reduce time to ship.

**3. Scalable AMD architecture**

There are also rumours of a handheld PS6 device. For this, Sony needs clean scaling from PS5 to PS5 Pro, PS6, possible portable hardware etc without each becoming separate optimisation nightmares.

They need to make scaling boring by 1) sticking with AMD (leaks already suggest thugs) and 2) giving devs standard performance profiles and insisting they are used - thats very doable.

The bigger problem is organisational. From what I can tell, Cerny and the hardware team already have this vision and the right concerns about the market, but first party studios have obviously been a mess this gen, with many basically skipping it or inexplicably dying mid gen without having released anything. Other efforts have cost Sony hundreds of millions in losses. Obviously things on this front have not been healthy.

The live-service push produced some wins like Helldivers 2, but overall it looks like Sony spent a lot of money chasing a market it did not fully understand and that gamers were already burning out on, and sacrificed the single player AAA narrative driven games that made them such a hit last gen to do so.

Hulst et al have dragged the brand from being at the top of gaming to being very precarious going into the next gen, but it’s from those execs that all the most important fixes can come. Example:

**1. Strict greenlighting and earlier cancellation**

Sony can’t keep letting projects drift for years until they are too expensive to cancel. Live service should be dead as a priority now, I can’t think of a time where you had more live case studies of how much of an abject failure that was than the PS5 gen for Sony first party.

Let these studios do what they do best, just don’t be hands off like Xbox were, focus the creatives towards achievable viable goals like you did with the PS4, just moreso now that the financial and dev time at stake is so much higher.

**2. More reuse of tech, worlds and systems**

Sony should still make AAA blockbusters, nobody wants them to stop making God of War, Wolverine, Ghost of XYZ, single player Naughty Dog games etc. But not every first party game needs to be a bespoke 5 year moon mission.

There should be much more asset and engine tech sharing between the AAA studios and the smaller ones. Thats the whole point of being first party. Make it a formal layer within world wide studios that services all the studios below. Let the smaller studios reuse engines, animation rigs, mechanics systems, combat systems, asset libraries and even models. This is how Insomniac have been so efficient this gen, by internally recycling assets and tech, and now this needs to be expanded to regenerate that AA first party space, allowing it to punch into the AAA tier on production values - also what Capcom does.

\^ with these two operational changes, and the hardware we seem to be getting with the PS6, you could bring AAA game dev time from 5-7 to 4-6 years and $300 to close to $200, but even more importantly, regenerate your AA scene with games that take 2 years to make, cost just $50-60m (like Stellar Blade for example) and not only make a profit but give birth to new IP, but could allow you to actually REDUCE game prices and help to push those dismal attach rates we currently have.

The goal has got to be not just to sell PS6s but also to build a consumer base where the average gamer buys 3-6 games a year, not one or two.

If the software part of this business can stop shitting the bed and make changes like this, I think it can be done.

Title. I want him to go down with this ship.

How unrealistic is a consolised handheld MiSTer up to PS1/N64? Like a portable SuperStation One?

I heard Taki was working on one in posts from 2 years ago but can't find anything recent.

Would be amazing if such a device existed and we could just take our SD card from our home console MiSTer and plonk it in a handheld MiSTer and carry on seamlessly!

As per the title, is this a pointless endeavour at this price range? I gather a tabletop dobosnian is the way to go but I don't know which specific models and specs are suitable.

Not CRA, but MM, the position typically occupied by a medical doctor.

It seems that at a given time there are literally only a handful of such roles listed on Linkedin or Seek in an entire country, and I'm wondering if that's because they are genuinely very rare/few in number, or if it's something to do with differing job titles or the way they are listed?

Title.. it’s becoming ever more clear that this man played a huge role not just in making the PS4 generation legendary in terms of game diversity and quality, but also clearly a massive financial success for Sony.

He recently disclosed that it was Jim Ryan, a man it’s now clear was responsible for basically all of the opposite, that pushed him out. Ryan is now rightfully vilified and long gone, and Hulst, his disciple, relegated to second in command after Sony Japan airlifted Nishino in to clean up the absolute mess these two western suits had made.

So is the path clear for a Yoshida return? His connections in the industry are not something you can easily replicate and his personality/taste is totally unique. If he had been in his position throughout the PS5 generation and its lead up, 100% we would have 10+ more GOTY contenders in our collections right now and total disasters like Concord simply would not have happened, saving the company literally hundreds of millions of dollars.

Bring back Shu :(

For context I have played 1, 2 (PS2), 3, SH2R and SHf - loved them all in their own way.

I always heard SH4 was a black sheep but, although I'm not super far (4th world), so far I can't escape the feeling that this is the most fun and creeped out I have ever been playing a Silent Hill game. The concept, the pacing (relatively short but many worlds), the tone is all just on point. I love the Rear Window vibes of checking out the neighbours and the Ghosts are probably the creepiest most panic inducing enemies I have come across in a SH game bar perhaps Pyramid Head himself.

Does the game drastically go downhill later on or something?

Whether it tops the psychological experience that SH2 is, I'm not sure, but so far I really fucking LOVE this game.

Hey guys, I’m on my first ever play through of thousand year door and after reaching chapter 2, I found the pace and enjoy has really grounded down.

It’s not terrible or anything, it just feels like a bit of a chore despite how beautiful and well presented the world still is. On googling it seems like this chapter is a bit notorious and that many people don’t really like it, but I wanted to confirm that it is worth pushing through this and that the rest of the game has better pacing and is generally more fun?

I have just got the blue key and I would also like to know roughly how far through this dungeon I currently am?

EDIT: Great responses guys, I will keep going!