4thVariety

You can grab a Sony Xperia XA for $170 without contract and it should do anything you want it to, i.e, phone, social, browsing, mail, GPS. Then get a contract that is not screwing you over on the subsidy. Take the money Apple and Samsung are overcharging you and spend it on a Switch.

If you need your mobile phone as a status device, then forget what I just said. Depending where you need to represent, either get the latest Apple device, or take 10 of them, dip 'em in gold and hang them from your neck Mr.T style for extra street cred.

The regular PS4 has a SATA2 port, which means it can transfer 3 Gbit per second, which is 300 Megabyte per second. It can fill the PS4's 8GB of RAM in 27 seconds.

The PS4pro has a SATA3 port, which means it can transfer 6 Gbit per second, which is 600 Megabyte per second. It can fill the PS4's 8GB of RAM in 13.5 seconds

No regular hard disk one would ever consider putting in a PS4 of any kind can do more than 200 MB per second in the best of scenarios. Your off the rack 4TB-8TB hard disk will do somewhere around 150 Megabyte, making Sata3 utterly pointless. So your hard disk will take 54.5 seconds to fill the 8GB or RAM in the PS4.

SSDs on the other hand can easily do 550 Megabyte per second. They can fill the PS4's 8GB of RAM in 15 seconds. Check the speed before buying. For people interested in putting an SSD into their PS4pro, Sata3 is a welcome upgrade.

Here is how loading times will still screw you over.
It is a folly to believe that a game loads in a third or quarter of the time because the hard disk can shovel data 3-4 times faster. Loading a level is more than just transferring data. Think of loading as the process where somebody dumps an entire box of Legos in front of you and commands you to assemble them. Sure, if you have an SSD the Legos are dumped in front of you much faster, but whether that improves the overall process is a question of where the bottle neck was in the first place. Are you able to process the Legos as fast as they come in? Do you need x amount of seconds to assemble the Legos and even a slow hard drive can toss them your way fast enough?

As somebody putting an SSD into a PS4, you obviously did the best you could to remove the bottle neck of data transfer. What you do not have any control over is how fast the game engine can initialize the level after getting the raw data dump. So whether your SSD speeds up things or not depends on whether it was the bottle neck in the first place. You optimize one factor of many in the process called loading.

In an online game, you also need time to get the server state, ideally a parallel load (Titanics cruncher decrunches while loading for those who remember), but too often a second and separate loading phase. Which then triggers another round of loading from the hard drive, since the game is only now loading the required player textures, instead of loading all of them before.

Do not expect wonders from SSDs either, they truly can improve load times, but they do not have to. The main advantage of the SSD isn't even the fast load times, it is the access speed. A normal hard drive still basically works like your old vinyl records. Sure, the technology is pushed to its limits when it comes to the speed at which the head jumps to the right spot, a good hard drive can do up to 100 random IO operations per second. This is also the point where the importance of RPM come into play. Hard disks with higher RPMs do better when it comes to random reading operations. A 5400 RPM drive has to wait longer for the random read to finish before it can readjust its arm, even if the 5400 could technically read data as fast as the 7200RPM drive, in reality it will not, since data is hardly ever arranged on a disk in such a way that the needle will stay in one place long enough. All of that is meaningless though, since an average SSD will do around 100.000 operations per second. Meaning your load times do not even have to get faster because of SATA3 being faster than SATA2, but simply because of the SSD not being a mechanical device with arms readjusting their position constantly.

At the end of the day, most PS4s will have regular hard drives. If you have loading screens between levels, you have linear loads, which hard disks can do reasonably well and SATA3 or SATA2 does not make any difference. An SSD might, but also might not. If you have big open worlds which stream in the data as you move through them, every developer will have to make sure it runs off a regular hard disk. An SSD could stream in worlds with a higher fidelity, but the as long as SSDs are not the default storage medium, developers cannot make use of that. So yes, one way for Microsoft to screw over Sony really hard with the Scorpio is not so much the processing power (they both buy the same AMD technologies), but to put 500GB SSDs in every device.

There is no excuse for the current state of the launch lineup. Forget other platforms having a slow start, those platforms cost a fraction of the price, their predecessors had an established consumer base and the games on them were a known quantity for consumers.

To that end, the Oculus start lineup is a burning trainwreck of the worst kind of greenlight and shovelware the PC has to offer. For hours on end, yesterday's stream featured the bored faces of the GB crew. There should have been knife fights to the death over who is allowed to play next. There wasn't even the desire to play that one must play game over and over. Instead is was a merciless grind through a bunch of games I am happy to never see again in my entire life.

Gaming did not need the mainstream press the past 20 years, VR won't need the mainstream press the next 20 years.

Even within gaming, the press has a very limited grasp on what is relevant. Moba and mindcraft became the biggest thing by far, but you would not guess it from reading gaming websites.

CD Project Red would probably be the first guys to admit that they are way out of their depth when it comes to putting a black person in a Witcher game in such a way that it works out perfectly with American audiences.

Besides, Witcher already shows a world full of warlords willing to use racism as a tool to dispose of everybody they do not like. The main character gets insulted pretty much all throughout the game. It is impossible to imagine that the characters in the world of Witcher would have much to offer on the topic of inclusiveness. It would be odd to find a town where they killed all elves, then all dwarves, then all magic users, then all people who come from the wrong country, but then left the black NPC alive for a reason and start preaching about inclusiveness.

Due to living in Europe, I was not able to see the whole show since it essentially ran the entire night from 8 p.m. to 4(?) a.m.
So for me, personally, a little less "live" in the Big Live Live show would be appreciated. Either reruns on justinTV, or some sort of download.
 
The push for member ship was also odd.  One of the membership benefits is not having ads, so I open giantbomb.com and there are no ads right now. 

It's got about 47 more songs on the disk than I care about, so I happily skip this. Won't complain much though, since Harmonix already released an awesome AC/DC disc.

It's quite sometime until I last read something on the forum, or heard something on the Bombcast about it. Is PS3 Trophy support happening anytime during the PS3 10-year life cycle? Is Sony to blame for being pricks about their data? Is it a programming issue? Should I simply give up on being able to browse my Trophies in a decent way? Will I be stuck with Sony's crappy trophy tools forever?

I can't say I like the characters really. This game would really benefit from using the likeness and voices actors the players actually know. Especially since the comments are counter to the atmosphere and the game makes a dash for the goofy side of things and away from dead serious tension. My suggestion would be a cast consisting of Bruce Campbell, Simon Pegg, Danny Trejo and Milla Jovovic.