So, I think most of the Trails games are garbage, but since I played them like five years ago over two months, up to CS3. Now I feel obligated to play the rest as well. Hate-playing or something.
Since there's been a bunch of new games released since then, I might have to do another one of these "marathons."
If you didn't like the story in Cold Steel so far, I don't think the next game probably isn't going to change you mind. I think it actually gets even worse.
Azure and Zero are definitely my favorite games of the series, since they just don't have anything to do with the rest of the story, until the very end.
As a certified Trails hater I stopped paying attention with Cold Steel, but is this still the same terrible story, all the way back from Trails in the Sky or something new?
While I do prefer turn-based, I played through Pillars 1 last year, and with the tons of options for auto-pause it wasn't really that bad. BGEE was also fine, and my problems with the game wasn't RTwP.
I played a ton of Cyberpunk 2077. I've done a lot of side missions, a bunch of the main missions and then started the DLC, when the game pointed me in that direction. The game still has many bugs and glitches, but they are pretty minor. The DLC seems to be worse than the main game, although even then it's minor stuff.
I usually do as well, but for some reason not this time.
Four more levels of Final Doom's TNT: Evilution. After it's done, I'll take a classic Doom break for a while. I gotta play Dark Ages first, before continuing with Plutonia.
The some more Cyberpunk 2077. I'm a bit pissed at myself and the game, because of a glitch, that blocks some side quests. Foolishly, I just used a single save slot, and the auto saves don't go back far enough, before the glitch happend, so I might try something to avoid it. The cause is probably a mod, although from what I read this bug isn't uncommon and can happen without mods. Through the use of a save editor I've managed to make the next quest available at least, but wasn't able to get the broken quest working again or "finish" it. I just hope it doesn't happen again.
Then I started A Game About Digging A Hole today. Just like the title says, you're digging a hole. You find stones and ores along the way, that you can sell, to upgrade your stuff. I'm two hours in, and looks like there's nothing to upgrade anymore, which is a bit of a bummer. Now i just have to go deeper, blow stuff up with dynamite, and look for treasure. That probably also means I'm close to the end of the game.
I think KOTOR is the only Star Wars game I have ever played. I don't really care if this remake ever comes out, but I'd probably play it.
Don't think the last point is true, since there was a report recently that said almost 50% of game time over one month was spent on live service games.
Rebates are definitely normal, but as for your first point, I honestly believe AMD were just going to give them for the launch, and thought they could get away with it. AMDs marketing is so bad, that this makes the most sense to me.
Even a Reference Model wouldn't have mattered, in this case, because to me, it looks like AMD wanted to be too much like NVIDIA and set the price for the chips too high (which they sell to the partners to make the GPUs). That's why AMD needs rebates to get the cards actually to MSRP.
As for your third point, it looks like they didn't just prioritize brick and mortar stores, but only those in the US (see all the posts about Micro Center stock). Another genius move by AMD marketing?
Sources similar to yours, and I think that's been the case for years: https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250109PD237/tsmc-54nm-3nm-capacity-2025.html https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/tsmcs-arizona-chip-fab-production-is-sold-out-through-late-2027
TSMC is also basically the only supplier, which is a reason the US and EU push so much for their own production lines, although it looks like the US wants to stop theirs.
NVIDIA used Samsung for one generation, people are saying because of the deal they got, but went back to TSMC, apparently because of yield issues.
Intel was behind schedule for a long time, and even used TSMC for their current line up, but I think their new 18A process is supposed to come this year, who knows how that will turn out.
For NVIDIA specifically I've also heard that the HBM chips for the high-end AI cards are also a bottleneck, otherwise we might get even fewer consumer GPUs, but I never followed up on that.
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