I bought a small press book with a collection of this art and it was a fun little trip down memory lane, as I’ve owned some of the hardware (boxes) depicted in it.
For anyone else interested: https://lockbooks.net/pages/overclocked-launch
To me, this is a continuum with the box art of early games, where because the graphics themselves were pretty limited the box art had to be fabulous. Get someone like Roger Dean to paint a picture for the imagination. https://www.rogerdean.com/
The peak of this was the Maplin electronics catalogue: https://70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/1980s-maplin-catalogues/ ; the Radio Shack of UK electronics hobbyists, now gone entirely. Did they need to have cool art on the catalogue? No. Was it awesome? Yes.
https://spillhistorie.no/2025/10/03/legends-of-the-games-ind...
Turns out that the Psygnosis developers in the 1980s used him as a kind of single-shot concept artist. They would commission the box art first, then use that as inspiration for designing the actual game to go inside the box.
https://row.rarevinyl.com/products/anderson-bruford-wakeman-...
Weird shop; they never really got rid of any stock that was even theoretically useable, so it was at least partially a museum of outdated gadgets.
Today, a layman couldnt chronologically sort CoD games from past 10 years from looks/play/feel, new Fifa and similar is _the_ same game but with new teams added to it, and virtually every game made is a "copycat with their own twist" with almost 0 technical invention.
Feels similar to how painting hasn’t had any revolution in new paints available.
I think he meant the software side (game-systems wise), not hardware innovation
I mostly play indie/retro/slightly-old games these days, so I mostly hear of the negatives for modern AAA, admittedly. I'm also tempted to complain about live service, microtransactions, gacha, season passes, and so on in recent big releases, but maybe that would be getting off-topic.
Just like Crysis did 18 years ago?
>it's no longer really feasible to keep most of your games installed all the time and ready to play.
Crysis was around 5% of common HDD back then. Now, it'd be equivalent of around 80 GiB now. That would be just about what Elden Ring with the DLC takes.
So I will probably install Linux (probably Debian) and move on and forget about those particular games... (~30 years since I first installed Linux on a PC!).
I built its successor in 2020, using a GPU from 2017. The longevity of the PS4 has given that thing serious legs, and I haven't seen the need to upgrade yet. It still runs what I want to run. It's also the first post-DOS x86/64 machine I've owned that has never had Windows installed.
The only reason I'd upgrade is to improve performance for AI stuff.
The AM5 platform is quite lacking when it comes to PCIe lanes - especially once you take USB4 into account. I'm hoping my current setup from 2019 survives until AM6 - but it seems AMD wants to keep AM5 for another generation or two...
You'd be better off complaining about how Threadripper CPUs and motherboards are priced out of the enthusiast consumer market, than asking for the mainstream CPU platform to be made more expensive with the addition of IO that the vast majority of mainstream customers don't want to pay for.
x16 GPU + x4 NVMe + x4 USB = 24 direct CPU lanes covers 99% of the market, with add-ons behind the shared chipset bandwidth. The other 1% of the market are pushed to buy Threadripper/Epyc.
Now it's a node in my proxmox cluster running transcodes for jellyfin. The circle of life
I genuinely don't believe this to be true for AMD. I bought a 6600xt on Release Day and by the time I was able to build my complete PC, it had upstream linux kernel support. You can say what you will about AMD but any company that respects my freedoms enough to build a product with great linux support and without requiring any privacy invading proprietary software to use is a-ok in my book.
Fuck NVidia though.
And it looks like Linux-Libre also opposes CPU microcode updates[1], as if bugged factory microcode with known security vulnerabilities is any less non-free than fixed microcode. Recommending an alternative architecture that uses non-proprietary microcode I can understand; this I cannot.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Linux-Libre-4.16-Released
I remember when running linux on your computer at all was hit or miss, these days i can go to lenovo and buy a thinkpad with ubuntu preinstalled and know that it will just work.
That was 2021 though when AMD was still a relative underdog trying to claw market share from Nvidia from consumers. AMD of today has adjusted their prices and attitude to consumers to match their status as a CPU and GPU duopoly in the AI/datacenter space.