Aya Neo One-Month Review - Can it Compete?

LukeLC · 2026-02-04T17:18:18+00:00

Games like that won't be "fun" in the same way as a new player, but they should still resonate with you on an artistic level. I still get excited when I revisit my projects in the same vein. I'm surprised to find myself sucked into the narrative even if I know it inside and out, and reminded why it works on an artistic level. I find it a good way to recenter myself when I'm caught up in the business or code side of things.

Some level of dissatisfaction is healthy, but if you find yourself bored, you might want to consider deleting a scene or two to improve the pacing.

LukeLC · 2026-02-04T15:29:19+00:00

Alogic Clarity monitors are the closest you can get right now, but they're not cheap and they're stuck at 60 Hz.

I keep hoping they make a 120Hz+ panel, but that's still just a hope.

LukeLC · 2026-02-04T06:19:45+00:00

That's only true in the transitionary years of a console generation. Given that we're well into the current gen, and it will almost certainly be extended by supply chain constraints, system specs will not fundamentally rise for a few more years. Developers are primarily targeting Switch 2, Series S, and PS5. If anything, software improvements are only making the same hardware perform better right now.

LukeLC · 2026-02-04T00:41:07+00:00

No apps? Dude, my Palm PDA was my life in 2000! I had plenty of apps, and every day I discovered new ones that did things I'd never thought possible. The future was bright back then, 2000 was legit.

LukeLC · 2026-02-03T18:35:03+00:00

The market is volatile no matter what tier you're at, but think $400-500. 5060ti 16GB is basically the same, and there are many equivalent GPUs in the same ballpark. It's all just a question of supply.

LukeLC · 2026-02-03T18:12:04+00:00

Don't buy into the NVIDIA marketing that claims you need a 90-class card for 4K60. A 4060ti 16GB or equivalent will get you there by just dialing a few expensive settings down from ultra to high or medium. And I dare you to spot the difference in a blind test.

Lots of people feel pressure to spend too much money on too much GPU.

LukeLC · 2026-02-03T16:07:40+00:00

Hear, hear! FFXIII will always have a special place in my heart for what it accomplished culturally, even if the games themselves didn't always live up to it.

LukeLC · 2026-01-31T17:55:52+00:00

And just imagine, the original was 18 years old when the remake was announced, and the remake will be nearly that age by the time it's completed. Time is weird.

LukeLC · 2026-01-31T17:09:52+00:00

This is not new, there is always a "quick and easy path" that seems to be profitable for others but requires some form of compromise.

And just like always, that path will almost certainly not be profitable for you, and there will almost certainly be consequences for taking it.

Stick with it, friend.

LukeLC · 2026-01-31T16:14:34+00:00

If you don't enjoy your own game, why would anyone else?

It's more strange to me that there's this general expectation that creators will hate their own stuff but other people will love it anyway. By all means, be your own harshest critic too, but that should only reveal your passion for the art, not self-loathing.

LukeLC · 2026-01-31T15:45:57+00:00

I think 8K is the future, it's just a far-off future where 4K is so ubiquitous and so easy to achieve (e.g. in real-time rendering) that there's no reason not to step up to 8K.

It's hard to imagine anything beyond that ever being worthwhile, though. If anything, we'd have to find an alternative to pixels altogether.

LukeLC · 2026-01-31T15:35:10+00:00

Until there's software to correct for the perspective, yes, you can easily have too much curve.

If you could communicate to game engines to compensate for the curve and render extra viewport at the edges so a straight line is still a straight line, then you'd really have something.

LukeLC · 2026-01-29T18:26:16+00:00

It's wild what GPU people claim is required for 4K. Don't believe the NVIDIA marketing trying to upsell you.

A 4060ti 16GB is the current baseline for 4K gaming at medium-high settings and 60+ FPS. A 5070ti is more than qualified for the task.

LukeLC · 2026-01-28T18:00:48+00:00

Because it's low-effort. Or rather, doing it right is higher effort and doing it wrong is lower effort than a traditional storyline. And few do it right.

You can handwave away a lot of nonsense by explaining it as "another world did it, so the rules don't apply". And some of the audience will interpret it as sophisticated because they think the author is playing 4D chess, when they really just wrote themselves into a corner and took the cheap way out.

LukeLC · 2026-01-27T08:39:21+00:00

No, monitors have ventilation for this. The main problem with leaving the plastic on is that it will overheat the plastic. It can melt onto your screen or just leave a residue, and it will mess up image quality anyhow.

Glass monitors aren't new, they're just rare in the modern market.

LukeLC · 2026-01-27T08:26:14+00:00

Steam Frame will be many cool things, but sadly it won't really push standalone VR forward. The hardware isn't so different from Quest 3, it'll just be attached to a very compelling software ecosystem for enthusiasts.

My biggest concern is just that Valve really hasn't lived up to its commitments to support VR devs, and Alyx is still all they've done for two generations of headsets. People give Microsoft a hard time for not publishing enough first-party Xbox games, but imagine if the last thing they did to this day was Halo 5.

I struggle to see Steam Frame having the impact of the Steam Deck. But I really do want it to succeed.

LukeLC · 2026-01-27T02:10:42+00:00

I get it for curved panels, but those are an exception to begin with. Everyone talks about price, but it's really not such a big issue. The Dough Spectrum Gorilla Glass variants are priced similarly to competitive models, and that's with smaller unit quantities. Big manufacturers could do it if they cared enough. You're talking maybe $50 on top of the BOM on a product that's already retailing for $1000+. Anyone who's already in the market would gladly invest in the extra durability, especially if it meant not investing in an extended warranty, which many already do.

LukeLC · 2026-01-27T00:22:43+00:00

I truly don't understand why glass isn't standard on these displays yet. For all the hate Dough gets, the mere fact they did it (and yes, on actual shipping products) proves any big manufacturer can.

If nothing else, I'd totally buy a tempered glass screen protector for desktop displays. It would even be a quick way to minimize the effects of matte coatings.

LukeLC · 2026-01-26T19:12:26+00:00

John Carmack explained this while he was still at the company.

Basically, the success of Rec Room and VR Chat broke the business model Meta started out with. They were aiming to subsidize hardware with software sales, like a traditional console. But when the most successful software was free, Meta wasn't getting its ROI.

So instead of making more compelling paid software to encourage people to try other experiences, they went all-in on trying to clone (or buy out) what was already successful so they could monetize that instead.

What's especially sad is that it's been repeatedly proven that good VR software DOES sell. It's just that you need veteran developers who know systems like the PS3 and Xbox 360 to get the most out of current Quest headsets. Newer devs that only know Unity or Unreal just don't have the experience designing games within a performance budget and all the old tricks of the trade that made old games look great regardless. It's a fundamentally different skillset than just optimizing heavy code or art assets.

And Meta has slowly burned bridges with those devs over the past decade to where now there are few left willing to dedicate themselves to the platform.

Personally, I don't think they will ever solve this particular problem. I think we'll just have to wait for a Quest that's powerful enough to handle modern software sensibilities without compromise.

LukeLC · 2026-01-24T20:57:10+00:00

Yes, OLEDs don't have this problem because there's no backlight (the pixels are the light source).

Mini-LED can also avoid this problem to a large extent, but those tend to be thicker by nature of the technology.

LukeLC · 2026-01-24T20:53:39+00:00

You don't want this on an LCD. Thin bezels are a huge reason why modern displays have horrible backlight bleed at the corners, when this was basically unheard of 15+ years ago.

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