[josekortez]

I bought the $9.99 upgrade for Outer Worlds that's supposed to get the new version. I do not own the game nor the DLC. Thought it was a worth a shot, but it didn't work. Just FYI. 

 

(I'm going to purchase everything anyways, just thought I'd try it out)

My local Walmart had tons of disc copies of The Outer Worlds for Xbox One and PS4 for $14.99.  That's where I bought mine.

 

This morning, I bought all the DLC and the upgrade, but I still haven't opened my Series X that I'm saving for my birthday next week.

 

So, perhaps by then, I'll see what all the hype is about regarding the upgrade.

[SackAttack]

TFW you earn three achievements and none of the respective rewards trackers recognize them.

[spoderman]

That section is about running around until the enemies leave. I do hear the movement is really clunky compared to the other RE remakes.

You're also only really supposed to use your ammo to trigger melee prompts if possible (shooting at a knee cap, head, etc) and then run up to them and melee for easy kills and it gives invincibility frames. RE4 is one of the easier survival horror games, and IMO one of the easiest Resident Evils. They give tons of ammo as well, so while you really shouldn't be wasting it.. you don't need to run from everything (aside from specific situations like that town sequence). That's how the original was anyway, I'm not expecting the remake to be much harder on normal difficulty

[bee01]

My local Walmart had tons of disc copies of The Outer Worlds for Xbox One and PS4 for $14.99.  That's where I bought mine.

 

This morning, I bought all the DLC and the upgrade, but I still haven't opened my Series X that I'm saving for my birthday next week.

 

So, perhaps by then, I'll see what all the hype is about regarding the upgrade.

The 'remaster' has terrible performance.  Better off playing the original version at 60 FPS.

 

Speaking of bad performance, it looks like they patched Gotham Knights to run at an almost locked 30 FPS:

[awp]

The 'remaster' has terrible performance. Better off playing the original version at 60 FPS.

There’s a patch on the way that hopefully will improve performance.

[bee01]

There’s a patch on the way that hopefully will improve performance.

Hopefully, but I'm skeptical.  It took Guerilla a year to fix the PC version of Horizon that was done by the same company that ported Outer Worlds (Virtuous).

[jlazenby1]

The 'remaster' has terrible performance. Better off playing the original version at 60 FPS.

Can confirm, at least on PS5, that the performance is awful! I fired it up last night, couldn't play longer than about 15 minutes. Those framerate drops are horrible and are constantly happening

[Bloomy]

TFW you earn three achievements and none of the respective rewards trackers recognize them.

Thursday, neither the daily 50 pointer nor the Women's History Month 100 pointer picked up on an achievement.  The 50 point daily worked for me yesterday and today.  The Women's History Month card checked off the achievement yesterday and I had checked off the 2 organization punches on Thursday.  So everything's checked, but the 100 points hasn't worked and the punchcard itself isn't checked.  Haven't tried the Powerful Women one yet.

[jimbo8574]

Not sure if this has been posted here but there is a Diablo IV beta.  You can get a code for PC, XBox or PS5 by buying a chicken sandwich at KFC.  It doesn't have to be the double down one.  I bought the cheapest one  ($2.15). 

 

Promo good through 3/18.  Beta starts 3/17/2023.

 

It's time to Double Down on Diablo 4 hype with this tasty KFC collab | Windows Central

[LoganDX]

I'm on day 3 of 50mg of Prednisone and I don't care, I'll eat that double down, judge me 😂

[Donken]

Ally no-penalty CDs at 4.75%. Get some

I would guess no one on CheapAssGamers is dropping more then $250,000 into this, but just be sure to not go above the limit of the FDIC insurance with Ally since they are not in a great place financially themselves.

 

https://www.marketwa...as-svb-c4bbcafa

 

 

Sorry, didn't realize this article is behind a paywall for some.

 

Spoiler

Silicon Valley Bank has failed following a run on deposits, after its parent company’s share price crashed a record 60% on Thursday.

Trading of SVB Financial Group’s SIVB stock was halted early Friday, after the shares plunged again in premarket trading. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said SVB was one of a few banks she was “monitoring very carefully.” Reaction poured in from several analysts who discussed the bank’s liquidity risk.

California regulators closed Silicon Valley Bank and handed the wreckage over to the Federal Deposit Insurance Administration later on Friday.

Below is the same list of 10 banks we highlighted on Thursday that showed similar red flags to those shown by SVB Financial through the fourth quarter. This time, we will show how much they reported in unrealized losses on securities — an item that played an important role in SVB’s crisis.

Below that is a screen of U.S. banks with at least $10 billion in total assets, showing those that appeared to have the greatest exposure to unrealized securities losses, as a percentage of total capital, as of Dec. 31.

First, a quick look at SVB

Some media reports have referred to SVB of Santa Clara, Calif., as a small bank, but it had $212 billion in total assets as of Dec. 31, making it the 17th largest bank in the Russell 3000 Index RUA as of Dec. 31. That makes it the largest U.S. bank failure since Washington Mutual in 2008.

One unique aspect of SVB was its decades-long focus on the venture capital industry. The bank’s loan growth had been slowing as interest rates rose. Meanwhile, when announcing its $21 billion dollars in securities sales on Thursday, SVB said it had taken the action not only to lower its interest-rate risk, but because “client cash burn has remained elevated and increased further in February, resulting in lower deposits than forecasted.”

SVB estimated it would book a $1.8 billion loss on the securities sale and said it would raise $2.25 billion in capital through two offerings of new shares and a convertible bond offering. That offering wasn’t completed.

So this appears to be an example of what can go wrong with a bank focused on a particular industry. The combination of a balance sheet heavy with securities and relatively light on loans, in a rising-rate environment in which bond prices have declined and in which depositors specific to that industry are themselves suffering from a decline in cash, led to a liquidity problem.

Unrealized losses on securities

Banks leverage their capital by gathering deposits or borrowing money either to lend the money out or purchase securities. They earn the spread between their average yield on loans and investments and their average cost for funds.

The securities investments are held in two buckets:

• Available for sale — these securities (mostly bonds) can be sold at any time, and under accounting rules are required to be marked to market each quarter. This means gains or losses are recorded for the AFS portfolio continually. The accumulated gains are added to, or losses subtracted from, total equity capital.
• Held to maturity — these are bonds a bank intends to hold until they are repaid at face value. They are carried at cost and not marked to market each quarter.

In its regulatory Consolidated Financial Statements for Holding Companies—FR Y-9C, filed with the Federal Reserve, SVB Financial, reported a negative $1.911 billion in accumulated other comprehensive income as of Dec. 31. That is line 26.b on Schedule HC of the report, for those keeping score at home. You can look up regulatory reports for any U.S. bank holding company, savings and loan holding company or subsidiary institution at the Federal Financial Institution Examination Council’s National Information Center. Be sure to get the name of the company or institution right — or you may be looking at the wrong entity.

Here’s how accumulated other comprehensive income (AOCI) is defined in the report: “Includes, but is not limited to, net unrealized holding gains (losses) on available-for-sale securities, accumulated net gains (losses) on cash flow hedges, cumulative foreign currency translation adjustments, and accumulated defined benefit pension and other postretirement plan adjustments.”

In other words, it was mostly unrealized losses on SVB’s available-for-sale securities. The bank booked an estimated $1.8 billion loss when selling “substantially all” of these securities on March 8.

The list of 10 banks with unfavorable interest margin trends

On the regulatory call reports, AOCI is added to regulatory capital. Since SVB’s AOCI was negative (because of its unrealized losses on AFS securities) as of Dec. 31, it lowered the company’s total equity capital. So a fair way to gauge the negative AOCI to the bank’s total equity capital would be to divide the negative AOCI by total equity capital less AOCI — effectively adding the unrealized losses back to total equity capital for the calculation.

Getting back to our list of 10 banks that raised similar red margin flags to those of SVB, here’s the same group, in the same order, showing negative AOCI as a percentage of total equity capital as of Dec. 31. We have added SVB to the bottom of the list. The data was provided by FactSet:

Bank Ticker City AOCI ($mil) Total equity capital ($mil) AOCI/ TEC – AOCI Total assets ($mil) Customers Bancorp Inc. CUBI West Reading, Pa. -$163 $1,403 -10.4% $20,896 First Republic Bank FRC San Francisco -$331 $17,446 -1.9% $213,358 Sandy Spring Bancorp Inc. SASR Olney, Md. -$132 $1,484 -8.2% $13,833 New York Community Bancorp Inc. NYCB Hicksville, N.Y. -$620 $8,824 -6.6% $90,616 First Foundation Inc. FFWM Dallas -$12 $1,134 -1.0% $13,014 Ally Financial Inc. ALLY Detroit -$4,059 $12,859 -24.0% $191,826 Dime Community Bancshares Inc. DCOM Hauppauge, N.Y. -$94 $1,170 -7.5% $13,228 Pacific Premier Bancorp Inc. PPBI Irvine, Calif. -$265 $2,798 -8.7% $21,729 Prosperity Bancshare Inc. PB Houston -$3 $6,699 -0.1% $37,751 Columbia Financial, Inc. CLBK Fair Lawn, N.J. -$179 $1,054 -14.5% $10,408 SVB Financial Group SIVB Santa Clara, Calif. -$1,911 $16,295 -10.5% $211,793 Source: FactSet

Click on the tickers for more about each bank.

Read Tomi Kilgore’s detailed guide to the wealth of information available for free on the MarketWatch quote page.

Ally Financial Inc. ALLY — the third largest bank on the list by Dec. 31 total assets — stands out as having the largest percentage of negative accumulated comprehensive income relative to total equity capital as of Dec. 31.

To be sure, these numbers don’t mean that a bank is in trouble, or that it will be forced to sell securities for big losses. But SVB had both a troubling pattern for its interest margins and what appeared to be a relatively high percentage of securities losses relative to capital as of Dec. 31.

Banks with the highest percentage of negative AOCI to capital

There are 108 banks in the Russell 3000 Index RUA that had total assets of at least $10.0 billion as of Dec. 31. FactSet provided AOCI and total equity capital data for 105 of them. Here are the 20 which had the highest ratios of negative AOCI to total equity capital less AOCI (as explained above) as of Dec. 31:

Bank Ticker City AOCI ($mil) Total equity capital ($mil) AOCI/ (TEC – AOCI) Total assets ($mil) Comerica Inc. CMA Dallas -$3,742 $5,181 -41.9% $85,406 Zions Bancorporation N.A. ZION Salt Lake City -$3,112 $4,893 -38.9% $89,545 Popular Inc. BPOP San Juan, Puerto Rico -$2,525 $4,093 -38.2% $67,638 KeyCorp KEY Cleveland -$6,295 $13,454 -31.9% $189,813 Community Bank System Inc. CBU DeWitt, N.Y. -$686 $1,555 -30.6% $15,911 Commerce Bancshares Inc. CBSH Kansas City, Mo. -$1,087 $2,482 -30.5% $31,876 Cullen/Frost Bankers Inc. CFR San Antonio -$1,348 $3,137 -30.1% $52,892 First Financial Bankshares Inc. FFIN Abilene, Texas -$535 $1,266 -29.7% $12,974 Eastern Bankshares Inc. EBC Boston -$923 $2,472 -27.2% $22,686 Heartland Financial USA Inc. HTLF Denver -$620 $1,735 -26.3% $20,244 First Bancorp FBNC Southern Pines, N.C. -$342 $1,032 -24.9% $10,644 Silvergate Capital Corp. Class A SI La Jolla, Calif. -$199 $603 -24.8% $11,356 Bank of Hawaii Corp BOH Honolulu -$435 $1,317 -24.8% $23,607 Synovus Financial Corp. SNV Columbus, Ga. -$1,442 $4,476 -24.4% $59,911 Ally Financial Inc ALLY Detroit -$4,059 $12,859 -24.0% $191,826 WSFS Financial Corp. WSFS Wilmington, Del. -$676 $2,202 -23.5% $19,915 Fifth Third Bancorp FITB Cincinnati -$5,110 $17,327 -22.8% $207,452 First Hawaiian Inc. FHB Honolulu -$639 $2,269 -22.0% $24,666 UMB Financial Corp. UMBF Kansas City, Mo. -$703 $2,667 -20.9% $38,854 Signature Bank SBNY New York -$1,997 $8,013 -20.0% $110,635              

Again, this is not to suggest that any particular bank on this list based on Dec. 31 data is facing the type of perfect storm that has hurt SVB Financial. A bank sitting on large paper losses on its AFS securities may not need to sell them. In fact Comerica Inc. CMA, which tops the list, also improved its interest margin the most over the past four quarters, as shown here.

But it is interesting to note that Silvergate Capital Corp. SI, which focused on serving clients in the virtual currency industry, made the list. It is shuttering its bank subsidiary voluntarily.

Another bank on the list facing concern among depositors is Signature Bank SBNY of New York, which has a diverse business model, but has also faced a backlash related to the services it provides to the virtual currency industry. The bank’s shares fell 12% on Thursday and were down another 24% in afternoon trading on Friday.

Signature Bank said in a statement that it was in a “strong, well-diversified financial position.”

[Z-Saber]

Dang, guess I'll put my billions elsewhere.

[briandadude]

Haha why would people ever stash above the FDIC limit in a single account. Maybe the same people that keep their savings account at mega banks earning 0.03%.

My daily achievement for 50 points wouldn’t register today. Oh well.

Do you all think goldeneye will disappear one day? I would’ve thought so if it was exclusive to Game Pass but since it’s on Rare Replay…I feel like it will stick for those “owners”.

[deszaras]

Thursday, neither the daily 50 pointer nor the Women's History Month 100 pointer picked up on an achievement.  The 50 point daily worked for me yesterday and today.  The Women's History Month card checked off the achievement yesterday and I had checked off the 2 organization punches on Thursday.  So everything's checked, but the 100 points hasn't worked and the punchcard itself isn't checked.  Haven't tried the Powerful Women one yet.

I can’t remember if it was Wednesday or Thursday but it took about 10 hours at least for AMEM to register. I know the Women punchcard that required three achievements had problems registering for the first day or so but that seems to be how it always is. Haven’t had any issues with them not registering yesterday or today.

[Donken]

I was today years old when I realized you can play split screen Fortnite on one Series X.

[Kromis]

I finally finished Outriders after dropping it shortly after the Worldslayer expansion came out (did not buy it though). I thought I wasn't going to try the endgame stuff but I did a bit to get some achievements. I almost fell into the loot grind trap until I realized I've spent too much time on it (52h 29m, same amount of time I spent in Anthem) when I could be playing something like Tunic (which might leave later this month or next). I only have one New Horizons expedition left (the Wellspring) for the related achievement but I'm only Tier 11 and too lazy to grind to 12 to access it. I'm probably just going to uninstall the game after getting a few more "easy" achievements. The game is mindless fun and I'm glad I didn't buy it. 

[josekortez]

The $25 Xbox gift cards are 15% off at Dollar General from Sunday, 3/12 to Saturday, 3/18.  In-store only.

[deszaras]

I finally finished Outriders after dropping it shortly after the Worldslayer expansion came out (did not buy it though). I thought I wasn't going to try the endgame stuff but I did a bit to get some achievements. I almost fell into the loot grind trap until I realized I've spent too much time on it (52h 29m, same amount of time I spent in Anthem) when I could be playing something like Tunic (which might leave later this month or next). I only have one New Horizons expedition left (the Wellspring) for the related achievement but I'm only Tier 11 and too lazy to grind to 12 to access it. I'm probably just going to uninstall the game after getting a few more "easy" achievements. The game is mindless fun and I'm glad I didn't buy it.

I played the campaign before expansion came out and really enjoyed it. Much better than I expected.

[Fuzzmeister]

I finally finished Outriders after dropping it shortly after the Worldslayer expansion came out (did not buy it though). I thought I wasn't going to try the endgame stuff but I did a bit to get some achievements. I almost fell into the loot grind trap until I realized I've spent too much time on it (52h 29m, same amount of time I spent in Anthem) when I could be playing something like Tunic (which might leave later this month or next). I only have one New Horizons expedition left (the Wellspring) for the related achievement but I'm only Tier 11 and too lazy to grind to 12 to access it. I'm probably just going to uninstall the game after getting a few more "easy" achievements. The game is mindless fun and I'm glad I didn't buy it. 

The Xbox Club LFG thing is full of max rank people that help others with that stuff so they can farm better gear.  They helped a friend and I with that and the expansion endgame that needed like tier 25 which I was not about to drop 100 hours into farming.  The campaign is fun, but their version of endgame activities was just nothing but grind and bullet sponges. 

 

Wo Long ended up being a good co-op game.  You must do the first level solo, but you can co-op every level all you like and can revive each other as well.  I've had a lot of close calls with bosses or big enemies, but it's pretty fun with a friend (or two!).

[p0rn0saur]

I was today years old when I realized you can play split screen Fortnite on one Series X.

Speaking of that I always notice in COD Modern Warfare 2 a press "something" to play split screen. Might be only multiplayer now that I think about it. 

[briandadude]

How I wish Forza Horizon had splitscreen.

[cancerman1120]

I played Undertale to get the 1000/1000 but did not even care to finish it. It is not a bad game but it just does not click with me. I felt very bored. 

[Strider Turbulence EX]

I’m at the point where I don’t wanna 1000/1000 every game anymore. Never mind it being impossible with shit like Atomic heart and chronic cross having broken achievements, it’s just too time consuming. And I’m so over collecting crap that is missable or might not register. Online achievements that are either miserable time sinks or unobtainable due to server closure.

I just finished Wanted: Dead and it was a very mid game with alot of heart and passion in it. I enjoyed it but not enough to run through on hard and get the rest of the achievements.

[Wa1terSobchak]

Trying to complete GotG before it leaves Game Pass. I'm on Chapter 6 and after seeing all the glowing reports on this forum I think I'm the only person that doesn't like it.

The banter is occasionally entertaining but the combat just seems frenetic and not in a good way.

I can't wait to be done with it, my OCD won't allow me to walk away until it's done.

I'm with you. The gameplay is Ass.

[The Brief Chef]

As I've gotten older, my free time has become more scarce and 1000/1000 games has become reserved for particularly enjoyable games.

IMMORTALITY was my last one and it was great. Felt compelled to see everything to the end. Additionally- most nudity I've ever seen in a game, so heads up there.

Working my way through 'Sniper Elite 5'; undecided if I'll go for all the achievements.

[Z-Saber]

I think I've 1000'd maybe two or three games ever because I don't care about the size of my gamerscore e-peen.

[2ndopp]

Alright, here is the racing gear I splurged on. Set it up at my parents house this weekend and there's nothing better than seeing my 90 year old grandfather smile ear to ear while playing. He loves cars and I've always tried to get him into racing games, but controllers are a bit too complicated. Putting him behind a wheel was awesome!

 

 

 

[blueweltall]

What racing wheel is that? It looks nice.

[briandadude]

Oh wow that’s a cool setup

[2ndopp]

What racing wheel is that? It looks nice.

I went slightly overboard. I had some money saved up for my car, but plans changed so I used some for this setup:

 

Logitech Pro Racing Wheel

Logitech G Racing Adapter

Logitech G923 Pedals

Logitech Driving Force Shifter

GT Omega: Apex Steering Wheel Stand