I’ve got to be honest, the price of a game is probably the least important factor on whether I make a full price purchase.

I’m not going to rush out and buy something I’ve no real interest in. I can count on one hand the number I’ve made this generation. On PS2 I’d be grabbing something every week or two, but now I just can’t get excited for the latest and greatest updates on old formulas. Half the time I buy just to encourage them to make more games like that, like I did with Talos Principle 2, Astro Bot and Split Fiction.

I might pick it up later if I feel inclined, or see it on a decent discount. Like Clair Obscur, that I picked up for £29 in a sale just because I remembered it existed and fancied something to play over the winter holiday.

A good APU solution like in the consoles would be a nice option though. Especially now with RAM prices through the roof again.

If it was going to be cheap, they’d have told us. They’ve prepared us for the worst, and we’ve still got people huffing the copium thinking the Steam Frame will be price-competitive with the Quest 3…

Agreed, the best selling dedicated gaming system of the last few years is the Switch, which has less power than many phones.

12GB seems to be the sweet spot for VRAM, but I suspect the real issue is PC devs not really giving a fuck how hit runs on less than their dev kit.

But then a lot of PC gamers seem to think a game should always run at ultra, no matter how good their rig is.

And I will die on this hill: raytracing has been a colossal waste of everybody’s time and money.

Yes, but mostly because most of the gaming PCs in Steam’s hardware survey are not really gaming PCs but just some piss poor spec laptops that can still run old games. Just having a dedicated GPU puts it in the top half.

The GPU in this is in the 7600 RX range of things. It’s marketed as a 1080p card. Can certainly hit 4K on older titles, and output 4K with upscaling.

Don’t expect miracles from it. It’s PS5 level hardware. But that’s good enough for most of us.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 completely dominated the spring and summer. Nobody would shut up about it. This year’s Baldur’s Gate.

Feels like it’s going to sweep most awards here just for that, and they’ve listed the other games just to be polite and pretend it’s a contest.

I should get around to playing it at some point.

Honestly didn’t think it was as good as the first one.

The truck is a hammer and every single problem is a nail.

Having played a fair bit of it, I can see why it isn’t.

Every award show ever: “Just give most of the prizes to whatever sold the most, with the odd curveball choice to make sure everyone comments to tell us that we are wrong to drive up those engagement metrics”

That intro section is fantastic.

Enemy design can be annoying though.

From the GPU specs in expecting a firmly mid range machine. Probably about the price of a PS5 Pro, but with the performance of a base PS5.

Impressive. This is like making a Star Trek replicator, but the only thing it can make is more garbage.

Yeah, at about £500 I’d have got one. I don’t need the full Steam OS or any of that crap. I just want wireless connection to my PC for streaming.

The use of a second wireless dongle could be a double edged sword as well. Right now I can use a Quest anywhere in the house on Wifi. Works better than wired, in fact. The dongle would limit where I can use it.

I hope there’s a giant archive of these guides we can download, should anything happen to that site. Any older games you might be stuck on, this is about the only place to go for help.

And I’ll tell you now, old games can be obscure as shit. They didn’t care if you finished them or not.

Depends how full it is, how interesting is it (note this is not the same as full), how fast you can travel, and how fun movement is.

There’s a lot of elements to open world and a lot of devs get the balance very wrong. You end up playing in a map rather than the world.

And the DLC is just as good as the base game.

Come on everybody, we need to make a…

Platform game

Doom clone

Command and Conquer clone

MMO

Open world game

MOBA

PUBG clone

Extraction Shooter

Coming soon: Fortnite Extractimum. Eleventy billion players in two days.

In fairness, I have never played any other game like Death Stranding.

I think game patches were even charged to the developers, which is why a lot of them were loath to patch minor bugs.

I canned Humble when it became apparent that I was just buying next months free Epic games.

Really, I think multiplayer should be free (it’s not like multiplayer games don’t nickel and dime you on top of that anyway) and the game subscription peeled out of it. I’m only interested in the “free” games anyway.

Well, it got you a better experience than whatever it was Sony were doing at the time, which was a weird ethernet adapter, and seemingly every game reinventing the idea of how online should work.

I don’t think it ever needed to be charged for, it just needed to be designed.

I only ever paid for it once they started giving away games with it. Multiplayer alone wasn’t worth it to me.

Yeah, if the Xbox Series S/X could have played my Steam library at that price, I’d have bought one in a heartbeat just to use as a gaming box.

But they’ve already hinted that the next one will be a lot more expensive, and at that point you might as well just buy a PC…

You wouldn’t. You’d buy Titanfall 2 for a whopping £2.49, and play a great (if short) single player campaign and then delete it.

If only for Effect and Cause, which is right up there with the best levels in any game.

Article next year: how 20 million unsold Switch 2 consoles finally killed the world oldest videogaming company.

Primal is a game that got a lot of hype at the time but nobody ever seems to talk about any more. No remaster, no sequel, nothing.

Those billion AI GPUs won’t pay for themselves you know.

They’ve been pretty underwhelming for a while now.

You used to get crazy deals on games only a few months old. Now it’s just the same 50% off a five year old game before being ramped back up to full price between sales.

There’s a few bargains of stuff you may have missed, but likely they’ve been an Epic freebie, or on PSPlus or in a Humble Bundle by now.

A game for everybody is a game for nobody.

I like the fact that everybody seemed to be expecting Grand Theft Horsey, and got a slow paced Wild West sim.

I actually played Assassin’s Creed Origins right after playing this for like two months straight, and it just felt so “gamey” in comparison.

Did you play the first one in the reboot trilogy?

There’s a bit where she has to kill somebody in self defence and then breaks down over it, before spending the entire rest of the game plonking arrows through people’s skulls.

“but his son will ride a camel…” vibes.

It’s a shame because their original Tomb Raider trilogy remaster was really good.

And by “new textures” we mean “just run it through a slop machine and don’t even look at it”

Like a Dr Strange game from the PS2 era.

The multiplayer will be like that.

But I’m not here for that, and Rockstar and Naughty Dog are in the “haven’t let me down yet” club.

“we haven’t optimised this at all, lol, $80 please”

I had to reopen the picture, as I was thinking they’d remade the PS1 Speed Freaks.

And now I’m disappointed again.

I cancelled mine ages ago when I realised I was basically just getting the PSN and Epic games over and over.

SMG2 is probably the best 3D Mario game, but since I already own them I’ll just keep what I have.

Dolphin can play them both just fine. If it’s anything like the last pack, it’ll be the laziest possible emulation anyway. This shit should have been in the NSO subscription if they’re not actually going to remake it.