TL;DR:

Welp, we’ve made all the money out of you suckers that we can. Fuck y’all.

I agree, from MS point of view.

But people around here were very excited a few weeks back when it got announced, and were convinced it means they’ll be able to play their Steam libraries on it.

No, they said it would run PC games.

Whether that means Steam remains to be seen.

Well for a start that’s the PS5 Pro and absolutely nobody is buying that.

That would be like me saying you can’t make a gaming PC without a 5090.

The PS2 launched at £299. Got reduced to £199 the week the Xbox came out (and stuck the nails in the coffin just as it was being born) and finished somewhere around £79.

If only there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you left them.

“I worked on the team that implemented Vulkan support for Unreal Engine 5, and have created over 200 shaders for AAA retail games.”

“Sir, this is a Wendy’s”

It was just a regular walking sim. Didn’t really do a lot that other walking sims didn’t.

If your game doesn’t feature shooting, platforming or sportsball, then you’re already off the mainstream slop, and you’re going to have to accept that you’re going to make less money by targeting niche audiences.

FWIW, I liked it. But I can see why a lot of people wouldn’t be interested. You’re dealing with a world where people’s “game collections” are just 6 yearly iterations of CoD and FIFA.

I’m still on a 1060. At 1440p no less.

It wasn’t even main friendly back when I quit.

Yeah, there’s quite a lot of that.

It’s basically an unholy hybrid of Metal Gear Solid, Euro Truck Simulator and QWOP.

It’s standard Kojima fare. Bonkers story, badly written women, and sad music. It’s really Reedus, Mads and Troy holding the games together.

Honestly didn’t like it as much as the first one.

Better combat but worse story and an over-reliance on vehicles.

Sure looks nice though.

A trillion dollars to reinvent cheat codes.

What a world.

In any case it sounds like a reason to actually read what the oauth login screens are actually telling you…

Oh, you mean the bits in between Gwent.

It’s pretty one note. Put up shield. Roll around. Hit enemy. If shield gone, reapply. Works from the start of the game to the end. Except ghosts because you need to use your magic on showing them to make them vulnerable.

Because MS will throw any amount of losses at this to keep themselves in the game.

Plus making games deliberately incompatible with the GabeCube will be trivial if it comes to that.

Valve can throw a lot of resources behind what they’re doing, but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to what MS can spend. At the end of the day Valve can only really match current consumer pricing, and even with 16GB RAM and 8GB GPU, that isn’t cheap.

Yeah, if the Series S could have run my Steam library, I’d have got one years ago when it was cheap.

You think the average person will buy a more expensive box that doesn’t play COD, FIFA, etc?

Many had a premium rate phone line, and it was just a tape so if you were stuck near the end you’d have to listen to the end and potentially pay many times the game’s cost.

Flipping between Tomb Raider Chronicles and Spiderman 2.

Probably partly down to the price of PC parts. I haven’t upgraded mine since I got a 1060.

A machine that could run PS4 titles better can be a Steam Deck. A machine that can run PS5 titles better is like £1200.

And tbh, I doubt they’re selling many PS5 Pros either. PS5 graphics are plenty good enough. They run at 60fps which is all most people were after when going from console to a PC. People obsessing over the latest all singing, all dancing raytracing are few and far between. 5090s are likely being bought for AI use.

We just want games.

A good few years ago now, I watched as my two cousins, Steam voucher in hand (and he didn’t even have a gaming PC btw), faffed about with one of those sites promoted by shady Youtubers.

Codes went in. Buttons were pressed. Glances were exchanged.

“Now what?” asked the younger one who’s Steam voucher it was.

“Oh nothing,” said the older one. “You lost.”

I think it was only teenage emoism that stopped him bursting into tears right there.

He’s an accountant now, so I assume he learned an important lesson about gambling that day.

You’ll be sending a lot of phones back then…

You’ll might as well be asking for a LP turntable to be included at this point.

I don’t have a massive amount of love for Valve (I like physical copies of my games, damn you), but patent trolls can go fuck themselves with a rusty pickaxe.

Especially over a patent as nebulous as this:

“System and method for storing broadcast content in a cloud-based computing environment”

Motherfucker, that’s called a “file”.

Hey guys, I know you made really good remasters of classic single-player games, but can you make us something nobody on this motherfucking Earth asked for?

Oh wait, we don’t want you do do that any more.

Why aren’t you making us any money?

Not sure why they’d think kids are the target audience for a remake of a 29 year old game.

Surely all the kids are playing the latest mobile slop pocket money sink?

Well that’s an ominous headline if ever I saw one.

Days Gone starts out like The Last of Us but for people who think wrestling is real.

But it definitely picks up later when you expand your toolkit. The horde gameplay makes this game memorable. I played on PS5 and I think the improved framerate and motion controls gave it a new lease of life.

I dunno, killing the idea of ownership of games was pretty bad.

I don’t think any amount of Proton patches submitted is going to bring that back.

I suspect that since they already make the keyboard cases, that all they’re planning on doing is making that but a bit smaller, and getting a no-brand Chinese phone manufacturer to make a small stubby square phone that fits in it.

I’m curious what the average Android app will do when presented with that little square aspect ratio. I’ve vaguely dabbled in phone dev before and there’s lots of twatting about to deal with different device sizes (tablets vs phones) and ratios. The proliferation of folding phones may mean there’s decent support for some apps, but I don’t expect that to be universal by any stretch.

I don’t get why the game publishers don’t just fucking employ the guy to do it officially if they’re going to get pissy about it.

Considering it’s from a small team of like 30 people it’s exceptionally competent.

Nothing is really new (it’s a turn based JRPG with some quick time button pressing like Vagrant Story had), but it’s fun, varied, well acted, well written. It doesn’t sit there wanting you to buy funbucks to buy revealing outfits.

It does exactly what it set out to do. Give it a go.

So black frame insertion with VRR? Is that what it is? Struggling to tell and struggling even harder to care.

Can’t help but think the motion would look even clearer without DLSS bullshitting entire frames out of nowhere.

There hasn’t really been that many VR games lately.

And then I assume they’ll study a large packet of banknotes each and forget all about it.

Hades (finally got out after 22 runs), Silent Hill 2 Remake (I didn’t remember there was a boss literally shaped like child rape), and some Expedition 33 (love it, but it’s a JRPG to a fault, including cursed platforming sections).

Looks similar to the old Radofin TV game unit I used to have. 10 games, and most of them were Pong variants.

Makes sense. The Soviets cloned a few Western machines. They had a clone of the ZX Spectrum too.

My Go S already came with Steam OS. Why they still messing about with Windows?

This is going to be some serious AI slop, isn’t it?

I miss the “flash sales”.

They got rid of them, and the Steam Sales were effectively just the regular discounts you can get anywhere else.

That and people like Rockstar figuring out that you can put “50% off” if you bundle in a load of funbucks nobody asked for.

That looks really uncomfortable to use, like the Nintendo DS. I ended up playing everything with the stylus.