Fair point. They basically did it with Windows 8 (engineering-wise), but that was even longer ago than the Surface Pro.

The actual hardware is irrelevant to their success unless they can pull off a Surface Pro type of innovative market lead (which we all know they can’t do anymore).

The only thing that matters is the ecosystem. Make every Windows machine an Xbox. Make the OS lean and portable. Run the same OS and games on PCs, laptops, handhelds, and set-top boxes. That’s it. Then console generations are obsolete and Sony is playing catch up.

That first paragraph is AI slop as fuck.

Valve did the same thing for the Index VR kit. They create these little brief but fully produced games to demonstrate the functionality when they release new hardware, and they’re delightful.

Doesn’t it also end with you literally exploding Hitler’s face?

Ping me back with your thoughts if you find yourself a copy!

If you like Horrified, you should try and track down the Ravensburger Wonder Woman game. Similar style but has an awesome mechanic to prevent coop quarterbacking.

Players strategize using a set of face up cards, but receive some face down cards afterward and have to program 3 actions using the whole set without communicating, adapting plans based on the newly revealed cards. Then each action plays out simultaneously for all players. It makes sense in action and is really quite elegant. I’m a big fan.

Cottage Garden is very satisfying. You Tetris together garden pieces to fill plots and you can cover a single spot with a sleeping kitty. There’s scoring and competition, but it’s not antagonistic in any way.

I’m also a big fan of cooperative games in general.

Oh no, two live service cesspools didn’t get released.

Anyway…

Hollow Knight never did it for me for some reason. I’m sure it’s great, but I just can’t get into it. Like, at all.

Gunstar fucking Heroes. You’re a gentleperson and a scholar.

It’s hilarious and incredible how we still haven’t made a Metroidvania game that solidly and undeniably bests the game that added the -vania in the first place.

Max Payne 2 is one of my favorite games of all time on any platform. Great memories. I don’t like how Remedy went so far down the artsy unintelligible plotting road after that, but they’re still one of the best developers out there in my opinion.

I mean, Hi-Fi Rush is RIGHT THERE.

Binding of Isaac is some OG classic stuff if you haven’t played that one, and Neon Abyss is a fun side-scrolling game on a similar vibe. Rogue Legacy 1 (very OG) and 2 and Dead Cells are also side scrolling , with a dash of Metroidvania.

If you like Slay the Spire, Astrea is the same thing but with dice, and Monster Train also scratches the same itch.

I would like to see them go back to just plain old numbering and call this one the Xbox 363.

Or I guess a Humble Bundle subscription.

To this day, if I turn to my best friend and say “sup”, his response will either be “Oh, not much, just… keeping it real.” or just “Word.” Vice versa as well.

These are the exact responses Seaman gives, which we deliver with proper intonation and all.

Chiming in. The teaser trailer was mediocre at best and I was expecting the worst. The game is fucking phenomenal.

I remember them boasting that an architect contributed to the level design. Turns out, real world environment design didn’t map to early 2000’s game design very well.

Now designing a modern VR game or something, that might be a different story.

“Well, it’s not all going to be rainbows and path tracing.”

Isn’t that like exactly why anyone would buy this thing in the first place?

One of the sadder milestones in my life was seeing my first announcement date reveal announcement.

It says, flugeldufel.

It says, auschgefarben.

I think it was a legitimately more fun game, and quite a bit more approachable. The production wasn’t quite as polished, but pound for pound I think I had a better time with it.

I remember Immortals: Fenyx Rising looking like a shameless, soulless ripoff of Breath of the Wild. Turned out to be an amazingly fun game that didn’t take itself as seriously as Zelda but had a tremendously satisfying gameplay loop and some really solid humor.

This isn’t that though. This is gonna be some creatively bankrupt trash.

I agree that there’s a ton of good stuff coming from the indie scene and also some amazing modding of existing games out there (check the Flat2VR discord - they just modded full VR support with motion controls into Silent Hill 2 Remake), but despite all the complaints about the PSVR2 library, there is more than enough gold in there to keep a lot of people entertained for a very long time, and some of it is truly AAA stuff. The headset itself is extremely well designed and easy to pick up and play, and the amount of tech you get is pretty nuts.

I’ve heard it’s pretty minimally supported on the PC because they’re kind of trying to get away with building half of a bridge (spoiler: it won’t work) but even without features like haptics and eye tracking, it’s a reasonable baseline headset. There may be some Bluetooth inconsistencies for some though, if I remember correctly.

I will echo some of the other sentiments.

Meta sells a lot of their tech at a loss. You are not buying a VR headset with just your dollars. You are taking a huge kit of cameras and sensors hooked up to the world’s most advanced internet-connected telemetry and strapping it to your face. The data it gleans is how you’re covering a large portion, if not the majority, of the cost.

In my opinion, a PS5 and PSVR2 is the best way into VR for most people right now. I have that and a Valve Index and while the Index is awesome, it’s pretty dated and fiddly and while my computer runs it pretty well, catching up to more modern tech will cost me $2000 in upgrades and the fuss associated with building/upgrading/buying/migrating a PC.

I’m hoping Valve releases their rumored standalone headset sometime before the end of the world.

Bro looks like he aged twelve years in the past four.

I see Star Control anything and I upvote.

Ugh. Fucking AI slop. As if Lemmy was so huge it was actually worth putting that garbage on here anyway.

Dude, I’m not disagreeing with your point, but your presentation is beat up from the feet up.

Caveat: been drinking because gestures at everything

1. At one point, you say it’s $950 a year after establishing that the actual cost is $950 after two years.
2. Your investment counterexample arbitrarily includes a $200 monthly additional investment which blows everything up and makes the example pretty much incomparable
3. Your investment counterexample also assumes an immediate initial outlay of $950 rather than distributing that over 24 months.

Basically you’re comparing two wildly different scenarios, which makes your point seem pretty broken, regardless of how right your actual thesis is.

TL;DR: Cancel your MMOs, play retro and discounted indie games, and stay in school, kids.

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(Had to, sorry)

It’s like Max Payne 1, only better in every conceivable way. It’s the perfect sequel.

Edit: I envy you getting to experience it for the first time!

Max Payne 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s the only game I ever finished, then beat 2-3 more times in succession on increasing difficulties just to get a different ending.

Yes. The writing is on the wall, I think. Between Valve and Microsoft, I think the line between console and PC is about to blur, hard.

Valve starts selling a new generation of Steam Machines, Microsoft develops a handheld and pivots the Xbox brand to be a PC gaming label standardized to a handheld and set-top form factor, and suddenly Sony and Nintendo are swimming in a much smaller ocean. The PlayStation 6 not being PC-compatible suddenly makes it “a weird non-PC” instead of a category leader, and the Switch 2 by all accounts just becomes an echo of the previous generation, treading water on Nintendo franchises.

I’ve been saying for a while that Microsoft’s best bet from here is to turn the Xbox into a Windows box, update Windows to work decently on handhelds, and launch an Xbox portable. Kill the console/PC distinction and leave Sony flat-footed to compete with Nintendo.

The only challenge to this approach is Valve beating them to it from the other direction.

Midnight Suns is perfect for you. It’s part team tactical deck building combat, part superhero relationship simulator. You alternate between fighting evil as part of a squad of heroes (the DLC includes Deadpool) and spending time hanging out and talking with other heroes. And it’s just a phenomenal game all around.

Edit: OP, you okay?

Original is awesome. I feel like the remaster basically just turned it yellow and deleted the fog and called it a day.

I feel like we’re only a year or two away from announcing a game and its remaster at the same time.