I bought it in the fall of 2022, when the shortages were just starting to end, expecting it would get more games. I wanted to get one before they did a mid-gen refresh that removed stuff like backwards compatibility, the disc drive, etc.
It’s been really disappointing so far. I still think I’ve put more time into PS4 games than PS5 games. Astro’s Playroom was fantastic, but unfortunately it is still probably the best game for the console.
Victor Gruen is widely considered the inventory of the modern shopping mall. He was an Austrian Jew who immigrated to the US when the Nazi’s annexed Austria.
I can’t find much specific on his political views, but I’ve seen him described by historians as “far-left” and “socialist”.
Shopping was originally a small part of his vision. He wanted to make an indoor, air-conditioned version of European pedestrian areas. Residences, schools, libraries, hospitals, parks, etc. He hated how the mall he envisioned became the shopping mall. He was influenced by Disney Land - trying to make a planned neighborhood that optimized the human experience. In turn, Disney took a lot of influence from him to make EPCOT.
So I don’t know that he was a Marxist, but he denounced the capitalist hellscape that his malls eventually became.
Just looking through my HLTB at things I’ve done recently:
The Ace Attorney series Sucker for Love Coffee Talk Haven (good for co-op)
If you want a bit more gameplay, but still chill:
Paradise Killer Braid Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
More gameplay focused:
Control Portal Wargroove Cat Quest Knack (I know it’s a meme, but the games are actually pretty fun)
I actually think it’s worse for Meta to take a loss on hardware. That tells me that they are expecting to make that money back and then some elsewhere. It’s possible that they are just hoping to make that money back through software sales (similar to Sony), but I just have a hard time trusting the company. The “Meta” name is such a turnoff that I don’t want a piece of their hardware in my house, let alone on my network, so I haven’t even looked at their offerings.
Also, I disagree with the notion that “for a budget rig somethings got to give”. The answers for a “budget” rig are… Nintendo Labo. The AR games with the 3DS. The various ways of strapping a smart phone to one’s face. Things that the VR community scoffs at, but the average consumer is much more likely to purchase.
I think the “budget” option is to just… Not use VR. For me, the adapter isn’t a huge deal. They just cut the price by $100 earlier this year. The Horizon bundle, plus an adapter, comes out to $560. The Valve Index can vary based on the setup, but I figure that’ll be at least $1k. The HTC Vive products seems way more focused on business than gaming, and all of their headsets are >$1k anyways.
So for me I have 3 options: wait for Valve or HTC to make more value-oriented products, get the PSVR2, or just not do VR. And I’m perfectly at peace with just abstaining from VR- I certainly don’t regret that I didn’t buy a 3DTV for example. But this PC adapter has suddenly made the PSVR2 an option where it previously was not one.
In this entire article, not even a single attempt to quantity the number of complaints.
This sounds to me like an extremely small minority. It appears as though Fallout 4 has sold over 25 million copies, and there’s… Maybe a couple dozen people on the Internet complaining?
There’s just no pleasing some people I suppose
For me personally, I dislike Meta strongly enough that the Quest was never an option.
I already had a PS5 and have a couple of digital VR games Sony have away a while back, plus there’s a few more I have been interested in. But until now the library was so restrictive that I could not justify the price tag for a PSVR2.
The only other option I considered was the Valve Index. I like Valve a lot and I’m sure it’s great, but at this point it’s 5 years old and would be 2x the price of the PSVR2. Not being comparable with the PS5 for those couple of free games plus exclusives in interested in like Horizon is a minor setback as well, although it’s not a huge deal and Horizon might come to Steam anyways. Also I would have to upgrade my PC a couple years earlier than I would otherwise- my RX580 is mostly fine now, but I don’t think it could handle VR.
Couch gaming.
I’m a technical person and I’ve tried a lot of different methods to do couch gaming with a PC. From having some sort of lap tray to various wireless mice and keyboard solutions. I’ve currently landed on having my gaming desktop just stream with Steam Link to my living room. As long as I’m selective about which games I want to play, I can usually get a good experience. But I still have at least 60% of my steam library that isn’t a good experience doing that.
Having a dedicated piece of hardware with a custom OS that is designed around a controller is a huge difference maker. Plus you add in how ridiculously expensive it is to get either a USB external optical drive or internal SATA drive to watch DVDs and Blu-Rays. Heck, even just watching Netflix or YouTube in the living room is easier on PS5 than a media PC for the average user.
There’s a reason Valve tried to make the Steam Machine.
I really miss front-facing speakers. It’s one of many features that phone manufacturers have removed from phones over the past decade.
I’ve seen several articles whining about this patch over the past several weeks. They all have the same vague complaints, but the only real tangible and provable one seems to be that some mods break, and Fallout: London was delayed.
I’ve seen claims of crashes and FPS drops, but no actual data or testing to back that up. It seems like a classic case of the Internet circling around and making something into a much bigger deal than reality.
Everyone I’ve seen commenting who has actually tried it themselves seems to have positive feedback. I installed it briefly on the Deck myself to try it out and it seems fine, although I don’t care enough to put in hours of proper testing.
I fell into both.
Bought Skyrim on PS3 a few months after it came out. Had an absolute blast and it immediately became a favorite for my wife and me. The load times were terrible and there were bugs, but the bugs were usually just funny visual glitches. The DLC came out and was fantastic - I still wish they released more.
Eventually built a new gaming PC. My wife really wanted to try the earlier ES games so we bought the physical PC pack with all of them in it. The load times were way better with an SSD. The graphics and frame rate were way better. At that point patches had fixed a lot of the bugs.
I tried some mods and found that most of them aren’t even worth the time it takes to browse for. 80% are just adding softcore porn that ruins the aesthetic. Another % are shit posts like replacing dragons with a model of Thomas the Tank Engine or replacing bears with Shrek- funny for maybe 30 seconds but not worth actually playing. 5% are other weapons that are just overpowered. The I’d guess about 4% are decent UI and graphics mods, some of which have since been rendered obsolete by newer editions. Probably <1% is actually good new content that I’d want to play, but even most of that isn’t as good as the base game.
It’s a similar situation with tabletop homebrew. Everyone and their mother thinks they have some great ideas, but in practice they usually aren’t as fun as the main product. It’s hard to compete with a corporation spending millions of dollars to pay people to work things out.
Add in how annoying it is to mod and how, even without any updates, it tends to break things. Skyrim has a reputation for being a broken and buggy game, but in my experience on multiple platforms (I eventually got the Switch and PS4 versions too lol) it’s really pretty solid. Back in the day when it was common to see posts complaining about how buggy the game was, 90% of the time you could dig into it and find that the OP was using a crap ton of mods.
I would strongly disagree that modding was a major selling point considering that it released for consoles without mods for the same price.
I mean… You can just go read the patch notes to find the things they’ve fixed and improved. Going from playing the original Skyrim to the Anniversary edition is similar to what a lot of other companies would try to call a re-make.
And with the horse armor- Todd Howard has since claimed in interviews that was priced that way due to pressure from Microsoft. It was the early days of experimenting with online digital content distribution. It was the time when most phones still didn’t have touch screens, but had some level of Internet connectivity. People were paying $1-$5 for low-quality 30 second music clips to use as ringtones, or UI skins. I don’t think this has been corroborated by anyone else, but it certainly makes sense.
What game has released for 100 pounds? In the States I can’t remember anything over $70, unless you’re looking for special collector’s editions. Which is more than just a game and not really a fair comparison.
And also games absolutely used to be more expensive. On the N64, Killer Instinct and Turok both released at $80 in the US nearly 20 years ago. That’s about $155 today. Virtua Racing was $100 in 1994- that’s $210 dollars today.
Gaming’s very roots are micro transactions: arcades. They were designed to suck quarters out of children’s pockets. Then with home consoles it was the rental market: games like the Lion King and Battle Toads are famous for being reasonable experiences for the first couple of levels, then adding a ridiculous difficulty increase to prevent people from beating it in a single weekend and trying to get them to rent the game for longer.
What we call DLC today used to be called an expansion, and was seen as a consumer-friendly cost savings mechanism. The studio got to save money by re-using a lot of development from the base game, and that savings was passed along to the consumers who already purchased the base game. No one complained about the Roller Coaster Tycoon expansions.
That doesn’t excuse micro transactions, but to say that wasn’t happening 20 years ago is just plain wrong. Plus this post is specifically talking about Bethesda games like Skyrim and Fallout 4. Skyrim definitively does not have micro transactions, and Fallout 4 I would argue does not, though I’ll admit some of the smaller and cheaper DLC’s are blurring the line.
And that’s if you buy everything at full price on launch day. People who wait a month or two can often get a decent 10-20% off these days. If you wait a year or two you can get DLC’s included for the same price. Right now Fallout 4 with all of the DLC is on sale for $10 on steam. Skyrim has different versions that have gone on sale for $5 at points, and is routinely under $20. So at this point I consider the launch prices to be adding in a heavy premium for impatience.
A company fares to continue providing support and free updates at the same time other companies are shutting down servers and pulling games out of people’s libraries, yet haters still find ways to complain.
For a long time I’ve argued that there needs to be stronger language differences between physiological addiction and psychological addiction, especially in non-academic discourse. Academic papers usually define their terms pretty well, and often use terms like “habit forming” or “dependency” instead of addiction.
A lot of work has been done to remove the stigma of addiction to shift the blame from the individual to the product, and I have no objections at all to that for physiological addiction. Nicotine, alcohol, opioids, etc.
The problem is that zealots have co-opted that model to try to ban anything they don’t want other people to be able to enjoy. Comic books, television, videogames, marijuana, pornography- all of these have had the word “addiction” attached in news media without solid scientific evidence of physiological addiction. At the same time, you can find case studies of individuals with mental health disorders who get addicted to literally anything… I’m not saying there are not individuals who don’t have problems with these things, but a lot of the effort into stigmatizing and restricting these seems to have ulterior motives. It’s parents who don’t want to teach their children about responsibility and discipline. It’s religious zealots trying to push their worldviews on others. It’s large corporations trying to gain market share by attacking competing industries. In some cases like “sex addiction” it’s used to try to excuse or justify criminal behavior and portray abusers as victims. It’s notable that efforts usually go to just banning and shaming these things rather than helping the alleged “victims”. At the same time, efforts at harm reduction for physiological addiction seems to be constantly undermined.
With all of that being said, there is a separate issue that applies to this case- consumer protection. History has clearly demonstrated that without regulation and enforcement, corporations will engage in all manner of activity to screw over every stakeholder (consumers, vendors, employees, lenders, etc) in order to enrich ownership.
Looking at videogames in particular, there are definitely marketing practices and pricing structures that need to be banned. I just hate this idea that “videogames = bad” when the real issue is corporate greed, and a lot of these issues apply to other industries too.
He was one of the key figures in the corporatization of NASCAR.
I think there’s some debate among fans as to how much of that was him as opposed to him just driving and leaving the business to other people and being okay with his face and signature getting plastered everywhere.
These memes go hard though so I don’t care that much
“Playable” is doing a lot of work.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve played through games with it and it’s really great. But there’s a ton of glitches and games that don’t play well. In another 5 or 10 years (hopefully I’ve upgraded my hardware by then) it’ll probably be great. But today it’s reserved for enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering with settings or playing less demanding games.
PS3 is a strong, strong contender for reliability and repairability reasons. You could replace the CMOS battery and hard drive today. You have to jump through hoops to add funds to your wallet, but once you do the store still works for the moment. The last time I looked there were even some decent deals from a couple of publishers.
No memory cards to worry about. The physical discs were expensive enough that people took care of them and are more inclined to sellt hem than toss them: it’s still really easy to find discs on eBay, and they’re new enough and most games have been remastered so they’re usually less than $20. It’s impossible to find Sixaxis or Dualshock 3’s, but fake ones from AliExpress are super cheap and almost identical except for the almost-never-used motion controls. You can also use a lot of USB controllers, or use something like a MayFlash adapter to use just about any controller you want. I think you can pair Dualsense too, though I haven’t tried. If you have original OEM’s, I don’t remember them ever having drift problems. The only real problem with the original controllers would be battery life (you can replace them if you’re handy), USB Mini-B, and how they needed a handshake and could only charge plugged into certain devices or special power supplies (another reason to just use counterfeits).
With a fat model you have full backwards compatibility with PS1 and PS2. With the online store you can get a lot of PS1, PS2, and PSP games. Not sure if this counts, but you can do remote play with a PSP too. Some of the online multiplayer probably still works, depending on the game. It has an HDMI out and the old AV out, so you can hook it up to almost any TV with cheap and a sailable cables. You can also load up video and audio files for playback, saving wear on the disc drive. I remember briefly experimenting with using mine as a media server back in the day.
The drawbacks are few. I’m assuming no hacking or modding, so no Nintendo games. No Xbox either, though I don’t think that’s anywhere near as important. A disc drive is always just a matter of time before it fails. The fat model has PS2 compatibility, but also was less reliable, so that’s a trade-off. The digital store is not long for this world. I used to use mine for Netflix, YouTube, HBO, etc and I’m guessing those apps have probably been shut down at this point. You lose out on modern games too. The PS2 and PS5 are both good options too, but I think the PS3 has the edge. If they ever add a PS3 emulator to the PS5, or if the PS5 library grows in general, it could still overtake the PS3 in the future.
If you lean more Nintendo I think the WiiU was better than the switch until they shut the e-shop down, and might still be better if we open this up to modding and hacking. It’s just easier to work with a WiiU because Nintendo stopped caring about protecting it. It’s also better for playing DS and Wii games for example. A ton of Switch games were also released on WiiU, and the Switch’s legacy content is mostly locked behind the online subscription - how long will that be available for? Still has the disc drive issue and can’t play Sony exclusives, but a strong option.
I’m not usually an Xbox guy, but they’re usually the easiest to mod, the emulate things well, and even without modding the Series X is probably the best option for pure backwards-compatibility with a good chunk of the libraries of every Xbox generation ever. The problem is you get neither the Sony nor Nintendo exclusives. And Xbox exclusives really aren’t all that enticing to me. Maybe if you’re into HALO or Gears or Forza Xbox is a more appealing option. The best IP’s Xbox owns are often released on other consoles, like MineCraft. Which is great for the industry, but hurts Xbox’s ranking here.
I also have a gaming PC (and I stream to every screen in the house) and a Steam Deck, so from that perspective it’s even fewer exclusive games.
I do really prefer physical games, but even that is going away. Some games just don’t release physically, or even if they have a physical version it’s basically just a different kind of DRM. I recently bought Gran Turismo 7 physically and was incredibly disappointed that it had to install 128GB to the PS5 to even open, then it took a while downloading ever more updates and data once I opened it.
I traditionally loved Naughty Dog and Insomniac franchises, but Naughty Dog has only re-released games on the PS5 so far. Insomniac… Rift Apart is decent. I don’t really like Marvel or superhero stuff though. I tried Spiderman and it’s… Fine., but it really makes me wish I was just playing Sunset Overdrive instead. I’m in the process of playing through the older God of War games for the first time- so far they aren’t bad but they seem overrated considering how hyped they were back in the day.
There’s no killer Hideo Kojima game yet. Gran Turismo is a micro transaction, always online, multiplayer-focused shell of what used to be a great series. There isn’t any equivalent to creative games like Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, Katamari Damacy, etc. Stray was really good- my PC kind of struggled with it so I might pick up the PS5 version if I ever see a physical copy on sale.
I don’t know that it’s just PlayStation either. Looking at my Steam library by release date, the last big AAA games I have are Yakuza 6 (2021, still haven’t played it yet), Control (2020- although I think that’s because I have the complete edition. The base game was from 2019), and Horizon Zero Dawn (similarly listed as 2020, but the base game would have been 2017). It seems like more and more studios are closing, more games being released are just “meh”.