Balaam_

Since a person can only really play one device at any given time, I can’t think of a single reason I would ever want to use one of these handheld pc’s instead of either a console or actual pc.

My consoles are hooked up to a glorious 77” 4K 144hz OLED in front of a comfy armchair, while if I want power I’d park myself in front of my (probably currently considered mid-range, yet still more capable than the consoles and exponentially more powerful than any handheld) pc.

I’m not a kid who rides a schoolbus. I don’t have a 2-hr. commute on a train. I don’t live in a Brady Bunch scenario where there are 12 people in my house all competing for the television. When I’m on the can, I’m doing my business, and when I’m at a party I’m circulating and socializing—not hunched over a tiny screen off on the sidelines like a troll. There are zero use cases I can see for using a handheld. Maybe if I acquire some debilitating disease and become bedridden for an extended length of time, perhaps. Until then, these handhelds are utterly useless.

It’ll be interesting to see how many PlayStation bros refuse to buy because they were acting in sincerity, honestly pointing out how broken, repetitive and poorly made Starfield is back during the exclusivity period, and how many cave because they were just hopping on the hate bandwagon.

A streaming service focused on retro games doesn’t qualify to be labeled as part of any “Backwards Compatible” program or initiative. Inherent in the idea of BC is the ability to take something you already own and be given the option to play it on current hardware you own, when you want. If the game in question is entirely out of your ownership and control, you’re at the mercy of whoever does own it. That’s not “Backwards Compatibility”, that’s ’we’re letting you play this, in the manner we choose, for now—retaining the rights to alter or remove it at our discretion and without warning’.

Somewhere out there in the multiverse there’s an alternate timeline where they won…and we still have incredible exclusives along with a business focus centered around the console and the prestige of being an investor in said hardware. Who knows what that ~$70 Billion could have been put toward instead? More exclusives, new startup initiatives, more nuanced IP acquisitions… 😞

Great to see Oblivion selling so well. Now they just need to put the entire game on disc for permanent physical ownership to rake in the rest of the sales from the hardcore elite who refuse to pay to merely lease a digital license.

If they can’t be bought individually this means nothing to me. I don’t expect physical versions or even a compilation disc for these retro games, but the inability to buy particular titles a la carte is a deal breaker. It may be part of a subscription service I’m already paying for, but gate keeping ownership for no real reason other than to force recurring revenue is utterly distasteful and reeks of corporate greed.

@M20B25 Same here. Hopefully it’ll get one alongside the PlayStation launch. That’s one thing I respect about a lot of Team Blue’s hardcore userbase, they appreciate physical media.

All the same, if whoever was in charge of the ‘physical’ releases (and I use that term loosely…) for Indy and DoomDA is stupid enough to screw over fans by withholding disc data and forcing internet downloads, I wouldn’t hold my breath for a smaller game like HB2.

🫰🎻

It plays for thee, poor 3 trillion dollar megacorp.

Indy is GOTY calibre quality, Gollum is 💩. Indy evidently isn’t worth putting any more than a few MB’s of data on the disc and requires an internet download to play, but Gollum has a full physical retail release with the entire game on-disc . That means decades from now it’s conceivable Indy might be unplayable while someone could insert the Gollum disc and start playing. That is so disgustingly backward.

Great, now I can have even more awful mobile games shoved in my face when I open the Netflix app, with no way to block that crap.

Interesting wording. Unfortunately, this doesn’t tell anyone anything who might be wondering about sales figures or how much money it raked in thus far.

Refuse to throw money away leasing digital code. Haven’t played it, will not be playing it until it’s released on-disc (with the entirety of the game on disc minus any internet download required BS). I have countless other high profile, high rated games on my backlog (fully on disc, mind you) to play instead of wasting money to own nothing.

This would be most welcome. Provided, of course, they leave that awful online stuff shoehorned into the OG release on the chopping block. They’ve shown good sense with RDR1’s remaster, so I’m praying that trend continues. Those achievements/trophies were a tedious, brutal, god awful chore to slog through and are the sole reason I skipped the game the first time around. When devs put Achievement/Trophy hunters first, everyone wins.

I can understand them wanting to close any major loopholes as far as getting what essentially amounts to ‘free game pass’ goes; they are a business after all. But their stranglehold on the reward point system, absolutely driving it into the ground in numerous ways goes much too far.

Take the cooldown for earning points through searches. Is that a sick joke? Maybe if their search engine wasn’t total trash I wouldn’t want to grind them out asap so I can go back to using other, better search engines.

Stop forcing that copilot filth on everyone’s screen without asking and let us permanently block it if we so choose. Not everyone is stupid enough to be suggestible to the degree of wanting an ai to dictate to them what is most relevant to them. It’s just another reason to use a different engine.

Oh and the jewel phone game used to give 20pts. Now it’s a measly 5. I take great solace in the fact I’ve used the rewards points I’ve earned over the years to more or less legally ‘steal’ content from Microsoft many, many times.

What’s the next surefire ‘in an emergency, break glass’ ace-in-the-hole moving down the conveyor belt if the handheld doesn’t move the needle?

Absolutely love to see this. Faith in humanity: Restored.

I myself plan on pirating DoomDA on pc if they don’t correct their miserable failure and mint the entire game on-disc

Why bother pirating, when I could play it free on gamepass? Because they deserve the hit.

Didn’t they just boast and brag about being the biggest publisher? Weren’t the revenue and profits last quarter through the roof? 3 Trillion dollars and jobs are being eliminated…?

This is literally just Bethesda’s Creation engine or whatever it’s called with UE5 running overtop producing the fancy visuals. The underlying engine is the same piece of broken garbage we got on 360. Every single horrendous, god awful characteristic and flaw in that old engine still exists. I did read Virtuos went back and fixed a handful of game breaking bugs during questlines, which is admirable, but there’s only so much you can do without addressing the fundamental failures of this geriatric, antiquated engine.

They don’t like it, but this is the correct way to approach development. Yeah the series S version is a blurry unplayable mess, nothing can be done about that. But to optimize the Series X version ahead of the Pro is smart—it shows the ‘home’ userbase they’re being taken into account. The Pro is easily as powerful as an X and S taped together, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t be running better than X and at higher resolutions or better settings. But it’s not. That’s competent prioritization, and I hope it’s a trend that continues.

Most of these are admittedly lackluster, but Kena is fantastic. Good thing I bought it physically, as no anti-consumer move by any corporation can now remove my ability to play it whenever I like. I’d pity all the low intellect pro-digital people, but they’re getting what they deserve. The intelligent among them will use this as a learning experience and buy physically where possible.

No big loss. Frees me up to play plenty of the backlog of games that built up from publishers who put their hardcore user base ahead of their own selfish interests. I own more than enough games deserving to be played whose discs contain the entire game without any ‘internet download required’ BS.

So what’s Bethesda/Virtuos’ excuse for screwing over hardcore gamers by only renting the digital version of Oblivion Remastered? Hardcore collectors want to OWN it, not lease digital code that can be taken away/tampered with. The game is selling literally millions. There’s no excuse.l for this anti consumer behavior.

Fantastic indie gem right here. I tried it on PS+ a year or two ago, loved it so much I tracked down a physical disc for permanent ownership. If you haven’t tried it yet or are on the fence, it’s quite fun and has a great Lovecraftian atmosphere. Great trophy/acheivement list as well, no online server dependent garbage or needlessly difficult/overly tedious criteria.

A million players. I wonder how many actually bought the game? Sounds like every small business owner’s dream, having a million lookee-loo’s but nobody buying whatever you’re selling.

Who uses a scale of 1-10 and sets 1 as ‘best’? Never thought I’d say this combination of words, but this is the worst poll I’ve ever seen on a pure design level.

I’m more impressed that someone actually managed to get a reply from customer support. Microsoft has probably what amounts to the absolute, abysmally worst “customer support” on the face of the earth. There are either infinite redirects because they do not intend to offer any actual support, or they try to force that horrendously worthless ai trash down our throats under the guise that it’s useful for solving any type of real problem.

However this person got a reply, they deserve a free autographed copy of Oblivion just for the hassle of having Microsoft’s ‘customer support’ inflicted on them. Hopefully we’ll all finally be playing a jank-free version of Oblivion by this time next week.

Completely disinterested. The visual aesthetic they settled on is atrocious. A garish, hideously ugly color palette coupled with outdated character models and stilted animations is a terrible combination. It reminds me of those eye-searing neon colored Lisa Frank art supplies for kids from the 90’s. ‘Graphics don’t make a game’ blah blah, yeah, but taking a mediocre looking rpg and giving it a poop-brown spraycoat doesn’t help.

@GuyinPA75 They never will. Once you learn the mechanics most of the game won’t pose too much of an issue (there are a few well known sticking points in the base game). There are more than enough tools at your disposal to prevail in any encounter, and the more you understand how they want you to play, the easier it becomes.

I’d offer to do casual co-op or even some more serious sherpa’ing, but I only play Elden Ring on the Pro now (currently the smoothest console experience) and since there’s no cross play unless you have a PSN I wouldn’t be able to help.

ID feels the need to force multiplayer trophies/acheivements on those who have less than no interest in mp and are only here for the single player, so I have no interest in that by way of recompense. South of Midnight looks…interesting, but it could easily end up being mediocre. Expedition 33 looks like the turn based RPG greatness all recent FF’s should have been, instead of that low-intellect real time slop so that one has me most excited. I’m curious as to what the secret reveal is, but that could go either way. Might be cool, might be some rinky dink throwaway nothing of a game.

Fair warning for achievement hunters: the trophy lists for the FF7 Remake games on PlayStation are some of the worst out there. Absolute trash. Nightmarish, ludicrously absurd difficulty related trophies and abysmal, incredibly tedious collection related trophies. I have the platinums, I speak from experience. The game director Hamaguchi has gone on record to issue a public apology for the ***** list, although he seems too lazy to patch his failure. Fingers crossed the Xbox achievement lists are fixed and not the filth the games originally launched with on Sony’s machines. Good news is that piss poor director had nothing to do with FF16, which has a comparably fine trophy list.

This is honestly pretty cool. For those with $1-2K+ rigs you can get basically every Xbox first party game and many PlayStation exclusives will eventualy trickle onto PC as well, so you can play all of that maxed out with maybe a Switch 2 for Nintendo exclusives.

For those of us who prefer the ease, comfort and reliability of console gaming, the PlayStation/Switch 2 pairing is still the way to go—between the two, you can get the best looking, best playing console versions on the Pro and if you want them on the go, Boom you have the Switch.

If only streaming services would follow this route so I could just pay for one or maybe two subscriptions and get all my Netflix/Disney/Hulu/HBO/Paramount/Peacock/etc etc etc all in one place 😔

I’m not really a big AC fan, but Shadows looks alright. What will kill it in the end is the worst possible timing of releasing in the same year as Ghost of Yotei. Take a look at the two side by side and it’s clearly Ghost of Yotei, and ‘We have Ghost of Yotei at home’. I suppose Ubisoft didn’t have any choice left but to ‘Break Glass for Assasin’s Creed in Japan’, but the timing couldn’t be worse.

I’d be cool with any of these suggestions, so long as Bethesda themselves aren’t handling the ports/rerelease. The entire issue with Bethesda as a company is they have great ideas and piss poor execution. What the world needs is for the entire staff to be gutted leaving only the writing talent and then contract a competent studio to actually code the game properly for once. That way we get all the great ideas with none of the endless janky, bug filled, glitch ridden trash we usually end up with. Don’t think so? Just imagine a version of Oblivion or Fallout that isn’t falling apart at the seams and tell me that’s not a tantalizing thought.

Expedition 33 looks like a proper RPG. Turn based combat instead of that rubbish, D tier real time combat most studios try to force down our throats to appease the stupid younger generation. If they don’t screw up the achievement list, I see myself enjoying this game for quite some time. If they decide to curate a trash achievement list (difficulty related achievements, multiplayer/online server dependent achievements, forced multiple replays etc) then they won’t get a cent or even a ‘free’ gamepass download from me.

Takes me back to better times. We had actual, honest to goodness exclusives that made those on other platforms jealous and left them contemplating whether to save their allowances to buy into the brand; we owned the games we bought, none of this ‘pay a recurring rental fee to own nothing’ garbage; and we had a console that was legitimately more powerful in almost every way than the competition—not essentially identical architecture with some slight advantages and some noticeable deficiencies. Better times, better times.

Unless the produce something within the THPS, Crash or Spyro series’ this means nothing to me. And if they do create a new entry in those iconic series, I will only buy-to-own on disc—and I’m more than happy to go elsewhere, if left with no choice.

Lots of reassurances being thrown around in the chat. Maybe they’re valid, maybe they’re not. I have to stop and wonder, If Xbox was spun off from parent company Microsoft tomorrow and its allowance was taken away, would Gamepass actually still be profitable (or even sustainable)?

That doesn’t change whether or not it’s sustainable/profitable now, or the fact that it’s a great deal (for gamers who prefer to spend their money on eternal rentals in lieu of ownership). But it does put into perspective why there are no true gamepass copycats from the other platform holders. When one must earn their keep, one cannot afford to throw daddy’s money at problems to keep one’s strategy afloat.

New law; You can only buy tea if you show proof of purchase for a physical disc/cartridge. Problem solved.

So…no steam OS then. Does this mean that all the ‘Xbox will integrate Steam into their upcoming handheld and it’ll be the best thing ever, we’ll have both Xbox and Steam libraries on one device!’ rhetoric was just a load of copium?

I can’t play Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallouts 3/4/76 for 20mins straight without getting stuck in the stairs, falling through the floor, literally keeling over dead for no reason as if my character just had a heart attack or encountering any one of a thousand other game breaking bugs or glitches.

If Virtuos wrote come c++ code on a piece of notebook paper and flushed it down the toilet, we’d automatically receive a higher quality, more optimized game than anything Bethesda has ever done.

I’m not worried at all about whatever Virtuos puts out if indeed they are doing this remake.

Techniques like frame gen aren’t optimization, they’re a crutch because your game isn’t optimized well. Black Mid Wukong comes to mind.

There’s no disc drive in my LG. Not interested.

I smell what the Nadella’s cookin’ and it smells like a slow but patently obvious transition from one of The Big 3 to World’s Biggest Third Party Publisher.

I remember sega tried this decades ago. The Saturn was floundering, so they jumped the gun and launched their next system earlier than expected. I don’t recall how that worked out for them though 🤔

If everything’s an Xbox shouldn’t they be factoring phones, tablets, Maytag washing machines and slow cooker crockpots into the sales figures too?

So close. All I really want is the PS5 Dualsense controller with Xbox’s signature offset sticks layout, then we would have the truly perfect controller.

All I saw in the list of possible Xboxes were two current gen systems, 3 previous gen systems, and a whole lot of mobile crap I’d rather throw in a landfill than try to game on.

PC was also mentioned, but claiming a pc is an Xbox because it can play Xbox games is like saying one of those gargantuan military aircraft carriers is a fighter jet because you can take off from one.

Literally the only reason I would ever use Bing over other, better search engines. Go ahead Microsoft, shoot yourself in the foot and give me a reason to delete the Bing app.

My history with the GTA series is an odd one. I played 3 and Vice City on PS2, then never touched the series again until a month ago. 5 was free, so I downloaded it just to see what it’s like now. What I was presented with was divisive.

The story and world and the sheer amount of detail and physics and things is pretty impressive, although the character models are stiff and poorly animated. That said, I’m having a blast with the story. And that’s where it ends.

Apparently you need to pay to play online(?), I’m not 100% sure. Either way, I immediately lost interest when I saw they do not segregate the achievement/trophy list into separate single player and multiplayer skus. I have no interest in online slop, and I bet the achievements are sketchy at best (all online dependent ones are; you’re either praying the stars align to fulfill some stupid arbitrary criteria or getting screwed over by some a-hole while you’re trying to work toward a goal). That immediately killed any and all desire I have to play this game ‘for real’ on my main account (for achievements/trophies). I won’t be buying GTA6 as they’ll likely have the same piss poor, gamer unfriendly setup as 5.