Cakefish

It’s been happening for a couple months now on insider beta ring. Seems to be server side I’d guess as it occurs randomly. They need to fix it, kinda crappy to have such obvious UI bugs on a console.

The regular one is overpriced vs the Steam Deck OLED considering it has the same 4 year old APU. At least the X offers tangible performance improvements so can better justify the price differential.

Either way it’s not for me as my Switch 2 is my current handheld and I only need the one as I don’t travel all that often. I’ll keep an eye on the eventual Steam Deck 2 and Xbox Ally X2 as those should be a generational leap over Switch 2.

I assume they mean PC rather than actual Xboxes. The difference does matter for as long as the game libraries remain separated. Play Anywhere is still only supported by a small minority of games.

Code Vein 2 release is way earlier than I expected. Hyped! 😄

Well it’s nice to see other regions remain unaffected this time. Leave us out of your tariff fetish party USA, please and thank you.

I guess it’s fortunate I can’t play until next month. Should be in a smoother state by then let’s hope 🤞

I’m quite excited for LN3. The co-op aspect could be quite fun. I can’t try the Xbox version out until next month, but I’ve downloaded the Switch 2 version to play with. Hoping it’s good! 🤞

Little bit apples to oranges comparison pitting a second hand Series S against a brand new Switch 2.

96K points sitting in the bank. Perfect timing! Lots of games coming in October.

Split Fiction still going strong! 🥳

@Nintendo4Sonic that was the original point behind Series S SOC design. It’s a lot easier to scale for GPU performance than CPU performance, optimising for the latter results in more fundamental changes to game design. So the idea was that with XSS having a very similar CPU to XSX it’d be able to keep up with XSX frame rate wise, just rendering the graphics at lower resolutions to account for the weaker GPU. That just never ended up happening as many games lack 60fps modes on XSS. The original vision for the console failed to materialise.

I actually liked 6 more than 5. I found having a voiced protagonist really helped the story and narrative. A silent protagonist just felt a bit off in 5 as all the characters just monologue at you relentlessly and it’s a bit weird. That’s just my opinion though.

I absolutely agree though that the series should stay true to its roots and not morph into a live service abomination!

Oof another 30fps game on XSS? The whole point of XSS having such a similar CPU to XSX was to have framerate parity at lower resolutions, but that’s increasingly not been the case as the years have rolled on. I wonder where things went wrong exactly? Memory bandwidth I guess? Just a bit of a shame XSS never lived up to Microsoft’s original vision for the console. At least the hardware engineers can take notes for the next generation.

@RiverGenie great to hear performance mode is decent so far for you. I hope it stays that way for the late game too 🤞

@darylb24 Steam is also £60, though I guess it’s typical for PC to be £10 cheaper so no surprise there! I’m definitely going to get it on Xbox as I don’t fancy the 30fps on Switch 2 and it’s not a game I need to have portable.

Not sure how I’ll pay for it. I have enough Rewards points to get the base game, but then I wouldn’t have enough for either Little Nightmares 3 nor Once Upon A Katamari. Too many games not enough points! 😭

@Fiendish-Beaver strangely the base game is £60 on Nintendo eShop vs £70 for Microsoft/Sony stores.

Sounds promising! I can’t play until October due to work related reasons but it’s nice to know I have a decent coop game I can play with my brother next month.

@SMJ ah Asus? Yes well that explains it then. PC component manufacturers love this sort of thing. Especially prevalent in the discrete GPU market. As a PC gamer I’m well used to it. All you can do is sigh and roll your eyes 😂
The sad realisation is though it must work because they keep doing it! 😳

Zero/anti gravity… 🙄 suuure riiight mmmhhhmm. Microsoft embracing the typical gaming PC marketing nonsense I see!

Very impressive spec sheet!

With that price though I can now understand why Switch 2 has an LCD VRR screen instead of OLED VRR… 😅

I can’t play it sadly. I never was able to finish the first game due to the incredibly high difficulty so wouldn’t stand a chance with the sequel. It’s a real shame because it looks like such craftsmanship. Alas, when you make a game that’s even more difficult than Elden Ring it crosses my personal threshold from challenging to inaccessible.

Assuming it gets good reviews I’ll be getting it in October. For work travel related reasons I’m not able to play Xbox all of September so Switch 2 it is all month for me.

Until I see Sony publish a single player, non-live service game on Xbox I’m not convinced the era of competition between these two platforms is over.

I hope Borderlands 4 is good. Wonderlands was fine enough, but by the end I kinda felt burnt out on the whole Borderlands formula. It just felt a bit stale. There’s just the one moment in the game that I really liked, but the rest proved to be quite forgettable. 4 seems promising in the marketing so far, but the proof will be in the pudding.

@ozkrmz yes there’s no drop-off in quality. If you enjoyed the base game you will enjoy Overture. It’s great.

Last week I played Lies of P: Overture. Incredible DLC for an incredible game. Story is intense, the new enemies and bosses are really cool, the aesthetics of some of the new areas are very novel and atmospheric, and some interesting new weapons too. Superb.

More info on Fable.

I just want to be able disable the play history. I hope we a toggle in future. I submitted feedback via the insider app.

Usually these sorts of things come bundled in with unpleasant price rises, so nice to see that’s not happening this time. Good stuff!

We don’t ‘need’ it, but oh I sure do want it. Not right now in this year to be clear, but by 2027 I’ll definitely be hungry for an upgrade!

Plenty of things that can be greatly improved. Dedicated hardware for upscaling, dedicated hardware for ray tracing, a big boost to CPU performance, and more RAM for higher quality textures etc.

It would need to offer a proper generational leap over Switch 2 to tempt me into buying a second handheld. Otherwise, I don’t travel frequently enough to justify having two portable gaming devices.

This bank holiday weekend I’ll finally have a chance to start Lies of P: Overture, as I finished Horizon: Forbidden West’s Burning Shores expansion last night (really great game btw!). Looking forward to returning to Krat, but I’ll no doubt be rusty so will have to try my best to resist the urge to knee-jerk switch to the new lower difficulty mode! 👀

Just the once, Ultimate Edition back in 2021. My brother and I played through the entire series in co-op mode.

@Millionski true true, 2022-2023 were bleak years for first party output. Truth be told, 2021 was really the only year that I’ve been wholly satisfied with how Microsoft has handled XSX. I’ve think it’s been troubled ever since then. 2022-2023 for lack of first party games, and 2024-2025 for shifting the focus away from XSX and onto Cloud/PS5 and the next gen ‘Xbox PC’ instead.

We already knew that they weren’t working on Psychonuts 3, I think I recall an interview years ago clarifying that they wanted to focus on multiple smaller projects for the forseeable future. As much I love 2 if their heart’s not in it for 3 then it would be pointless, it only makes sense when they feel passionate about making another sequel again. I’ll enjoy all the cool things they cook up in the meantime. Keeper looks super interesting 🙂

This trailer does nothing for me. I was tricked by the cool flashy trailers of the first one and naively preordered. And it was an absolute abomination at launch and stayed that way for many months. I’m not being a foolish guinea pig again, I’ll only let myself get excited once I see reviews upon launch. That 2023 game is in a better state now with the 2.0 update, though still more janky than I would like. The core game is perhaps a 7/10 at best. It’s okay, but definitely flawed. I hope they do improve with the sequel. I’m willing to give them a second chance because they have shown genuine commitment to patching the original, but I’m certainly not touching preorders of this sequel with a bargepole!

If you want a preview of what this actually means in practice just look at Nvidia’s recent PC GPU tech demos and presentations. It’s essentially just that. Nvidia have been talking a lot about neural rendering and suchlike. Digital Foundry have a lot of YouTube videos on this subject if you want to learn more.

Go Hazelight! 💪 Split Fiction is still my favourite game of this year so far (as my current profile photo probably shows). Love to see it doing well.

Interesting to see AC Shadows do well. Evidence of why online narratives can be very misleading, I was the impression it had flopped in sales like Star Wars Outlaws did. Reddit is such a tiny bubble vs the wider population, always gotta remember this!

We still haven’t received Fable, or even any decent length of gameplay trailer footage, the game announced at E3 2020 (literally predating XSX|S) for crying out loud. It seems a little crazy that Microsoft are already ‘wrapping up’ the generation.

It’s felt like XSX has been on life support ever since January 2024 honestly. Not Xbox mind you, I mean specifically XSX. Ever since then it’s all been about the future, both with the media reporting on the never-ending ‘Xbox PC’ rumours and from Microsoft itself, repeatedly boasting that next gen is going to be the best thing since sliced bread while focusing primarily on PC/Cloud.

Poor XSX, it was great hardware but it never really got a chance to shine in the limelight. Microsoft’s attention clearly moved on 1.5 years ago. And thus, so has all the discussion online amongst media and enthusiasts. I’m super excited about new hardware for sure, I love cutting-edge tech, but I just wish that I didn’t feel as though the XSX swansong has been ringing out ever since Jan 2024.

I feel old, time is passing so quickly these days, I swear Borderlands was only just added recently. I own the game so it doesn’t bother me, it’s just the light speed passage of time that’s scary.

I’m not buying it. As disappointed as I am with current Switch 2 third party support, I just can’t justify owning two handheld gaming systems - I simply don’t travel often enough. I’ll reassess this when Steam Deck 2 comes out (and whatever Xbox handheld is available at the time), it may be enough of a generational performance leap over Switch 2 to get me to reconsider this stance.

I use one of the third party rechargeable/dockable battery packs for my controller. In a perfect world I wouldn’t have to buy it separately, but it is nice to have a backup option in case this battery pack ever fails. Having said that my Switch Pro controller is still going strong after 6 years, so that’s not a major concern.

With the Xbox design you can get some nice minimalist, sleek controller docks, whilst the Switch design requires a little USB dongle to be plugged into the controller to make charging docks viable. Not a major issue for the Switch, but that’s still an obvious win for the Xbox design.

So I say no need to fix what ain’t broken.

@Jenkinss yeah, I agree, I can get most of the news from just browsing Reddit, but I like reading the opinions of both article authors and commenters here.

@ValentineMeikin 100% agreed. They actually used to have it on the Xbox app but for some unfathomable reason they removed it a couple months ago. A complete step backwards, just baffling really. Meanwhile the Cloud Gaming app doesn’t even have any filter or sorting options at all.

They need to add a way to filter and sort games on the mobile app. The list is starting to get overwhelming and difficult to navigate now.

@Millionski I don’t disagree, it won’t affect their console sales, but think how much more money they’d be making if there were plenty of Switch 2 optimised third party games to choose from on the eShop. I’m gonna be buying the new Katamari game on Xbox instead of Switch because there’s no Switch 2 version available, just one example where Nintendo loses out. Yeah it’s only enthusiasts who care about this kinda stuff, but the people buying a new console within the first 6 months are primarily the enthusiasts!

There’s a notable drought of third party games on Switch 2 this year because of Nintendo being super stingy with the dev kits. As a Switch 2 owner I think they really shot themselves in the foot with this strategy.

@Master_Cthulhu70 I’ve been eagerly awaiting their next game ever since Psychonauts 2. That game is still easily my favourite first party XSX game to date.

Do save files carry over from the Ultimate Edition Remaster?