swedetrap

@GlasgowGuy Which 28TB drive are you using for 'cold storage'?

@Master_Cthulhu70 Thanks. I also owe ya one - I somehow completely missed MX vs ATV Legends. That's 100% a game I'd play and yet I had no idea it even existed until I looked it up just now.

@Kezelpaso I was one of the Fable Legends faithful - possibly to a fault. I met some great people playing that game. For me, that was sort of the beginning of the "Xbox Cancels Games" era that still continues to this day.

RIP Fable Legends, Scalebound, and so on and so on and so on.

Huh. I guess I need to revisit Fable 2. That was the one that I aborted after only a couple of hours because something else came out, and I never went back. To know its the most popular here is saying something.

I have a 2TB series X with a 4TB expansion card and a 4TB SSD for OG and 360 games and I still want more. Losing digital libraries on things like my Vita have made me paranoid and I can’t stand owning games that I can’t keep installed.

@theduckofdeath You could release Whore of the Orient for $99 retail tomorrow and I'd buy it. Unfortunately that entire project was scrapped and will never see the light of day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whore_of_the_Orient

@FrenchVaniIIuxe Cue comments about the game being "woke!" Here we go!

We still have an Xbox One X connected to fantastic 2 gig ethernet and use it to play all kinds of cloud games. Works great. It's not the main console in the house, that's a Series X, but you'd never know it's as old as it is, and no installing much of anything.

@Questionable_Duck Almost the exact same list I have. I really love the Marathon art style but have never cared for anything Bungie has made, post-Halo. Destiny 1&2 are a lot of hours trying to enjoy a game that I was never meant to enjoy. Same with Plague Tale.

There are maybe 3 games on this list I'm not interested in. That's a pretty solid ratio.

@ElectricWizard This! I can't even count how many PS games I've bought on disc where the disc is rendered worthless by the sheer number of updates post-launch. GT7 is a great example - abysmal game at launch; fantastic today, but the disc does absolutely nothing to reveal that.

Sure, I could play Spider-Man 2 again using the disc I guess, but other than The Last of Us 1&2 and the entire Halo series, I can't think of a single-player game I've gone back and played a second time. There's too much good stuff out there to retread.

Hate LRG and couldn't care less what they do, regardless of how much I love this game.

Meh. I couldn't care less about the box that sits under the TV so long as all of my future boxes can continue to play my massive Xbox library. I've had a blast with my Series X and play it 10-1 over either my PS5 or Switch 2. If the next one is more PC than Xbox, I truly don't care as long as I don't have to do all of the usual PC things like manually update 30 drivers a week, wait for shader compiling, and all of that nonsense.

I remember I was visiting London for a few weeks when Anthem came out. It was weird seeing all of the buses coated with EA Anthem propaganda, giving one the impression that one of the best and biggest games of a generation was imminent.

And here we are, nary a game preservationist in sight crying foul that it'll be no more.

Sort of a bummer really.

Finish:

• The Outer Worlds
• The Outer Worlds 2
• Pokemon Z-A
• Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter Rebootmakemaster

@Jenkinss Triangle Strategy is fantastic. Don’t pass on it at that price if you have any interest at all.

I’ve just finished this and gotta say, it was shamefully overlooked when it released. Yeah, a couple of the later chapters are a tad tedious but overall I think it’s truly a beautiful experience.

@Weebleman oh 100% - I mean, my GOTY is Vampires: The Masquerade 2 but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone due to the thrashing it got from critics. I just assume I really liked the story and overlooked its flaws. And I REALLY like the story. But should anyone else buy it? Maybe at 80% discount.

Different strokes; different folks and all of that.

@Fiendish-Beaver So true! I think for me its that I was really looking forward to Yotei and AC: Shadows for quite a while, and neither of them really worked for me like previous games. I assume its burn out, but I find it sort of funny (and expensive) to learn the hard way that the things I look forward to the most are oftentimes the games I don't like as much as I think I will.

Meanwhile, I'm having a blast with Metroid Prime 4 even though none of the previous games clicked and I hadn't care about it at all in the lead up to its release. Go figure.

@Fiendish-Beaver Maybe Tsushima was enough for me? I don't know. I loved the original; played it twice. Yotei felt great for the first few hours but then became a slog for me.

As to whether or not it was better than anything Xbox put out? Eh, probably. I haven't started in on The Outer Worlds 2 yet but I enjoyed the first one (though admittedly not to the degree that I liked Tsushima - not even close). And yeah, I'm a lifelong Doom fan but didn't care for their latest whatsoever.

@TheGameThrifter Not sure you got the memo but Halo is coming to PlayStation.

@OldGamer999 100% agree. While I personally didn't care of DK Bananza, Astro Bot was the best platformer on any system in a decade. Xbox's output this year was strong (I REALLY enjoyed Keeper and South of Midnight) but nothing that deserved to hit over 89 at best. That said, as I look at everyone else's internal studios using the same criteria, I don't see much of anything that deserved to cross the 90 mark - at least not in my opinion. The best games of 2025 were all 3rd party; multi-platform.

Someone is going to say "Ghost of Yotei" and no, sorry, Tsushima was a 98/100 game. Yotei is more like an 82.

@TheGameThrifter Easy. GT7 reached 14 million sales early this year but hasn't even come close to hitting the 15 million mark. That puts is somewhere near GT3 in total sales, despite having a development budget 7-8x higher and a marketing budget 11x higher than that same game. Ultimately it has made its money back but its earning potential has stalled.

MLB The Show went through a similar situation, and while yes, it was MLB that forced Sony's hand a few years back, Sony has seen the financial wisdom of publishing older titles (or franchises like MLB) on other platforms once their sales have stalled significantly.

I can't help but think that all of the extra development work on GT7 is coming at a cost (it has to) and needs to be offset somehow. It's certainly NOT through additional sales of GT7 on PS5.

Don't get me wrong, I already have GT7 on my PS5 and love it, and ultimately I don't care if it goes to Xbox/PC or not, but Sony has gotta be paying attention to the success of Helldivers on Xbox, FH on PS, etc., and GT is a perfect franchise to send over now that it has fulfilled its sales potential within the playstation ecosystem alone.

GT7 takes forever to get into due to Sony's insistence that I've never driven a car (or played a GT game) prior to first launch. That said, once you get into it, it's a truly amazing game, even with the absurdly over-complicated UI.

I'm waiting for GT7 to land on PC and Xbox. I don't even think it's a question of if so much as a question of when.

An Xbox GOTY will happen once Microsoft outbids Sony in the great race to line Geoff's pockets.

Or when a new Xbox-published Kojima game arrives.

Either/or.

Loved Avowed way more than I thought I was going to. Keeper and SoM were also top-notch. Doom didn’t do enough to keep me playing, I guess? I played it a few times and then promptly forgot it ever released.

I do have a feeling that Outer Worlds 2 will probably end up being my favorite 2025 game but there’s no way I get around to playing it until 2026.

This is how Microsoft and Xbox push me to hook my ps5 back up and switch over to GT.

There is literally no demand for this game on Xbox, or so I've heard.

More accurately, there's literally no demand for this game to be on MY Xbox. I already went through this with Wukong, which despite owning both an Xbox and PS5, I refused to buy on PlayStation because this timed exclusivity thing is stupid. Once I did buy it on Xbox, I was fully underwhelmed with the experience and wondered why anyone cared at all in the first place. Not going down that road again.

This served only to remind me that I:
a) didn't love Control as much as other people did
b) will never get the Quantum Break sequel I want
c) need to finish Alan Wakes 1+2

I'll never be even remotely interested in anything that goon has to say. That show literally makes me embarrassed for the industry.

Whatever. I couldn't care less about campaign mode but am 110% loving this year's multiplayer.

@Runex2121 I loved it too.

If it isn't Perfect Dark, I'm not altogether sure that I care.

I loved the campaign - it was everything I had hoped for. The MP started off a bit slow but was top notch within about 6-9 months. Unfortunately, that delay felt like it killed a lot of momentum in the press and on the internet, but I've never had a problem getting into a match quickly to this day.

You'll forgive me for waiting for the cancellation announcement.

I'm 3 hours in and so far it isn't as good as any of the above mentioned games these folks have worked on in the past, but whatever.

Still Wakes the Deep is an absolute classic

Honestly, you guys did more to celebrate it than Microsoft did, so for that, thank you.

Bought it because of the sale. Haven't played it because I don't like scary things.

Gaming awards shows need a category for something like "Best PS2/OG Xbox era-style game on current gen platforms." I feel like South of Midnight and Keeper would both be in contention for that. Honestly, they're 2 of about a dozen highlights for me this year precisely because they remind me of that era. I'm over 8000 sq mile open world slogfests that take 120 hours to complete (except Square RPGs obviously). Give me great, unique, and even quirky stuff that I can spend 6-8 hours in and just enjoy

Good of them to keep the Remnant IP so that they can ruin it down the line and keep it out of the hands of its own studio and creators

It's only NOW in early development? I assume this was due to moving resources to Marathon? It feels like Destiny 2 is almost as old as the Xbox One generation.

Downloading this .... now.

I love these games. Thanks for the heads up. I somehow missed this completely.

Eh, that's fine, but what I really want is the a proper Gushing Geoff reveal of the next Hazelight game, followed up with a expletive-filled speech from Josef Fares, letting me know that his next contrived and mediocre game is better than all of the other games at the show. It's not the Game Awards without him and Hideo getting a proper foot wash.

And yes, I just called It Takes Two et al "Mediocre." I'll stand by it. I halfway enjoyed his prison game a few years back but the rest have done nothing for me.

Love this! There are quite a few games I come back to that I don’t want to install. Now they’ll look even better.

@Blastfemur This is exactly why I haven’t picked it up. Sounds like my experience with every extraction shooter to date.

I have a launch day ROG Ally with a 2TB drive in it, so Play Anywhere games are the lifeblood of my gaming life, Switch 2 aside. I LOVE the program, though I do get a bit confused at how some publishers deal with it - looking at you, Square. Why are they so inconsistent? Either way, I give Play Anywhere credit with my having finished quite a few games in the past year: Keeper, South of Midnight, and several others.

I fully admit that I think twice before buying anything that doesn’t have Play Anywhere.

Funny you should compare this to Ryse. I felt that both were given a bit of a bad wrap when they were released. Maybe it was because there wasn’t a whole lot to play at the time, but man, I sure do love both of them, even all of these years later.

Thanks for celebrating this. It feels like the rest of the world, at least in the gaming press, has more or less given up on the Xbox brand.

For me, one of my fondest memories of the past 20 years is moving to my new home state and falling asleep on my recliner playing UNO multiplayer on Xbox live. It was NEVER boring, I’d just play it that late into the evenings. Add on some of the best experiences and innovations in the history of gaming, and the 360 will always hold a special place in my heart. I no longer own one, but I’ve managed to pick up nearly every BC 360 title available today, if only for the nostalgia of it all.

This was the game I was most excited for after watching the showcase. Can’t wait to try it.