whmchrish

I wasn´t expecting anything, but I would have been pleasantly surprised by a one-off drop of new X360 backwards-compatible games to mark the occasion. Most of the games in my collection are accessible via BC on my Series X, but anything less than 100% backwards-compatibility makes it - by definition - an incomplete feature

I´m not a huge graphics-snob, so the specs on this seem fine to me. Moreover, while Xbox has been my primary couch-gaming-console this generation, I find myself quite eager to move all my gaming to the living-room via this Steam machine, get a Mac Mini for work in my office and just wash my hands of Windows once and for all (yes, yes, Apple have their own issues, I know ).

I´ll have to audit my Steam library and see how many games I´ll lose access to, but a preliminary check this summer when I was vaguely considering a Steam Deck were optimistic.

My main sticky points are the price and availability. Since Norway is outside the EU it´s a pain in the ass to get this kind of gear imported without braking the bank or buying third-party.

I own it on PS4 and PC. It´s a good, decent, fine game that in hindsight was a little underwhelming to me - even if I did 100% it and mostly remember it as a good time.

Maybe time for a reappraisal. I need to 100% it on PC as well for the Steam achievements I guess, so might as well have a go at it. But this anniversary upgrade/release is pointless. I genuinely don´t think the Creation-club extras will give anything new to the experience that´ll move the dial for me, so I´ll just play it as I already own it.

I´m sure this will be a nice little jaunt. I have vaguely positive-ish thoughts of the original, even if I bounced off it long before wrapping it up.

I´m sure I´ll pick this up eventually, but for whatever reason, space just apparently isn´t my vibe when it comes to gaming worlds. Starfield, Outer Wilds, Outer Worlds, Mass Effect, No Mans Sky... There are so many highly acclaimed (and some less so) space-themed games that I have tried to get into, but it just doesn´t happen.

And I feel a little poorer for it, since a lot of people I respect highly keeps raving about Outer Wilds in particular - and I´m keeping myself spoiler-free in the futile hope I´ll actually get past the first 30 minutes of it one day. But so far, no such luck.

I frequently replay parts of games I´ve finished before, but anything from the 2010s and more recent suffer from a lot of bloat and nonsense map-clutter, so I rarely finish them the second time.

I bought the original Vive back in the day, and I eventually upgraded to the Quest 2. There is some fun to be had with this tech, but I'm just not that excited about VR these days.

A lot of games are "neat" when I boot them up the first time, but just get uninteresting fast and I never return to them. BeatSaber is the only exception, and as fun as that can be, it's hardly something that'll make me upgrade.

And honestly, Meta is a corporation I generally want as little to do with as I can.

This Series/PS5 generation has been so incredibly underwhelming to me, I genuinely can´t take talks of "wrapping it up" seriously.

I´m sure that if I were to sit down and make a list of games I´ve played these last 5 years, I´d have to concede that there are quite a few bangers that wouldn´t have been possible to do on PS4/XBONE, but it certainly doesn´t feel like it to me. At no point have I sat down and thought "Yes, this game really shows me that the next gen is finally here", so it´s weird to think it´s apparently almost over.

I liked the first one well enough, but the industry is telling us very clearly with these price-hikes that they want us to buy fewer games, and "well enough" isn´t a safe enough reason for me to show up for the sequel on day 1.

I´d have bought it at $60 on release, but now it'll fade into the obscurity of my Steam wishlist - where games go to dwell until they're at $25ish at some unforeseen point in the future.

Hard pass. I use the Series X as my main console these days, so unless it’s a Nintendo or Sony exclusive I’m playing it there. But I hate Windows, and barely use the Switch handheld as it is.

I’d welcome a Steam-console that does what the ‘Deck does, but with a more powerful and standardized build for my living room, tho.

I already have my Series X so I guess I'm good for now, but there used to be a time when aging tech actually got cheaper with time.

The writing was on the wall when Nintendo took the plunge and turned the dial up to 11 on pricing for the Switch 2.

I absolutely believe that Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony understand there will be some churn in their customer-base from these changes, but I genuinely hope they vastly underestimated how hard it'll hit. Personally I think they all deserve a 3DS-like clapback from consumers.

There are a few reasons why Xbox has been my preferred console this gen. I don´t much care for the Playstation 5 controller. I´d much rather play on the big 4K screen than the Switches handheld. I have a huge backlog I want to chip away at in-between big new releases...

Ultimately, it was the backwards-compatibility of Xbox that paved the way for me to further entrench myself in that ecosystem So since I´m generally leaning towards the Xbox, I automatically buy most 3rd party games I want there as well. Xbox has plenty of flaws, but it caters to my preferences more than the competition - at least for now.

I played it for a good chunk 6 months out from launch, and went back when all episodes of the Monkey Island tie-in adventure were released. It's a fine enough game. The gameplay loop was entertaining if you had a friend or two to join, the art-style is on point, and there was a moment sailing my ship out of the storm just as the sun rose on the horizon where everything came together in an almost transcendental way.

But I'm mainly a single-player-gamer who has little patience for SaaS/subscriptions/premium-currency-games, so Sea of Thieves isn't for me long-term. It was fun, but I'm done. I'm happy to see it thrive, though - particularly because of some deep-rooted affection for Rare.

I like these kinds of games, but I didn't pick this one up yet. And it's not because I fear that it's bad or anything. But just casually glancing at its Steam-page, I was given three different price-points (Regular, Deluxe, Ultimate-editions), a table of content showing what's in each version, and a price that's equal to games like Baldurs Gate III, Tears of the Kingdom, and God of War Ragnarok.

If publishers learned how to scope and price their mid-tier single-player adventure games more reasonably, I'd buy them a lot more often.

The Ubisoft-like content-tables for various editions give me serious ick.

I´ve only dabbled in the FC-franchise. I quite liked FC5. Something about sabotaging and dismantling a cult of American right-wing a-holes forcing their nonsense onto everyone else seemed appropriate at the time of the games release.

Overall, the social commentary was heavily neutered - but I expected that from Ubisoft, and I enjoyed it for what it was. Bounced off of the sequel pretty quickly though. Maybe I´ll give it another chance with these improvements?

I've liked this since the original reveal, and I'll definitely pick it up. The setting is fresh and evocative, and it looks like the visual designers are onto something with the various creature and location designs. Right up my alley.

The choppy animations / Stop-motion effect is not great though. I understand that it is an artistic choice, but my eyes strain at the sight of it. Hopefully it'll be an easily-found option to turn it off in the settings.

If true, I hope it doesn´t beat the Skyblivion-mod to the finish-line. Those guys have been chipping away at an Oblivion remake as a Skyrim mod for years, and it´s supposed to wrap up this year.

I´ll probably end up playing both anyway, but after all this time the Skyblivion team really does deserve their moment in the sun when they finally release.

As one out of maybe, like, 7 people on the planet who only ever touch Call of Duty for the campaign, I was thoroughly puzzled by what this was for. In my head, MW2 had a perfectly adequate remaster that came and went fairly unremarked upon years ago.

Took me a minute to remember that I'm not the target audience for this stuff, and the MP is actually a big deal to a lot of people. It didn't even properly register to me that it was gone from the "campaign"-remaster until today.

Was the MP of MW2 held in particularly high esteem? A mod like this is a real labor-of-love, so it's obviously nifty for those who have real nostalgia for that game specifically.

I haven't played it yet - so I have no real horse in the race here - but I take the Steam-reviews of high-profile AAA-titles with a huge grain of salt. A lot of people use that as a venue to vent their frustrations in order to "punish" the developer for a multitude of reasons not always relevant to the game itself.

If the game is good, the "Mixed rating" will go up over time as the trolls move on to something new to be pissed about.

And to be fair - I'm not saying people are automatically wrong for giving this - or any game - a negative score, but I'll personally disregard any review that can't even muster up a coherent text explaining why it's bad.

An example; Overwatch has taken a beating in the Steam Reviews recently. And I'm not saying that's undeserved. But one of the top reviews last time I checked was a single word; "Bruh!" and a negative rating. It's only there to gleefully pile onto the games negative PR - to the delight of people who already hate the game. New players looking for a well-reasoned opinion get no value from that.

I'm sure Starfield has its share of similarly vapid brainrot.

Looks good. Really, really good.

I'm in the camp of people who prefer fantasy to SciFi, so the pitch for Starfield never seemed all that appealing to me, when they could have put the resources into making the next Elder Scrolls instead.

I was also baffled by the hype some people seemed to have almost immediately - just based on a logo and title.

I guess they must have seen this presentation a few years before the rest of us. But I'm gonna quietly fall in line - Starfield is now a day 1 purchase for me.

Backwards compatability is probably a bit nichè in the grand scope of things. But as a gamer with more games than time, "new games" turn into "old games" alarmingly fast. Microsofts commitment to backwards compatibility is the reason I prioritized a Series X over a PS5.

I'll get both eventually, but that still means Microsoft are the recepients of my money for new games right now - and by the time I get a PS5, maybe I'll just use it for exclusives and keep Xbox as my "dominant console" for 3rd party output this generation. The ripple-effect of good BC can have a noticable effect, and it's fairly common knowledge that the manufacturers don't make a lot of money on selling the console itself - it's all about the games.