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)

Seriously I’m not sure if you messed something up or if Lemmy is messing up but I can’t read any of that text other than the title

I didn’t realize Canadians measured things in 240p

Are you under the impression that Canada doesn’t use imperial measurements for anything?

Link… Look up here! It appears that the time has finally come for you to start your adventure! You will encounter many hardships ahead… That is your fate. Don’t feel discouraged, even during the toughest times! Go straight this way and you will see Hyrule Castle. You will meet a princess there… If you are lost and don’t know which way to go, look at the Map. The areas you have explored will be shown on the map. Press START to enter the subscreens and Z or R to find the map. On the map subscreen, you will also see a flahing dot showing you which way to go next. Did you get all that Yes/No? (Yes) Alright then, I’ll see you around!

Why is this story suddenly getting posted to dozens of communities that in seeing in my feed?

It’s one 73 year old tribal elder who complained that today’s youth don’t respect tradition. This same story has been pre-printed for thousands of years.

Lol a good chunk of those “breaches and hacks” are either unrelated to PlayStation (Sony Pictures being the most notable) or had no impact to users.

I don’t care if they leak their source code for games or if their social media account gets socially-engineered. Even an outage from a DDOS isjust a minor inconvenience. According to the source you posted, they haven’t had any issues leaking PlayStation user data since 2011, over a decade ago.

Security concerns are valid for everything you do on the Internet of course, but are you bringing that same energy to Valve for the security issues Steam has had over the years too? The 2023 issue with dev accounts getting hacked to inject malware. The 2020 issue with the “Steam Sockets” library. They had their own data breach similar to Sony’s in 2011.

It’s funny to me because tons of PC-exclusive games also require accounts on Steam and no one cares.

The requirement is dumb, but the attention is also disproportionate because of console war fandom.

It released too late and was way too expensive.

I say this as someone who grew up in that time period and has fond nostalgia: it has one of the worst libraries of any console. Depending on how you count (the different regions, the 64DD, what counts as a “game”, etc) there were 200-300 N64 games. That may seem like a pretty big difference between 200 and 300, but in comparison the PS1 had, on a conservative count, 4,100 games. If you want to say only 10% of PS1 games we’re good that’s still more good games than the N64 had games.

There are a handful of titles that will be remembered as some of the greatest games of all time. The two Zelda games, Super Smash Bros, Mario Party, Mario Kart, Paper Mario. Personally I like the Pokemon games too. But the list falls off pretty hard after that.

I love 3D platformers and collect-a-thons, but I could never get into Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, or Donkey Kong 64. They all feel rudimentary to me, similar to Jumping Flash on the PS1. Maybe it’s because the N64’s joystick was so uncomfortable and loose. Crash Bandicoot 1 came out in the US before Mario 64 did, and in my opinion it was more fun, looks better, sounds better, and holds up better today. And then there were two more Crash games, plus the Spyro trilogy which I consider even better.

There are “cult classics” for the N64 that I think are only remembered like that because of the lack of other options. Blast Corps for example is a unique and creative little game. It’s fun to play for a bit, but was that experience really worth the price of a whole game? It almost feels like it could have been a side mode in something like Twisted Metal.

There’s so many games it didn’t have. Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania, and Final Fantasy are perhaps the most famous. Even a lot of games it did have were much worse- Resident Evil 2 and the Tony Hawk series are big examples where the cheap storage of the PS1 was clearly better. I remember I had a mediocre PS1 game called Battletanx that was pretty fun. Later on in high school my friend had a modded Xbox that emulated N64 games and I recognized that title, so we played through the co-op. It was still fun, but the textures were mostly replaced with flat colors and it was hard to see what was going on. I thought there may have been an issue with the emulation, or maybe the ROM was for some beta build or a hacked version, but… No, that’s just how it looked on the N64.

I didn’t mind the 3-prong controller. Honestly just having handles was already an upgrade over the SNES and Genesis. But the controller itself feels so cheap. The buttons all rattle around loosely and feel mushy and unsatisfying to press. The joystick is hard plastic, too tall, and flaccid. The plastic itself is a downgrade compared to its predecessors and to the Dualshock and even Saturn controller.

I still have my N64 and the handful of games I got for it. It had some of the highest highs of any console, but little else.

That was explaining the delayed releases for PC, not saying they would never come to PC.

In this example Ragnarok came out in 2022, so there probably isn’t much meat left on the PS5 bone with this one.

Tough call between the Dualsense and the Dualshocks 1-3.

The Dualsense has great features, but is large enough and bulbous enough that I’m forced to use a full palm grip. That’s good some of the time, but sometimes I like a lighter finger grip that the earlier Dualshocks allowed for. I think of it similarly to claw vs palm grips on mice. A full palm grip on either can get too sweaty over time. The Dualshock 4 is a bulbous mess that fatigues my hands. On all of them, the plastic feels premium and sturdy and really fits well together. Plastic molding is an art, and they are good at it.

I have a few 8BitDo’s and they are all good too. The Pro-2, SN30 Pro, and Ultimate C (their naming conventions are flour of control). A bit cheaper feeling than the Sony offerings, but still pretty good.

The Xbox Series controller is… Fine. The plastic feels cheap, the face buttons feel cheap, it’s too big and requires a palm grip, the R1/L1 buttons feel cheap, the d-pad is one of the worst in history. The analog sticks almost feel great except they’re too tall.

Shout-out to the Steam Deck for feeling phenomenal. Also shout-out to the RetroBit Genesis controllers- they feel really good, but the lack of sticks and fewer buttons than most modern controllers makes it hard to use for modern games.

The JoyCons are awful. Most 3rd party options are better but I still haven’t found one that I really like.

The GameCube and N64 both feel kind of cheap. I think the plastic is a bit thin, and the sticks and buttons rattle around slightly.

What are you talking about?

Sony’s Japan studio’s own library was always gimmicky games that were basically tech demos- Ape Escape was for the Dual Analog controller, LocoRoco for the PSP, Gravity Rush for the Vita, Knack to be a pack-in for the PS4, and games for VR, Move Eye toy, etc. In fact it’s kind of hard to find games they did on their own because they’ve always been mostly a support studio even going back to the PS1’s launch lineup, and they are continuing that. There have been several studios that make original games that started as part of Sony Japan that have been spun off into separate teams too.

I’m struggling to think of many studios Sony has closed. Sony London studios was similar to Japan- mostly just games to go with hardware gimmicks like the EyeToy, SingStar, and Wonderbook. It’s even harder to find studios that Sony has purchased and then closed or turned into a support studio- I guess you could count that Psygnosis was purchased and merged into London studios back in the 90’s, but considering they went 20 years between that merger and closing I doubt there were many Psygnosis devs left there.

A quick search pulls up PixelOpus, a tiny studio Sony formed from 9 college grads with a couple of industry veterans to lead them They released 2 small games and were closed last year.

I don’t mean to be too defensive of Sony- they did close one of their own studios and laid off ~900 people this year. But it’s not really a comparison to Microsoft who now has a long history of buying 3rd party studios, mismanaging them, and closing them.

I’m also confused about your comment about Xbox making more single player games than Sony. First of all… I would expect that to generally be true. It looks like Sony owns 21 studios while Microsoft had 40 as of the Activision-Blizzard acquisition. And while a lot hasn’t been announcedwith release dates, we know of a handful of single player games Sony has in the works- Horizon 3, TLOU3, Ghosts of Tsushima 2, and new IP’s from Bend, Housemarq, and BluePoint. Plus Wolverine, and you could argue whether Physint should count or not since that’s a partnership between Kojima and Sony-owned Columbia Pictures. If you’re trying to imply that Sony is abandoning single-player games or something that’s pretty far from the truth.

I wonder how many promises Microsoft made to the FCC and other regulators about how their mergers and acquisitions wouldn’t result in layoffs?

Local pizza places are usually both cheaper and better than chains, at least in every neighborhood I’ve lived in. I think they are better than frozen pizzas, but also about 2x the cost. Both vary from place to place though.

Aldi’s pizzas are my go-to for value. Usually around $6 a pop now (they were $3.29 pre-pandemic). I add extra cheese and toppings to remind myself I’ve made it in life.

I really miss front-facing speakers. It’s one of many features that phone manufacturers have removed from phones over the past decade.

There was a C-tier PS2 game called Airblade that was basically that

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.