I hope that once my account turns 18 they will stop asking my for by DOB to look at mature content.

I love how the Connect app has user notes, so I can appreciate the irony that I already marked DragonTypeWyvern as “Sexist” before.

You have a much more optimistic memory of gaming review platforms than I do.

I remember getting several different magazines in the 90’s and they were always the same thing. Any “professional” journalist knows that their livelihood is based on selling games. Journalists have to strike a balance between their audience and publishers, which makes negative reviews incredibly rare.

It’s not just videogames. Music, movies, TV shows, books, comics, consumer products. Unkess you’re paying out the nose, reviews almost always have some sort of bias towards trying to sell things. I find the best opinions come from other sources: people I know personally, organic community discussions on the internet (though those are not immune to corporate influence), or when products are only mentioned in contexts where the author clearly will not benefit. For example, a journalist making a list of the top-10 games of all time putting Ocarina of Time on it is probably not incentives to do so… Unless Nintendo is trying to promote a re-release.

“It was just a joke bro, why are you taking everything so seriously? I was only spreading misleading information about a state’s economy in a conversation about economic policies, no big deal right?”

Using nominal GDP just shows how bad-faith your argument is. There’s no such thing as a “retirement state”- every state has retired people in it.

You can make whatever excuse you want- that won’t change the fact that Florida is full of people who are not producing much GDP.

In 2024 Florida was 35th in GDP per capita, well below the US average.

Florida is still about 3x the GDP per capita of Argentina, so you’re correct that it would be a huge boon for them.

The article seems primarily focused on new games. And the article still makes some great points, but when you factor in older games the problem gets bigger.

I am not going to say that old games were better or that “they just don’t make them like they used to”. What I will say is that a lot of older games that are super cheap on Steam or out of print entirely are still great. There are occasionally new great games being released of course (I haven’t played Hades 2 yet but I expect it to be great, for example). But there’s a lot of new games being released where I think… “Why would I spend $70 or $80 on this when I already have this backlog of older games? Why would I spend my time playing 7/10 games when I have dozens of 9/10’s sitting in my library waiting for me?”

Back when I was on Reddit years ago, one of my favorite subs was the Patient Gamers one. There are a couple of similar ones on different Lemmy instances but they’re nowhere near as active.

I remember friends of mine assuring me I absolutely HAVE to get games like Atomic Heart, High on Life, Avowed, the Oblivion remaster, Starfield, Prey, the Outer Worlds, and many more. There are series that I have enjoyed in the last that have way too many entries to keep up with- 3D Sonic, Assassin’s Creed, Monster Hunter, Yakuza (with all it’s spinoff games like Judgement and others). I’m sure a lot of those games are great, but I just don’t have the time to play then all. And with hundreds of games in my backlog already, these games need to be on sale for dirt cheap and without anti-features like DRM and micro transactions and online requirements in order to get me to buy them.

So I think it’s worth asking- are there enough whales willing to buy these games for $70 or even $80 to subsidize people like me picking them up for $10 in five years? If not, perhaps these developers and publishers will need to move to a different business model. Maybe there are simply too many devs and too many games getting made.

Disney could have just looked at Target as an example of exactly why they shouldn’t have done this.

Alas I have the PS5 version.

I generally point to controllers first and foremost. It’s incredibly difficult to get good 3D movement without two analog sticks. The N64 only had 1. The Playstation’s were optional, so those games were in a weird spot where the sticks were ignored or treated as a bonus option (often with the D-Pad being mapped to the left stick and the right stick just not getting used at all).

But it’s not just that simple. I’m replaying the PS1 version of Spyro the Dragon, and while it’s not perfect the camera usually does a good job of following Spyro while he still feels great to control with either a D-Pad or a stick. I could map the shoulder buttons to the right stick and get camera controls that way, but for the most part it’s not necessary. According to legend they hired a guy who had previously worked on flight control systems for NASA to help with Spyro’s controls. Little things like the movement speed, camera height, and the distance from the player character make a huge difference, and Insomniac clearly put a lot of effort into those details that other devs didn’t.

Some games still managed to do a decent job in spite of these limitations, and the power of emulation can help a lot. A couple years ago I played throught the PS1 Armored Core games. I tried to play them as they were originally intended, with the movement and camera controls split out across the D-Pad and shoulder buttons. But after a while I gave up and re-mapped them to the sticks. But having my right thumb on the right stick makes it harder to use the face buttons, so I mapped those to the shoulder buttons. Once I got it all sorted out the games controlled wonderfully.

I’ve recently been playing through God of War (2018), and one of my biggest complaints is how bad the camera and movement is. Everything feels slow and clunky, and the camera never lets me see what I want to. It’s too close to Kratos and his thick ass takes up too much of the screen. The graphics and art direction are great but I can’t appreciate it because I can only move the camera in a very specific way, and often the game either softly guides the camera towards where it wants you to look it just full-on takes control away from you and it’s really annoying.

Another game I’ve been playing is Bloodborne. Once again they give you no control over the distance from your character and have a very limited vertical angle. One of the strengths of Bloodborne (and most FromSoft games) is the use of vertical space in both level design and combat design, but the limited vertical placement and angle of the camera makes it a pain in the ass to actually see what you need to.

These games should have been like maaaaybe $5 each on the 3DS a decade ago. Maybe $30 for a physical cartridge with all of them bundled.

Source? The article only confirms that he is Israeli, doesn’t mention his religion at all. Because it’s not fucking relevant.

Russian citizens who refused to condemning the Ukraine invasion have faced similar consequence. There’s plenty of precedent internationally for these sorts of decisions. The only difference here is that Israel has been purposefully supplying propaganda for decades to conflate antizionism with antisemitism.

Why are you assuming the religiosity of an Israeli person?

The Souls games is another good example I considered bringing up. I’ve only played Bloodborne so far and while I did enjoy it one of my criticisms is that it’s pretty monotone. Even the few NPC’s there are tend to not be very likeable. Everything is dark. Everyone is bad. It’s not even clear whether anything the player experiences is “real” even within the game world, or whether anything the player does accomplishes anything. While I haven’t played the other games I get the impression that they are similar.

I can also think of games that only lean into one side or the others but they do it in a way that I dont mind. “Cozy” games have made an entire genre of this, like Animal Crossing.

Or games where the tone of the game is always dark, but the player and player character both know that there is an “outside” world they can escape to. Resident Evil, Portal, BioShock, etc.

You brought up Metal Gear Solid because it has moments of levity within a gritty military espionage setting, but I think it’s also helped by being set in the real world. If I remember correctly, the end of MGS2 has a boss fight on the roof of a building in Philadelphia and we are shown in cutscenes that the streets below are filled with normal people going about their business, completely unaware of the threat. It’s a reminder of what the player character is fighting for.

Uncharted is another series worth discussing. The first 3 games all kind of blur together in my memory so I could be mistaken, but I remember the first game felt too isolated. I don’t think you really spend much time in a non-hostile environment: it’s all either jungles or ruins or the enemy base. 2 and 3 did a better job of putting Nathan in more mundane and civilian settings: museums, tourists sites, cities, etc. There’s moments where you need to put away your fun and act like a normal person, and that contrast makes the action sequences hit that much harder.

A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.

I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.

By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.

I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.

I gave my opinion and you have not changed it: I would still say that the Deck’s triggers are better than the Dualsense’s.

I mean, that’s just diving into the classic Console vs PC arguments that have been going on for years. My point is that it’s gotten worse for both. We can argue all day over which is the best way to go in 2025.

What I think we CAN say for sure is that buying any sort of gaming device in 2019 is better than any option in 2025. I’m using 2019 because that was the year I built my PC for $1k total, and that holiday season I bought my PS4 - a slim model that came bundled with Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and The Last of Us 2 all for $199.99. Either of those deals blow pretty much anything today out of the water.

I guess profits are up, the PS5 is selling well so far, and it looks like the Switch 2 is tentatively on place to be one of the better-selling units of all time. Maybe the average consumer just doesn’t care about the bang for their buck- they just want the new shiny thing.

I can’t name a single PS5 game I’d want to play that doesn’t already look and run better on my PC

The keyword here is “my”.

It’s not just the console generation that is suffering. PC gaming is dying too. Crypto dealer the first blow, now AI. I’m still running an RX580 that I bought for $180 back in 2019. I was planning on buying a 9700XT at launch this year. Still not a great value- an MSRP of $600. Adjusted for inflation that’s still ~2.6x the price and it’s not going to give me 2.6x the performance. But even then it was impossible to find a card for $600 - even months later the cheapest one on nowinstock is $700, and those are hard to find. That’s JUST the GPU - you still need another grand or more to build a decent PC around it. Even with this price increase, the base PS5 is $550.

I’m not trying to make this a console vs PC thing. They all suck right now. The only good values for gaming is on the fringes. The Steam Deck was an incredible value when it launched, and only looks better today. Other cheap, low-powered solutions like Chinese handhelds and android TV boxes loaded with pirated old ROM’s. Mini-PC’s that are good enough to handle 5-10 year old PC games… At 1080p or less with the settings turned down bit. Maybe an Xbox Series S might be a decent short-term value, especially if you are a person who loves game pass or just wants to play free games like Fortnight.

It’s looking bleak. Not just videogames but everything. Food, medicine, clothing, housing.

I’m not sure what you mean? The Steam Deck, and a TON of other controllers have analog triggers. Sony has been using them since the PS3. The GameCube used them, though Nintendo has gone back-and-forth on analog vs digital triggers. Every Xbox controller has had analog triggers. Most VR systems have analog triggers. It’s hard to speak for an entire industry, but I think most 3rd party controllers have analog triggers unless they are soecifically intended to replace a Nintendo one that doesn’t have it (like the JoyCons).

For the ADAPTIVE part… Yeah the Dualsense has it and nothing else does. I suppose where you and I disagree is in judging how important that is. To me, that was a fun little gimmick in Astro’s Play Room and Ratchet & Clank, but I can’t even remember any other games supporting it. Even in those games I thought it was a bit tiring on my fingers after prolonged periods of use. If we could knock $10 off the price of the Dualsense by removing it I would totally do that. It’s also worth noting that 3rd parties like 8Bitdo have similar hair-trigger features that physically reduce the travel distance and turn them into digital inputs.

When it comes to all the other aspects- the material, the springs, the radius, the shape, the texture, the ability to customize in software - in my opinion the Deck is better than the Dualsense in all of those areas.

I don’t mean to come across as hating on the Dualsense. It’s a great controller and my 2nd favorite behind the Deck for most games. I actually bought a Dualsense for PC use more than a year before I bought my PS5. For triggers specifically,

For me personally, I would compare adaptive triggers to other gimmicks like analog face buttons, the light bar on the Dualshock 4 (which was ironically way better on PC than PlayStation), the built in speaker and microphone on the Dualshock 4 and Dualsense, the WiiU, the 3 prongs of the N64 controller, the VMU of the Dreamcast, the IR camera on the Right JoyCon, NFC readers, etc.

Somewhat related was that I did not mention haptics in my original comment. I’d say the Dualsense has the best haptics, but the Steam Deck is a close second. This is another feature where it’s cool when the Dualsense uses it like in Astro’s Playroom, but it’s so rare for games to actually use it in interesting ways that it doesn’t matter much. With the Deck, it’s quintessential to how the track pads work, and the operating system itself makes great use of it. It can’t do all of the spectacular haptic details, but the Deck has a nice subtle approach that makes the whole thing just feel more substantial. The Dualsense uses haptics for immersion while the Deck uses it more for feedback and feel.