This is a disturbing trend. I can understand how some smaller companies may want to be more selective to which platforms they port to (to save their limited money and resources), but I would be willing to be that Sony is behind a lot of this. I don’t want to go too deep into “tinfoil hat” territory, but the recent Square-Enix releases not being on Xbox has to be some kind of back room deal with Sony, right?
Not to sound too bitter, but I feel like paying for exclusives is crappy but understandable. Your marketing can go crazy promoting games that “you can ONLY play on xx console”. But I feel like making deals so that publishers are releasing games on all platforms EXCEPT your competitor is really shitty business practice.
If it is some sort of backroom deal with Sony, wouldn’t that come out as part of the Microsoft discovery process around the proposed Activision acquisition?
It might just be the case that Microsoft demanding support for the S from all games is becoming a problem. Porting to Xbox is not one Console port but actually two.
The argument about Series S “holding things back” is that it’s a problem for new games not being able to take full advantage of the PS5/XSX hardware, not that having to make a game also work on Series S - which is more powerful than a launch PS4 or a Switch, which games are being released on just fine - is causing any problems.
May’s Games with Gold are announced, looks like it’s Star Wars Racer and Hoa. Not familiar with either one, looks like the Star Wars game is based on the pod race stuff from the prequels?
Finally a good game! But of course, I already own it.
I played Star Wars Racer first on the N64 and finished it there. Then on the Dreamcast and finished it there. Then I bought it on the PC, and finished it there using my joystick. Then last year I bought it on the Xbox and ran through and easily won all the races on it. It’s either a lot easier on the Xbox version or maybe the game was always easy and I just had a tough time with it on the other versions because I wasn’t very good at it yet? I don’t know, it felt weird to just run through all the races on the Xbox version, after years away from the game, and to just win them all on the first try. It never went down like that before.
Haha, that’s such a gloriously cynical encapsulation of American media dystopia. Gun violence! Junk food! Intrusive advertising! Now back to your regularly scheduled gun violence!
It appears that Seagate has permanently cut the price of their storage expansion cards. They’re still overpriced, but they’re no longer hideously overpriced. Now wait for a sale and they’ll be sorta reasonable.
2TB = $280 (down from $400)
1GB = $150 (down from $200)
512MB = $90 (down from $140)
Which thread for this? I guess here is as good as any. I managed to set my Steam Deck up for local streaming this evening, using this guide. This isn’t Game Pass cloud streaming, but streaming locally from your own box. So you can play those games you’ve started on there (that aren’t on GP), streamed to your StD, picking up where you left off, etc. It’s even more simple to set up than the Cloud Gaming via Edge.
I wanted to do it because I started a couple games I picked up in the current sale, and wanted to play them from the hammock in the back yard. Blacktail, a kind of weird FPS thing, and WarTile, a really neat semi-real-time/semi-turn-based tactics game with a rockin’ minis aesthetic. Streaming them from my Xbox works great.
This Xbox Wire article I’m posting doesn’t have much to do with anything, but I was amused by one of the categories: first person games where you can see your legs. It’s something we take for granted these days I think, but I remember playing Mirror’s Edge and realizing I could look down and see my own legs! I was kind of blown away, and find it distracting now if the game (usually indies) don’t put legs on my character.
Yeah. Working on the college paper, after we sent the flats to the printer every night, we’d bust out Marathon for a multiplayer session. Bill Clinton was in his first term.
