I like the sound of this! The Starfield coffee article was funny. $7 a month miiiight be a little bit much for me - but I’ll keep an eye on this and if the journalism is decent and they put out a fair number of articles I’ll definitely consider it. I guess I used to spend around that amount on gaming magazines…

The first two games that came to mind are unfortunately only available on PS4. I’ll mention them anyway, just in case they come to PC in future or someone else that has a PS4 is interested: Tearaway Unfolded is a really sweet game in a paper craft world. You manipulate paper scenery to help with platforming and really customise your character in creative ways. Just a unique and charming game. And Gravity Rush 1&2. These games let you alter gravity to fly around a beautiful open world - I’ve never played something with a traversal and combat system like this.

I agree with Obra Dinn and the Witness as mentioned by others!

This is probably a weird suggestion, but you could emulate Metal Gear Ac!d 2 (PSP game). It’s a stealth game (like the rest of the MGS series) mixed with a deck builder, so your actions are dictated by the cards that you play. The second one in particular perfects the formula IMO. It’s super satisfying and I’d love to see more games of this type!

Big corporation: Whoops, we lost this game so we can’t re-release it. Sorry. Even if we found it, it’s not worth our time/money porting it.

Meanwhile, random person on the internet: I’ve updated this emulator so you can play old games at 4k 60fps for free. The weird bug that was never fixed at launch is now gone too.

It depends on the game. For something like COD, it feels like it goes against the fast-paced nature of the game. However, in squad-based games like Battlefield it’s a sensible tactic. You want to observe your surroundings and do some overwatch rather than running in guns blazing. (However if you’re just sitting on a hill sniping other snipers for 30 minutes rather than playing the objective it can be annoying).

I did this for the Witness - it really helped to think out some of the puzzles if scribbled possible solutions down. Oh and Obra Dinn to an extent - mostly things like ‘I saw this guy hanging around in this memory - could he be X’?

Thanks - I wasn’t aware of either of those before! Is VS still the best of the lot?

It’s interesting that this has now become its own genre! I haven’t actually played any - what games are there besides Vampire Survivors and Brotato?

You might want to look specifically at rogue ‘lites’ which tend to have some form of upgrade system outside of the main gameplay loop. In Hades for example, you pick up certain items during a run which you can use to upgrade your character after you die. Other ones that spring to mind are Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, Monster Train and Rogue Legacy. All of these have generally quite short sessions and each run lets you improve your character for subsequent runs.

What exactly does it mean for a game to ‘launch on the Blockchain’? Is that a fancy way of saying that weapons/clothing in-game will be NFTs?

Wow! I mean, if it works okay and you’re happy to clean it then $40 is good.

I remember the inside of my PS4 being a bit of dust trap. The fan was much quieter after I gave it a good clean - but it was never as bad as your photo :o

Heh, well they were planning to shut it down but there was backlash! Hopefully it stays around for a while.

I bought one last year to play the Metal Gear games. There are quite a few good ‘HD collections’ available if you wanted to play upscaled PS2 games for pretty cheap. I don’t have a PC powerful enough to emulate PS3 so it was worthwhile to me. Allegedly MGS4 is being ported to current gen, so that’s one less exclusive!

All the basics still work with the online service, though you have to go through some extra steps to buy games on the PS3 store now.

This looks cool - feels like a combination of New Super Mario Bros and Rayman Legends. Glad they’re trying new things with 2D Mario!

I like mint chip a lot, but I feel like a nice quality strawberry wins out 9 times out of 10. Now I’m craving some ice cream :')

I’ve played bursts of Hades throughout the day, and that’ll probably continue during the week. I’d been neglecting it for a while but it feels like it’s suddenly clicked and I’ve now made it to the final area/boss. So close! It’s also a great one to play during work breaks on the Steam Deck.

Besides that, TOTK has been a fun one to dip into a little bit each day. I love going in with an objective in mind, then getting distracted for an hour on something completely unrelated (mostly blowing myself up by mistake or accidentally sending koroks to their deaths).

The only version of MGS3 to have crouch walking was the 3DS version. The pressure sensitivity on PS2/3 was to control whether you’d aim/shoot, and hold someone/cut their throat. You could walk quietly by using the dpad