I understand that half of the world is currently healing psychological trauma from the US election results but Atlus has been commenting on politics in their games for much longer.

It was the only last gen console to run Cyberpunk 2077 with a stable framerate. First party exclusives made good use of it too.

Well, did you?

Same. I have Game Pass Ultimate so I don’t need to ;)

Apple Arcade is still going and getting plenty of releases. I don’t know anyone buying it specifically but including it in Apple One (competitively priced subscription for most Apple services) means lots of people have access to it. Me and my partner use it a lot. It’s very nice knowing that those games won’t try to shove microtransactions down my throat.

No longer a leak, embargo lifted couple of hours ago.

I don’t get it, regular people post on Twitter and traditional media are nice enough to credit them but somehow that becomes some kind of invasion to be stopped in your browser. Yeah, block those share / like buttons but if you just block whole social media platforms outright on purpose then why complain that they don’t work - you chose that yourself.

Person commenting above seemed to be negatively affected without knowing the reason and complained about it so I offered advice.

You likely block social media embeds due to overactive or badly set up adblock. Works fine here.

Fair enough, it’s a very divisive game for sure.

I’m FFXIII fanboy and the game gets bad rep so apologies for this uninvited tirade.

If you didn’t give XIII a proper shot then please do. FFXIII battle system is extremely unique and although you have to waddle through 20 hours of tutorials it gets sublime and feels really natural by the second half of the game. That story while cheesy can be as serious as Shin Megami Tensei at times, with people doomed to be trapped between divine powers. Main characters decide not to eat their shit and go against all odds to one of the better soundtracks in series. It all happens along a corridor but the sense of scale does not suffer from it. Sequels to FFXIII are awesome too.

Me along with 3 other Xbox players are still waiting for FFXVI :(

Literally never had the need to disable defender or change anything about my Windows install.

This doesn’t mean anything if you’re not saying what hardware are you running. I saw what was happening in task manager no matter how much time I gave it. I don’t have time to debug a product I paid for, especially if the free alternative „just works”.

Driver support is far better on Windows than Linux.

For things that Linux supports (which is most of it and the older the better) it’s a much better experience since everything just works out of the box. You might have trouble with bleeding edge hardware but in year or two stuff gets done and keeps working. You might encounter issues on some cheapo laptops with broken ACPI implementations but those are just trouble in general.

I’m not surprised. Very few people can afford hardware to drive such displays at native resolution so 1440p is usually though of as a good balance. The other issue would be that it’d have to either kinda big or you’ll have to deal with display scaling which is not great on Windows.

I just contributed to this. My gf bought her old work laptop for cheap (an employee perk) for simple survivors-like games. It should have been perfectly capable machine (i5-8350u, 16GB of RAM, fast NVMe drive) and it’s compatible with Windows 11 so I went with that. I’m a Mac guy these days and but use Windows at work so I’m only familiar with LTSC versions. I wasn’t ready for how much of a shitshow it is.

Couple of hours later I had debloated it and disabled Defender yet it was still running dog slow. The laptop had trouble with Thunderbolt 3 docking station, not recognising anything beyond connected displays. Intel graphics drivers were so unstable games kept crashing left and right.

I got tired of fighting it and installed vanilla Ubuntu (didn’t want to disable Secure Boot). I’m not a Linux newbie by any means but these days it’s home server stuff and the like. I stumbled on Bitlocker protection that I’m 100% sure is there to discourage people from switching. Microsoft set it up so that when you look at it funny you have to find unlock keys at your account page. Funny thing about that - when my gf was typing the address for that page in Safari with Google search on her phone the first autocompleting result was a scam page. I’m fairly sure Google does this to spite Microsoft. Fuck big tech but I digress.

After that it took an hour to install including figuring out that I had to add DisplayLink drivers for the dock myself. The process wasn’t great but I guess it’s a real niche case. Either way, this machine is now flying and Steam+Proton handle everything pretty well.

Last time I used Windows on desktop was around W8 and it wasn’t half that bad. Microsoft is doomed if they offer this kind of experience. I was critical of Proton before but I need to acknowledge that some working solution had to be created ASAP to get people off this dumpster fire.

This is precisely what Digital Foundry specialises in - objective assessment of technical performance. This one seems to be slightly boring due to game running well but for me at least this is important to know before any big game purchase. Not that I plan on buying Veilguard after some other reviews.

I’m not super into CoD and the last one I played (not counting remasters) were Advanced Warfare campaign and some Black Ops 3 multiplayer. They were okay but at that point I was quite tired with the series. I started BO6 on my XSX and the single player campaign is quite fun. I probably won’t be touching multiplayer on the account of being old.

The thing about CoD campaigns is that you have to suspend your disbelief and go with the flow of what game is throwing at you. There’s a lot of scripted scenes where you just have to push through to progress to next scripted scene. If you play to exploit that you won’t get much enjoyment. Treat it like a amusement park ride and it’ll treat you with bombastic set pieces.

I’m not sure if I’m missing anything lore-wise. Black Ops 1&2 which I played were heavy on spy / CIA stuff, plot twists and I enjoyed them a lot. So far I’m just assuming BO6 is cryptic on purpose like older ones so it doesn’t bother me that I jumped without playing previous ones.

Technically CoD games have always been rather accomplished with nice visuals while targeting 60fps (but not making a big deal out of dropping to 50 or so). BO6 looks very good.

Overall it’s not some revolutionary or overly ambitious game but it’s quite competent equivalent of a popcorn flick.

In Game Pass Ultimate it’s an okay deal. It is getting uncomfortably pricey lately but for now it’s still a good value.

I get what you mean but this kind of stuff is just infantile:

Either the Switch 2 drops later than that (my guess around May), or this game will launch on both systems, or the Switch 2 is actually a fever dream and the regular Switch is Nintendo’s last console ever.

Switch is going to release in 2025 but that’s fiscal year so April at the earliest. I get a feeling Nintendo is delaying because they don’t want to release in the middle of industry-wide slump.