Scarlet and Violet may only run at 10FPS and there are plenty of other flaws, but it’s still a ton of fun. And those are sequels, not remakes. The gameplay is a dramatic shift from everything the mainline series has done before.

Legends Arceus has performance issues too, but was was critically acclaimed.

As for the remakes, they’re generally pretty good upgrades. Gen 1 has really aged poorly, but FRLG are fantastic. I never liked Diamond or Pearl, but BDSP were really solid and fixed almost everything they could without making fundamental changes to the game. I’m really hoping they re-make Gen 5 because those are my favorite and they are stuck on the DS- my adult hands can’t handle holding something that small for hours on end.

Or… Maybe for most of human history we re-told the same stories over and over again for thousands of years until the relatively recent concept of “intellectual property” has forbidden us individuals from doing what comes naturally, forming this sort of weird resentment for when corporations do it?

Redoing animations? To me, that’s definitely more than a re-master. The musical equivalent would probably be something in the mixing phase- adding or adjusting effects, changing pan, level, EQ, automation, etc.

Technically it was never released on PS5. It was released on PS4 and later received an upgrade patch for the PS4 Pro.

But yeah it works with backwards compatibility on the PS5. I would expect the PS4 Pro patch to work but I haven’t tried it myself.

That’s over 7 years old. Roughly the length of a generation. I think re-mastering console games from 2017 is reasonable in general.

Not for HZD though. It was already one of the best-looking games on the PS4, and then they added a free upgrade for the PS4 Pro to get checkerboard 4k. Like… What’s left to improve?

Maybe upgrade from checkerboard to full 4k? The FPS seemed fine for me playing on a base PS4, but perhaps there’s room for improvement there. The initial load time to open the game is pretty bad, but if you don’t switch between games often that’s not really a problem. I haven’t tried the PC version yet, but perhaps there were some UI improvements there they could apply to consoles?

My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel. Also the itemization system was clunky and felt like it was trying to be similar to an online multiplayer experience for some reason.

Lol tech companies are going to be spewing bullshit about how they hired too much in 2022 for the next 50 years to try to excuse their labor exploitation.

This post doesn’t include everything. There were a variety of hardware revisions and price cuts that you could add in. Plus the change of the price of games and accessories.

I waited until 2011 to get my PS3. It was $150 for a slim model, and I chose the Uncharted 3 bundle for $200. I think it ended up being a pretty good deal. You mentioned Blu-Ray and DVD, but it was also good for a lot of streaming services. The PS3 pre-dated the rise of smart TV’s. I don’t think there were even Android boxes back then- the NVIDIA Shield and Amazon Fire Stick were both released in 2014, and the Chromecast was 2013. Media PC’s were a lot less common, and so were couch-friendly operating systems.

Unrelated- the Deck is amazing. With PS1 and PS2 it’s really easy to rip your games on a PC and emulate them on the Deck. And with widescreen hacks, cheats, texture packs, save states, speed up, and slow down, plus the extra buttons to control it all, it’s even better than original hardware. PS3 is doable too, though there’s a lot more hoops to jump through and fewer emulation benefits. You can also use Chiaki to stream from your PS4/5, so it’s pretty close to having the whole library in the palm of your hands.

I’d say fantastically. I went back to it for a bit last month.

I played the Legendary edition on the Steam Deck. Graphically, I think it’s fine (it’s way better than how I played it on the PS3 originally). The draw distance was always a strength, I think the Legendary edition included some visual upgrades, and being a game so much older than the Deck it runs at max settings 60FPS with no problem, so it looks better than it did on the PS3/360/most PC’s in 2011. I also think games from that era really hold up well because the generational jumps weren’t quite as big- the consoles had HDMI and a lot of games aimed for at least 720p, if not 1080p. Contemporaries like Assassin’s Creed, BioShock, Uncharted, and the Last of Us are all similarly still pretty good looking. Audio quality more or less peaked too, at least for stereo.

There’s also the Anniversary edition, which I have on PS4 but not PC. It looks more modern- tons of fancy lighting effects and upgrades textures. The models and terrain are still a bit low-poly, the animations a bit stiff, but overall I think it’s good.

The combat is simple- it always was, even compared to its contemporaries in 2011. A lot of people just call it bad, but I actually like the game design of Skyrim’s combat. Success or failure largely is just a preparedness check- is your combination of character level, skill level, equipment, buffs, follower, and consumable items good enough to get you through the fight(s)? It’s about resource management and good use of downtime. It’s not about mechanical proficiency or complexity, and I think that can be a good thing. I don’t have to be sober to play Skyrim. I don’t have to dodge and block for 3-5 business days before I get a turn to attack. It’s a power fantasy- ebony great sword go ‘brrr’.

And I think that helps the roleplay too. Mechanically intensive soulslikes can be fun too, but I find they feel fun in a more arcade-y way. Using mechanical proficiency to defeat an enemy your character is underpowered for feels great as a player, but for me that also kind of ruins the immersion and reminds me that it’s a videogame. To apply the same concept to something other than combat- it’s similar to replaying a game where the player has all of the knowledge the character doesn’t - where the best items are, which direction to go, which NPC’s to kill before they betray you, etc. Speed running stuff. Which is great in its own right, just not what I’m always looking for.

Then the quests. There’s a lot of quests, some better than others, but on the whole I would say they’re pretty good. The main quests early on are basically tricking you into visitng all of the major cities and points of interest across the map, introducing you to all of the factions and mechanics. A lot of quests are just “go clear that dungeon, either to kill someone hiding there or get an item”. Which is fine because clearing dungeons is fun- there’s a good variety of enemy types and dungeon themes. There is a LOT of voice acting for it’s time, and it’s mostly pretty good. Not on par with something like Hades, but still good.

The puzzles are notoriously simple, but they function more as a way to change the pace and have downtime in dungeons. They aren’t supposed to be hard.

On the whole, Skyrim probably isn’t (and never was) the deepest game in any one area. Soulslikes have deeper combat. Plenty of games have more intriguing plots and better characters. The lore is strong in the Elder Scrolls, but Skyrim only contributed a small part to what was built by other games. The crafting system is… Okay. There are hundreds of books in-game, but most are only a couple of pages. The leveling system is less complex than Morrowind or Oblivion. Everything is just as deep as it needs to be and no deeper. And that makes everything really intuitive.

You can’t ruin a build with a bad decision. You can’t get screwed by a bad loot drop. You don’t need to min-max to feel powerful. You don’t need to find one activity that gives a lot of XP to farm to build other skills. You can’t kill 100 rats to level up your lockpicking- you just need to pick locks to get better at lockpicking.

I also don’t mess with mods. I tried it out years ago and found it just wasn’t worth the effort of dealing with a mod manager. I find most mods are trying to turn Skyrim into another game. Shit posts like adding Shrek or Thomas the Tank. Adding ridiculous anime swords and big-tiddied women with bikini armor. Re-creating other games like Ocarina of Time or Morrowind in the Skyrim engine. Adding guns. Adding a bunch of fetch quests with whole novels of text and no voice acting. I’m sure there are some decent ones out there (especially visual and UI improvements) but the process of modding is much less convenient than Steam Workshop games. I haven’t seen anything that looks good enough to merit going to a 3rd party website to download stuff and fuss with a mod manager for.

Also, I find vanilla Skyrim is pretty stable and bugs are rare. Some of that is from things being patched over time, but also I think Skyrim just received an unearned reputation upon release. The rag doll physics cause a lot of chaos, but I don’t know that I’d call that a bug. There’s the occasional clipping. Even back on the PS3 where I first played it, I’d say 80% of issues were solved by reloading the area I was in, with another 19% solved by restarting the game. There were some interesting exploits (Fortify Restoration potions used to be broken, there are still item dup’ing exploits with merchants, you can access the hidden “chests” that the game uses for storing merchant inventory in the overworld, etc) but I find most of them are things you really need to go out of your way to find, and actually can make the game more fun if that’s what you’re going for.

True, but I’m not sure how closely Xbox works with the rest of Microsoft. As far as I know you have never been able to put Windows on an Xbox or Xbox System Software on a PC officially. In contrast, the PS2 and PS3 had official Linux support (which Sony tried to remove from. The PS3 for security concerns and got sued for).

Microsoft has a hardware division yes, but barely. It’s basically just Xbox, which is failing, and the Surface, which is also failing. They already lost the Mobile market. They seem content to have their laptop and desktop focus just be getting Microsoft software on other hardware.

I kind of get the impression that’s the direction they are moving. They simply haven’t done well in hardware, and their more successful business areas are the ones that are putting Microsoft software onto 3rd party hardware.

I’m still not convinced GamePass is really going to work, but Xbox and Microsoft seem to be. And while I don’t like subscriptions in general, GamePass definitely surpasses any competitor. So rather than roll out new hardware, I think they are moving towards putting GamePass on the Switch 2 and PS5 or PS6. Microsoft has instructions published for getting Xbox Cloud Gaming working on the Deck. I think they want that on the handhelds from AYA, AYN, Asus, Logitech, GPD, and everything else.

They might want to make Windows a viable option for those handhelds, but… They also might not. That would be a huge amount of work for them to compete with Steam. And we’ve seen how unpopular Windows 11 has been. They’ve been downsizing the teams working on Windows for years and focusing more on Edge and AI. I get the impression they just want the Xbox division to lower costs and become profitable at this point.

I have some questions there.

1. hHs that even ever been so much as rumored? There were leaks from various suppliers hinting at the Deck and Switch long before they were in develop. It’s possible I missed something, or possible they just haven’t leaked anything, but so far I don’t have a reason to think they would be trying to enter that space.

2. Microsoft seems to be abandoning that space. The Windows phone died ages ago, and the Surface seems to be languishing.

3. Operating System. Would it be windows? There are already plenty of handhelds that run windows, and usually the biggest problem people have with them is that windows sucks for that application and they replace the OS. Would they have a custom OS like the Xbox? What would it bring to the table that Steam LS doesn’t? Valve already put in a ton of work to get Steam OS as good as it is- would Xbox/Microsoft do that too? If it just uses Steam OS, what does the hardware bring that differentiates it from the Deck?

4. Software. I don’t know what the unit cost of a Deck is, but I’m guessing it’s pretty close to the sales price. The Deck does not need to be a profit center for Valve as long as it drives software sales on Steam. The Microsoft store has already failed- would an Xbox store on such a device manage to be profitable? Would it be locked down and incompatible with Steam? Maybe they could partner with Epic to compete? I’m just having a hard time seeing Xbox/Microsoft enter that business model.

What might be more likely is something like the Portal or G-Cloud. An ARM-based, lightweight product designed to be used for cloud gaming with GamePass. Maaaaaybe some local streaming from your PC or Xbox too. Even with that they would be competing against other products and pretty much every smartphone and tablet. There might be room to move some units, but similar to Sony I don’t see that being huge.

For my library of 390 games, only 2 are “Borked”.

One is Magic: Duels, which was discontinued by WOTC back in 2019. It’s still playable on Windows, but seeing as it was kind of a weird experiment they did that ultimately got replaced by Arena I can understand the lack of support there. Also it was free, and I got clean a few years ago, so I’m not salty.

The other of Flatout 3 (the car racing/destruction game, not to be confused with the similarly named Fallout 3). I remembered seeing ads and reviews for Flatout back in PSM when I was a kid. Never got to play it back then, but I grabbed the series bundle on sale at some point. Still haven’t played any of them yet, but it appears the issue with Flatout 3 in particular is… It’s a bad game. Just learned this now, but apparently it was made by a different developer than the first games and is, by review score, one of the worst games of all time. So there’s probably not a whole lot of demand for it on Linux.

Fun stuff. Always neat to find a new way to look at the library.

All PS3’s could play PS1 games too

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.

The whole world uses both for various things. Even the countries that “officially” use metric. Specific global industries still use imperial. Canadian and British people are perhaps the most famous for combining the two, but most of Europe also mixes things in here and there.

And of course the whole conversation is Euro-centric and ignores the historical use of traditional measurement systems in Africa and Asia, but somehow that never gets brought up.

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.

I feel the same and I think I’ve narrowed it down to a handful of things, in no particular order.

1. The environment design. Fallout is mostly wastelands, with just a few settlements scattered around. Everyone is fighting each other, plus the monsters that are encroaching on civilization. Everything is a shabby remnant of the past shoddily cobbled together. Even the entire settlement system in Fallout 4 is based on gathering scrap and taping it together. In Skyrim, you can mine and process the minerals to make the nails to put your house together. Skyrim has ruins and remnants of past civilizations, but a lot of the buildings and infrastructure are still in good condition, and there’s fresh growth. The wilds of Skyrim are much more diverse than the wastes of Fallout. Fallout 3 in particular has the annoying green filter on everything unless you mod it out. It doesn’t feel like there’s really a world left to save- it seems like everything is doomed to chaos and anarchy.

2. “Survival”. I would not put Fallout in a list of survival games, but it does borrow a lot of elements from the genre. I understand what they’re going for, but I don’t like the resulting gameplay. Constantly scrounging for weapons, ammo, and resources getd really boring really fast for me. Managing health and Rads too. Every combat effectively takes twice as long when you factor in the time you spend to recover the resources you used.

3. Guns. I know there’s a schism in the Skyrim community between those who mod in guns and those who don’t. I see a few problems with guns in Skyrim, and most apply to the vanilla Fallout games too. BGS just isn’t great at gun play. The feel of the weapons, the environmental design, ammo distribution, enemy AI, physics engine, the sound design… BGS isn’t particularly great at any of it. When the ranged combat is a supplemental element of the gameplay that’s fine- Bioshock has 2 great games despite mediocre combat mechanics, and the Elder Scrolls games are similar with their bows and ranged magic. Fallout puts the ranged combat front and center, and it falls apart.

4. Progression. I think this is why I love Skyrim, and the source of it’s commercial success. I was no stranger to RPG’s before Skyrim (both videogames and tabletop), but the ones I enjoyed were imusually in spite of the leveling systems. Usually a lot of grinding and overly complicated systems with points, skills, abilities, etc.

Fallout uses one of my least favorite systems- general experience gained (mostly through combat) that leads to an overall character level increase, which then grants points that can be used to improve specific skills. You want to get better at lockpicking? Go kill something. Barter, speech, science, repair, medicine… The answer is to kill something. Improve the Energy Weapons skill? You can kill something with Small Guns or Melle and it’s just as effective. It completely disconnects the actions you take as a player from the development of the character.

Skyrim is the opposite. To get better at lockpicking, you pick locks. To get better with a shield you use a shield. It’s both intuitive and satisfying. Other RPG’s boast more complexity, flexibility, or realism, but I think Skyrim really hits the sweet spot between accessibility, realism, and customization.

This also ties back to the survival aspects I mentioned earlier, because I also felt like equipment was much more important in Fallout. Your damage there is often more about what gun you’re able and willing to use than anything to do with your character. In Skyrim, a character with a high one-handed skill and perks can have pretty good damage with just about any one-handed weapon. There’s variance of course- you can tell the difference between an iron sword and dragonbone. But the smithing and enchantments mitigate a lot of those differences. If you haven’t focused on enchanting yet you might choose a lower-pedigree weapon with a better enchantment.

5. Lore. This is subjective of course, but I think Skyrim and the rest of the Elder Scrolls just has better lore. The alt-history of Fallout isn’t terrible, but it’s hard to compete with thousands of years of over a dozen races, various factions, and pantheons of gods interacting with each other. I love reading the books, listening to the dialogue, finding carvings and paintings in the textures or on the item models. Fallout’s lore is mostly either “where were you when the bombs fell?”, “that asshole leading a group of roughians is being a real jerk”, or "Wow Vault-Tex was really unethical ". My wife and I have spent dozens of hours watching YouTube videos breaking down ES lore- everything from speculation about the godhead and very nature of the universe to the one NPC who is vaguely connected to a faction thought extinct.

You think most adults were 100lbs heavier than me at 18?

No. I never said that. I have no idea why you think I did?. According to Guinness, the heaviest baby ever birthed was 22lbs in 1879 (and only lived a few hours). I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess you were born weighing less than that, and spent a considerable portion of your early years weighing less than most adults.

I think you’re construing this into specifically abusive and destructive people. Those do exist, but my comment was referring to a broader scope. Anger can be a valid emotion, and there are healthy and unhealthy ways of handling it.

Ultimately, my point is that the original comment I replied to was ridiculous.

I straight up don’t believe that you were never in a room with an angry adult as a child. Personally I was never sexually or physically abused, but I know plenty of people who have been. A lot of strides have been made over the last several decades to improve parenting, but no one can be perfect for 18 years. Plus you add in teachers, coaches, or other community leaders that might be trusted with children.

The most important part of my comment was just pointing out the absurdity of the comment I was replying to. I could also point out the extent of hyperbole they used- the average American adult male is ~30 lbs heavier than the average American adult female, per the CDC. Or… Well, I could dive deeper into it but ultimately this whole conversation is based in bigotry and isn’t worth looking at much more closely than that.