Garwoofoo

The Switch 2 has been getting some decent third-party ports - it's not a bad place to play FF7 Remake, Cyberpunk or RE Requiem, especially if you value portable play - but those will dry up if more powerful machines come out and I'm not sure people would have developed those games for that system in the first place, if that makes sense. Over time I'm sure it'll become like every other Nintendo machine, a place to play first-party games and the occasional indie title, and they're starting to fall back on remakes like everyone else. They're in a good place right now, though, at least.

I have no idea what Xbox are going to do next - I've been a defender of theirs this gen, mostly thanks to the excellent hardware and the fact I've got a LOT of use out of Game Pass, but I can't see them developing anything other than an Xbox-branded PC as their next console and Valve have already shown how hard that is to do at any kind of reasonable price point. That's before you take into account the difficulties of things like backward compatibility and so on. Also the fact that everyone hates them now, and they have no idea what they're doing.

Sony will no doubt plug on, but "Sony with no competition" is the worst sort of Sony and they've shown signs of getting cocky lately already.

A few years ago we'd all have been saying mobile gaming was the future but that's buried under a mountain of ads and microtransactions and crapware these days so that's fucked too, isn't it?

Apologies in advance for a Doom & Gloom thread.

I've been thinking about this for a while now. We're six years into the current generation of consoles, by rights we should be getting ready for the launch of exciting new hardware in the next year or two, but it's not really happening, is it? In fact the games industry looks completely screwed in a way I don't think I've ever seen it before.

• Those six-year-old consoles are more expensive now than they were at launch
• The PS5 Pro is already £800, the Steam Machine is even more. Who's going to pay a grand for a next-gen console?
• Games are getting more expensive too. £70 for an AAA game feels mad but is starting to become normalised
• Subscription services no longer look like the future and Game Pass isn't doing the numbers that Xbox needed
• We spent so much time on cross-gen releases that it feels like we've only actually had about three years of proper PS5/Series X games, and half of those have been remakes anyway
• Games are taking longer and longer to make, with a 5-year cycle not being uncommon and fewer exclusives this gen than ever before
• Massive layoffs in the industry almost on a yearly basis

And on top of that you've got GTA6 looming just around the corner, which looks set to suck all the oxygen out of everything else for months. Will the next gen just be based on what machine can play GTA6 the best?

So where do we go from here? It feels like we're already in a slow-motion industry crash and we haven't realised it yet. Sony seem determined to press on with the PS6 but I'm not sure who wants it, Xbox have been firing bullets into their own feet all generation, PC gaming remains a niche. Nintendo are doing OK and have finally got decent third-party support but their "new" console is still less powerful than the ones we've been using for six years. Have we reached a point where sticking with what we've got is the best approach?

I watched Fantastic Four: First Steps and thought it was just very silly. I probably need to stop watching comic book movies, I can't remember the last one I genuinely enjoyed. Shang-Chi maybe.

Additional Play: Vampire Crawlers, the first-person card-based spin-off of Vampire Survivors.

I'm not sure quite what to make of this yet. It's got a clever design and does a good job of keeping all the VS-related stuff in it while being completely different in play. I have fond memories of playing Dungeon Master on the Amiga and I love deckbuilding games so I'm pre-disposed to like this kind of thing. And it's really quite compulsive in play, time flies by and you're always unlocking new stuff to play with. It's definitely got that "just one more go" quality to it.

But it feels a bit empty too, it's like a meal that's all sugar and no nutrition. 95% of what you're doing is just playing cards in an obvious order, there isn't (so far) a lot of clever strategy there. And it suffers from the problem of the whole roguelike genre: it doesn't really matter how good you are at it, you just need to play it enough to unlock things that will make you good at it. It feels like it's playing you, rather than you playing it.

But I do want to carry on playing it, and maybe it gets better later on (VS definitely did); I'll report back in a couple of days.

FF7 Remake runs really really well on the Deck so I’d be surprised if you couldn’t get similarly great results on the Claw. There’s a tiny little mod you can do that turns off the overly aggressive dynamic resolution and after that it looks amazing and runs really well. Out of the box it easily hits a consistent 40fps but I used Lossless Scaling to get it to 60 and had no issues with it at all after that.

Rebirth is a slightly different matter, but I’m still enjoying my Deck playthrough. It’s a bit more compromised though.