Garwoofoo

I think they went a bit too hard on the TV series to start with - stuff like Falcon & the Winter Soldier and Loki felt like required viewing, which started to become a big time commitment. While they were often good, keeping up with Marvel started to feel like work. Then they went the other way and several movies (Shang-Chi, Eternals) and shows (She-Hulk, Echo, Wonder Man) just seemed to go absolutely nowhere. So the narrative momentum has been completely lost.

Incels howling "woke" at everything with a female main character didn't help.

Then the whole Kang thing happened - they built up a shit villain over the course of several of the worst movies they've ever made, then dropped him abruptly when real life stuff happened, leading to the next Avengers movie suddenly being Dr Doom with absolutely no build-up whatsoever.

I've kept up with the movies (which have been a real mixed bag lately) but I'm several shows behind and not really inclined to catch up. I'll probably see Avengers but it's definitely not got the hype of Infinity War, and I'm not sure how it ever could have had.

I am happy to take recommendations for DreamCast games. I know Skies of Arkadia, Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, Crazy Taxi… Is Sonic Adventure good?

In general the Dreamcast suffered the same fate as the Wii U, in that most of what made it good and unique simply got ported to other systems after its demise. So it doesn't really get the respect it deserves. aniki's list is a good starting point and I would add a few personal favourites:

Space Channel 5 Part 2, if you can get it. If you're playing on original hardware you may need some sort of boot disc as it never got an EU release. Emulated it should be fine (and go for the Japanese release, it's not like it'll make much less sense anyway).

The original Soul Calibur is still unbeaten in its genre, IMHO. Six games into the series and they've never recaptured the magic of the first one.

Bangai-O is often overlooked but is an absolutely mental Treasure shoot-em-up. It came out on the DS as well but the two versions are quite different.

Shenmue II, obviously, if you liked Shenmue. I think it's by far the better game.

I'd add Rez which will always be a Dreamcast game in my mind but sadly every other version from the PS2 onwards was better (higher frame rate) so no real need to go back to the Dreamcast version for anything other than curiosity.

I regularly play it on the Deck using Xbox Cloud Gaming and it works really well. I think the Switch 2 version will be a big hit.

40fps modes are the future, I guess the only reason they're not more common is that you need a fancy-pants 120Hz TV to be able to use them. Control recently got updated to add a 40fps/all bells and whistles mode and it's a huge improvement over either of the previous options. Star Wars Outlaws was another one that used it to good effect.

Anyway I'm not really playing anything that I haven't spoken about already, mostly Final Fantasy XIV still. I'm in the post-Heavensward, pre-Stormblood stretch now, I really like these lengthy little interludes as it's where the game does a lot of its character building and it's really fun watching the building blocks of the next expansion falling into place.

I've also been playing a bit of Vampire Crawlers which turned out to have more legs that I expected - nearly done with it now though - and I'm starting to play around with XCOM 2 a bit. So plenty to keep me busy.

Want: I'm not even sure what's coming out in the back half of 2026, GTA6 is sucking all the air out of the room already. I'm not fussed about it at all but it will inevitably sell gazillions.

Additional Play - XCOM 2. I absolutely loved the original XCOM (and it still stands up very well today) but have never found the time to delve into this, despite for some reason owning it on three different platforms (I swear it's been about six quid multiple times, and I am weak-willed and forgetful). cavalcade was raving about the Switch 2 version recently so I thought I'd compare them:

• Running it on the Switch 2 is a massive improvement over the Switch 1, which felt like it was permanently on the verge of crashing - this runs exceptionally well in both handheld and docked modes. Resolution's a little low in docked mode but basically fine. Unfortunately there's apparently a long-standing unpatched bug that breaks a key Sniper ability, and there are still memory leak issues; it's a little hard to recommend on that basis but it's definitely a much better option than it used to be. If it gets patched it'll be the best console version by far.

• The Xbox version looks nicer (higher resolution) and the Auto HDR feature (remember that?) does a great job with this game, but it's capped to 30fps so is nowhere near as nice to actually play as the Switch version. Loading times are very quick though. Subtitles are absurdly tiny. Allegedly this gets a bit crashy when stuff gets really busy in late game.

• On the Steam Deck, this more-or-less runs at 40fps but Lossless Scaling easily gets it to 60 and it runs really nicely. Text in general is a bit too small although weirdly subtitles are nice and chunky.

Basically all three versions have their drawbacks and if there was ever a game in need of a proper next-gen remaster it's this one - it's an undisputed classic of the turn-based strategy genre but it's kind of been left in a dodgy place on console which is a shame.

I think I'll stick with Steam Deck for this one, the PC version is the only one that's relatively bug free and there are obviously mods and stuff you can't get on console. Now I just need to play several hundred hours of rock-hard strategy game, see you in a few months.