Garwoofoo

The Xbox 360 store goes offline permanently on the 29th, I believe… is there anything on there that's essential, but would actually work on a Series X?

Anything that’s backward compatible will remain, because it’s technically now on the regular store. It’s only the old 360 marketplace that’s going offline, ie the thing you can only access from a 360 itself.

It’s on Game Pass, isn’t it? Might have to give that a go.

I share Mart’s concerns about the multiplayer but I’ve been telling myself for ages that I need to give NMS another go as I haven’t played it since launch. This is clearly the point at which to do so.

I love that I wrote this six years ago and still haven’t played it, because every time I think about doing so there is always another humongous update on the way. I see the new one is called Worlds Part 1 so there is at least one more just around the corner.

Inkbound - As a huge Monster Train fan I had high hopes for this, but found it was really, really not to my taste. Hated the art style (which also looked shit on the Deck or full size monitor), theme and mechanics. Shame really.

Ah that is a shame. I agree with you about the theme (it's really in love with its own plot, which I didn't care about at all, and it throws a lot of tedious dialogue at you early on - but it does calm down) but I really enjoyed the mechanics and I don't think it's a bad looking game at all.

My main issue with it, as with a lot of PC games, is that it appears to be in permanent development. i.e. nothing ever gets fucking finished. At the moment it's still a bit lacking in content and variety, and I wished I'd just waited a year or two until they were done with it. I blame Agile.

Had that thing of a friend saying she wanted to be more than a friend, and (due to Leonardo diCaprio-style age gap of 15 years) that not being a good idea and now quite hard to go back to a friendship again.

If it helps (it won't), my mum's second husband is 25 years younger than her, not far off my own age, and they've been together over 30 years now. It's a reverse Leo but it shows these things can work.

Anway:

Play - Cyberpunk 2077. It's astonishingly good. I really wasn't sure about it for the first hour or two (it throws a lot of tutorials at you early on, and it's all a bit 12-year-old edgelord in tone) but once you hit The Heist mission it just never lets up. This is one case where I'm glad I did wait to play it because I'm sure three years of patches and fixes and a big expansion have really enhanced my experience.

So here's a weird one - I started Cyberpunk on the Xbox the other night and after a few hours of play I am very surprised to find that I prefer the 30fps "ray tracing" mode over the 60fps "performance" mode.

Even Digital Foundry is a bit sniffy about the ray tracing on the console versions - it's shadows only - but there's something about the image overall that looks a lot better to my eyes. As well as shadows I think a number of other settings get a boost (like running them on high rather than medium) and of course there's a resolution boost too. It's just a really, really nice picture that somehow looks more coherent and less gamey than the performance mode, and the 30fps seems to give everything a bit more weight and heft than the slightly skittery performance mode. I swear even the lip syncing is better.

It's weird, I started off this gen thinking "frame rate over everything" but this isn't the first game lately where I've settled for 30fps. I find after a day or two I adjust to a lower frame rate quite well, so I might as well have all the bells and whistles. I'd definitely rather take a locked 30 over something that wobbles between 40 and 60, as seems to be increasingly the case with newer games this gen.