feltmonkey

Yeah, those are the sort of allusions I have heard. I could spend my rare, precious leisure time doing that, or I could do something with instant gratification. I'm currently choosing to be shallow, but I might change my mind.

Not respecting the player's time is a bit of a gaming pet peeve of mine, and by the sound of it, Blue Prince goes out of it's way to do the opposite.

I haven't had much time to play videogames recently, but I played some of Blue Prince. I've listened to it being discussed by people who are saying it is a masterpiece and definitely Game of the Year, but the discussions of how great it is have slightly put me off.

I like puzzle and mystery games. Or at least I like certain kinds of puzzle and mystery games. I love the Phoenix Wright series, and Return of the Obra Dinn is one of my top five games of all time. However I hated The Witness. I think I like mystery games that have a bit more on top of the puzzles, a bit of personality, and Blue Prince seems very dry.

That's not what my problem is, though. From everything I know about the game, I am certain that it is not one that respects the time of the player. I don't want to put 100 hours into figuring out a puzzle. No resolution is going to be worth that. There would have to be a literal physical cheque, one that I could take to the bank and deposit, for at least £1000 in that 46th room for me to persevere through that amount of puzzling and RNG. Even then that would come in at less than minimum wage.

Do not take this as a judgement on the game. I'm actually sure that it's amazing, and a masterpiece. It's just my personal reason for not currently engaging with it. I haven't played Dishonored 2 yet. Instead of going through five runs in a row and discovering nothing (which WILL happen) I could sneak up on some poor sod, shiv him from behind, and teleport onto a nearby rooftop, and get more enjoyment in a fraction of the time. I don't have time to mess around with dartboard math puzzles or failing to get a disk I need because it just doesn't exist in this run.

Again, I accept that this is a masterpiece and that I should play it.

How about we just expand the remit to include PS4, Xbone?

Madness. Sheer madness.

Lets do it.

Jedi Survivor is a great shout. Hitman too, although considering the first part came out four years before the PS5 and Series S/X launched, I dunno if it counts. You're squeezing it in on a technicality. 😁

The thing about any games of the generation conversation about the PS5/SeriesS/X generation is that a lot of the games released had PS4/Xbone versions too, especially on the PS5 side.

For me, Elden Ring is the best game released during this time period, but can a game with a perfectly fine PS4 version be the best game of the PS5/SXS generation?

I've only recently joined this generation on the console side of things, so I'm not really the right person to judge, probably. I also tend to play things years after everyone else and often prefer indie games to the AAA blockbusters. Astro Bot, Balatro, and Forza Horizon 5 would be up there. Vampire Survivors also. There are a lot of games that look like they're probably amazing but I haven't got round to yet or played enough to judge - Tears of the Kingdom (where do Nintendo games fit into all this anyway?) Indiana Jones, Cyberpunk 2077 (I only played this before they "fixed" it) Spiderman 2, and Baldur's Gate 3.

A console generation tends to be around seven years, so we're probably still a few years away from the next machines being announced. There probably won't even be another Xbox home console. The next few years will be weird anyway. The price of graphics cards and components have gone through the roof, so unless that changes the next generation of consoles might be prohibitively expensive. We've seen a trend in this direction with the eye-watering price of the PS5 Pro, and a truly next-gen console could easily cost £1000 if Sony or Microsoft don't want to make it a crippling loss-leader. The move away from cutting-edge living room consoles towards handheld machines that Xbox seems to be making makes a lot of sense. We've seen how much of a Game-changer a high-spec handheld can be from the likes of the Steam Deck, ROG Ally, and of course the Switch. I think this is where we're heading. Asus have teased another version of the ROG Ally already, which got lost in the Switch 2 news hurricane.