I haven’t got around to playing it yet, but what you’ve described sounds a lot like The Witcher 3 for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it enough to finish pretty much everything (except all the Skellige question marks which thoroughly outstayed their welcome), and Hearts of Stone is better than Blood and Wine, but the gameplay was pretty flat throughout, and most of my enjoyment was in the cutscenes and dialogue and following threads to their inevitably grim conclusions. It’s not a game that I would ever replay.

It does seem like a very obvious thing to add, and the mind boggles at how it wasn’t there to start with.

If you have a solid gaming PC, yes. There is no immersion quite like VR. No amount of monitors will get you there.

It’s a bit of a faff each time you want to get it going (having to start the link each time), at least compared to a dedicated headset like the original Rift. The Quest 3 is a bit pricy, the 3S and 2 not so much. There’s a few decent exclusives for the 3 that aren’t even available on PC, so of the two I’d get the 3S.

Low framerate will make you dizzy. The resolution not so much. You will need a decent GPU.

Most VR games are fairly small and low budget affairs. The big exception is Half Life Alyx which is amazing. The game I come back to the most is VRChat, just for the massive number of worlds that people have made. It will help you get your VR legs over time.

What did Episode 1 and 2 push forward?

The first is a bit rough. It got a remake with Black Mesa which used to be free, but I don’t think it is any more.

I’d honestly just start with 2. It’s a better game all round. You can always go back and play Black Mesa later if you like it.

If you have a VR headset and a decent rig, Half Life Alyx is well worth it. I’d definitely play HL2 plus Episodes 1 and 2 before heading into that one.

This is what game launchers looked like in my day.

If I wanted a different game I’d put in a different tape!

It’s probably the inbuilt browser component that seems to be in everything these days.

Chrome pulled support for Win 7 and 8 ages ago, so anything that relies on an up to date browser is sure to follow.

Gee, I wonder why it’s all AI generated horseshit from press releases these days.

The writing was on the wall when Jeff Gerstmann was fired over a bad review back in 2007. The whole game journalism industry has been on life support since then, and realistically been shafted ever since we went from purchased magazines to online.

Even then magazines would find themselves without timely review copies if they were not sympathetic to the need for good reviews.

Meanwhile Final Fantasy XIV is doing a collaboration with hair dye.

I mean, Nintendo have often been fairly good with back compatibility.

If the architecture and form factor of physical media isn’t really changing, there’s not a lot of need to block older games from running.

They’re already on ARM, and there’s not much better for mobile gaming and GPUs have been fairly similar for a long time now.

The more interesting question is: will the Switch games get a performance boost on Switch 2? And it’s probably going to depend on the game. I’d imagine they’ll test a lot of the more popular titles, and anything with issues just gets it disabled until the developer patches it. It’d be nice to play TotK at a decent frame rate. Impressive as it is, it certainly chugs.

Do you honestly think that people who use Windows do it for no reason?

We’re not just using a browser over here. We have thousands of games we’d like to continue running, as well as thousands of dollars of business software. PC gaming is buggy enough as it is, without throwing one of a million distros of Linux into the mix.

“None of my stuff works but I least I don’t have to use WinBloWz$$$”

I would think it would still do most of it’s business on console regardless of which PC store it launched on.

Lack of a physical release probably hurt more than not being on Steam. When you go pure digital, you miss out on those impulse purchases.

And much like ad blocking in browsers, if it starts becoming a common behaviour, it will be prevented at all costs.

Children Ruin Everything: The Videogame.

“Rich Ongoing Notifications”

Translate Google to English:

“Intrusive Unblockable Ads”

I’m thinking I made the right choice to quit a few years ago.

I guess Notch as well. Sold Minecraft for an obscene amount of money and got into indefensible right wing views instead.

When has any really rich person ever gone “you know what? I actually have enough now…”?