So maybe people are willing to pay 150% markup on a Steam Deck, or maybe that was all scripts from scammers so they could charge 1500% markup to fund their lobbying for adding the “take a bunch of crack and meth” program to public school curriculums. Either way the next round, if there is one, will be twice as much, and it will never be less. And now the Steam Machine price will be $5000 USD pretty much guaranteed. In that same vein, Xbox is still talking like they’ll have a “PC/console hybrid” at some point, which I seriously doubt would be anytime this decade or any less than five digits in price.
I guess the most notable thing from Xbox recently is Forza Horizon 6. Maybe I’ll borrow a copy of that once it’s on the PS5, since I’m certainly not in the market for any more new consoles at this point. I’ve enjoyed those games in the past, with their ability to carve a straight line through nature and historical landmarks to get to the next objective, while driving as a weird car with funny paint. They also had some comment box thing set up to try to figure out what people actually want instead of cramming Copilot into everything, and apparently people want exclusives. But Xbox already has plenty of games like Car, Shoot, Also Shoot, and Block Game We Bought From A Redditor. What else could people want, aside from exclusive games and also for those games to not be exclusive at the same time? Maybe something like Remake Of A Peter Molyneux Game Minus Peter Molyneux? Honestly I have no idea how the new Fable will turn out, but at least they kept one of the remakes of an old game so far. Maybe a colorful platformer character of some kind. They tried bringing Conker back at one point inside of some weird game building game thing. I played it once due to some free access deal or something and got out of bounds and broke the level.
Then looking at Sony, even they have a platforming mascot they seem to deny is their mascot, in the form of Astro Bot. Back in the day they had the likes of Crash and Spyro but those ended up under Activision eventually, and that’s now under Xbox. And they seem to not feel like using those because Activision is the Calladooty factory and nothing else. And that’s finally coming back to Nintendo, which is weird because with this latest entry, Modern Warfare 4000 or whatever, they’re dropping the now last-gen systems finally, yet Nintendo’s tech seems to usually be relatively equivalent to last-gen in terms of power. But upscaling is a thing now that somehow magically makes framerates happen, a form of “AI” that doesn’t seem to require a constant drain on power and water and money, but taken too far it turns Resident Evil into Balenciaga or something. Also can they even fit a modern Calladooty within 200 GB? Or given what limited availability the storage is for a Switch 2, where the largest usual SD Express thing is pretty much just the same amount as the internal, maybe it’d install across between the internal and add-on storage somehow. Or maybe they do the unthinkable and actually optimize the size for that version.
Either way I’ve got more interesting things to look at on Switch 2, including other FPS games like that long-awaited Metroid Prime 4 thing that apparently was okay and had a lot of dialogue. I just wonder how much more for what counts as a killer app for me will happen since the first year of that system was pretty front-loaded to where I just decided to hit up the secondhand listings after not too long.