Keeping public-facing servers up is a significant cost, and if Sony are being responsible it’ll likely be an order of magnitude or two more than you’d guess. Server hardware aside, it just costs a lot of money to keep staff trained up and going on a project.

To my mind, Sony didn’t learn from the PSP’s failings. I liked the PSP as a hardware device, but the big games brought onto the platform tended to feel pretty boxed in, like console games trying to get out, rather than playing to the strengths of a handheld. I remember getting play out of Lumines and not a lot of…

It’s inevitable that optical drives will have failure rates but you wouldn’t think it’d be too many, given that games come off disc onto HDD once and then all the drive should be doing is verifying the presence of the game disc before spinning down. Not like the old days where the game ran off the disc itself.

I picked one up for similar money, it was fun as a little afternoon tech project to mess around with Retroarch for a bit but as you say there are a number of other devices I own that could’ve done the same thing, most of them more powerful. The unit is cute as hell, anyway.

When the OG PS3 launched and sat on store shelves for ages following the brief sales period at launch, they went “People don’t care about BC.” and that was that.

I’d have tried to add something like “all characters created as part of these promotional streams will be deleted” to that reddit post if I possibly could’ve (to address the ladder headstart concerns) but maybe there’s some facet of this that I’m missing.

How do you explain dead pixels then, eh? Checkmate.

I think the name alone would be a trademark violation, but in any case, I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve seen a giant corporation fire off baseless/highly questionable C&Ds and get the result they want. The legal system doesn’t favour the little guy.

CRT sets can often be repaired, but the broader issue remains - there’s a rapidly dwindling number left and eventually they develop problems that you can’t work around. Even if nothing goes wrong, phosphor burn-in affects the tubes with use, which can’t realistically be repaired. More modern CRTs have various ASICs…

Yeah, that’s a fair shout - I didn’t finish the game either time, perhaps the last few bosses are a significant hike up in difficulty. Wouldn’t be unusual.

By Metroidvania standards Hollow Knight is pretty average in terms of difficulty. My main problem wasn’t boss difficulty, it was getting lost. I took two runs at that game and both times I opened the map way up and then stalled in the back and forth.

There are fixes for the d-pad on the Pro controller out there, but I have to say that I don’t remember them working for me. I know I was playing a lot of Tetris 99 at the time, which is a particularly unforgiving game for a d-pad - if there’s any inaccuracy you’re going to feel it, and the stock Pro controller wasn’t…

Looked great back when I tried it around PS5 launch. If only they’d give me the option of buying the damn game I’d be happy :|

Nathan’s been reading a few too many wannabe fintech moguls during the course of his gamestonks articles, would be my guess.

Eh... I dunno. Sweeney isn’t some job-hopping suit that’s been brought it because he has a business degree from Harvard and high-up friends at the golf club. He started the company in the late 80s when he was 20 or so and has been the lead programmer ever since, particularly on the Unreal Engine. He’s not really the…

That was my thought, too. By all means, demolish the building if it’s an unavoidable health risk, but then maybe rebuild as much of it back using original parts as possible, make it a tourist stop? Just seems weird to knock it down and pave it over for a carpark like nothing was ever there.

I agree with 99% of that, but over the years I’ve noticed a tendency for people to say that certain things are impossible in games, and that’s just true until someone comes along and proves it isn’t. I don’t know what that game would look like, how it would overcome the logic trap you’ve laid out. Maybe it’d be a…

Thanks for the story. And for the perspective; your grandpa rightfully deserved to have his own, and have it respected. Anyone who’s been through the horrors of war deserves that much, I think.

If you told 6-year-old me that thirty years later I’d have the resources to buy a fully robotically articulated Optimus Prime, made of 5,000 parts and 60 microcontrollers, that transformed on voice command, but would decide not to because it wasn’t a prudent use of my money, kid me really would lose his goddamn mind.

Noone’s saying there can never be faceless mooks in fiction