Quite a few years ago now I went to my nan’s house for Christmas.

My cousin, I think he was about 13, had got a £50 Steam voucher for some games. Him and my other cousin who was a couple of year older went to Steam, swapped the voucher for something, and then took that to a gambling site. I don’t know if they’re still a thing. It was something to do with Counter Strike drops I think. Heavily advertised by YouTubers who ran them, with a bunch of videos showing them winning. The sort of thing they’d be sent to prison for in any right thinking society.

They took that £50, put it in, and clicked. The younger one went “what now?” and the older one just went “oh, nothing. It’s gone.” A couple of games worth of money, gone. For nothing.

He looked like he was about to cry, and only didn’t because he was going through that acting tough phase.

He’s an accountant now, and plays crown green bowling. I like to think that was a relatively cheap lesson in why not to fuck around with gambling.

The problem is that everybody sitting around that table thinks they’re skilled enough.

I stopped playing WoW because it didn’t value my time. There is a limit to how much you can spend on WoW. Sure, you can buy gold, but it honestly won’t help you that much. The upgrades come from the weekly content, mostly.

And then there’s the mobile stuff where whales rule the day.

It might do now. They’ve done a lot of improvements.

Even on PS5 it was an absolute mess in co-op. 30fps (if you were lucky) all round, constant freezes (several seconds) when swapping characters, many many crashes. Whenever we told it to save, we’d have to both touch nothing to make sure it didn’t crash while saving. Oh, and there was a bug meaning only the player who chose to sleep for the day would get any companion progression.

I really like my PS5, but I see no value in a model costing 80% more and being only current for half a generation.

All that for an “up to” 40% performance increase.

I don’t care how much of a graphics nerd someone is, that just isn’t worth it.

The dollar ain’t buying what it used to either.

Also, remember that our prices include VAT, so we slap 20% on it right there. That £700 is £583 excluding the VAT.

That’s still 10% more than in the US doing a direct currency conversion, but it’s not quite as bad as it first looks.

Still a lot of money for a games console though, especially a mid gen refresh. Paying at the start of a gen for 8 years gaming ain’t too bad when you look at it per year. PS5 Pro will be over 4 years, and on that alone is piss-poor value.

My TV from 2017 was HDR, so it was. But HDR monitors would have been pretty rare, so the bug probably wouldn’t have shown up in any great numbers.

I don’t even run Windows in HDR mode (because it looks awful), but it picks it up anyway and completely fucks the graphics up.

Yes, I know. And I already can’t play it due to changes in hardware.

I mean, a pound don’t buy what it used to. We’ve had rampant inflation, and it’s going to be hard to keep any next gen console in a price point that we think of as suitable. I mean, this is the first gen where the price has gone up during it. PS2 slim went down to under £100 by the end. I paid about £80 for a GameCube late in the gen. I remember Xbox having to give money back to people because they launched at about 300 and Sony immediately went down to £199. It was carnage.

£299 felt like a standard price point for ages. My Amiga 1200 cost about that in the early 90s, and I paid the same for a PS2 nearly 10 years later, and the Xbox 360 was about the same.

£700 feels like a piss take though, and the sales figures will surely reflect that. PS6 has got to be under £600 I reckon, and we’re probably about 5 years away from that.

Load times have always been bottlenecked by the CPU, so it’s not a massive surprise that the SSD is about on par with a decent SD card.

On the PS4 an SSD was faster than a HDD, but not by a massive amount. At least it was quieter though.

It was MS that started that back on the OG Xbox.

I think all the F2P ones (and a handful of others like FFXIV) are exempt from it. At least on Playstation.

Fucking auto correct…

It was Nex Machina.

PC streaming is extremely hit and miss. I ended up with Moonlight/Sunshine for playing from my nVidia Shield and that works a charm. Steam streaming never quite worked right. There’s a ton of options, and unless you pick exactly the right ones for your setup, it’ll do stupid things.

Steam sales have been crap for years though.

You used to be able to pick up games a year after they came out for like £5 on a flash deal. These days stuff is still full retail price years after launch just so it looks better during the few sales a year. We need to get back to the days of cut price re-releases (Playstation Platinum).

I got a shitload of games from bundles though. That at least is cheap on PC, along with Epic delving into their Fortnite war chest to bribe us with actually free games.

Think the best way to game cheaply on consoles is to pick up physical discs second hand (although a lot of games don’t even launch on disc any more), and be on the higher tiers of PS Plus for all the games. There’s some really good stuff on there, more than enough to keep me busy.

I think the best thing about this gen is running those slightly too ambitious PS4 games at 60fps.

Unless they change CPU architectures.

And even then it’s no guarantee. Plenty of games needed support from the likes of GoG to run. Hell, I couldn’t even play Ex Machina because I had a HDR monitor and the game detected that and completely broke. Disabling HDR in Windows did nothing.

Unless I know the manufacturer, I don’t buy from Amazon either.

It’s 95% junk. Need to start holding corporations responsible and not just going “oh, it’s a third party seller! It’s not our fault.”

They’re taking fuck knows how much in fees, and worth trillions of dollars. Fine them. Massively.

TVs have been available in 120Hz and VRR for a while now. Even my 2017 OLED supports 120Hz, albeit only at 1080p.

That said, I don’t see the need to chase that with more expensive hardware. Any game with a choice of performance vs resolution, I find myself swapping to performance mode. I can see extra frames, I struggle to see extra pixels.

I’m not sure the disc drive can be saved at this point. There’s big games that didn’t even come out on disc, like BG3.

The PS5 controller is pretty sweet.

But the PS1 Dualshock is the original version of that, and has influenced basically everything since. It’s the Ocarina of Time of controllers.

That second analogue stick fixed everything to do with cameras in early 3D games.

For VR it’s the Oculus Touch. Takes everything about the classic Dualshock design and adds hand tracking.