When buying a console, the only question that matters is what games you want to play on it.

Xbox One X is the last generation model, so it won’t run newer Xbox Series exclusives. The line between console generations is quite blurry these days, the Series line has been out for over five years and some games still get cross-generation releases, but even then you should be aware that cross-gen titles may be poorly optimized for older hardware.

If you’re only looking to play games from the Xbox One era (2013-2020), those should all run great on the One X and you can save a lot of money by deliberately staying a generation behind. See !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works

But if you want to play anything newer, if you want to be future-proof going forward. Series X is the high-end current generation model for current generation games.

I’m beginning to suspect this thread is just you having a personal grudge and vagueposting about it.

You’re looking for actual Roguelikes then. That’s what the genre originally was before it got bastardized.

I sincerely wish these kinds of grinding games would keep the good name of Rogue out of their mouths. No, it’s not -lite, it’s the exact opposite of Rogue!

Assuming you don’t live in Japan, Red/Blue actually is slightly more recent than OP led you to think. JP Red/Green was 1996, but international Red/Blue was 1998. Assuming you don’t live in Japan, you get two years of youth back.

Tetris: The Grand Master is the only good Tetris. Honestly sad that they had a good thing going and TTC decided to throw it out in favor of Guideline.

Kirby Air Riders. I waited 22 years for this sequel and it delivered. I’m actually blown away by how much Sakurai has managed to evolve on the concept.

Quite a lot of modern anime. My list of all-time favorites has become dominated by shows from just the last few years. Apocalypse Hotel, Apothecary Diaries, Bocchi the Rock!, CITY: The Animation, Dungeon Meshi, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Takopi’s Original Sin.

For Chrono Trigger, definitely don’t play the original SNES localization. No disrespect to Ted Woolsey, he was one man working on an unreasonably tight deadline and hard technical limitations, but the retranslation is much better.

Farfetch’d

If you want a few recommendations that I think are particularly great for their combat mechanics:

• Etrian Odyssey - Regular encounters are no slouch, FOEs are a terror, status effects hella matter, and you always have to carefully gauge how far you can push before it’s time to retreat back to town. IMO, 4 is the peak.
• Bravely Default - The ability to bank your turns or take an advance on future turns adds a really cool layer to combat. As a spiritual successor to FF5, the job system gives you lots of fun toys to play with and encourages you to constantly change up your builds.
• Tales of series - These games are partially inspired by fighting games, and if you squint hard enough you can see those influences in the early titles before it started to go off in more of its own direction. I think Vesperia is the most polished, though I actually want to suggest starting with Symphonia for the story/characters, because otherwise you’ll find it a hard game to go back to since it doesn’t have the Free Run mechanic from later games. The trick is that you won’t miss it if you play Symphonia first.
• CrossCode - Closest thing I can try to compare this to would be Secret of Mana, if that game was faster and significantly more technical.
• The World Ends With You - If you can, play the original DS version to fully enjoy how it was built around the hardware. If you can’t, the Switch version is still worth playing, and does have some cool added content to compensate for some of the sacrifices made to adapt it to a single screen.

I’ve got a handful of JRPGs sitting on my backlog, that I never make time for because I’m just grinding another round of the same few forever games.

There are a lot of bots on Steam. If I get a random friend request from someone I don’t recognize who has only F2P games in their account, or just no playtime in anything that I play, I ignore it.

But if it’s someone you’ve been playing with, that’s a human. A bot would’ve just gone straight to the scam as soon as you accept their friend request.

I’m guessing they’re probably talking about Discord, which is what most people use for voice chat these days (and other social media-y stuff). It’s not a virus or anything, but it is another proprietary corporate-owned social media platform, which I’m sure a lot of us here on Fedi might have opinions about.

AFAIK none of those games actually do have explicit content in them, they’re just named that way in the hopes of tricking suckers into buying them.

All evidence points to CERO. They won’t throw CERO under the bus by saying it outright, but it’s pretty clear.

The Switch 2 version of Dispatch is a universal binary for all regions, meaning it has to comply with all regions’ guidelines. The JP PS5 version that just launched has the same censorship, the only difference is that PS5 has a separate international version.

And we know that separate versions is an option on Switch 2, Cyberpunk 2077 has a censored JP version, but for whatever reason AdHoc chose to have one universal version here.

Ultimately I think it just reflects very poorly on AdHoc that none of this was disclosed prior to release, allowing this shitstorm of finger-pointing to happen.

Yeah, regardless of where it came from, the lack of disclosure reflects very poorly on AdHoc.

Unconfirmed, but the rumor I’m hearing is that AdHoc submitted one universal binary for all regions, and it’s CERO who won’t allow this content in Japan. FWIW, the JP version of Cyberpunk is also censored, but it’s separate from the international release.

It’s also worth noting that the JP PS5 version just launched alongside it, separate from last year’s international version. Haven’t been able to find confirmation on whether that version is censored too, but if it is then it’s definitely CERO.

How would you define oversaturated then? Since you counted them up and said seven isn’t a lot, is there a certain number that’s a cutoff?

Oversaturation should be relative to what the market will bear. They’re absolutely right that the time commitment is what really matters here. You might not think seven sounds like a lot, but no one’s committing to grinding battle passes in seven live services at once.

If we were talking about something like visual novels, seven isn’t a lot because you’ll finish one and move on to the next. But seven live services is a lot of live services, because it’s more than what people will play.

Breaking news: Company wants consumers to buy new product. Details at 11.

I feel like hero shooters, and many other genres, have players swearing allegiance to one game and hating on all the rest. The FGC is a unique anomaly for having this shared space where the only way we can make our offline events sustainable is to put them all under one roof and encourage players to support as many games as possible.

That’s something you don’t see in any other genre, even the idea of a HSC sounds laughable. I think that’s why in other genres it’s saturation, only in the FGC is a rising tide lifting all ships.

People say they’re sick of live services, but the successful ones are still doing hella numbers. Execs have seen how much money Marvel Rivals is making and they want a piece. I think the real problem is that they’ve become so saturated. Most gamers already have one or two live services they’re hooked on, and these games demand so much of your time that they’re not going to fit another into their rotation. Do people truly hate live services, or do they just hate the ones they’re not currently playing?

Live services also come with an expectation that they have to be a massive megahit overnight or else they’re dead on arrival. All or nothing. With the budgets that get poured into these games, the only way to get a return on investment is to hit it big big big. I have a lot of opinions the way gamers throw around the word ‘dead’ to describe any multiplayer game with a less than Fortnite-sized playerbase, argumentum ad SteamCharts has done irreparable damage to gaming discourse, but it is a sad truth that a lot of modern multiplayer games can’t just find their niche and be comfortable with that.

And I say all this as someone whose favorite multiplayer games have a matchmaking system that consists of just pitting you against whoever’s available, or even a Discord server where you ping a matchmaking role and hope someone responds. A modest little indie game can sustain a tight-knit community that way, but it’ll never fly for a big budget live service. I have games I love dearly that I can’t actually recommend to people because getting matches can be a chore that I doubt most of you want to deal with.

This then leads to this self-fulfilling prophecy where a live service with this kind of anti-hype train is what seals its grave. Live services are an investment to get into, but it’s already been pronounced dead, so don’t sink any cost into it because no one else will. I have games that I’ve enjoyed but couldn’t justify putting money into because the future looked too uncertain, which is exactly how they ended up dying.

Maybe there’s even a bit of us vs. them, because market saturation has made the fight for an active playerbase so cutthroat, people don’t want to see a competing title risk siphoning players away from their preferred game. I’ve even been there too, my favorite game of all time dropped off because another game came in and split its playerbase.

But mostly, I think a lot of people just like shitting on the new target of the day without even thinking too hard about why. Making fun of a flop has always been a popular gamer pastime. I’ve seen this sort of thing happen all time time, dating back before we even had the term ‘live service’. TORtanic is the one that immediately comes to mind for me, the one people made such a big deal out of that they had to come up with a funny name for it. Anyone remember that?