HowHammerYou

I save manually every time I end a session, and every time I feel like the game is going to try subverting my expectations.

I stopped paying attention to them around 2017-2018. The Bethesda/Ubisoft Mono-genre and corporate focus-grouping have destroyed most of the classic series I loved and turned the industry into a wasteland of shovelware. This year I am paying a bit more attention than usual because I'm hoping Nintendo will announce the Switch 2 in preparation for a 2023 launch.

I bought a used Xbox One X so that I would have a 4k blu-ray player for when I upgrade my TV next year. Got it from Amazon for an absolute steal at $270 (there's no demand for them now that the Series X is out). It looks like it's hardly been used. Even when I opened it up to swap the old HDD with a 1TB SSD, there was hardly any dust inside it, and I was the first person to open it. Aside from that, I do plan to order an Odin Pro in August, and get a replacement for my recently-deceased PS4 as soon as I can find one that isn't in the hands of scalpers. That'll be it until the Switch 2 comes out in 2023 or 2024, which will be my only 9th-gen console out of the big 3.

Though I do most of my retro gaming through emulation, I do have a very short list of old game consoles I'd buy or re-buy if something happened to them: N64 Pikachu Edition, Sega Saturn, PS4, Gamecube, and Neo Geo AES. The Neo Geo in particular is one I've never owned, but would love to.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Reason: That stupid electro-torture button mashing QTE. I have never been able to beat that without a turbo controller. Bad game design 101.

I consider Legends: Arceus to be the best Pokemon game I've ever played. It's not a true open world game as the world is segregated into 5 zones according to biome, but each zone is quite large and contains a good variety of pokemon. And because the whole point of the game is catching pokemon, the world never feels boring or empty. Then there's an abundance of secondary gameplay mechanics such as Spacetime Distortions (inside which are treasure and rare pokemon), Mass Outbreaks, and Massive Mass Outbreaks happening randomly which make the world feel like it's constantly changing and there's always something to do. The main story takes about 50 hours to complete, but there's also a lively postgame that can easily keep you occupied for another 50+. I'm well over 100 hours into it and still haven't done everything in the postgame.

Gardevoir. I'd like to post something cooler like Giratina or Mewtwo, but the fact remains that if it is at all possible to catch a Ralts in any pokemon game, I will obsessively grind until I get a female Ralts to raise into a Gardevoir. If Gardevoir's in the game, it will wind up in my team.

Favorite: Pokemon Legends: Arceus. Least Favorite: Pokemon Silver. Silver actually used to be my favorite, but after recently starting another playthrough, my adult self started noticing a whole lot of flaws that I hadn't noticed as a kid. Notably the absolutely glacial pacing of the main story until you get about halfway through the gyms (there is NOTHING going on until you get to Ecruteak), and how although there were some damn good new pokemon designs in gen 2, most of them were trash. I've come to realize that the reason I held it in such high regard for so long was the memories I had of playing it with my friends.

Usually an hour or 2 per day, if I even play at all. Back in my younger days (when I didn't have a ful-time job) I would game for 5-7 hours a day. But these days I can't stand playing video games for more than 3-4 hours straight, even when on vacation.

Eh, maybe just a superslim then. The slim came out in 2016, It just seems odd to me that they'd go a full 9 years without another hardware refresh.

Breath of the Wild: It just doesn't feel like a Zelda game, it feels like an Ubisoft mono-genre game with a Zelda skin pack applied. This is one of my biggest gripes with it. Final Fantasy XV: Threw away any pretense of being a classic JRPG to become an inferior version of Kingdom Hearts. Bomberman Zero: Threw away the cartoony aesthetic of the older games to look like a halo/doom clone with nothing but the name to link it to its predecessors.

I'm surprised they're waiting that long to kill it off. Hopefully this means they'll send it off with a third revision in the form of a smaller and more power-efficient PS4 Pro. My PS4 died recently, so I'd love to get something like that as a replacement.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the old Pandemic game, not the EA remake), Samurai Shodown 3, Metal Slug 2, Golden Sun 2, Zelda: ALTTP, Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, to name just a few. I also plan to start another Fallout: New Vegas playthrough in the near future.

Any of the Samurai Shodown or Metal Slug games made for the Neo Geo. It blows my mind how most of today's 2D games still don't look as good as those classics.

Thanks. I stopped collecting because I already have too many consoles hooked up to my TV and electrical outlets, it's getting to be a problem whenever I get a new console. Also because after having video games as my main hobby for decades, I honestly got tired of them and wanted to try other hobbies. As for what consoles I collected for: My PS4 collection was definitely my largest at 80+ games, but I also collected for just about every major system from gen 4 through gen 7, whether it was original hardware or microconsoles.

Yeah, I'd take that offer. $1M just to stop playing Fallout: New Vegas is a no-brainer, regardless of how great the game is. There's plenty of other games to play. I'd just put the million in my savings and collect the interest.

Old games make up the majority of what i play now. I love how in games from gen 7 and earlier you could have a blast playing them for short time spans like 30 minutes to an hour and then put them down. In today's games it takes 30 minutes just to run to the next quest marker.

The Series X and PS5 are nearly identical. They both have nearly identical AMD chipsets running the exact same programming language and system architecture. The only real difference comes down to what features the manufacturers deliberately chose to lock out or include. Not exactly inspirational. Personally I won't be getting either because I just don't see any value in them beyond the improved load times.

They'd have to make some pretty major changes to the gameplay to get me interested in RDR3, namely implementing a free fast travel system right from the start and changing the ultra-realistic animations to something more responsive so it doesn't feel like I'm wrestling with the MC instead of controlling him. I loved the first RDR and forced myself to finish the second one for the story. They tarnished RDR2's playability by trying to make everything too realistsic. Realism should always take a backseat to convenience in a video game.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus. Not only my favorite game on the Switch, but my favorite Pokemon game of all time, and it even made it into my top 10 video games of all time.

^ It's definitely in the top 5 LoZ games of all time, in my opinion. I think it's far superior to BOTW, but then again I'm in the minority who didn't like BOTW.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I really regret not having played that game earlier in my life.

I'm a former video game collector. I mostly got out of contemporary gaming at the end of the 8th console gen to focus on other hobbies, and because I'm opposed to the direction contemporary game development is going in. I came here because I got tired of not having a place to discuss things like this.