ampersandrew

I don't think the Windows license factors into the math much at all, but otherwise agreed.

That's surely what they're planning, especially since the architecture won't be very different this time around, but that still pales in comparison to the value you'd get from a PC handheld for what will likely be an extremely similar price.

I'm playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance II right now, and it's excellent. Baldur's Gate 3 took 6 years, though they attribute a good portion of that to an Eastern European war and a pandemic. Given other side projects, it's a bit nebulous exactly how long Indiana Jones and Great Circle took that team to make, but it was somewhere between 5 and 7 years, and I loved it. I'm not exactly a fan of Nintendo lately, but people sure do love Donkey Kong Bananza, and that team had been working on that game more or less since Mario Odyssey's release in 2017.

I don't see how this thing possibly competes with a handheld PC. It'll play the same games approximately just as well but with a tiny fraction of the library, and unless something changes, online play won't even be free.

There have been some great games with development times that long. But for crying out loud, if you're not making a surefire success, make a smaller game so it's less risky.

They all take seven years to make, so there aren't as many of them.

Correct me if I'm wrong: they all complied because action from the payment processors was imminent, and GOG and Itch have both made public statements about next steps that Valve hasn't, which doesn't mean that Valve isn't taking next steps. Did I miss anything?

Nah, this isn't a memorization type of game, or at least not so much based on the other games this developer has made. You're basically just going to press Light then Medium then Heavy, or you can just mash on any one of those three buttons in order to do a combo. And largely, everyone has pretty similar reaction times when you're familiar enough with a game to know what might be coming; in general, you mostly just want to hold down-back until your opponent does a big slow move.

My then-girlfriend-now-wife and I went to a temporary video game exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image. A lot of the mainstays you'd expect were there, particularly from the arcade era, including ground-breaking titles like Dragon's Lair (which is fascinatingly beautiful and a bad video game at the same time). At one point, one of the signs mentioned moving on from vector graphics, which my wife had no idea what that meant, so I immediately looked around for an Asteroids machine. You don't really get how one of those games looks unless you're playing on the genuine article. That's the kind of thing that probably ought to be in a museum most.

I recently went to Galloping Ghost in Illinois, which is now the world's largest arcade. It's got nearly every arcade game you can think of, and they do a good job fixing them up. They have an F-Zero AX machine. I've always wanted to play one of those. I went to Galloping Ghost two years in a row, and it was broken both times. Turns out they're having trouble sourcing the displays. As you go around the place, most machines are working, but even only a year later, more of them had display problems. I imagine even just getting regular old CRTs is going to make this kind of thing way harder as time goes on, and a good CRT does affect how these old games look, because they were designed for them. This is the kind of burden I'd expect a museum to take on.

Quality of Life Improvements

• Battle Retry Prompt: A new pop-up window appears after defeat, giving you the option to quickly retry the battle.

I haven't tested the patch out yet, but boy this would have come in handy the last two times I played.

I imagine Silksong gets a release date announced for all platforms during Microsoft's Gamescom things, but there are a number of third party games with no release dates that could feasibly show up here. I'm hoping for the likes of Mouse: P.I. for Hire. Plus there will probably be a bunch of games that are old news on PC and other consoles but get release dates for Switch 2 now that Nintendo has a platform that can handle them.

The base price increase would still raise the total with DLC. Not including the DLC is still worth talking about, since there are plenty of ways to enjoy a game without it.