I don't know if you're American, but it's just bizarre to hear Americans call out Russia, China etc for propaganda.

Reverse everything you just said using US as the good guys and Middle Eastern, Russia or China as the bad guys and the US is doing this NOW. They've been doing it for decades.

It starts when the kids are young. American's have no idea how bizarre it is to have propaganda drummed into their heads as kids. "pledge of allegiance" IN SCHOOLS. :-O That's not normal. That's weird. The national anthem at every given opportunity...

If you're a citizen, why would you need to "pledge your allegiance"? The only people that should be doing that are the politicians to remind them who they serve. If you criticise anything, you're against the flag, which means you hate the military, or you're a "commie"... This stuff is not normal.

How many "YA MURICA YAAAAA!!!" games and movies are there for example? It's become so normalised. And we're really gonna sit here and criticise Russia because they might want to do the same? It's just hypocrisy on a WHOLE new level.

100%. And they sold these consoles on promises of being amazing. They weren't... Now they want I assume another $500 for that amazing experience. Sounds like a hustle.

I have to wonder if the philosophy has changed. The more resources you give someone, the less they optimise. I don't think anything apart from a some of the first party games are highly optimised.

I was playing Arkham City the other day and I was thinking, how did they get all this going with 512MBs of RAM on consoles.

Now it's more like, games are designed for the infinite resources of the PC, squeezed to work on consoles and shocker, developers haven't got time and money to make it work on the Series S. When I think of the kind of games developers were making for past consoles, like Perfect Dark on the N64. Crysis on Xbox 360... I have a hard time believing that the Series S is incapable with a lot of these games.

Most 3rd party games look like improved 8th gen games to me anyway. And now they're being given more resources, so they can do less with them and complain more on twitter?

I think people are reading too much into this. But MS needs to do something about the overhead on their api.

Just came to see who the TC was. Was not disappointed. XD

I'd say get into retro gaming for sure. I love 2D gaming, 5th gen games the most, but there's a good mix on the 7th gen consoles too.

This is why I'd say get a Series S. It's actually good for retro gaming, and I don't mean emulators and all of that, but there's a ton of a mix of games, non 8th and 9th gen games on the Xbox store. If you had a n Xbox 360, a lot of the games you bought digitally will show up too.

And because it's also a current gen system, you may find something more current you may like too.

This is why it's "each to their own" and there is a good place for the Series S, because there's a gamer that it makes sense for. I'd be mad if I got an expensive Series X or PS5 and I wasn't attracted to all these new games.

The PC is obviously by far the best for the retro game.

Just saying. You don't need to force yourself to play or find anything new to like, and in the mean time, there's a bunch of classics to enjoy.

I'm kind of the same. Partly why I'm more of a retro gamer now. I don't find a lot this gen that is that appealing.

I don't think I would ever give up on gaming. I'm fascinated with retro consoles and games.

Give it a couple of months, I'm sure the dev can fix some of this with updates.

I don't expect much from AAA games at launch.

Gaming is so reliant on the internet, physical media is practically redundant. It's gotten to the point where in a lot of cases only the base game is on the disc. You still need to download tens of GBs of updates and a ton of the games are dlc. And you need to install the game. It's just so pointless imo.

I don't think many have any issues with digital on the PC. And realistically, no one wants to by a blue ray drive just for gaming.

And people can complain about Xbox going digital, but out of Sony, Nintendo and MS, I personally trust MS more when it comes to digital. So far they've gone the furthest to make sure your content carries over and is compatible, even improved in many cases. Compatibility is a bit of an after thought for Sony. And I really don't know about Nintendo. They've been SO slow to progress their online systems compared to the others. It doesn't instil confidence. Maybe that's changed idk.

As for rights, so far MS has been pretty good with those I think.

I'm pretty confident in Xbox, Steam and GoG off the top of my head. So if any of the consoles are going to go digital, MS doing it is the least concerning to me.

Nintendo is the only company I appreciate having physical, because their products still hold collectors value.

I'd share your point of view if gaming was like it used to be, when games were more like whole products. But it hasn't been like that since the 7th gen. When being online was more of a choice. To me, physical games is just a distribution method on non Nintendo consoles.

I said 7th gen, but to me, physical games hasn't been meaningful since the 5th gen (6th gen is okay, but it's not my favourite gen). Now it's a cheap disc, in a cheap case, with a few inlet bits of paper. There's not even much resale collectors value for them any more. I just don't feel good or excited by physical games any more outside of Nintendo platforms.

If I see a PS4/5 or Xbox game on a shelf, it just looks cheap to me now. Man, I used love physical games, especially on 4th and 5th gen consoles.

At the same time, I'll give you one thing about digital distribution that's a negative imo. I miss going out to buy and rent films, music and games. While that sounds contradictory, I'm an all or nothing person. I don't like how physical games are half in/half out now. Physical, but still reliant on the internet.

So in that vein, if you asked me if we could go back to gaming with ZERO use of the internet, I'd be 100% behind physical gaming. There was a joy in going to the shops and hunting down something you really wanted. The other day, I really wanted to go out and rent a movie. I miss that shit. I've never not had good memories about renting entertainment media physically.

What... Like Phil and EVERYONE ELSE on the PC? :-S

The problem isn’t the Series S in itself. It’s that developers start on the PC with infinite resources, they don’t optimise the game as they’re making it and then they try to squeeze it on to consoles backwards. But the problem, is memory management needs to kind of be baked into the base of the game.

For example, I was learning about the techniques used to squeeze Arkham City into the 512mb of ram on the 7th gen consoles. You can’t do that later on. They’re the foundation of the game.