> Steam sales, Humble Bundles, and other sources can make games dirt cheap these days.

This.

If you don't want to pay MSRP, like... Fucking don't. Nobody's got a gun to your head and there's literally hundreds of games for under $10. Like right now, on PSN, I can buy Street Fighter V, Burnout Paradise, and Persona 5 for under $25.

If you'd told SNES me he could have the latest copy of Street Fighter, a great racing game, and one of the hottest JRPGs for that price way back in the day I'd have assumed I was getting stolen goods, even as a snot-nosed twelve year old.

You're acting like games didn't routinely come out buggy and unfinished previously. That is not the actual case.

Hey, remember when you could buy a copy of a popular game for $5, ever, back in those days? Me neither.

Meanwhile, on PSN, SFV is $3.99USD+tax.

Cheaper, even without inflation.

Ocarina of Time was $89.99+tax in Canada when it came out. Meanwhile I paid $79.99 five months ago for MW2.

It's a shade under $150. For the record.

Please compare the runtime of a NES era game to the runtime of an Xbox 360 game and compare the adjusted price to dollars per hour of content. Go ahead and make that comparison.

I'll wait.

Plus, even disregarding MSRP, we have way more fucking sales going on right now than we used to. Way more.

Street Fighter V is $5.19CAD on PSN and it's far from a dead game, for example. Even discounting what you get from PS+ extra tiers or Gamepass, you could reasonably spend under $30 on either PSN or Xbox Live and come away with like 3-4 high quality games easily which will occupy your time for a month or more.

Gaming is fucking cheap right now.

Zelda 1 was $50. That's $132 today.

Games have gotten bigger, better, and cheaper even at full MSRP.

The Legend of Zelda on NES was $49.99+tax on release in 1987. That's about $132+tax today.

Want to shut up now, or do I need to give you more examples?

It's going to happen with certain titles, and expect it to be a lot more common in the coming decades when older games start going public domain due to copyright expiring.

The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, has had 50 different film, television, and animated adaptations, though most people are probably familiar with the 1936 classic, the 2002 edition, or the sci-fi anime where he's a vampire.

FFT's Vormav.

He personally puts his country into a civil war to raise the in-universe equivalent of Satan from the dead, which simply involves getting enough people killed. He does this from the FFT Vatican and winds up killing the FFT Pope.

Did I mention he involves his only two children in the plot by throwing them in front of the main character, fully expecting him to kill them? Because he does, and Ramza winds up killing one of them. He has no remorse over this.

Probably either Street Fighter IV or Final Fantasy Tactics.

The former because I made a point of getting really really good at it right before Ultra, and was probably playing it 3-4 hours a day during the hayday of it. I wasn't never quite EVO good, but who the fuck is? The latter because of SCCs and TDDs.

The aging of it is very obvious though. It does not look good against a PS3 game shooting for realism.

Meanwhile DQVIIII still looks good compared to some PS3 games.

This. Compare two very drastically different games from the PS2 era: Dragon Quest VIII and Black.

The former still holds up well and looks fantastic for the most part, especially when you dial up the resolution on an emulator. Black... Does not, but was praised at the time for it's graphics.

The same thing is going to happen for games pushing "realism" today, twenty years from now. Between then and now a bunch of new rendering and modelling techniques will be discovered and new technologies will emerge which make the games of today look wooden and plastic. Maybe not in terms of raw polycount, but in numerous little details like fully rendered hair and clothing which moves and shifts realistically, soft textures having appropriate give (i.e. stand on a couch or in a puddle of mud, foot sinks in), rendering liquids as real volumes on the fly (i.e. dynamic rain which forms dynamic puddles and drains according to gravity), etc, etc.

Neon White is a good shout. Makes you feel like a speedrunning god while giving you all the tools to do so.

Oof, this one hit me hard.

This.

Color correcting the game so that people who are certain degrees of colorblind have the same access to information is an accessibility option. Nerfing Quelaag because someone is butthurt they can't beat her is not.

Strangely enough, the Yakuza series features this heavily, especially the latest one, Like a Dragon.

Every game has a separate "Completion Log" which gives you a bunch of different tasks to do, which ranges from performing certain actions in combat, eating every item in every restaurant, getting the high scores on various arcade games, minigames, etc.

To give you an idea of how addictive this can be, I beat Yakuza: Like a Dragon's main story at 65 hours or so, but didn't finish the completion log until 140 hours.

The last time I bought a NFS game was at the PS4 launch, and that was because I was already buying Killzone and there was a deal for buying two games with your console.

It'd need to be potential GOTY talk about a NFS game for me to even look at one these days.

Reputation matters.

While there are certainly some people who will mindlessly buy Game X+1 from a developer, there are others who get burned by developers and don't give them the same trust. On a large enough scale, this can shift a game's sales enough to effect overall profits.

To use your exact example of Battlefield 2042, EA investors and upper management were NOT happy about the sales figures. Management declined to comment on the sales figures in an investor call, and given how much money EA spent marketing the game they might very well have lost money, even with the relatively large sales numbers.

That depends entirely on the monitors.

Gaming is dirt cheap, but if budget is a problem, it's not something you sell your current platform to try one game.

I mean, a Series S is $300. Why bother selling your PS4 for one when you can literally just buy one?

Console Wars are over, bruh.

IMO the best setup would be the 27" for the main, and a 24" on a rotatable stand so it can be vertical instead of horizontal.