ampersandrew

I'd encourage you to utilize those limited funds legally by buying games on deep discounts, if you were implying piracy, but even legitimately, being able to sideload all the old PC games you have is a massive plus. GOG and Epic give away great games for free on the regular, and an Amazon Prime subscription has recently been filled with some bangers that you get to keep via both of them.

You can sideload a program called Heroic Games Launcher that lets you easily manage your GOG games, as well as Amazon and Epic.

For $50 less, you get a similarly capable machine in terms of specs but more comfortable to hold, with an immensely larger library, and an operating system far more respectful of your authority to do what you want with the machine you bought.

It's also launching day 1 on Game Pass, so Microsoft paid a pretty penny for it.

My running theory has been that the official release date is tied up in Microsoft marketing deals still. So I'm guessing we'll hear the date from Microsoft during summer game fest.

$449, $499 with Mario Kart digital.

For $80, apparently?

I'm definitely keeping an eye on Selaco, but I'll wait until it leaves early access.

Consoles won't go away, but they're in the process of transforming. Peak spending on consoles was all the way back in 2009 and has dropped ever since. There are perhaps dozens of reasons for the change, but one of them might be that the average consumer picked up on the air quotes around the ways consoles are cheaper. As for non-DRM, as long as piracy remains better than the official option, there's money being left on the table, and I have confidence that a lot of that will change too, though it will be far slower than I'd like.

I agree, but it'll be the only way they get my money. Everyone can see that PC line going up and that console line going down, so we'll see how long they hold their ground; probably one generation longer than Sony does.

There is, if the money is there. Nintendo's also under new management these days, and if the old strategies don't work, they could pivot, just like Microsoft and Sony have.

You know, I just checked the ones I was confident on, and it turns out they each had an obscure Windows port back in the day that I never heard of. Still, the other popular trend going on right now for porting old console games like Tomba and Mega Man is to run them through tools that emulate the game and then output native code, and I wouldn't consider it a waste of time to show where the demand is. For old sports games, it may be difficult or impossible to acquire the old rights, but if it's at all possible, and these are customers that aren't making them money on the modern iterations, that's still worth it too.