College Football 26 on PlayStation 5.
I picked it up for $20 (75% off its usual price) a couple of days ago.
Don’t believe IGN when it says it was a moderate improvement from the previous year. It has many quality of life improvements besides just the addition of trophies.
Now I just have to build up Kent State again. I led them finally to a national championship in Year 4 last game, and so far in this game they are 1-3.
I’ve just finished Planet Crafter (which did a bit of a crap selling of its dlc, I bought the toxicity one which was mentioned in game, and found out that there’s a Humble one as well which it didn’t mention), and was going to be doing Doom: Dark Ages but then found out it needs ray tracing on the gfx card (and Indiana Jones too). Guess I’ll refund it, it’s a pity, it was a 2/3rds off on Steam and a bit of a bargain. I suspect the ray tracing has killed its sales.
Speaking of Ray-tracing and other “gee golly” features, I wonder if the sky-high prices of RAM and GPUs is going to make game designers reconsider their current tactics of “brute forcing” performance out of games. You know, rather than making the most of quality programming…
-snerk-
Of course not, based on what’s happening in the industry, I suspect that it’s going to be nothing but remasters, and increasingly AI enabled slop, if not an industry collapse - Microsoft demanding unrealistic profit margins to prop up AI with ever more casual gamers moving away from the sky-high costs of a gaming rig or even a console and going with handhelds or just their phones seems far more likely.
I’ve played all of the Bioshocks multiple time, definitely on my all-time favorites list. Bioshock 2 was mostly the same as you remember. The significant differences were giving a much quicker ramp-up to getting your plasmid powers, and the addition of the Big Sisters and ‘mini arena’ sections of the game where you could methodically setup freeform complex traps for big chaotic Daddy & Sister battles. 2 was less memorable for any story or discovery, but much more fun for upping the battle variety and tactics creativity.
“Hop hop Mr B, angels don’t wait for slowpokes”
FWIW, if you’re really interested in those games, they’re both playable via GeForce Now for $10-$20/mo. Works well enough… I used it for years, including for shooters, before I got a gaming PC. You actually get a monster rig (5080) for the price, and it’s far, far cheaper than a gaming PC.
I agree that it’s stupid for games to require ray tracing, though.
I wonder if they’re ever going to try making another push for game streaming? Google’s Stadia failed miserably, but both GeForce Now and xCloud (Xbox Live Streaming? can’t remember the official name) are still alive and doing well. Makes sense, especially for game rentals (Gamepass already includes its own shitty streaming)
That, or Microsoft is just gonna give up on everything not AI-related… they’ll sacrifice everything until they make the ultimate Clippy…
And yet, both games are Steam Deck verified. I know the Deck can’t do ray tracing…
GeForce Now is really good. I’ve used it on my tablet, and it’s remarkable how a device as humble as that can run some high-end games with cloud gaming. I could use a Bluetooth controller, or a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to game smoothly. The only reason I don’t do it anymore is because I’m also paying for Game Pass, and I don’t want to pay for two services.
It’s amazing what you get for it though.
Can’t it? Valve just enabled native ray tracing on the Steam Deck and it actually looks pretty wild | PC Gamer
Maybe not very quickly, but in theory it can…
I just finished it yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised by the improved gameplay, but the story was kind of blah. It was interesting to see what DNA it shares (no pun intended) with Bioshock: Infinite, though.
I remember kind of liking the story with the Minerva’s Den DLC, so I’ll play that too.
I guess I’m a little sheltered but I’d never heard of this before. Am I understanding it correctly? I could play current AAA games (if I had any) on my current half-a-potato laptop? It’s not that bad. The laptop I’m using currently is my former gaming computer until I replaced it … and then that replacement went tits up. So there are few games I own that just don’t play right on this old machine.
There’s no lag? You use their hardware and your screen? I guess I don’t totally get it.
Pretty much. The game runs in their data center and they stream you the live video of it. Your computer just sends mouse and keyboard events back, but otherwise it doesn’t use much of your CPU or GPU at all — it’s just like watching a YouTube video. All the heavy lifting is done in the cloud, so even a 10-year-old laptop with no graphics card can run the latest AAA games at max settings with no hardware upgrade on your side. As far as your own hardware is concerned, you’re just streaming a video, not rendering any 3D graphics. It also works on phones, tablets, Steam Decks, TVs, and more.
It’s pretty magical and mostly just works, with a few caveats:
But still, for what it is — a $20/mo way to play games with a RTX 5080 — it’s a really great deal. It’s probably a loss leader made possible by Nvidia’s own chips and data centers. There are many competitors both dead (Onlive, Stadia, etc.) and alive (Xbox streaming, Playstation Streaming, Luna, Shadow, Boosteroid, etc.) but all the others are some combination of more expensive or worse quality (usually both). Nvidia’s offering is far and away the best, both on a technical level and a pricing one.
There is a free plan you can try, or you can pay for a day pass or a full month of the Ultimate plan to see the full capabilities. I gamed exclusively with GeForce Now for like 4-5 years before finally caving and getting a gaming desktop again.
EDIT: Oh, another caveat: The service runs best in the US. If you’re not in the US, other countries usually have partnered offerings where local ISPs work with Nvidia to offer a similar service, but usually with worse hardware. In the US, it’s all 5080s and 4080s equivalents now (it’s actually their data center cards with far more power than that, but each user gets roughly the allocation of a 4080 or a 5080 on select newer games, especially those that need raytracing).
I suspect the big gaming companies will end up pushing things over the edge for themselves into a collapse. As I’ve said on other forums they typically insist on acting like they are monopolists controlling a necessity, and can squeeze and abuse their customers as much as they like because those customers have no choice but to buy.
Except they aren’t some bunch of Fallout Raiders controlling the only water source in the Wasteland, they are one of many providers selling a luxury good in a competitive marketplace. There’s smaller companies, people have game backlogs, and people can just do other things than buy a new game; they like new games, they don’t need them and can just play an old one, read a book or do something else instead.
But they refuse to acknowledge that, and so keep getting blindsided when customers either go to somebody else or don’t buy a game at all when they produce garbage or try some especially obnoxious form of monetization.
Here’s a video with some real players testing it out with a blind test (start at 6:46): https://youtu.be/bMkdVFh5tf0?si=m7CVsDcBXxtmi4yH&t=406
The second half of the video is where they switch to the actual discrete GPU (a Radeon of some sort) and have the players try again.
At 36 minutes, they reveal the test to the players and discuss it.
I think most of the players didn’t really realize that the game was being streamed, just noticed some micro stutters (which I didn’t have much of in my experience), compression artifacts (which are there), and the minor input lag (not enough to break the game, but noticeable). Tellingly, I don’t think any of them outright suspected that the game was streamed; they just assumed it was some different graphics options tweaking.
So while GFN streaming isn’t quite as nice as having a real, local 50xx card, it’s definitely a great option compared to either an old potato or not having a GPU at all.
I wish they offered a method for this using my Steam Deck. I am assuming now?
A method for what? You can run GeForce Now on your Steam Deck, if that’s what you mean. There’s a native client for it, in fact: GeForce NOW Steam Deck App Arrives | NVIDIA Blog
That lets you stream games to the Steam Deck and run it on full graphics with all the raytracing mumbo jumbo, at 60 Hz and probably 100+ FPS, without using much battery or generating any noise/heat.
Or if you have a desktop gaming PC in addition to the Steam Deck, you can also stream directly from your desktop Steam to your Steam Deck (now say that ten times, fast) — that doesn’t use GeForce Now at all, it’s just Steam’s built-in streaming functionality.
(To be clear, GeForce Now streams from Nvidia’s cloud data centers to your device. Steam-to-Steam streaming happens between your own devices, on your own local network.)
This is no joke, especially for me. I had planned on building a new system last Black Friday, but the RAM in my pcpartpicker list that had been $200 for over a year had jumped up over $600, which felt like a rip-off. Then this month I happened to come into some money I wasn’t expecting, and thought about maybe I would indulge myself and splurge for that $600 ram. Except now it’s listed at $870! Even though I could afford that, hell no. That price just offends me on principle.
I have literally over 80 games installed (not just purchased; actually installed!) on my computer right now, and have so far played fewer than 20 of them. And the only game I particularly want a new computer for would be cities skylines 2, but it is still not in a state I would consider playable. So now I’m thinking more like 2028 or even 2029 for my next computer build unless a miracle happens in the component markets between now and then.
Nor for me. Little of my entertainment budget is in “consumables” like fancy food, alcohol, movies, stuff that’s used up. It’s almost all games and books, stuff that lasts. Close to 20 years of “hey, look at that game on sale on Steam” means that my accumulated backlog has become quite large.
I have a different problem… my taste in games changed dramatically over time, but apparently I never got the memo 
I keep buying games that younger me would’ve loved, but that older me just can’t seem to give a damn about.
I used to spend months and months exploring every nook and cranny and line of dialog in narrative games like Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, KotOR, Fallout, Morrowind, etc. CRPGs have gotten even better since then, and there are so many excellent story-driven games now that are universally loved. I own many of them.
But I can’t play them for more than a couple hours now. My brain just kinda shuts down and goes on autopilot, skimming and skipping dialogue, killing enemies and processing loot without any thought, etc. It’s all just a blur of pixels and buttons. It’s like mindlessly channel surfing through games. I’ve lost all ability to actually engage with the content, stories, or characters…
I try them out but quickly lose interest and go back to the same 4-5 online action RPGs instead, which have nonstop mindless action and not much else. What the hell? When did my tastes get so… trashy? It’s like going from scotches to Coors Light.
Definitely didn’t see that coming. Maybe there’s just so much information and entertainment overload these days and my attention span can no longer sustain anything lasting more than 2 minutes at a stretch… sad.
Anyone else?
I have 584 Steam games and I often forget how I even own some of them. I went through a big Humble Bundle phase (as I’m sure we all did) and have a ton of games in my library I don’t even recognize. I have absolutely no memory of ever purchasing Agricultural Simulator 2013 or TransPlan or YIIK Nameless Psychosis or Test Test Test. Some of the randos are actually pretty good, but most are just… random.
Yeah, I have a couple thousand games but a lot of them are just chaff from cheap bundles or impulse purchases. Stuff that I bought because I was legitimately interested and excited to play has all been played for the most part. Some I need to restart and get back into because I dropped off for unrelated reasons but my “Steam backlog” doesn’t really represent my true personal backlog. And let’s not even talk about hoovering up various free games off Epic, etc.