But even before recent tariffs, modern console prices weren’t dropping nearly as fast as history suggested they should. In fact, Sony first raised the nominal starting price of the PS5 Digital Edition back in 2023, way before Trump’s current trade war was even on the horizon.
I’m not saying Trump is to blame but this is misleading. Trump hurt our economy with tariffs during his first term nearly 10 years ago. During 2023 he was releasing “Agenda 47” policies, in which he specifically mentioned more tariffs. Here’s Trump threatening tariffs 8 months before Sony raised the price
For regular people, Trump tariffs came out of nowhere in 2024. Corporations and people holding stock have different perspectives.
You can’t compare current generations to previous because starting with the PS3/Xbox 360 the generations became artificially extended.
With no no new impending hardware, there’s no impetus to reduce prices and clear stock.
The OG Xbox 360 launched with a 20 GB hard drive (2005). That got a price cut when the 60 GB version was announced (2008) and that coincided with the much more expensive “Elite” with 120 GB. Similarly that had a price cut when the 250 GB version came out in 2009.
Honestly can’t imagine why I’d ever consider a new console anymore. Got a PS3 gifted recently and it’s been a blast, InFamous, Jak & Daxter HD Collection, Motorstorm og & Pacific Rift, Sonic Unleashed, original TLOU, Black Ops Zombies with couch co-op.
Even being beat up the thing looks sleek as ever, it’s a CECHK03, Piano Black with Silver trim, 80gb.
Chrome trim too gaudy, I said what I said smh.
It even streams game data straight from my home server (via PS3Netsrv in docker), no USB hard drive required, no FTP or file transfer, and it actually runs faster than off the internal HDD (for the same reason it ran faster off BDROMs).
The poor thing can even play videos off Jellyfin with DLNA and a lot of patience.
Set up a custom fan curve too. Wrote a custom bash script of curl requests to the webman API to simulate a YLOD to trigger panic attacks in visitors.
As far as modern games go, most games I play aren’t on any console at all, and I’ve no idea what exclusives (if any) the consoles have.
Google’s move to block sideloading of unverified Android apps marks a major shift toward tighter security. While it aims to curb malware and fraud, it also raises concerns about user freedom and indie developer access—Android’s openness is slowly fading. mcdvoice
Man I friggin loved Descent II. Game was so fun and immersive. I watched that opening cinematic over and over. The soundtrack was fantastic as well.
I later went and played Descent 1 as well but 2 was the one I played the most.
2 also has the thief bot which while infuriating also lead to some of the most memorable gameplay for me. Just chasing that little piece of shit to the ends of the earth and then feeling so triumphant when I finally nabbed it and got my stuff back.
I was in a computer club in High School. So we were able to play a few games in the computer lab after school. The teacher that headed it absolutely loved playing Descent, but she was also so bad at it that it was pure blind luck if she ever actually hit anyone.
It really was incredible. Especially back then when I hadn’t had much exposure yet to that style of music. The fact that it was CD quality instead of midi really helped.
I vividly remember discovering how you could just put the game disk in a regular CD player and it’d work. Kinda blew my mind lol.
I used to have an early VR headset. With 3DoF headtracking, 640x480 at 60 Hz (combined, so actually every eye got only half of that). Descent supported stereoscopic 3D and the headtracking could be added to almost every game with a mouse driver. It was bad. Really bad. Descent alone could be nausea inducing. In VR it was a literal pukefest. Still I had to try it every few months or so, because it was so cool on paper.
I remember playing this on my Voodoo graphics card back in the day.
I always wanted to check it out again, but there are no proper discounts of this game anymore, and the price even increased to 20€ a couple of months back. Who thinks that anybody will buy Descent with DOSBox for 20€ in 2025? Might as well just use my old pirated copy on a burned CD I have somewhere.
Playing on a Pentium with 3D accelerator was a blessing and a curse. Multiplayer Descent 2 with someone who used one was wild. The game used client-side calculations that would break if your computer was fast.
Enemy homing missile trajectory was calculated per frame, so they were extremely difficult to avoid. At the same time, weapons like the gauss or plasma beam would shoot per frame, so you could kill an opponent so fast that it seemed instantanous on their end.
arstechnica.com
Aktywne