Pretty sure the PS5 drive can’t actually read CDs, so that’s the PS1 library and most early PS2 games gone right way, even though they can be emulated pretty easily. The PS3 should be possible, but they haven’t bothered when you can play it streaming.
I guess the awkward truth here is that there’s no real business need to have it. Most of us into retro games will have a way to play them already, either via PC emulation or old consoles. And if you show a Gen Z kid some of the horrors we used to enjoy on PS1 (although I maintain Sheep, Dog ‘n’ Wolf is an underrated classic), they’d run screaming back to Fortnite and CoD.
It would be nice to have it, but nobody is not buying a PS5 because they can’t run Terracon. They’re still selling them as fast as they can make them, even with the economy in shambles.
I’ve already told my wife that if I suffer a brain injury and lose all memories, to not bother showing me pictures of our wedding day or any of that guff. I want to play The Outer Wilds again.
Although having said that she might take the opportunity to pretend she never met me.
Stray - There’s not a massive amount to it, but what’s there is charming, with just enough storytelling to drag you in. Plus you’re a cat. Who doesn’t like cats?
Guardians of the Galaxy - The gameplay feels a little rough around the edges, and the characters have an extremely irritating habit of starting to talk just before you cross the invisible lines that stop them talking again (and unlike God of War, that conversation is now lost), but it felt like a Marvel game should. More fleshed out than the movies (especially Drax and Mantis, who are just fucking moronic on screen). I feel everyone (including me) ignored this on launch because of The Avengers, which is a shame because it deserved to do better.
Ghostwire Tokyo - Definitely unique. It’s kind of a shooter, but not. They’ve added a (free?) update to it with a school, so if you played it before and wondered where the horror element was, go back and play that bit.
Death Stranding - The first strand type game. I’ve certainly never played an apocalyptic Deliveroo driver before. I recommend mostly just mainlining the story here, as the payoff is the best bit.
Humanity - Neat little puzzle game. Not especially challenging. Somewhere between Lemmings and an obscure Amiga game called Timekeepers.
Endling - Come for the cute foxes. Stay for the sudden realisation that you can actually lose those babies and this isn’t what you thought it was. Like Stray it’s not overly long, although somehow even bleaker.
Sure, but none of it is as simple as just saving what you need to at fixed points, and letting the console handle the suspend function.
Oh, and additionally: what happens when you softlock yourself by saving just as you’re about to die? Is the player to blame? Sure. Will they blame you anyway? You betcha.
Game state can be a tricky thing. By saving at certain points you just need to maintain a few things, like player health and inventory and which checkpoint they were at. And it’s only got worse the more things a game has to keep track of.
The solution was used by all last gen and current gen consoles and even the DS and 3DS, which is to suspend the game. This is fine, the Steam Deck can do this too. It’s not perfect. Power loss can lose the data, and some won’t let you play something else while another game is suspended. But for general use over short sessions, it’s alright.
It’s less useful on PC because it probably will crash the game anyway, and normally you’d want to use the PC for other things.
There’s only a handful of games that made me turn down from normal, but when I do it’s out of pure frustration and just wanting it to be over so I can play something else.
The end of the Control Foundation DLC comes to mind. There was a fight that was a red room, with red enemies, red health bars, and bullshit instadeath mechanics. Man, fuck that.
I don’t think it’s the difficulty of games that makes them take so long for me. Just that everything is so bloated now. There’s so much to do, but so little of it actually adds to the experience.
I appreciate that a lot of games have realised this and let you differentiate between “go this way to see the end of the game” and “here is some bullshit if you’re not getting another game until Christmas”.
Like sure, I could deliver every parcel in Death Stranding, and really get into the class fantasy of being a post apocalyptic Deliveroo driver, but I’m just mainlining the story quests at this point. Which is taking long enough on its own.