Agree so much! 5 was amazing (although will always have a soft spot for 4) especially with the ending. Blurry being in the game is possibly the most 2005 thing to happen, and I love it.
I think with the expanded third party support we saw on the Switch (and will likely follow with Switch 2), handheld PCs will still remain a mostly distinct market from the Switch. They are more of an alternative option - more choice from the massive PC backlog + emulators, but none of the heavy hitter Switch 2 exclusives. They will keep the pressure on Nintendo, however, to keep indie developers happy enough to go through the extra work to make Switch ports of their games, as the PC development experience is far more flexible. For PC gamers, the Switch serves as what I like to call a “gap filler” - anything that doesn’t get released on PC almost certainly gets released on Switch, so the platforms complement each other quite well.
Even ROCm on some distros isn’t that bad. On my 7900 XTX (admittedly an officially supported card, your mileage may vary on unofficial cards) on Fedora it was just a case of doing sudo dnf install rocm-*
and everything installed (might be some extra packages you need after for specific apps, but you know if you need them). On openSUSE though, it was a total pain.
I do wonder what console manufacturers will do in order to keep at least some all-physical releases around as game sizes grow. Blu Ray has topped out at 128GB on the highest end discs, and flash storage isn’t dropping in price as quick as before for making larger cartridges. Maybe we will see more cases like Mario Kart World where the physical version is more expensive? However, I do think there might be less key card games as Switch 2 goes on, as likely a big motivation for key cards at launch is the current low production volume and high price of SD Express cards (which the cartridges are based on). Shelf space and shipping are a considerable cost to publishers, so they would have some motivation to avoid any costs related to the eShop hosting if possible.
Pre ordered the day it was available here in the UK, so excited for release day! Just wondering from everyone who pre ordered in the US, did you have some stores do in person pre orders only too? Here, Currys (major electronics retailer) did in person pre orders only, which I thought was a good idea to prevent scalping as the online stock everywhere was bought up nearly immediately.
I haven’t tried it myself yet, but there is a GPodder sync server app for Nextcloud that can let you sync subscriptions and play time to any compatible app. This would probably be the best solution as it would use your existing setup.
Died 1990s, born 2025 - welcome back Mac hard drive firmware lockdowns
One of us! One of us!