For me “too much” was a long time ago. The price of graphics cards went insane at some point and it stopped being worth it. The last time I bought a graphics card new was in 2009 and that cost me, adjusted for inflation, £220 (Why do I still have the receipt…?). It was an nVidia GTX 260 and at the time was a fairly decent midrange card. Looking at graphics card pricing now, uh, nope, that wouldn’t buy me anything comparable - it looks like we’re talking ~£380 for midrange stuff, so a ~70% increase in price.

Whilst obviously the hardware is a lot more capable now than it was then, the amount of enjoyment I get out of gaming hasn’t gone up. If anything I enjoy gaming less now than I did then, although that’s more due to me getting older.

I’m constantly baffled as to how anyone can justify the cost of a decent gaming PC these days.

A great many of us spent our childhoods with terrible associations with sport. To this day I dislike it, despite not wanting to.

I’m hoping I can make it more fun for my daughter so she can walk a different path.

The PSP was both amazing and awful. So much squandered potential. So few developers did anything cool with it.

They appear in Warhammer a fair bit.

Until recently I was buying second hand games for my Xbox One. Then I got a Steam Deck and that was that.

What about Starfox 2?

I’m perhaps the outlier in that I felt like San Andreas felt like they’d thrown shit at the wall to see what would stick. Most of the extra mechanics didn’t land for me at all and I was pleased to see them gone.

That assumes that the congestion is caused by the speed at which the cars travel, which it basically never is.

If the average speed of congested traffic is already below 20mph, how do you figure?

Must be NW in that case as I spent every summer from 1994 to 2005 near Hexham!

It’s not a UK thing I’ve ever heard of and I’ve lived in Wales, England, and Scotland.

“lawfully held” - when your go-to argument is “it’s not technically illegal” then you might want to consider your stance.

Lauren Schultz told the BBC what had happened in recent years was “unacceptable” but said “we have drawn a line under it”.

Wait, that’s a thing we can do? I wonder if the missus can write off her student loan like that.

That’s, uh, not what PIA means in this thread.

Excellent question! Commenting to follow.

The “open world craze”? I get disagreeing with design decisions but that seems a bit of an odd angle, given how long open world games had been popular at the time of release.

I’ve not played an open world game that was anything like Exodus. It was an interesting blend of sandbox and tight narrative.

I couldn’t really get into the early games, despite liking the concept, but loved Exodus. I could see how it wouldn’t suite someone who preferred the style of the previous games, but I think I would argue that “a third helping of the same” rarely takes a game series anywhere interesting.

A great many of the games I grew up with were descended from coin-op design principles and so were designed to delay progress as much as possible.

I think I put 200 hours into Fallout 3.

It’s nowhere near as good as 2. Not even close.

Whilst it’s an oversimplification, if the old price only got Y sales then a higher new price was always only going to get a subset of Y.

Console sales go up over time in part because the price goes down, broadening the customer base. Sure, the library gets bigger over time too, but that’s barely happening either.

Yeah, I use it for Marketplace and a wargaming group I admin. Its original use case for me is long gone.