I’m employed in Film and currently “stood down” while our actors are on strike. On one hand it’s great to have time to hit some of the games I’ve been hoarding, on the other, I may be playing them in a cardboard box come February.

Blame is too laden a word here.

TL;DR: CDPR have opted to shutter their in-house engine, Red Engine (which CP2077 was built on) in favour of a partnership with Unreal. Most of their devs have now switched to Unreal; with only those left on the upcoming CP2077 release still using Red Engine 4.

They have opted to no longer work at all on the Red Engine projects; ergo they either port CP to Unreal (an incomprehensibly large task given that Unreal doesn’t support many features that Red does, or at least not in the way Red does - not a slight on Unreal, simple reality of different engines, especially internal vs external tooling), or cease further development of CP. They opted for the latter.

The wealth that comes from ill-spent teens, I suppose.

Sounds a lot like the VR Missions and VR Missions Expansion for Metal Gear Solid.

It excelled as a pass and play game, not too many of those about these days. Good for an evening of exploring spooky shit with a friend.

How about my smart watch? Or […] smart fridge?

Well it worked for Skyrim? They released that for my niece’s speak and spell.

But it doesn’t have the same name…

Also, children.

I think the wording “console exclusive” is becoming quite wide spread, but for the avoidance of doubt, in the headline, I’d have avoided it perhaps.

It’s been a while since I did Xbox memory mapping (One X) but IIRC there is approx 2GB of ram withheld by the system, and then an additional one or two can be recalled by the system for the purposes of running things like background downloads, party chat, video chat. That means that when your game goes to cert it’s checked to be performant under max OS load; so 6GB. This causes lots of issues (and is a pain as even MS’s analytics indicated this was a use case that appeared almost never. From what I have heard since, these TCRs/XRs/FTCs having changed much.

PS5 Short King it is.

I have, though even MD is getting on for 7 years old now. I don’t think that the series lived up to it’s roots in either title. I found myself feeling very constrained by them; I don’t necessarily mind if I have to play a character (Corvo is great as a Tabula Rasa) but Adam Jensen and his backstory are so fundamentally unlikeable.

The First Person Stealth Sim genre (Thief, Dishonored, etc) has been getting very little love in the last few years. Sadly the Arkane games don’t embrace it anymore; while great Prey was borderline as you really couldn’t control the stealth in many sections, and Deathloop and Red Rain are primarily short action games.