Viqor

Since the death of the Wii E-shop, I've bought most of my console games physically unless the price difference is dramatic. I play a lot of old games, and even considering that some (but certainly not all) games require server connections and patches to work at all, I feel way better about my chances of being able to play a game 15+ years from now if I have it on disc. PC is a different story, since most PC games have no real physical release anymore I gravitate towards DRM free if possible.

I will also recommend Steelcase. I got a Leap recently and it is an incredible chair. They are expensive, but you can sometimes get a good deal by going through a local dealer (I got mine for probably $2-300 less than buying direct) and the 12 year warranty means that I won't be shopping for another chair anytime soon. There are also less expensive models (like the Series 1) that are comparable in price to some nicer gaming chairs ($400-450) and still carry the 12 year warranty.

I guess I'm in this boat now too since FedEx "lost" the PS5 I pre-ordered months ago during delivery (it was somehow marked as delivered even though it never showed up at my house).

As for strategy, I've been using an automatic page refresher to update each site that might have every 30 seconds, sitting on a second monitor while I work. I am also trying out the Chrome extension "Octoshop" that I found on Reddit, it's supposed to push a windows notification when stock comes in.

I've been using SSDs as my OS drive for at least 10 years now, and I've only ever had one fail (I don't remember the brand, but it wasn't one of the major players and it way 64GB, so it was a long time ago). Modern SSDs are very reliable and are rated for lots of reads / writes (the 1TB Samsung 980 pro, for instance, is rated for 600TB of write endurance), so I honestly don't think that reliability will be a major concern in the short term (as in the 6-10 year life cycle of these consoles) unless there is something wrong with them.

For me, the bigger issue may come from long term preservation, especially for the PS5. What happens in 10/20/30 years when the SSD finally dies? Will there be any way to perfectly experience those games as they originally existed? If the XBox Series becomes Microsoft's platform going forward, then theoretically, you should be able to simply buy the newest Xbox and keep playing your games, but will Sony make the same investment in backward compatibility going forward? The answer could be yes, but if they move to a new tech platform at any point, there could be content that is simply stuck on old platforms (as is the case with the PS3 right now), with little hope of long-term preservation once those drives die.

Best of wishes to Abby. Love Clue Crew and 13 Deadly Sims is a genuine classic and one of my favorite features ever. I'm going to miss seeing her on the site, but I'm definitely going to keep an eye out on Twitter and Abby Dearest and look forward to seeing whatever she's doing next.

Run off. I already ran too much in Spelunky 1 and still get myself killed dashing into skeletons and the like.

Personally? A little, but probably less than it should. I'm way into retro games, so I have every Playstation and good quality way to hook it up to a modern TV, so if I want to play Tony Hawk 3 (like I did last week), I'll get my PS2 out, ditto for PS1, PS3 or PS4 games.

It disappoints me more because most people don't have the time, money, or interest to invest in getting old systems to work well on digital televisions. An easy to use, decent quality setup that you might already own would make it pretty easy to check out a few old games to see if it's something you might be in to or replay something that you have fond memories of.

It's super hard to pick just one. Obviously several Ghibli movies are great (my favorites are probably Only Yesterday, Proco Rosso, and Princess Mononoke) and the allure of all of Satoshi Kon's tragically small body of work is powerful (Millennium Actress is my favorite and very close second to my pick, maybe first on another day). Patlabor 2, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Akira, Sword of the Stranger, Redline, Ghost in the Shell, Space Adventure Cobra are all great movies that deserve to be seen by anyone interested in the medium.

Frankly, I'm a sucker for beautiful animation, and no movie has quite made my jaw land, and stay, on the floor like Macross: Do You Remember Love. It's hard to describe since I'm not an animator, but every frame of that movie feels like so much love and work went into it. It's not the most cerebral Anime out there, but it can't be beat as something I could watch any day of the week or as a pick me up when I'm feeling down. Real bummer that the only legal way to watch it is via an untranslated import Blu-Ray.

@mister_v that looks awesome. I'll definitely check it out. I find that even small goals really help me stick with sandbox games.

As far as performance goes, running at 3440x1440 w/ Ryzen 3700x, 32GB 3200Mhz RAM, 2080 Super, it's extremely variable. Running on a mixture of medium and high settings, I've seen everything from 70+ FPS in rural areas and especially mountains and places above the tree line on a clear day to mid to high 20s (after heavy tweaking, why I'm not running straight "high-end" settings) sitting at JFK (a high detail, hand built Airport in one of the world's largest cities) in a 747, just before dawn in a rain storm.

My takeaway is that MSFS is very taxing on both CPU and GPU, but the main limiting factor for me in the heaviest scenario was CPU. Hitting 60 FPS with reasonable settings just doesn't seem possible at the moment.

Usefully, I did find that in the most extreme scenarios, disabling live and AI Traffic made a huge difference. I went from high teens / low 20s to high 20s / low 30s just by disabling air traffic in the New York scenario mentioned above, so consider temporarily turning air traffic off if you find your frame rate tanking in or around cities.

QVT-R2L-9WG

Blink Block, Tick Tock

A fairly standard level and very doable. It's themed around blinking blocks and platforming under pressure.