I got one a few months old that was clicking like something from The Last of Us.

I swear SMART data is the most useless shit.

What bought me back to piracy was the twatting about between several apps, only to find that what I wanted wasn’t on any of them.

If they want me back, they’ll have be more convenient than piracy. And piracy is pretty damn convenient these days.

We’re talking one service, all content that isn’t still in cinemas, 4K HDR, 5.1 audio. Let’s be reasonable, £30 a month with no ads at any time. Feel free to have ad tiers and lower quality if you’re charging less or even showing for free. That’s not my thing, I’ll pay for the good shit tier. I don’t need 8 screens at once or whatever nonsense Netflix know you won’t use. It’s just me, and my big television and sound system.

Music managed this. There’s no reason video can’t other than greed. I’m done asking nicely.

Remember kids: Torrents and Jellyfin are the only way.

I tried docker for Windows and it was pure pain. Not sure I’d recommend it for a beginner when the windows installers exist for most of it.

Jellyseer doesn’t have a Windows installer as far as I know.

Bazarr seemed useful but most stuff comes with subtitles anyway, and every time Bazarr grabs them for me, they’re inevitably out of sync because they’re for a slightly different version. I normally have to go to opensubtitles and grab a few until I find the right one. It’s probably more useful if you require subs in a language other than English.

Radarr, Sonarr, Jellyfin, qBittorrent.

Apple: Enough!

But you’ll have to buy a whole new laptop when it turns out that was a lie.

I honestly think it’ seven more important to have an adblock on a phone.

The amount of pages that on mobile are an advert covering the top half, and a give us your data prompt at the bottom seems to be nearly everything these days. At least on a monitor there’s room for the content.

I could never get on with the weird shaped triggers.

It might do now. They’ve done a lot of improvements.

Even on PS5 it was an absolute mess in co-op. 30fps (if you were lucky) all round, constant freezes (several seconds) when swapping characters, many many crashes. Whenever we told it to save, we’d have to both touch nothing to make sure it didn’t crash while saving. Oh, and there was a bug meaning only the player who chose to sleep for the day would get any companion progression.

I really like my PS5, but I see no value in a model costing 80% more and being only current for half a generation.

All that for an “up to” 40% performance increase.

I don’t care how much of a graphics nerd someone is, that just isn’t worth it.

The dollar ain’t buying what it used to either.

Also, remember that our prices include VAT, so we slap 20% on it right there. That £700 is £583 excluding the VAT.

That’s still 10% more than in the US doing a direct currency conversion, but it’s not quite as bad as it first looks.

Still a lot of money for a games console though, especially a mid gen refresh. Paying at the start of a gen for 8 years gaming ain’t too bad when you look at it per year. PS5 Pro will be over 4 years, and on that alone is piss-poor value.

My TV from 2017 was HDR, so it was. But HDR monitors would have been pretty rare, so the bug probably wouldn’t have shown up in any great numbers.

I don’t even run Windows in HDR mode (because it looks awful), but it picks it up anyway and completely fucks the graphics up.

Yes, I know. And I already can’t play it due to changes in hardware.

I mean, a pound don’t buy what it used to. We’ve had rampant inflation, and it’s going to be hard to keep any next gen console in a price point that we think of as suitable. I mean, this is the first gen where the price has gone up during it. PS2 slim went down to under £100 by the end. I paid about £80 for a GameCube late in the gen. I remember Xbox having to give money back to people because they launched at about 300 and Sony immediately went down to £199. It was carnage.

£299 felt like a standard price point for ages. My Amiga 1200 cost about that in the early 90s, and I paid the same for a PS2 nearly 10 years later, and the Xbox 360 was about the same.

£700 feels like a piss take though, and the sales figures will surely reflect that. PS6 has got to be under £600 I reckon, and we’re probably about 5 years away from that.

Load times have always been bottlenecked by the CPU, so it’s not a massive surprise that the SSD is about on par with a decent SD card.

On the PS4 an SSD was faster than a HDD, but not by a massive amount. At least it was quieter though.

It was MS that started that back on the OG Xbox.

I think all the F2P ones (and a handful of others like FFXIV) are exempt from it. At least on Playstation.

Fucking auto correct…

It was Nex Machina.

PC streaming is extremely hit and miss. I ended up with Moonlight/Sunshine for playing from my nVidia Shield and that works a charm. Steam streaming never quite worked right. There’s a ton of options, and unless you pick exactly the right ones for your setup, it’ll do stupid things.

Steam sales have been crap for years though.

You used to be able to pick up games a year after they came out for like £5 on a flash deal. These days stuff is still full retail price years after launch just so it looks better during the few sales a year. We need to get back to the days of cut price re-releases (Playstation Platinum).

I got a shitload of games from bundles though. That at least is cheap on PC, along with Epic delving into their Fortnite war chest to bribe us with actually free games.

Think the best way to game cheaply on consoles is to pick up physical discs second hand (although a lot of games don’t even launch on disc any more), and be on the higher tiers of PS Plus for all the games. There’s some really good stuff on there, more than enough to keep me busy.