PS5 Life Cycle, FF7 Paint, And More Of This Week's Strongest Opinions

Sony announced its third-quarter earnings on February 14, and they weren’t exactly full of glad tidings for PlayStation fans. For starters, the company revealed it doesn’t plan to release any new titles in its major franchises for the remainder of 2024. Sony execs also said that its current-gen hardware, the PlayStation 5, is nearing the end of its life cycle. - Jen Glennon Read More

Last week, thanks to the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth demo, some old video game discourse returned and overtook social media: The use of yellow paint to mark certain in-game objects or ledges. All it took was a now-viral tweet of Cloud climbing some yellow rocks in the new demo and a comment about how yellow paint was a “virus” and, bam, the debate is raging all over again. Like a comet returning for another scheduled pass by Earth, the yellow paint topic has once again predictably appeared, leading to endless takes, jokes, threads, opinions, and arguments. Why is this topic so incredibly capable of sucking in everyone around it for days or weeks on end? Well, it’s not really because of the paint, but everything the yellow splotches represent. - Zack Zwiezen Read More

2023 was a year of amazing games, but Starfield was not one of them. The spacefaring role-playing game from Bethesda was supposed to be the next Skyrim, but bigger. Garnering mixed reviews and player reactions, it quickly became clear that Starfield would not reach the heights of Bethesda’s best work. Now, less than six months after the game’s launch in September, the player base has shrunk by 97 percent, according to SteamDB. Some outlets are reporting on this as if it’s dire news, and sure, if you just see that number and don’t think about the larger context, you might think it looks pretty bad. But here’s the thing: why should we care? - Willa Rowe Read More

Ahead of my hands-on preview with Unicorn Overlord, the new tactics RPG from developer Vanillaware and published by Atlus, I was told that nobody had beaten the demo yet. So I made it my mission to see if I could change that. Cut to two-and-a-half hours later, and I can see why people were having difficulty. I was in the midst of a massive battlefield, juggling multiple units of soldiers across a sprawling map and getting into fights with enemies twice my level. But after 45 minutes of strategizing (and the occasional save reload), I came out the victor. - Willa Rowe Read More

Arrowhead Game Studios’ third-person co-op shooter Helldivers 2 has had a rough launch. It’s been plagued with server issues, progression problems, and more, and after several rapid fixes failed to fix things, studio CEO Johan Pilestedt issued an apology to players. - Alyssa Mercante Read More

It’s Valentine’s Day, which means love is in the air. Maybe you have someone to squeeze, or maybe you’re holding on to an unrequested crush. And to be clear, we’re talking about video game characters. Because let’s be honest, for some of us who have been playing video games since we were kids, game characters helped us figure out what kind of people we liked and what we wanted to see in romance. So we want to know: Who is your biggest video game crush? - Willa Rowe Read More

There is a lot of advice out there about how to maintain a healthy relationship with your significant other. Communicate effectively, set aside time to spend with each other, things like that. Having been in a relationship with my partner for nine years, I like to think we are pretty good at these things. Not much can threaten our relationship. And yet, that all went out the window when we played 2018’s two-player narrative game, A Way Out. What transpired in the roughly seven hours it took us to beat the game still haunts us to this day and I’m somewhat surprised it didn’t end our relationship. - Willa Rowe Read More

It’s been a whirlwind week or so for Xbox. The weekend of February 3, rumors began swirling that major console exclusives like Starfield and the upcoming Indiana Jones game would head to other platforms, and Xbox fans’ reactions were intense, to say the least. The backlash prompted head honcho Phil Spencer to announce a seemingly impromptu “business update” taking place on February 15. That update came in the form of a special edition of the Official Xbox Podcast, and after watching it I can safely say: This could have been an email. - Alyssa Mercante Read More

In the spirit of the season of love we asked you, dear readers, to share with us your biggest video game crushes. The answers are in, and they are varied. Turns out there are a lot of characters to love across countless video games. Heroes, villains, sidekicks, you name it, somebody is crushing on them. While there were a few franchises and even specific characters that a vast majority of the community seems to be in consensus about falling in love with, there are just as many deep cuts. And the reasons for these crushes forming in the first place are equally varied. - Willa Rowe Read More