The Thursday letters page wishes Sony would make more half-sequels like Miles Morales, as a reader is unimpressed by The Super Mario Galaxy trailer.

Games Inbox is a collection of our readers’ letters, comments, and opinions. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk

Steamed off
So, Valve is back in the hardware business again and it doesn’t really seem like they’ve changed anything about the Steam Machine concept, except that there’s only one this time. That really wasn’t the problem last time though. The problem was pretty obvious: they were too expensive.

You could’ve just got a good, ordinary PC for the money they were asking and, unsurprisingly, that’s what everyone did. I really don’t see it being any different this time round, especially as they’ve not said what the price is. It’s out in early 2026 and you can’t bring yourself to admit how expensive it’s going to be?

Considering more a decade ago they were £900 I don’t think there’s any chance that the new one will be less, and it’ll probably be considerably more due to inflation and component cost increases. And who’s going to pay that?

I really don’t see the point and would rather they just get on and make Half-Life 3 instead. At least I’d be able to afford that.
Grackle

GC: We think you’re overestimating how powerful the Steam Machine is. It’s comparable or maybe less powerful than a PlayStation 5, so the best guess is that it’ll be a similar price to that.

Half the time
Very interesting to see the top 10 selling PlayStation 5 games and how it’s clear that exclusives do sell consoles but also that they sell a lot on their own as well. If you just take it as a simple business question, I do not see why Sony would suddenly stop doing what has worked so well right up until now.

I know it’s not easy to just knock out a game as good as Spider-Man 2 in a couple of years but, as you pointed out, the half-sequel sold just as well and we could’ve had a bunch of them by now. Sony apparently had all their studios making live service games but imagine if they had told them all to make half-sequels to their games. We’d be drowning in top notch exclusives now and some, like Miles Morales, might even have been better than the original ones.

They could still have pivoted to that now, to make up for the long years with virtually nothing, but they didn’t do that either. I think the only conclusion can be that Sony just doesn’t really care.
Boop

Short list
Appreciate you did mention it yourselves, but it just shows how bad this generation has been that in your top five PlayStation 5 exclusives feature, two of the five games are on PlayStation 4.

Sony’s focus on live service must be a factor on this but it’s such a shame this gen hasn’t had much to do in terms of exclusivity.
Adam

GC: We except the number of cross-gen games to be even more next generation, if there are any PlayStation 6 exclusives at all.

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Probably not
Is there any need for new consoles? How much better can graphics get, realistically? Sure, that Unreal Engine car fire was pretty realistic but imagine the power draw that console would need to have to do this in a mid-sized open world game, if everything else was as detailed.

This gen has been poor for must-have games. This might be why there is such apathy toward console and gaming in general. Maybe the other two can wait until tech moves forward and can be made affordable.

Even the PC has plateaued in tech. A GeForce RTX 5090 £1,000+ graphics card isn’t a lot better than its previous counterparts. AI is used a lot to make it look like games are getting more frames, so it’s kind of a scam. Thankfully, I’m to poor to buy one so I was saved from the upgrade.
Bobwallett

Family unfriendly
My daughter, earlier, was looking through the newly released games menu on her Switch and as I was passing I glanced at what I thought was hentai.

Once she’d gone to bed, I went onto the menu and sure enough there it was… but not just one. Scrolling down I found two , three, four hentai games were you do some sort of puzzle that will uncover a picture of a lady.

I, then put hentai into the search bar… and I was shocked to see how many games of this nature there was. Is this an oversight on Nintendo’s part letting this slip through the net on what is predominantly a family-orientated console? Seems a bit odd to me.

Is it too early to say merry Christmas?
Mick

GC: This has been a big issue on all online stores recently, including Steam, but all the publishers seem curiously impotent about it.

Cinematic influence
I know it’s only a kids’ film but the pretty obvious problem with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie trailer is that it wasn’t funny. Worse than that, there wasn’t even really an attempt at a joke. I guess it was supposed to be funny that Bowser was small and spoke with a squeaky voice but is that really the best they could do? Especially with that whole scene going on for way too long and it revolving around you remembering what happened at the end of the last film.

The animation was good, I guess, but nothing that blew me away and then of course there’s the problem that other people have said, where they’re jamming all the different 3D games into the same film and they’re only on movie number two. What are they going to do for number three?

My biggest problem with it all though is that, to me at least, it damages Nintendo’s reputation. The Mario games are famous not just because people recognise the characters but because they’re amazing games. This isn’t Sonic the Hedgehog, where the brand is the only thing about them. But now one of the things that non-gamers are going to closely associate with Mario is just kind of meh.

I worry the Zelda movie is going to be even worse for that. The whole idea of making it live action seems like a bad idea to me. Everything is going to look silly and cheap and people that don’t play the games are going to assume the games are like that too. At least they should’ve made it CGI, if they were going to do a movie, but the whole idea seems doomed to me.

I know things like this shouldn’t matter to me, but I hate to see my favourite games being dragged through the dirt like this for no reason.
Onibee

Only option
Just a note that when the PlayStation 5 launched, the Japanese yen was a lot stronger, so it was never as cheap as £196 in reality.

Really disappointed I won’t be able to buy a monitor with a controller hook in the UK though, I just have to drop mine onto the concrete floor. From standing.
Magnumstache

Rich man’s game
I don’t see anything that Valve announced with the new Steam Machine and other hardware being any kind of mainstream success and, personally, I don’t think Valve care. I can’t explain why they don’t want to make games anymore, any more than anyone else can explain their behaviour, but I do think there’s a team they’ve got there, that likes making high-end gaming hardware and as long as it pays for itself that’s all Gabe Newell and co. care about.

The guy is one of the richest people in the world and lives on a mega yacht, he obviously doesn’t care about making games at all, but he does seem to have some interest in VR and hardware like that. None of that is going to help ordinary schlubs like me, who can’t afford any of that stuff, but it is what it is.

There’ll probably be some more tech demos, like The Lab, for some of these releases but an actual Half-Life 3? The problem is there’s no way to tell. Valve hasn’t done or said enough to identify any kind of pattern, so you might a well just flip a coin to guess, or listen to a leaker, which is basically the same thing.

I hope it happens because it’s annoying to know that Half-Life: Alyx exists and I’ll never get to play it. They wouldn’t even put it on PlayStation VR2. We’ll see though. It’s The Game Awards coming up so who knows, there may actually be an annoucement there.
Gorf

Inbox also-rans
If I was Microsoft, I would be very worried about the Steam Machine. I’m not saying it’ll be a hit, but it has a lot more chance than a next gen Xbox. Microsoft were going to try and steal Valve’s idea but now Valve has got in there first and I’m not sure where Xbox goes from here.
Focus

I hope Nintendo announces a new Star Fox for the Switch 2. I know they’ve had multiple failures now but I feel if they basically remade and expanded Star Fox 2 that would be a great starting point.
Taylor Moon

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