The good news is that many of these DualSense PS5 problems are fixable. Some require nothing more than a paperclip and five minutes of your time. Others might need a firmware update or a quick cleaning.

The first thing that dispels most of the prejudice is the game's prologue, which is bombastic and well-directed. The game throws you into the role of Koen, the eldest son of a peasant family in Vale Sangora. This is a classic "Slavic" backdrop characteristic of the 14th century.

You don't hear half of it because bullets from some kind of Maxim gun are flying around you. The world turns to grey as you throw yourself into a conveniently placed crater. Maybe they planned to build some kind of skate park there but gave up after digging; who knows, although it's strange they planned so many of them

The good news is that most Steam Deck errors fall into a handful of repeatable categories, and once you know the pattern, the fix is usually quick. Network errors like 105 and 150 almost always trace back to a DNS or connectivity hiccup. Black screens and freezes are often tied to a bad update or a rogue plugin. SD card errors usually mean a duplicate folder or a corrupted file system. None of these require you to be a Linux expert or send your device in for repair.

Another extraction game? Somewhere out there, there are still people on management boards who get a self-satisfied thrill from the thought of having an extraction shooter in their portfolio, because they think they too will succeed like Fortnite and other copy-paste games. Of course, nobody stops to consider that the extraction genre already has more games than there are blatant Flappy Bird clones.

An environment that is cold and vast, and ready to "amputate" your enjoyment over one bad decision (provided you don't like to "rewind"). We went into this story expecting a competent but formulaic "Haunted House in Space." In the end, we rewound the ending three times because we didn't like the epilogue, and that somewhat spoiled the enjoyment. We gave in to temptation. That's motivation enough — or demotivation enough — for you to take a look at this title.

The heart of the matter is simple: your controller registers movement when you're not touching the stick. Whether it's dust, wear and tear, or a design flaw, this glitch can ruin your gaming sessions. Fortunately, there are numerous ways to tackle this problem, ranging from simple software tweaks to more involved hardware solutions.

When I launched HALO: Campaign Evolved, that same sound returned, only now renovated, deeper, richer. For a moment, I forgot that I was sitting in my living room at my desk with my child on my lap. Instead, I found myself in a room where chaos from a torn-open box was decorated with the hum of cables and the terrible guilt of an approaching December exam period.

An Xbox Series X that won't download in standby mode is rarely a hardware problem — it's almost always a setting, a network hiccup, or a storage limit quietly getting in the way. Run through the update toggles, double-check your power mode, and keep your network stable, and background downloads should pick right back up.

This isn't a hit piece. The Switch 2 sold faster than any console in Nintendo's history, and for most owners it does exactly what it says on the box. But "most owners" isn't "all owners," and a console selling in the tens of millions means even a small percentage of defective units translates into a very loud, very persistent online conversation.