Somehow this plain family car makes perfect sense as a collaboration between huge German and Japanese corporations.
In CTR's case I believe they weren't even strictly gated behind microtransactions, being also "earnable" but still requiring you to interact with an online component. Though I think the game also had a Battle Pass system which means some of the content was probably vaulted because that FOMO has to be leveraged.
Was that game even any good? I remember liking the original when I played it as a kid.
Also, I assume you could just cheat those in as well if it came out on PC or Switch 
It did get pretty decent reviews overall when it came out, and it has a good amount of different modes to try.
Most people liked the single player campaign even if I thought its dialogue suffered from Marvelitis too much. It's also co-oppable with 3 people, though the third player is stuck playing as a support drone.
There's also a DLC campaign that was pretty fun and also had proper 3-person co-op.
Then you have two different PvE modes. There's the new Escape mode, which is a fun enough way to level your character class cards where you try to rush through labyrinthine levels within a time limit, and the original horde mode, Horde mode where you hunker down in Gears 5's multiplayer maps against 50 waves of enemies with character classes and minor base building elements.
You also have Gears multiplayer which is a bit of an acquired taste. Hope you like shotguns, abusing the cover animation system in a weird way and insults in Spanish.
Gears 5 also had a really annoying battlepass system when it lauched but they've made most skins earnable with ingame currency and made said currency easier to get
I was about to recommend the Fatal Frame games if you're looking for classic survival horror recommendations but on second thought they don't really fit your parameters about descending into madness. They're more about exploring haunted Japanese manors and villages with the protagonists themselves being mostly blank and static.
If you decide to check the series out, I would recommend you grab iso files of the first three PS2 games and play them on your nightly build of PCSX2. While 4 and 5 have been made available on all modern platforms, I don't think either of them really showcases the series at its best. 5 is just a huge mess all around and while 4 is more in line with the PS2 trilogy, it's still frustratingly railroady and trivially easy.
I've been occasionally dipping into Minecraft since 2011 and it's the exploration that keeps me coming back. Despite essentially just being randomly generated noise, I find Minecraft's landscapes really pretty, especially with a nice shader installed and it's always a great feeling when you crest a hill to discover a unique canyon or valley on the other side.
I started a new world in September after not playing the game for at least a year and to keep exploration more interesting and fresh this time around I installed Alex's Mobs, Aquaculture, Exotic Birds and mods that add every losing mob vote mob as well as the mobs from Minecraft Earth to make the world feel more alive. The way Alex's Mobs distributes appropriate animal species to each biome makes a huge difference in immersion, even if I have some issues with some of its more unbalanced monster mobs.
I also installed a couple of mods that added more randomly generated structures and dungeons though I basically had to go in and reduce the rates in which they spawned when it felt like the same graveyard got generated multiple times in one square kilometer. If anyone has more suggestions for more dungeon/ruin/structure mods that aren't too crazy, I'd be happy to hear them
The only regret I have with my current world is that I discovered a mod that changes world generation into continents and islands separated by water as opposed to Minecraft's usual endlessly stretching patchy landmass when I had already played the world for over a month 
I hate always online licensing DRM schemes 
I meant GTA Online's expansions, several of which feature DJs, musicians and music producers whom I assume are very big with the kids these days as themselves
>You can't eat me, I'm HERBERT MOON!!!!
John Marston just basically shrugged his shoulders when he got eaten 
I'm enjoying Undead Nightmare so far. They didn't even attempt to take the premise seriously and it's essentially just Red Dead Redemption: Halloween Special. The moon's a sickly yellow color and there's black goats and vampire bats in place of normal animals
I don't think anyone is emulating PS4 in any meaningful sense currently- AFAIK PS4 emulation only runs homebrew and maybe 2D indie games at the moment.
The Xbox 360 is even farther behind than the Switch and it's not trivial to run on my system. Then again, Switch emulation has much more interest and work put into it, so it may even out
It's got twice the capacity of the stock battery though! 
You have to love these small Chinese companies and the speed with which they come up with new controllers, emulator handhelds and other gadgets 
These are a series of cheap (10-30 bucks depending on the seller and when you get them) Chinese Bluetooth controllers intended for use with phones and other mobile devices. The one I got was the D3 which I believe was the only model that was even available back in May, and it looked like this:
As you can see, it was very heavily inspired by the Switch, and that unfortunately extended to the dpad, or lack thereof. I've used it to play emulators on an Android phone and while it feels cheap, I've actually really liked it and my only real issue with it has been the horrible separated dpad. Trying to do any sort of diagonal movements on those tiny little round buttons has just made me map the dpad to the left joystick where applicable and made me avoid 2D platformers.
The last 3 models- D6, D7, and D8- have all had a proper dpad instead, with the D8 looking like the best controller design they've done yet. The reviews I found for it seemed to agree so I ended up ordering one from AliExpress' Black Friday sale. Apparently it has Hall Effect joysticks and analog triggers, but all I need is for the dpad to be actually passable this time around. Here's hoping I won't get a lemon🤞
Looking on Reddit it seems like these are all designed by one guy who posts videos on Douyin and he's already teased what the D9 is going to look like. While the D8 looks heavily inspired by Xbox controllers, the D9 looks to be even more heavily inspired by something else that recently came out:
Once again, you gotta love these Chinese companies, no shits given
Now, which one of these 999 save state slots was I using in my last session 
Is there a way to toggle between save states you have saved or see them in a list instead of just trying different slots until you find the right one? I'm on Android
I actually like the centipedes, they're frankly terrifying and make the depths feel appropriately intimidating. Crucially, they can't fly and you can run away from them. They're also huge and with their glowing eyes they're easy to see from ways off even in the dark so you can keep a wide berth.
I just hate all the hyper-aggressive and fast flying mobs since it feels like there's nothing you can do to escape them.
For the most part I'd heartily recommend Alex's Mobs, since it adds a ton of biome-appropriate animals that fit the Minecraft art style that make the world feel much more alive.
I had it installed when I last played Minecraft over a year ago, but I didn't make it far enough to encounter its many overpowered hostile fantasy creatures and now they've been responsible for most of my deaths in my current world.
My first encounter with one of them was when I was scoping out an ocean on a boat and was suddenly being killed by a giant skeletal swordfish in a matter of seconds. These guys spawn near shipwrecks, have an insanely long aggro distance and can outrun your boat so you're basically screwed the moment you accidentally wander near a shipwreck you can't even see on the bottom of the ocean.
Then I built a Nether Portal and realized I hadn't yet even seen the new Nether biomes. I enjoyed the view for about 30 seconds until I was swarmed by giant mosquitos that attached to my face and sucked half my healthbar away in one go. I managed to kill a couple but they just kept spawning, instantly making a beeline for me the moment they appeared. Very fun and balanced 
After I'd gotten annoyed and just disabled the mosquitos from spawning I was building a bridge across a lava-filled chasm when a gigantic snake skeleton knocked me off and I burned to death. My first warning that they existed was the second one of them leaped up at me from a dozen blocks below. At least they're only limited to lava lakes, I guess.
Later, I was back in the Overworld exploring a giant deepslate cave when all of a sudden I was being attacked by a shrieking head floating up from the caverns below. After I once again got killed in a few hits I looked up what the hell even happened and it turns out it was this Japanese youkai thing that has an attack range of 50 fucking blocks. Just now I was surveying another deep cave from a ledge, saw one of these spawn in way below and it just aggroed instantly and murdered me.
I mostly like these monster designs but why do they have to be this overly aggressive and powerful? They give you no warning and can outrun you and kill you in seconds- it's just completely out of tune with the way Minecraft's hostile mobs are designed. Even the more dangerous mobs like Ghasts make their presence well known far in advance. I guess they're balanced for players kitted out in enchanted diamond armor but they completely kill exploration for me... until I disable them in the config, but I just wish you could turn their aggro range down instead.
The mod also adds several large dangerous animals, like crocodiles and grizzly bears, but you can just avoid those or run away if you too get too close and they feel much closer to how Minecraft usually operates.
I started a new Minecraft world after a long time, the last time being shortly after the update that added the new cave biomes and changed world generation and I'm instantly reminded of how useless copper is. Can't make tools with it, can't light torches with it, can't use it as fuel, and it's all over the depths you'd typically find iron and coal, the two early ores that actually do those things
No reason to limit yourself to just PS1, since most 50+ dollar devices can do that- while GC and PS2 support is hacky at best, you should be able to do Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast and PSP with upscaling.
That's okay, I'll still keep playing that garbage 
spoiler
A bit of context: When Gears 5 released in 2019, it was monetized out the wazoo in all the ways you'd expect a major AAA release to be in a post-Fortnite world, with content seasons, a store, two different ingame currencies (an earnable one and one you had to buy with real cash), buyable emotes, banners, weapon and character skins, etc.
They also sold all kinds of even more pointless customisation, like the little marks that show up on enemies when you tag them for your teammates or, the most pointless of all, the blood spray pattern that appears on the ground when you execute an enemy. They must have realized that no one would ever notice or care about the shape of a puddle of blood on the ground in the middle of a multiplayer game so they also made it so the graphic shows up on the screen of the players you kill. Because the Gears fanbase is the Gears fanbase, most people equip the giant middle finger.
I googled starfield ad login screen and this is not even the only Starfield™®© image in rotation
Thanks for ruining the rotating login screen photos you assholes, I actually liked those
I'm sure everyone alive on Planet Earth already knew about Todd Howard's latest Gamebryo-powered mess
I love that this ad is presented just like a picture of a savannah or a castle
PCSX2 has a Linux version so you should be good to go. (Steam Deck users can play the games online too, in case any are reading this)