Andee

The AI boom has arrived, and it’s infiltrating the video game industry at large.

Like that prat who brings their acoustic guitar to a house party

@MrPeanutbutterz I love Lonely Rolling Star (check out the 8-Bit Big Band's rendition, it's wonderful) and Crimson Gin and Tonic

Oh absolutely I'll be rolling this up on day one.

@MrPeanutbutterz they're brilliant aren't they? Easily some of my most-listened to videogame soundtracks

I love how in the trailer, between 0:10 and 0:15 the two characters are just having a mundane conversation while the fish is floppin' around on the floor for dear life.

@Quintumply I'm rather surprised they kept the numbering after a 13 year gap, but I imagine I don't need to have played the previous three entries in order to pick up and enjoy the story do I?

@Dragoon1994 I wanna see Joe facing off with the F-14 Tomcat jet airplane from Afterburner

I'm really keen to see where they go with the final part, but I'm also glad to see it wrap up — the sheer length of Rebirth really did a number on my enthusiasm to fire it up.

@J2theEzzo Yeah I think a lot of people are sick of the idea of multiverses

Genuinely curious to see how they're going to sell this one — remember how they said that the PS5 Pro was going to do away with toggles for Performance and Fidelity? How's that working out?

'Av-a-go-atar

Your doom in this comment section is more or less sealed

@Jammer Yeah, same — I thought it was solidly made and had a (mostly) engaging cast, but I can appreciate that the monumental shift in tone and gameplay must have been pretty whiplash-inducing (I'd only just finished Inquisition a few weeks before) for mainstay fans.

Okay Death Adder I get, but Eggman? What a one-sided showdown that'll be

@IntrepidWombat ah, so they're already on the case then — that's good to know, thanks

Yeah that was my first thought as well. If there was any lingering doubt that Dragon Age as a series was completely dead in the water, I imagine this news utterly clinches it.

Would it be too naive to float the notion that the former talent from Bioware might be able to regroup as a new, independent dev studio that could create spiritual successors to ME and DA that are just different enough so as not to incur the wrath of EA's legal department?

Stock prices in brown trousers just skyrocketed

@Jammer Yeah, the game's levels simply weren't designed to be played with those kinds of modern controls, so while I appreciate that they went to the effort to include them, I would never suggest anyone try to play it with them turned on.

I'd be very curious to know, but do we know what "Megabit" size the game would have been had it been released on a cart? Apparently the Mega Drive as a console had far more power than I think people were aware of, as many games of the era were ultimately hobbled by the limited amount of available memory on the cartridges that they were willing to shell out for.

Yeah I'd love to see them do a proper HD remaster of the Legend/Anniversary/Underworld trilogy — hell they already did it for PS3; just port that.

This and Resident Evil 9 are gonna be my first main big pickups of 2026, having never played the original I'm super intrigued by it.

Looking forward to the PEGI 18 version, Dragon Quest: Smash/Pass

I should hope so; they're still releasing games for it.

@ShogunRok cool, thanks — it's a series I'm completely new to, and tbh I don't think I'd ever heard of it (or I was at least conflating it with the "Tales of" series in my mind) but I've downloaded the demo and I'm gonna jump right on it once I'm done with FFVI 🙃

I'm gonna go out on a limb and theorise that Randy slept in on the day Gearbox had their Customer Relations seminar

Yeah I've heard the dialogue is a little more transliterated than the original which, while more authentic, can sometimes dilute the personality a little bit (i've seen it in a couple of anime redubs)

I'm starting to become really allergic to dialogue-heavy games, particularly in non-RPG genres where it's entirely unwarranted, but is the dialogue in Trails at least decent and compelling/likeable?

@Dogbreath I'm somewhere in the middle, in that I've got an external HDD where I store all my games and move them over to the SSD if I'm currently playing them. Beats sitting around waiting to download hundreds of gigs of data

I didn't need cheats so much as multiple food rations and stamina-replenishing medication to get me through the final few dozen hours of Rebirth

I'm a little behind on Borderlands — I finally picked up 3 for £4 the other week, and it's unlikely I'll be rushing to play 4 any time soon

Heh, was thinking the exact same thing — I set up my OG PS5 and now I'm afraid to go past it too quickly in case I blow it off its precarious round turntable grill thingie.

Does it still have the loading delay when going from screen to screen, and when the background FMVs loop? Or have those been trimmed/streamlined?

@wildcat_kickz The right way is the best way.

My thoughts exactly — one of the things I enjoyed most about CU:E33 was that it was an original, standalone experience — when you start ladling extra narrative and lore onto something you run the risk of crushing it under its own weight. I really hope they don't oversaturate it, and it becomes something like Assassins Creed where they churn a new one out every year.

Love the blatant "inspiration" from Golden Axe! Really hoping to see She Ra make an appearance as well

You'd be surprised.

Oh hell yeah — I'd happily pay for a proper remaster.

"You think you're solving a case? What if the case is you?"

What if the real case is the friends we solved along the way?

@PuppetMaster @Kidfunkadelic83 yeah I already have the base game so I might just end up picking up the physical when it goes cheaper

@Kidfunkadelic83 Yeah, I looked on PSN and the first two character passes (4 characters each) are £27 a pop — which seems a bit steep, especially given that the Years 1-2 Fighters Edition is actually cheaper than both combined. You think there'd at least be a bundle or something.

@get2sammyb I've a broad, somewhat basic question about season passes in general (as I've never gone in on them) — do you basically pay for each individual Year/Season, and the new characters are trickled out until that season ends? If all I want is the new characters/levels, but don't care about cosmetics/in-game currency, what would be the thing that I need to buy if I already have the base game?

@CDCYPER00 Yeah, if I was coming to the series new I'd be all over these, but these are games I'd be unlikely to revisit any time soon

Ah that's a shame — I would happily pay to be able to upgrade to get the extra goodies, but I wouldn't double dip on a full purchase, AND not be able to transfer my dozens of hours of progress over (I think that's the ultimate clincher — how much disposable time do they think players have??)

Oh the bandaid has already gone a bit gross, in fact it fell off quite some time ago, I just don't have the heart to throw it in the bin for good.

This is how you do a retro collection

@get2sammyb yeah, World Tour Mode would be pretty sweet

I'm pretty sure the ship has sailed long ago, but if they can somehow manage to cram in the collective hardware of the PS1/2/3 for full native back compat, I would snap up a PS6 in a blink.

Retry Battle and Dialogue Auto-Advance were the two things I was really itching for whilst playing — great stuff!

It's a shame that this is reviewing badly, but whoever greenlit it surely must know that the market is utterly oversaturated with cosy/life/farming sims at the moment - and unless you're selling it as a AAA genre-definer, slapping the LotR licence on one isn't really going to cut it.

Sword of Sodan, now that's a name I've not heard in a long time...

Phew! Somebody dial down the yoga flame...

Considering how much AI slop already exists on the storefronts, I would like to hope that people are voting with their wallets, and acknowledging the difference between what's good and what's bad, but people can be fickle. Just because developers claim to be using AI in some capacity, doesn't necessarily mean that what they put out will be actually any good.

I (somewhat ill-advisedly) worked my way through the GoW games in the lead up to the release of Ragnarok, but burned out after the third one. Even now though I would like to see the studio try something new, but given the state of the industry, I can see them relying on something tried and tested.

But would you buy it for a dollar?

Does using the disc drive to play 4K Blu Rays count? I've only done that once, but I have no interest in firing up and running my PS5 for streaming; I can do that through my TV.

@Max_the_German yeah I'll definitely be picking it up on Switch over PS, it just feels more natural as a handheld game