Balaam_

I think it’s generational.

Growing up with the NES, YouTube, social media and the internet didn’t exist for much of my life. I got most of my gaming info at the time from magazines. While there is definitely the potential for overlap with the article topic, I learned to form my opinions more on info contained in previews. Reviews, not so much. Every once in awhile there’d be a particular reviewer in a given magazine who I observed liked/disliked most of the same titles I would, and that was a handy gauge as to whether or not I should look into a game, but nothing like today’s easily influenced crowd who merely parrot what their favorite YouTuber says.

@RockyOfficial the game isn’t on disc, so unless you want the steelbook just because you want a metal dvd case it’s pretty pointless. I’d wait a few years until this is $5 in the bargain bin or until Ubisoft does right by the player base and ships the full game on disc.

I never knew I needed a ski mask and a bag with a dollar sign on it until I read this Bank of America quote.

I think Sony thinks Horizon is bigger than it actually is. Or maybe it’s just nepotism from Hermen Hulst, as it’s kind of his baby. Either way, I have less than no interest in this.

That hot air balloon escape sequence at the end was amazing

Shoutout to the 2 people in the poll who probably never played a videogame before and voted for Starfield. Fear not! Most games aren’t as glitch riddled and borderline unplayable. There are plenty of high quality, polished experiences out there, don’t give up👍

Nothing for me either. Not a sports fan, not a Chinese mythology fan, and while I love souls games I’m not a fan of Nine Sols’ art style.

I eagerly await the next in this series of articles where we discover water is wet. (Poking fun at the obvious nature of the topic, not the article itself. It’s well researched and written).

Most overrated game since Skyrim. It isn’t bad, but it doesn’t deserve half the unwarranted praise inexplicably heaped on it either. A solid 7 out of 10; good rpg mechanics dressed in a hideously ugly visual aesthetic.

Is there a petition to keep it dead and buried? I want to sign that petition.

It’s the right call. You risk destabilizing your cash cow by putting stuff day&date on pc, and then if that still doesn’t pan out, you’re screwed. That said, porting these outside the launch window shows the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze. It was worth a try, but they’re making the right call by backing away.

Think Cyberpunk 2 will launch bug free?

flips over Fool card

I have nothing against this game or the first one, but I find it hard to believe this is the #1 most wish listed game on all of Steam. This seems like the type of game that wouldn’t really garner much attention from the pc crowd, that would fly under the radar a bit. Still, better this than Fortnite 2 or some crap like that.

@BuGGy2DaB yeah I noticed they forgot to add “no actual ownership for the ‘physical’ disc out of the box” to that quote

It already looks better than those awful Milla Jovovich ones

I hope they give a breakdown by region when the sales numbers arrive. It’ll do well in America yeah, but baseball is huge in Japan and so is mobile gaming. I bet it’ll do great there too.

Is the one time check done at the time of download? Or is this needlessly redundant, as in ‘You’re obviously connected to the Internet in order for you to have even purchased and downloaded the game in the first place, but we’ll do an unnecessary spot check again immediately afterward for no good reason’? I so rarely buy anything digitally I don’t really know how they handle that side of the product line.

@Skinny-Pete This one isn’t a huge deal to me. I liked the original, but I’m not super into the AC games. I might have picked it up but now I get to put that money toward something else.

That’s all I needed to hear. No sale ❌

I’d buy this if it’s an actual physical release and not a fake lie where the disc is nothing but a worthless plastic coaster. With the literal billions GTA6 will probably rake in, Take Two really has no excuse not to pay the extra pennies to ensure the game is indeed fully on disc. Throw a manual in there too while you’re at it; there are too many trees in this world.

Haven’t watched this week’s Sacred Symbols yet but I imagine Colin&co. will go over this topic, particularly since Saint Slayer seems to be affected. If not this week, then next. I still can’t imagine Sony would deliberately do this. This has to be a bug. It would be like shooting themselves in the foot with a howitzer if this was intentional.

Pity whoever threatened to pull the funding didn’t get a chance to see that god awful, low-IQ wave survival slop they shoehorned into the game post launch.

I wonder what the pitch for that would have sounded like? ‘Let’s take everything that made Uncharted great—the riveting action adventure set pieces, the dialogue, the story progression, the gameplay loop—and throw it out the window. Let’s replace it with a mind numbingly boring loop of running around in circles going to point A, point B, point C then back to point A again. Because that’s the reason people bought into the franchise in the first place. Also, let’s force trophies for it so trophy hunters can’t just bypass this garbage.’

I have Horizon Chase Turbo digitally (I believe it was free with ps+ at some point years ago). So how does this work? Does it go away because I don’t actually ‘own’ it digitally? Do I get to keep it as long as I stay subscribed to ps+? If I let my subscription lapse and then renew it at some point later on, am I still able to redownload it?

Very befuddling. Yet another reason owning a game physically is the superior option.

I had the same thing happen the other day. A game I ordered from VGP arrived and I opened the box, peeled off the cellophane, and when I pried open the jewel case there was this note saying my game was about to expire. The disc flung itself into the air and exploded into confetti. That’s what I get for foolishly buying physical media

Not really my type of game so I never even looked at the list, but I’ve double platinum’d a number of games over the course of trophy hunting on my account. If the trophy lists are well designed and the game is good, I don’t mind.

I’ve also autopopped a few games here and there. I know there’s some foul sentiment about that from a certain subset of trophy hunters on the forums, but the way I reason is: I’ve already done it once. It’s clear I can do it. If the list is trash or the game wasn’t as fun as I expected, why would I put myself through that hassle a second time?

This guy is like the modern day Tyndale, printing these heretical physical manuals in his basement while digital persecution rages in the outside world

Yes, restrict your first party output to what is by far the smallest install base. Do not offset Gamepass expenditures by recouping those cannibalized sales with all the units moved on PlayStation and/or switch. Because you don’t answer to shareholders or have any fiduciary responsibility whatsoever.

That guy sitting behind you in the theatre, the one kicking the back of your seat and talking and who keeps checking his phone during the movie—that’s the invader out to ruin your experience.

@Rich33 It will be, in comparison. Just like the series S version will be compromised compared to the X version, and just like the Pro in comparison with someone’s $5,000 RTX 8090 super Ti + 99,9950X3D pc. It’s the nature of the beast; unless a game is at Bethesda levels of piss poor optimization then more powerful hardware will always run it better.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the base PS5 version will be bad by any stretch of the imagination either. It’s just the reality of technology.

Nightdive is one of my favorite retro/remake/remaster studios and they seem to be doing well under Atari. I’m hopeful Implicit Conversions prospers too. As others have said, it is a strange thing indeed to have lived through the Atari downfall and Jaguar debacle and to now think ‘well at least [insert studio] wasn’t acquired by Sony or Microsoft.’

As far as I’m concerned, we already received (or are about to) 90% of anything they have that’s worth playing. I would have liked to see Sunset Overdrive, Quantum Break and the Alan Wake American Nightmare dlc, but those were unlikely to ever get ported regardless due to cost/demand.

After everything is said and done, even if Xbox returns to exclusivity moving forward I feel like I’ve had my fill of what they can offer. A re-exclusive Forza 8 or Halo 10 is unlikely to be something that makes me think ‘I must have an xbox to play this.’

To paraphrase an old saying, Microsoft needs to make up its mind and port or get off the pot.

I got this platinum so long ago I don’t recall much of anything about the game other than there were some trophies in the single player portion that still required online connectivity. Something about fighting whales, or whaling if memory serves. I wonder if they corrected that aspect because I recall the trophy hunting community being pissed at that at the time. Unreliable, glitchy etc. They’d be smart to axe that or make it so it can be completed entirely offline.

I’ll wait for the inevitable post-patch hour long glitch compilations to start showing up on YouTube rather than trust that Bethesda knows what it’s doing.

First GT I never even played, let alone purchased. Can’t own it? Don’t want it. When they mint the game on-disc and don’t require any internet downloads/connectivity, I’ll pick this up. Until then, racing games are a dime a dozen.

This one’s always been utterly and completely obvious to anyone who can set aside personal preference/fanboyisms and look at things objectively.

The Gamepass model could work, theoretically—with enough volume. If it couldn’t, Microsoft would have never pursued it to begin with. They honestly thought they could garner enough subscribers to make it work, but in the end they could not.

Without the required volume of users, it’s all the stuff anyone with half a brain has said over and over already—it’s cannibalizing sales and deincentivizing purchasing games à la carte; it’s creating subscription fatigue for its users; skyrocketing development costs are at odds with unsustainable profit margin expectations etc etc etc.

Sony is waiting to collect each golden egg their golden goose lays. Microsoft got out the axe and realized their pyrite goose’s belly was, alas, empty.

Loved Ecco on Megadrive, love the idea of having a PS5 collection. Hate that the words “built-in speedrunning support…and leaderboards” are even mentioned. Hope they don’t ruin the trophy list by forcing that slop. That was never what these games were about.

I hope Xbox sticks with this mentality and it produces more tangible changes. Ultimately, I’d like to see 1st party content be unwound from Gamepass and the industry to get back to the age old, tried and true method of ‘make game, sell game’. Subscription services should never be the primary method of dispensing content, they should only ever be additive. Complimentary. Supplementary. Not the focus.

Someone should make a tie-in game for the movie

Quite pleased I invested in the Pro early. Got modest fps increases around launch, like an appetizer of the big performance gains that are beginning to become more regular occurrences. If only the console itself wasn’t a monolithic hunk of ugly plastic. Fingers crossed PS6’s design hearkens back to launch model PS2 aesthetics and design principles.

The full game is not on the disc and isn’t even playable without a download. This should read “…in tracked fake physical & digital US full dollar sales”

Lousy criteria.

This is the perfect game to highlight what good vs. bad trophy criteria feels like.

As things stand, there’s essentially zero challenge here and you might as well hack your account and just add a platinum. But this could easily have gone in the polar opposite direction, which would have been just as bad an implementation. Imagine being forced to beat a Magnus Carlson calibre ai opponent to earn a trophy.

No, as in all things balance is the key. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Provide a decent challenge on the road to the platinum without being stupidly easy or exclusionarily unfair to the average gamer.

Edit-Magnus Carlsen not Carlson lol

@Haruki_NLI I despise Gacha games but despite that feel this one is high profile enough and technically impressive enough (for a Gacha) that it’s worth an article.

Also, I would not be opposed to this hypothetical boob-physics article you speak of.

Is this a once-and-done verification, or do you have to scan that stupid QR code every time you start a party chat? Also, are there any extenuating provisions for those with Benjamin Button syndrome?

Hoping it’s not actually vaporware, this looked quite good on those rare instances it was shown.

Nice job. Fun little game with a rather well designed trophy list.

Sort of moved on after the news broke that the disc would still require a download to play. I have too much other (arguably better) stuff in my physical backlog to bother with a studio that pushed out a fake ‘physical’ release.

Finished that trash raid in the slop of Yotei dlc, so now I can move on to something well designed and competently made. Pity sucker punch didn’t make any legitimately engaging dlc content for Yotei like they did with that awesome Iki Island expansion in the first game.

What they offered was mostly ‘Run to point A!! Kill enemies! Now run to point B!! Kill more enemies! Lather, rinse and repeat!’ I felt genuinely stupider after slogging through that low-iq fodder.

Looks good, but I’ll need to check the trophy list. If it’s onerous, I have plenty of other games to occupy my time rather than sink tens of hours into overly tedious or needlessly difficult trophy criteria.

@TheArt I hear you. This isn’t a new problem; a janky, formulaic, by-the-numbers rpg completely broken on a technical level inexplicably beat out Dark Souls in 2011 for GotY. It can be incomprehensible when it happens, and it’ll doubtless happen again in the future.