Balaam_

It looks cool and I bet the gunplay feels solid as with all Bungie games. Too bad everything else about this game is the complete opposite of what I’m looking for. I’d have bought this immediately if it had been a single player focused, narrative driven sci-fi game.

I hope if he uses the chains it isn’t just CGI. The axe shouldn’t be an issue (except the boomerang effect obviously) but I can see them ditching practical effects for the chains. That would be a shame.

Practical special effects > CGI

Exclusives being good for brand recognition and as a way to entice users into an ecosystem really isn’t a matter of debate. Forget gaming, this is why any exclusive product or service exists. It’s the reason McDonald’s won’t let Burger King sell a Big Mac, it’s a reason you can’t buy Reebok Air Jordan’s or a Ford Corvette. Exclusivity matters, period.

It is, however, wise to broaden the reach of live service multiplayer focused type games and expand those titles to reach as large an audience as possible. The very nature of the thing in question thrives or dies based on player count, so it is an altogether different beast.

Really like the fact that when you guys at PushSquare write up these sale related articles, you take the time to list the physical releases too (when applicable). That’s going above and beyond 👍

“Here’s some salt in your Bluepoint wounds.”—Hermen Hulst

I knew this would happen. Catering to the larger demographic with the cheesy over the top action instead of what made the originals so great to begin with: survival horror. Wha Capcom should have done is split Requiem into two actual games, one for the slobbering masses and one for the elites.

@Fiendish-Beaver it’s developer dependent. Some games force you into only one mode that uses PSSR, some games offer a toggle, and some games don’t use it at all. Good news is Sony first party games are largely pretty good about using it and implementing it well. Same can’t be said for certain third party titles.

There are two types of consumer, the informed and the uninformed.

The informed consumer (most likely the ‘hardcore’ gamer) already knows a bit about the industry and the players in it and how they operate. They know Microsoft’s abysmal track record of flip flopping, abruptly changing course, empty statements and the litany of broken promises. Trust in the brand or leadership is at an all time low and completely eroded, and would take generations to build back (if that’s even possible at this point).

The uninformed consumer (‘casual’ gamer) is the person who walks into a Walmart or Best Buy or is shopping around online and sees a PlayStation copy of Halo or Gears and thinks ‘Hey I thought that was an Xbox game? I guess PlayStation bought the rights or they’re the ones who make them now, neat.’ It’s a passing thought. They aren’t following the industry, don’t know the monumental shift over the past 5 years and don’t really care enough to learn what’s been happening. To them, it’s simply ‘I can get that Halo on the PlayStation now, so I don’t need to look at the Xbox stuff.’ They won’t know who Asha is, that the multiplatform push could theoretically be walked back, any of that. And they won’t care. The uninformed consumer will drop Xbox from the radar.

Even if Microsoft does yet another 180, it might not even matter now.

Up until quite recently I was of the mindset that no matter how badly you detest what Xbox’s vision for what the industry should be is, the alternative(s) were going to be worse.

An Apple console? A Google console? An Amazon console? All bad.

But that was before ai clouded Satya’s mind and began rotting his brain. Now I’m not so sure Microsoft is the better of these evils. It’s a pipe dream, but I want nothing more than for current Microsoft to bow out and 90’s Sega to come back and replace them as the third big player in the console hardware space. Won’t happen, but just imagine if it did😍

Cannot begin to fathom the mentality of someone who saw this and thought ‘that looks good, I will buy and play it’. I am bewildered.

Seems to be a good choice, but this might be a case of too little, too late.

Best anime of all time.

Sounds good. I’ll still hold off until a year or so after launch. Can’t trust them not to shoehorn in another horrendously awful and out of place rogue like mode and forceably attach trophies to it. Not going through that slop again like how they blindsided players with Ragnarok or the PS5 version of TLoU2.

It’s not a first party game. It’s a second or third party game depending on how you want to look at it, so I always expected it to inevitably head to other platforms. When you contract someone you don’t own to make something you don’t own, you won’t ever have eternal exclusive rights to that thing. It’s why they’re called ‘timed exclusives’ and not ‘exclusives’.

At the end of the day the game is fantastic. Best real time 3D combat I’ve ever played. If ShiftUp wants more people to experience their awesome game and pay them for the privilege, I say that’s great.

I wonder which would be potentially more damaging to the brand—another 10 years of this RAM crisis, or another 10 years of Hermen Hulst? 🤔

This is Xbox-level tone deaf stupidity.

Haven’t had a chance to give it the time (I hope) it deserves, but I like what I’ve seen from screenshots and gameplay snippets. Great pixel art, solid looking combat/gamplay, good ambient fx and score, and while I only took a cursory glance at the trophy list it seems well designed (i.e. no online trophies, no difficulty related trophies, no low effort tacked on modes like wave survival or rogue like stuff etc). If the game proves to be what I think it’ll be, I’m expecting a solid 8 experience.

What about the static NPC’s rooted to the ground? What about the hideous visual aesthetic and its garish pastels? These glaring issues haven’t been addressed, and true PS5 Pro support is nonexistent.

£100 says you won’t get 20mins into Elder Scrolls 6 without getting stuck in the stairs, falling though the map or soft locking the game in some way. That Creation Engine is the root of most of Bethesda’s problems. Gamers want quality, stability and polish—we don’t care if you can stack a thousand grilled cheese sandwiches in a line and topple them like dominos. Someone needs to do the world a favor and take the Creation Engine out behind the barn and put it out of everyone’s misery.

I hear the Pro has difficulty upscaling hideously garish pastel visuals. I wanted Avowed to look like the awesome teaser reveal trailer, but it’s clear they…went a different direction.

I’m aware this game is of necessity shackled to online servers, so a true physical copy was likely never going to happen anyway, but pretending this was a different game with equally awesome packaging I’d still say: No physical disc in box, No buy

I’m none too concerned, it’s too high profile an IP to not perfect the gameplay style, whichever way they choose to go. I’m far more concerned with Sony’s history of ‘it’s fine how it is, let’s force in content no one asked for to fix what isn’t broke’ mentality. They might try to bolt on some awful rogue like mode like they did with Ragnarok.

Actually, what really needs to happen is to ditch the side content, that Challenge of Olympus mode or whatever it was called.

Wave survival modes are just about the most patently obvious low-effort “extra content” a developer can add to pad out their game. It’s tedious, repetitive and doesn’t fit the core gameplay loop, the driving reason behind why anyone would buy/play GoW to begin with.

@get2sammyb No, “a great game with bad trophies is still a great game” is not true. You’re allowing your personal opinion to cloud what should be an unbiased, impartial assessment. Just because trophies aren’t that important to you and don’t necessarily impact your experience doesn’t mean that everyone else feels the same way. This is effectively the same as someone saying ‘Mind’s Eye is a great game because I didn’t mind the endless bugs and technical issues.’ That’s faulty reasoning.

If you wanted to highlight a specific aspect of an otherwise great game with bad trophies, that would be different. Mind’s Eye may have had great combat or something (don’t know, didn’t play it, don’t really care) and you can cite that point, but you can’t say it’s a “great game”. A “great game” is the composite experience as a whole. A bad trophy list is hand picked by developers and is part of the intended experience and drags that down.

Online multiplayer doesn’t belong in a game of this nature, never did. Konami made the right call. The psp game was structured differently and online made more sense there. It’s been so long since I went through PW that I don’t recall if there are any online specific trophies, but if so these should be reconfigured to be unlockable offline as well to protect the trophy hunting experience from server closures, bugs, the added hassle of even playing online etc.

No sports team goes for a Hail Mary type of play unless they’re either so far ahead it doesn’t matter, or so far behind that it’s their only option. When you’re comfortably in the lead, you don’t take unnecessary risks.

PlayStation has nothing to gain by messing with the status quo, while the Xbox brand is in dire peril, shriveling like a raisin in the sun. It’s do or die for them, so their desperation moves are logical. There’s a reason Xbox didn’t port everything to PS3 during the 360 gen. Those days are over for Team Green and they’re just trying to stay afloat while they tread water.

So the game operates under a single player first mindset, multiplayer is an afterthought, and no multiplayer trophies to screw up the trophy list? Sounds perfect to me.

Love that Konami is returning to form, but this rpg was immediately dead the moment they showed what it looked like. This is th exact same cookie cutter, generic anime art style that’s copied&pasteda thousand times over in the past 10 years. If you took these screenshots and said it was a new Trails game or a new Gatcha game no one would know any different.

Doesn’t mean the game is automatically bad, but it does mean they’ve failed to capture my interest. A game is a composite of multiple aspects, a strong core visual identity needing to be one of them. This doesn’t have it.

Jaffe can be contentious to be sure, but I picked out one sliver of his rant I can get behind 100% (and which makes a larger point): the 2D games he cited which “look better” (Shinobi, Blasphemous, Ninja Gaiden etc) genuinely do look better. I don’t hate Sons of Sparta’s visual aesthetic, but it could have been a bit better I think. More important, Jaffe didn’t cite one of the trillion of ugly magic marker styled 2D games to compare it to—and in that way he’s 100% right. He picked games with a visual design language and art style that actually are top of their class.

There are literally countless games (both 2D and 3D) that all use that magic marker slop aesthetic, the ‘Fortnite look’. The new 2D Castlevania shown off at this most recent State of Play is a prime example. The gameplay looks great and I’m overjoyed to get a new 2D entry in the series, but that artistic ‘style’ is just awful. It’s cheap, low effort, and reminiscent of a low budget Saturday morning cartoon from the era post when cartoons used to look good.

Can’t wait for Jonathan Ferguson, the Keeper of Firearms and Artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in the UK, which houses a collection of thousands of iconic weapons from throughout history to analyze the game and its depiction of weaponry and the handling of said weaponry.

It’s almost like all the goodwill that Bethesda, CDPR and others have lost over the recent years has been soaked up by Warhorse. Those guys just keep doing everything right. Queue up that Leo DiCaprio meme ‘Gentlemen, you had my curiosity with the 60fps; now you have my money with the physical disc.’

Classic Castlevania fan here, very happy to see a new 2D installment, and the actual gameplay looked solid. That art style is trash though. Cheap, low quality aesthetic, so unappealing. Fingers crossed the next game(s) they reveal will either shoot for realism or old school pixel art, not this generic magic marker style infecting too many of today’s games.

Ok that was pretty freakin good.

Whose idea was it to remove the explanation as to what the update does from the actual update screen on PlayStation and replace it with a QR code? That is the stupidest possible decision they could have made regarding this. Yeah, create an extra, completely unnecessary step when it was perfectly fine before. Probably the same person that removed the ability to sort our trophy lists alphabetically like how it was on PS3, replaced with the awful ‘last game you unlock a trophy in gets forced to the top of the list’ method.

Elated to see this course correction. The obvious thing to do would have been to not require the needlessly tedious battle arena slop or pointlessly restrictive Hard mode requirements for the trophy list in the first place, but at least they’re fixing those mistakes. I’ve done them already, this doesn’t affect me personally speaking, but it’s nice for my fellow trophy hunting bretheren to be able to have a now-competently curated platinum to work toward, one where the devs acknowledge our time is more valuable than their personal opinion(s) on what should be required for certain trophy unlocks. Hopefully they design a better list for part 3 or at least incorporate these ‘trash trophy workarounds’ into that game at launch.

I voted for Cairn. Those Trails games all blend together and I absolutely despise that cheap generic anime aesthetic. I’m not exactly thrilled with Cairn’s art style either, but it’s at least trying to be something different gameplay-wise.

Great game, solid remaster (even if the lack of 60fps on current gen stinks). More relevantly, this one has a fantastic and enjoyable trophy list. Much better than the Crash remaster (although the games themselves are solid remakes too). Devs should consider what the trophy hunting audience wants rather than try to shove arbitrary time trials down everyone’s throats.

@Scottyy I know exactly what you mean with reference to PSN not giving you an option to buy the game because you already ‘bought’ it through PS+. That’s so irritating. There may be a workaround, but I’m not entirely sure, and it would involve jumping through several hoops.

Unfortunately, I have news for you: you won’t “own” the game if you buy the twin pack either. No one ‘owns’ digital games, you’re buying a license to access the game which can be revoked at any time, for any reason, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The only way to actually truly own the game would be to hunt down a physical copy.

Cool, this soulless multiplayer focused game creates a nice void in which I can chip away at the old backlog while I wait for the next real Horizon game.

It will feel so morally good to circumvent garbage trophy design by selectively using these.

I got the PS4 platinum for FF7R legit soon after launch and those horrendously tedious Chadley challenges were pure filth, along with Hard Mode’s stupid nonsensical gameplay restrictions. What a boring chore it was to slog through that crap. Booted up the PS5 version recently for a replay (trash trophy list aside, it’s a good game otherwise) and played through normally until the badly designed parts—I cranked the cheats on to speed though that slop. Felt great. Can’t wait to trample the intentions of whoever was responsible for curating the trophy list for Rebirth as well.

Hard to believe something that only looks…this good didn’t already have a 60fps mode.

Immediately turned off by the low budget Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic, and the ‘online live service-y’ feel is the other nail in the coffin. Hope it does well for Sony so maybe they’ll finally get a cash cow and go back to making the types of games I actually want to play, but in reality this reveal means less than nothing to me.

Looks promising.

Good news!…if the full game is on disc(s). If not, this is literally irrelevant since it would be a digital release masquerading behind the lie of being a physical release anyway.

Is that quote accurate or a quirk of cross language communication?

“We do have PS5 Pro enhancement.” is either grammatically incorrect and no big deal, or it literally means they have one enhancement. I’m not going to nitpick the grammar of someone who may not speak English well, but if there really is only one enhancement that sounds kind of lame. It better be something of consequence, like it’s 60fps on Pro vs 30 on the other consoles or else…blah

Great idea, terrible execution if this really does use a touchscreen. Besides the general crap quality of mobile games, one of the biggest downsides is touch screen controls. The rare instances I play a mobile game I am forever ‘losing’ the button or stick, as in I think I’m pressing it but because the button doesn’t actually physically exist there’s no tactile feel to maintain that brain-thumb connection. Touch screen controls (as a main method of play, not a sparsely used gimmick) are trash.

Allowing us to swap button placements would be nice if it used physical buttons somehow, but also largely redundant. The DualSense is easily one of the best controllers I’ve ever held and quite literally the only thing I’d change is to go for offset sticks. That’s it. Otherwise it’s perfect.

The sister site put up a bar chart, and what’s interesting is PS+ (which is not a platform, but a service on a platform) was listed whereas Gamepass was nowhere to be seen. Unless that’s a mistake (or a poorly cobbled together chart where Gamepass is included as part of a different item but not mentioned) then that’s way worse than Xbox consoles having less a share of devs’ interest. Remember, Microsoft is trying to spin failing hardware an console marketshare into a magical positive, as if they never cared about that anyway and only focus on services and subscriptions now. Well…where’s the devs’ interest in gamepass on this chart then?

There must be more than one Bonkers game, because the only one I remember playing on the Genesis wasn’t a sidescroller. It was a collection of different mini games, some puzzle related others action oriented. I don’t know enough about this collection to know which Bonkers game this is, but it would be nice to revisit for nostalgia’s sake.

This does look pretty awesome. I know John Linneman from Digital Foundry must be excited for it, he did a lengthy retrospective of the older titles in a video. $100 says he mispronounces the word basically as “basely” at least 5 times when he inevitably covers this game.

If it’s worth it in the end, I have no problem waiting. If it isn’t, what did we all wait for? It’s a dangerous line Judas is walking, but Bioshock is one of my all time favorite games so I’m not writing this one off just yet.

Top of the line with story, gameplay and tech; bottom of the barrel when designing a competent, trophy hunter completionist friendly trophy list.