Balaam_

Is traditional single player story content without any gimmicks too much to ask? No rogue lite modes, no wave survival modes, no multiplayer anything, just plain old story content. Elden Ring put out one of the best DLC’s of all time, and it was 100% single player and didn’t even force additional trophies down everyone’s throats. Copy that model.

Tekken 3 is one of the best fighters ever made, certainly on the PS1. Accidentally clicked Nah, Not Really when looking at the related poll choices; I intended to push Yeah, I’m Happy

Unless this effort spills over into guaranteeing any formerly online-only trophies are still attainable, this is a half step to nowhere. Either flip a switch and auto pop any online-only trophies when a server closes, or build in redundancies to ensure they’re obtainable offline.

Rumor has it a Sony executive poked his head in a hallway door and saw pre alpha footage of The Final Remaining Ones of Us and then called off the mobile adaptation.

So my choices are to play from the comfort of my plush armchair watching the action unfold on a gorgeous 4K@144Hz OLED…or hunched over this thing with one eye on the battery indicator and the other on a fuzzier resolution with cut down settings?

I only hope it’s better than the ‘third person modes’ in Bethesda’s games (Skyrim, oblivion, fallouts). Those 3rd person modes feel horrrendously bad. It took me longer than I care to admit until I pieced together exactly why they feel so bad—it’s because when in third person, you aren’t actually controlling the onscreen character model. You are still controlling the reticle.

Test it out for yourself and see. They literally just overlay a representation of a character model atop the standard first person mode, slightly off center, and call it 3rd person. Movements all feel off, as if there’s a disconnect between your inputs and the character model. If you cover the portion of the screen with the onscreen character, it is identical in behavior to the first person mode.

This is different than most other games built from the ground up with an actual third person perspective. Play something like MGS5 and note the precision movement, inverse kinematics, terrain positioning and reorienting etc etc and you’ll notice the difference between a legitimate 3rd person mode and faux 3rd person.

Yeah, this isn’t the same studio making Outer Worlds 2, but it’s under that umbrella. Hopefully they do what Bethesda either can’t or won’t.

Silent Hill 2 and Tekken 3? Good month.

Not as long as any Chadley type characters with tedious, immersion breaking, waste of time arena battles are still in the game and swinging the buster sword at him doesn’t do anything it won’t be.

Wish there was a ‘It feels too soon’ poll choice for whether or not I’m excited for PS6. I am, but I don’t want it to arrive until November 2028 at the absolute earliest. I’d be fine with 2029.

DF was none too pleased either, Mr Linneman mentioned this one briefly in either this week’s or the past week’s Direct. I tend to agree with him often whenever retro games or remasters/remakes are concerned.

Let’s hope for the sake of those interested in this game that they don’t butcher the GI like on the Xbox version, as well as fixing the arbitrary and nonoptimal framerate cap in the one mode. Ditching the framegen they implemented to get to 60fps and doing it natively would also be a huge win as far as lag is concerned. Lots of strange choices made with this one, now that I think about it.

Solid 9. No game is truly perfect, but for a game of its type this is about as close as you get. From a trophy hunting perspective I’m not looking forward to that garbage Legends multiplayer slop they’re going to shoehorn in to what was ostensibly presented as a single player epic, but the game is so good I’ll make the rare exception and slog through that tedious trash like I did with Tsushima.

Really not expecting this to have beat out Silksong, but I’m glad it did. Silksong is great, but not enough to it to keep me engaged for long. SH:F has more going for it to keep my interest.

Idk, a game where you can go around stealthily dispatching members of the Kay Kay Kay seems like a slam dunk to me.

Depends on what’s coming out. No other way to frame things, really. There are blocks of time where my wallet was crying, having bought 5-6 games in a two month span. In times of gaming drought, I recall going more than 6 months without anything coming out that looked remotely good enough to buy. But on average, I went with the ‘about once every 3 months’ option.

This is analogous to some terrible accident. The victim appeared gone, but now we have a pulse. Once we learn if at least the base game will be playable offline from the disc, the condition will either be upgraded to Stable or the patient will flatline.

Perfect excuse to replay this, thanks Remedy.

I like how many of the same people who push for an exclusive-less, pure multiplatform approach to game releases under the pretense that games should be available to everyone regardless of platform are also some of the loudest who lash out against the accessibility options, thereby denying an equal experience for handicapped/differently abled gamers (or anyone who just plain stinks at games in general).

Apparently people deserve equal rights to be able to buy games, but not when it comes to the experience of actually playing them.

With any luck they’ll axe the multiplayer for this remaster. The base game is phenomenal (in other news, water is wet) but that mp is just a tedious slog through waist high rubbish and nothing but an obstacle to full Platinum+100% trophy completion. Get rid of that tacked on mess and let the glorious single player campaign shine.

“…designed, engineered and built by Xbox.”

Designed and engineered, yeah, but doesn’t AMD handle the fab work at its plants? They must be referring to the “other devices” in the same statement when they say “built by Xbox” as I’m pretty sure Xbox doesn’t have foundries spinning up silicon and etching die’s.

@BearsEatBeets Rumors have been circulating for ages now that Valve may give it a second try.

It seems all the low intellect fanboys and YouTubers that heralded the acquisition as somehow inexplicably ‘Good for Gamers’ and ‘Good for the Industry’ are now realizing what the rest of us knew all along. Somewhere Lina Khan and Jim Ryan are having coffee together and both are laughing like the J. Jonah Jameson gif

Xbox’s Concord moment

Have my $5 minimum deposit for preorder in at a few places. If Microsoft/Bethesda butchers their opportunity here by issuing little more than a blank disc with a few mb’s on it, it’s no problem to cancel my orders. After that it’s just a matter of waiting for the steepest discount on the digital version I can find so as to give them as little money as possible.

A bit surprising. I expected Silksong to annihilate everything, but I guess the casuals who only play sports games and wait for the latest iteration outnumber the Silksong fans. That, or perhaps it’s down to release timing and Silksong will shoot up next month.

How is this a “publishing matter”? Sounds more like a development matter to me. Should have been properly implemented at launch to begin with.

$30 a month for access to something I won’t even own, which can be patched/altered/changed/removed without warning while not necessarily even having a disc version to fall back on? No thanks

Fantastic news. If someone with a track record as laughably poor as Pachter’s says this, all my worries are gone. We can conclude Sony is doing just fine.

Any word on whether the game data is contained on-disc? Seems like the sort of thing Bethesda should have mentioned in the post, kind of dodgy they didn’t. I’d be ok if some of the bonus deluxe content required a download, but if the full main game isn’t there in its entirety this is literally pointless.

That prototype PS1 looks like one of those pretentious faucets you’ll find in the bathroom of an upscale restaurant. Still looks better than the PS5’s design :/

Someone should tell Obi-Wan we’ve finally found a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than the Mos Eisley Cantina

Not ideal, but at least they aren’t potentially screwing with the actual trophy system or adding some other stat that will be permanently attached to one’s account. Nothing worse than ‘you have a finite amount of time to unlock this tchotchke, and if you miss the window of opportunity you’re screwed for all eternity’.

Happy with both machines, but good lord are they ugly. Fingers crossed whoever designed the plastic shell has been handed a mop instead, with someone else at the helm of aesthetic design.

I would be, if not for the imminent arrival of Ghost of Yotei. I don’t like splitting my focus between such high calibre releases, so I’m waiting on Silent Hill F.

I have a feeling DigitalFoundry is going to have a field day with this one. Some shots looked really stunning, but I noticed quite a bit of artifacting, fizzling, occlusion issues etc and that was while watching a fairly high quality stream.

@Northern_munkey Darn straight. I’d much prefer to allot the time it would take to ‘git gud’ and eventually prevail on Hellwalker mode to other games in my backlog, ones with respectable, well thought out trophy lists that value people’s time. This is, of course, providing there’s even a trophy for that mode in Phantom Blade—I don’t think any list has leaked yet, so we don’t know for sure either way. The game looks so good though, so even if they botch the list I may still pick it up down the road in the bargain bin and play it on my alt.

If you’re going to go the console route, at least you have choices. You can get the family friendly hybrid with best-in-class first party exclusive support. You can get the de facto 3rd party machine that’s considerably more capable, has some incredible exclusives of its own and full 3rd party support in addition to most of its direct competitor’s games. Or you could get…the less powerful, more expensive console that has next to no true exclusives, dwindling third party support and whose very continued existence is murky.

I found a fix, similar to the Gearbox suggestion but it permanently fixes the problem. First, quit the game.

That’s it. There are no more steps.

If true, fantastic news. As something of a history buff, ever since the original game my sentiment has been ‘I wish that cheesy animus stuff wasn’t part of the game. Seems like an attempt to shoehorn some lame overarching plot to connect everything and ensure the door remains open for prospective sequels’. I say retcon the entire animus stuff and keep them individual adventure stories that explore characters and events from different historical eras, nothing more.

You either die preferring physical media, or live long enough to see yourself become part of the problem.

If they don’t interfere with trophies, they’d be the perfect solution to circumvent awful trophy design. No trophy hunter wants to be forced to repeatedly beat the same game over and over on tedious, ever increasing difficulties. That’s a colossal waste of time that could be more enjoyably spent elsewhere. Had this been an option at launch (and if they don’t interfere with trophy progression), I would unquestionably have used them for that grueling, laborious chore that is the Hard mode (and also those horrendously awful Chadley challenges). Doing them legit provided zero satisfaction or sense of pride; it was all a tedious chore that kept me from getting to other games as soon as I would have liked.

Agreed, these are really great titles. They basically did everything right. Separate trophy SKU’s for the dlc/add on was a god tier management decision. Let those who want them go for them, don’t screw with the 100%+platinum of those who don’t. Win-win.

I’m really only waiting for one specific FF9 related bit of news: whether or not that stupidly brutal ‘jump rope one thousand times ‘ trophy is part of the remake. Without remote play and a pc macro cheater, it essentially makes the current ps1 remastered version’s platinum unobtainable, which is a glaring oversight on the part of the devs. If they pull the same nonsense here, it’s an immediate Pass for me.

Any word on whether that ‘cheat’ mode will be added to PlayStation versions by way of a patch? And whether or not it will affect trophies? I have a handicapped friend who goes for platinums when possible, and he was severely disappointed at the hard mode related FF7R trophy requirements that effectively locked him out of 100%. He’s hoping this will circumvent that poorly thought out, anti-disabled-gamer trophy design. And for those wondering, Yes I’ve had the plat for years and No he wouldn’t just let me unlock it for him. He wants to do it himself.

Usually I can find something each month worth playing, but this time it really is a genuinely bad selection of games.

Regardless of whether the original’s artistic vision was compromised or not, Demon’s Souls Remake is still stunning to this day. The fidelity is out of this world, and performance is surprisingly solid.

I want that truck from Spielberg’s movie Duel as an add-on. That guy knew how to motivate other drivers on the road 😌

Tough decision. The game itself is a fantastic little platformer, but there’s more to the overall experience than just that. The trophy list is a tedious nightmare of a chore for trophy hunter completionists, which really drags down the fun factor. You could design the perfect luxury sports car, but if you decide to make the steering wheel out of razor blades it’ll ruin an otherwise magnificent driving experience. I’d give the game itself an 8 or a 9, the trophy list a 1 or a 2, which means the whole thing averages out somewhere in between.

Should have sprung for the ‘Silver briefcase handcuffed to armed security guard’ priority shipping

I could comment on what I hope the internals will be, or that they hopefully commit to physical media for at least the entirety of the upcoming generation, but instead I’ll throw this out there: I’m praying it won’t look as hideous on the outside as the PS5 models do. I’m hoping whoever designed the ps5’s plastic shell was out the door a long time ago, and that they somehow get the person who designed the PS2 or PS4 launch models back to do the PS6.