GirlVersusGame

Enjoying my first Yakuza game, I can't say I know what's happening but I like it and the game-play loop is very enjoyable. I found a book that goes deep into the series lore/etc too so I'm finding out about the other games outside of this one. - happy gaming folks

@Onearmbandit I see your Cult of Static, good choice.

@exile93 I see why you like this game, I just need to get better at blocking. It's great so far.

I've been wanting to say day one buy for so long, this definitely is one of them. Hopefully physical too, there's a lot they can do with a special edition. One of the last ones came with a really nice custom deck of cards. There are so many Fable books too for anyone who wants to dip into the lore and world before the game releases. Some of the novels came with DLC codes too, I haven't seen any other franchise do that. Blood Ties is one of the best in the series.

@DTfearTheBEARD I was stuck on that game on Steam, a lot of people were. There was a certain point where things would just one shot you, prepare to grind. It's worth reading about the augments first too, I tried to wing it, bad idea. It's got a great soundtrack by Pawel Blaszczak too, same guy as the original Witcher and Dying Light. He's up there with Jesper Kyd. I might play through it again on console before it leaves.

@exile93 Thanks I'll give it a try, I've been enjoying turn based in Pathfinder, Persona 5 and in Unicorn Overlord. It's definitely been a different way to play. The series has been showing up for years and I never knew when to jump in. I've been looking for something bigger to break into after a string of small Indies.

@PuppetMaster I'll look into that one too, that dolphin though.

@StitchJones It's the same Mogwai as 'auto rock' from their 2006 album, small world. I've been listening to them for years and didn't realize they were the same band.

I really need to play one of the games in the series, just the dolphin thumbnail is enough to justify it.

@StitchJones Thanks for reminding me to look up the soundtrack, I meant to do it after playing the games and never did.

It makes me want a new Wipeout game. All I can see when I look at those are ship decals.

@Dan12836666 Word of warning that game crashes a lot on PS5 and on the Pro. It crashed every time I fast travelled, entered a cut-scene, or visited the village. The 'kind of' fix I found was to disable the sync on my saves. It was conflicting with Uplay, once I did that it didn't crash as much. It's a good game, they just need to fix that save issue or sync issue. It's worth looking into it before you do play it. I had to fight the end boss six times in a row until it finally allowed me to continue. I ended up watching the cutscenes on Youtube, it was that broken.

@ilyn I was trained to use a cinema projector a couple of years ago, the guy owned a chain of theaters and had a projector in his home. I still don't know if he was winding me up but he told me that back in the old days the bulb was so strong that if it blew it could take out half of the room. I thought of that every time I laced up up a projector, it was 35mm film and comes on multiple reels then you splice it and run it off platters. The sound is separate and has to be synced by a computer system. That type of bulb would have to run a massive machine so maybe he was serious. I did it because I wanted to learn to lace a projector, it's easier with small hands. It took him maybe thirty minutes to lace one, I got it down to twenty minutes but after what he said about the bulb I said thank you and wanted to get away from that machine.

Some of those bulbs go from 10K lumens to 60K, we had an industrial sized blonde explode on a film set once. Grips call lights after women. That thing was running off it's own generator not the studios grid and when it went the BOOM was massive, they had to clear the set. I can't imagine what a machine like a boiler would be like, lights were enough. It sounds like an interesting job, I can't imagine you did it without some kind of Hurt Locker level of protection.

@SteveJaye Thanks Jaye. I think there's propaganda on both sides. Except on one side it's softer and it slowly works it's way into peoples minds and days by making them fear the ultimate scenario then stresses them out. Back home my entire Christmas was turned into battle plan, it was loud and nonstop every day and every where I went. I called it real life V for Vendetta for a reason, billboards all over Moscow. Propaganda and giving into fear is so dangerous. I had to leave early, people have lost their minds.

It's lead me to believe that conflict on such a scale is mental illness, almost like we've learned to wipe out life on an industrial scale before we've gotten past the illness of wanting to do it in the first place. Enjoy your Megadeth, I am.

@MrPeanutbutterz This echos almost word for word what I keep hearing from that other side of the fence but it's been a constant for over a year now, and yet I wake up every day and the world is still here. I tend to just agree with Ministry 'fear is big business' and I have no time for it. I focus more on Megadeth 'peace sells and who's buying?'. Propaganda has made me cynical. Either way you get Metal, so you get what I'm saying. It's a universal language.

I never thought I'd be Youtubing videos of boilers exploding but if it was anything like that then I can't imagine the shock people got or the damage it did. The steam one I saw blew a ten meter hole in a wall.

@MrPeanutbutterz You are only as old as you feel. Which is either a good thing, or a bad thing.

Happy with the selection, I'll probably try Art of the Rally after MrPeanutbutterz's recommendation. I'm not sure what Exit 8 even is but I might try that too. Darkest dungeon 2 also looks interesting, so a good month.

I'm not sure what I just watched but I like what I saw. It reminds me a cross between Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (my first Medtroidvania, loved it) and Odin Sphere. It helps when you can see beyond the horniness and view the game for what it is, I'd play it.

@BentIeyma This. But they should have at least gotten the difficulty right, and enchanting. Adept meant the game was ridiculously easy and Expert meant I had to put thirty arrows into one wolf. It didn't level off until around level forty, I'm not sure people played that long. Everything else was manageable and most of those bugs people reported were something I never encountered. Except the forest lighting up like a rave, I really thought it would be worse. People were reporting issues with saves too, I never encountered that.

Enchanting was the big one, I found some obscure fix by doing something with the text size in the U.I. My build was broken without it. I probably put about four hundred hours into it before returning to Indies. It's the only shadow drop I've ever bought and it was running all day and all night, it was an addiction.

There goes my chance to complete my Arab Hajwala drift collection. I did buy some jank on there, because I knew it from Steam but the majority of shovelware made navigating the store a mess. I almost bought a rip-off of MegaBonk and others on multiple occasions. I definitely made less purchases on there last year, simply because I didn't know what I was looking at. I can't get to a console now but I'll be glad if that Banban thing is gone from my homepage.

That thing would not leave my latest games. Every time I checked the store I was met with that face.

Edit: never mind it's still there. As soon as I booted up, I saw it.

I'm still waiting for someone to add the white ashes.

I feel like a new copy of GTAV is purchased every time a child comes into the world, someone has to be buying it.

@Leetware1 I wish there were more parents like you. I do work for an organization that prevents exactly what you just said and if every parent were like you it would be so much easier. There would be far less children who need to be put back together. And I say children, not people, they aren't developed enough to understand why a grown adult would want to talk to them in the first place. They instead see the reward system, which so many modern games offer now.

@nessisonett They should and some organizations do send out packs and information, most schools won't do it. The material is too taboo for them and they feel (going from an actual response) that it's not their responsibility, it's the parents. That's for America, we haven't sent any to schools in England, it's a complicated situation. Some schools think it introduces an element that they aren't comfortable discussing.

I think had they been through it themselves they'd change their tune. I think it rests mostly with the parents, every parents I've talked to who was on that receiving end were absent in some way and turned to a console as a babysitter, mine too. That's the attitude, and when it does happen they button up and rarely share, which buries the issue even deeper. Gaming is a great hobby, but it's an entry point like you said and the main one we saw throughout last year. You already know which game.

@Korgon Different groups and organizations have been approaching all three with reasons and examples to prioritize child safety. It's on-going. When something does happen, it's too late. There's a push to be more proactive, it's necessary. Parents need to be educated too, siblings, and schools. It's a start.

Fishbowl and Moonlighter 2 are definitely going on my list. The first one had a really good rewarding game-loop. I'm onboard if they can improve on it in any way.

I was curious if this would make the jump to PS5, I could see it being popular with younger players, if they can pull it off technically. I'm holding out for Megabonk. I've seen a couple of knock-offs, hopefully the official version comes to console. I started it on PC then stopped, I prefer to rack up my hours on a console, it would be right at home on PS5.

@MrPeanutbutterz I'm going to try that game you mentioned. I never got into Expeditions, so many vehicles were too small. I can drive small vehicles in real life but no ones going to put me behind the wheel of an Azov 42-20 Antarctic, I know what would happen, so the other games in the series appeal more to me. I enjoyed that slower more difficult pace of the others, and still do. I started with Spintyres, then it became Mudrunner, no one understood why I wanted to play those games. Especially the older ones, they weren't as polished as Snowrunner and they were even slower, less forgiving and muckier. I called them Dark Souls with trucks, especially when they were so janky.

Then Snowrunner came along and more people finally tried the series. Expeditions isn't bad, I just couldn't stick with it. I played Roadcraft at launch, now I'm waiting for some DLCs. I'd hope for a new Snowrunner but realistically there are still DLCs I haven't played, they supported it for years. Maybe they'll do the same with Roadcraft, there's a lot of unmet potential in the game and Snowrunner became a different game with all of those DLCs.

I scrolled too fast I thought we were getting a new Sega Classics Collection (bundle) It's starting to seem like the first one was a once off. Unless someone knows otherwise.

BL1 and BL2 will always be two of my favorite games, BL3 never got there for me. I liked a lot of the systems and features they mentioned about BL4 so I'll probably end up playing it. There aren't many other shooters I'm interested. It bridges that sort of gap in genres for me. If I did play something like Destiny or Cod then I probably wouldn't buy BL4. Sometimes you need to just shoot things.

@RiotMaker2424 The game publisher doesn't always get enough notice. Movie studios just decide one day that it's going to be pulled. Sometimes it's because they are getting ready to reboot a franchise and they want to move away from the old Image. Warner Bros. distributed the last rebooted movie (Evil Dead: Rise) there's unofficial talk of a new one. The original Evil Deads were far superior but that's the way the system works.

Game companies don't always know what they are getting into with movie licensed games. It's too compartmentalized and all it takes is one person to make the choice. Usually that person doesn't even know what a video-game is. Vic Miller managed to get Friday the 13th shutdown and he's hardly a heavy weight compared to the actual studios. All it takes are 'licensing issues' (unofficially they want more money) and we lose a game. Unless of course there's a way to preserve a copy.

@Jrs1 £24 from Turkey at the moment. Price discrimination brings a lot of needed perspective to value. And a VPN can often be a lot cheaper than being ripped off for a year, or longer. You could even get a PO Box, send your purchases there, have it redirected and still save money each time. That's how much some countries are being ripped off right now.

@Buhjeezuz I reckon their Sea of Stars review was probably the worst I'd seen for spoilers. It was so bad that they removed the video then uploaded a new one. I haven't used the site since. They didn't even care that it was an Indie and that they could damage sales. They actually broke the embargo on the game, that's how publications get blacklisted. Nothing happened to them. I wouldn't even trust them with the time of day anymore, I'd rather spend the rest of my life trying to build Stonehenge than trust anything they had to say.

Yet another reason why I need to stick with one console/company. Why bother supporting multiple platforms when you know you are only enabling a system that is most definitely pricing some people out of their hobby. There are always going to be discounts (eventually) but day one was already looking less and less appetizing. Now so is some hardware.

@PocketHotDogs Were you on there for the last few days of Friday the 13th? It was a whole event, lots of people on there we're talking about the movies/books even the TV series. The Horror fanbase came out in force. It will probably happen for Evil Dead too. It's still not as bad as Evil Dead on the PS1 with the constant spawning of enemies, they took never stay dead to a whole new level. It meant most people never saw anything past the first level, they didn't have the ammo to get through.

@dodgykebaab I just closed on my first home. There's a garden but it's Uncharted territory. I considered buying that cosy garden sim (not this one) on PS5 to get some practice in before I start doing whatever it is you're supposed to do back there.

@Mythologue It's written by Sam Winkler. The same lead writer for Bl2, BL3 and Wonderlands. The guy is on Linkedin and all of the other places you'd expect to find someone in the industry.

Friday the 13th first, then Evil Dead, it's a safe bet that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will eventually be next. The servers can be very choppy and the TXCM licensing has always been a rough one. For a long time it was owned by the Mafia, Louis Peraino used it as a front company, getting the rights back was almost impossible until his crew was indicted for conspiracy.

Licensing is what killed The Friday the 13th game, there's so little preservation when it comes to movie licensed games and so little transparency over ownership, the game could be be there one minute and gone the next. Not groovy.

@Don_Corleone I wasn't surprised, I only saw it as a trailer but some of the reactions were as if the sky was falling. There's still a lot of disbelief that games like Forza made it over to PS5 with some Xbox users questioning what's next. For some people it will take a while for that belief to shift but profit is profit. Everyone wins in this situation, even if they don't see it.

It's a weird situation, one I didn't think we'd ever see but it makes it easier to focus on one console when you previously had to switch between two. They've moved over almost all of the the Xbox exclusives that I cared about. Now all we need is for Flight Simulator to land on Sony's doorstep.

I don't know how I'd feel as an Xbox fan right now, I saw the reaction to that one DOOM trailer. Part of it felt like a touch grass situation, but I can get why they might feel burned by Microsoft. At the end of the day both companies are profiting from this situation, and profit often equals growth. The one thing this will probably do is prevent me from buying the next Xbox, whatever form that takes. I don't see a reason to, yet at least.

I have only one question. Why is her watering-can upside down.

I still have to remind myself this isn't Tokyo Xtreme Racer: Zero. I had a bootleg of that game with the Ridge Racer name both on the box and on the title screen, with a full dub. For years I thought I was playing Ridge Racer. It wasn't until I heard the soundtrack being played in a sketchy nightclub in Poland that I found out. The guy was a gamer. He even played Hell March from Command and Conquer, a mini moshpit instantly formed. Bootlegs were really common, most official games never got released and bootleggers often got inventive like that. Switching titles especially, I've seen about 20 different versions of GTA since then. I keep meaning to start a collection but it doesn't feel right giving them shelf space.

A game might always be for me but I respect the hustle. They didn't just showcase a game last night they showed the power of the console/platform too. Regardless of the game and how well it sells it does give the console/brand even more visibility and that means more potential sales for Sony. There's always more than one way to look at it.

Had I not watched it I'd have had no interest in BL4. Their initial reveal trailer didn't sell it to me, the characters looked too trimmed down. They didn't in the showcase. I love the first two BL games. One day a message arrived from some LittleBigPlanet friends to check out a new game and the next day we were all on there shootin' and lootin', just brilliant memories. And one of my earliest platinums, it made me want to try every class from start to finish. Few games do that, so did BL2.

I never had that with BL3. Too many people were experiencing a kind of franchise fatigue, especially with so many DLCs. We never had a dedicated group of friends playing at once even when it was on Plus. I've got a lot more optimism for this new one. It looked a lot more like BL2 than I expected and it definitely made me consider a buy.

I think Sony are onto something here, and I don't think the game has to appeal to me to work. It will appeal to someone and that's all they have to do. Of course I'd like to see a State of Play for something like Death Stranding 2 but I don't need to see it to know I'm going to buy it. If I did see more footage of the game it would only spoil something I'd rather discover by playing it. BL4 needed that stream, Death Stranding 2 didn't, it'll sell gangbusters.

@Deljo If you are gay and a perv that's not my business, the game is for everyone. More power to you. I don't judge.

It looks really promising and definitely one of those times where my cautious optimism turned into something more definitive. The gameplay looked tight and slick on the Pro. The level we saw looked more bleak and realistic, the glide mechanic looked a bit off but only because it's from a first person perspective, dynamic weather and dynamic events are something I didn't expect. Nor was what they call 'Big Encore' meaning we can farm bosses more easily. The weapon customization looked fantastic as did the overhauled loot system, skills and traits.

I didn't expect couch Co-op either (something more games need to do) It looked a lot more like the first two games, which is what I'd hoped for but never expected. I'm sure folks will still find something wrong with it but as a looter shooter it seems to (from what they showed us) do exactly what it's meant to do. Thanks for hosting the Livestream.

@Bamila This actually isn't Ark 2. It's the same game (Ark: Survival Evolved) enhanced for PS5 with the DLC maps included (added over time) Ark 2 is still in development. There was no upgrade path from Ark Evolved PS4 to Ark Ascended PS5, which as you imagine didn't go down well. It had to be bought again. They even closed down the official servers. Now you have to play Ascended if you want to run c-op/clans.

@Matroska If that's the same Gun with Thomas Jane (The Punisher before Dolph Lundgren) Ron Perlman, Lance Henriksen and a bunch of others then I absolutely remember it. I hadn't thought about that game in years. It was pretty bad but the cast made up for it. Crime Boss: Rockay City had a good cast too but they didn't make up for it. I don't know what happened to the direction in that game but the voice acting was dreadful, they even made Chuck Norris sound bad.

I have a high tolerance for bad games, it comes from seeing if they have any actual redeeming features. I managed to make it through both SAW games, it was like being tortured by the real Jigsaw. It was that bad and brutal. I had dreams about it for weeks after. I can still hear Billy the puppet laughing each time I died to some broken janky mechanic.

I played it on Gamepass (all my DLCs are over there) it feels very surreal but I'm not buying all of the extra content again. The base game would feel weird without it.

@DTfearTheBEARD But it's just a card game. How fun could that possibly be? - was me with Gwent in The Witcher 3, then Slay The Spire. There's something really addictive about card games.

@Kiefer-Sutherland I think 7 Days got so much hate because the version we got back on PS4 was an early Alpha. I found it day one in a local gamestore, they'd gotten in 3 copies and they'd put one aside thinking I'd like it. We were due updates but everything went into limbo. The review copies ended up being that Alpha and people tore it apart. Sammy called it 'Youtubers The Game' and gave it a 3/10, the Alpha was that bad.

They didn't send out enough review codes when they launched the nextgen version. I'm still hearing from people who didn't know it existed, they assumed I was on the Alpha. It's still very under the radar on the store. They have a roadmap now with a lot of new features and systems. I didn't think we'd ever see the current build on console. We're up to a 860% player increase now on PS5, that's after they delisted the old PS4 version.

It was a bit rough releasing Oblivion with Expedition 33 but it goes to show how well built Clair Obscur is to stand beside such a massive release and still do so well. As much as I love indies I don't know that Twitter/X are the best places to advertise your game, they get the numbers but they also get the drama. There are a lot of other platforms like Twitch (to actually showcase your product) or even offer a demo on the various storefronts. Time was every game had a demo and you didn't need a subscription to play them.

Indies don't have a big marketing budget, but so many platforms are free, it sounds like a cop out. It's baffling how it's never been easier to promote a game but some companies don't even try, they expect they will release something and buyers with automatically snatch it up. You have to grind to advertise, complaining isn't the way. There are countless things they could have done to get the game out there.

I've seen the argument a few times on different forums and when I do go to check out their game I can hardly find a mention of it anywhere. It's not a good look for them when so many indie developers are almost brought to tears when they thank people for buying their game and making their dream possible.