IntrepidWombat

It was a very good game. Not the best ever. Not even the best that I played last year, but it was a good experience. Narratively, I didn't care for the twist, but it is what it is. It's in maybe my top 20 or so RPGs.

@ozkrmz My favorite thing about PS5 has been how snappy everything feels. The load times are very fast thanks to the storage. I only really noticed it when I went back to the PS4 to play something with my family. I also appreciate how easy it is to expand storage internally, the more modern wireless network controller, and the USB-C connector on the controller.

I just bought my son a 2TB SSD for his PS5, and the darn thing was 60% of what I paid for the system itself. This AI madness and the cost of anything silicon is to blame, I would think.

What a great game. I'm working my way through the post game still and really enjoying my time with it. I haven't had time to play any games for a few days and probably won't until maybe Sunday evening, but I'm looking forward to finishing the "other" ending.

I do think it's incomplete - it's not in the ESRB site at all for any platform (searching by both this name and the original name used in North America, Tales of Destiny II). It would be curious if it was exclusive to Switch in Europe only. May just have to wait a bit and see if there are further updates.

Just Trails for me. Maybe Phantom Blade 0, we'll see.

2028 maybe? I wonder if it will be cross gen. It will be interesting to see how they thread that needle. I'll skip it regardless. Rebirth is my biggest disappointment this generation.

@DennisReynolds Rev 2 Raid Mode deserves all of its flowers. That's the game that pulled a lot of people back into the series.

It's why I never pay more than a rental fee's worth for a digital game. I don't reckon I'll even do that anymore. No disc no buy moving forward.

I hope so. The best game you've ever played is one that fits your vision of what a multiplayer game should be. If you're a talented game developer, of course the game that you developed is the best one - it's a reflection of everything you want and nothing you don't want in the experience. Kind of a weird statement.

@ozkrmz Goodness, I didn't know that was possible. Thanks.

@ozkrmz Didn't give a penny to Sony, but you have a PS+ Subscription for the next 4 years? How's that work?

Prices are reasonable. Hopefully he ships to the US - I'm going to try to order a few.

Edit: Yup, they do. $30 for the RE2/3/4 bundle shipped to the US. Looking forward to it, thanks for the write-up!

Still working my way through Pragmata. I think I'm closing in on the end of the game. It's been fantastic! It's raining here, so no outdoor work. Maybe I'll come up with something easy to do in the garage. Our push mower wouldn't start for my son this past week, so maybe I'll work on that.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

That Leon cake is peak. The little medallions on the side look exactly like the decorative letters in the RPD do in the game.

@Arkz How dare you enjoy something?! You must be doing it wrong! Come on. Go touch some grass.

@Arkz At first I thought you were full of it. My typical distance is about 13ft - the recommended distance for that sized display is between 6 and 8.9 feet, so I set up right at 6 feet and gave it a test. And you know what? I still think you're full of it. It looks fine.

Playing on base PS5 hasn't left me wanting for anything. It looks excellent on my TV. Calling it "poor image quality" is not accurate in the slightest.

Capcom is cooking with gas, and I love it. This Monster Hunter game seems right up my alley, I just didn't get into it from playing the demo. Still working through Pragmata and loving the experience. Not sure if it's one that I'll platinum or not, we'll see, but I do intend to pick up every little collectable that I can. I can definitely see the Resident Evil 4 influence in this game, most notably in the boss designs.

I spent a lot of time with it this weekend - Capcom did awesome here, and not just with the gameplay. The most memorable games tap into emotions on some level , whether that's anger, love, jealousy - you get it. This one taps into my primal fatherly urge to protect. She already reminds me so much of my daughter at that age to boot. It doesn't hurt that it's just so darn fun to play and explore.

Lots of Pragmata this weekend. I have a few parts arriving today, so I may start digging in to the Polaris ATV when I get the urge to do something with my hands.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

Yōtei over E33 for music is WILD!

Good on both of these games though. I really enjoyed my time with Dispatch.

This dropped down to $30 on Amazon, so I went ahead and ordered it (in addition to a few others because I was in a splurging kind of mood). I may hit this one up after Pragmata.

Okay, hear me out. I have an idea for an extraction shooter.

Game developers of failed, high budget, live service projects are all kidnapped sack-over-head style and taken to a remote island. They must team up with their own team (or defect to another team!) to take out the other teams in order for a chance at redemption. None of them have ever shot guns before, so they'll be using sling shots, water balloons filled with skunk musk, and coconut launchers.

The losers have to move to France and work for Ubisoft making licensed platformers in permanent crunch until they retire.

We shall call it: Con-Guard Game$: The Escape.

Joel was prolific. VAs make a huge difference. I haven't played MGSV because Keifer Sutherland is #NotMySnake.

If Troy Baker had voiced Snake instead? Maybe I could have stomached not having David in there.

Happy for those guys. Love the premise of the game - I do wish they had maybe let it bake for a while longer before unleashing it on the public. Maybe this is a No Man's Sky kind of turn-around but massively sped up? I'll look forward to playing it perhaps later this year after it's dropped in price.

With this kind of single player success under their belts, I wonder if they'd be tempted to do something in the Eve Online universe. No live service shooter or VR fighter game, but a single player adventure in that world would be amazing. I can't sink the time that I used to in Eve (my main will be 19 years old this year...), but being able to spend a bit of time here or there in New Eden would be cool.

I skipped Spidey 2 entirely. The first one is enough to scratch the web swinging itch. I have no doubt that Spidey 3 will be highly-reviewed and make a baskillion dollars, but Marvel just isn't for me these days.

Capcom and Falcom fans are both eating great this year. I couldn't be much happier with this year's slate of games between these two.

Outstanding. Thanks for the write-up. Mine has shipped. It'd be rad if it got here early, but if not, I'm cool with settling into it on Friday night after work.

When they said it was the best version of the game, maybe they meant it was the most true to the Bethesda identity? Skyrim YLOD 2 of my PS3s, so this just feels right!

I finished the Platinum on Requiem last weekend, a rarity for me. I've been cycling through games trying to find one that I look forward to playing rather than doing it out of convenience - Lunar: Silver Star Story (PS4 Remaster) is one that I spent some time on in the last week, so that may be it this weekend.

I've had a hankering for something similar to Unicorn Overlord, but nothing is really scratching that itch. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a recommendation that I saw quite a bit, but I just can't get into it. Alas.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

They didn't say no AI, they said no AI visual tech. Which is fine, to be honest. I bounce ideas off of an AI nearly every day. I'm a one man department, so it's nice to have. I wrote a real slapdash piece to get a proof of concept over the finish line last week, and it took something like 40 seconds to render. I spun up a conversation with my AI assistant on Monday to get some ideas, and yesterday, I finished up a re-write that renders in two seconds instead.

It not only speaks to how awful my first go at it was, but also how just having that LLM you can bounce ideas off of can be really beneficial. That's the kind of usage I would hope to see in the future from game devs.

Yes, I believe I will. That looks great.

Not feeling it at all. It looks well put-together, but there's something off about it that I can't put my finger on. Art style maybe.

For such a contained, tight experience, technical issues are unacceptable. This isn't an open world with hard to find or hard to duplicate bugs - this is a linear game. For a small studio trying to make a name for itself, this is an awful look.

Insert "Corporate wants you to find the difference...." meme here.

Maybe it's my aging eyes, but I don't see a difference in those three shots. I've played other games with and without ray tracing in the past, and for my money, it's not enough difference to make a difference. If these are the changes being billed as "wow!" in 2026, then it appears to me that hardware and software developers alike have found "the wall" and smacked into it quite hard.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword and the Okami sequel are what I'd like to see. Maybe they'll tease DLC for Requiem, but I doubt it.

Persona fans: First time?

@Steelhead 8-bitdo makes a PS1/PS2 adapter that allows you to use a PS4 or PS5 controller with the older consoles. I haven't used that product specifically, but the other things of theirs that I have used have been excellent.

Can Requiem count for 2 months? I've played so little of anything lately - it's the only game that I beat in the month of March.

@Balaam_ 30fps, woof. Thanks for the report on that.

@Dimey You've been gaming for 40 years and can't handle reading opposing viewpoints?

In my experience, it's the game you play for a little while, wish you were playing something else, then go do that. Everything this game tries to make you feel, No Man's Sky does it better. I may try the PS5 version down the line when it's dirt cheap in a couple years, but I'm not lining up to play it on day one.

Those are rookie numbers. We haven't seen it hit Skyrim levels yet.

That would be about 10% more expensive than the PS1 at launch when adjusted for inflation($299.99 -> $639.90, US Bureau of Labor Statistics), and that's with a shortage of NAND and RAM. It also includes other pieces of technology like on-board storage and network connectivity that PS1 didn't have.

I haven't touched a game controller in more than a week. Not sure I will have time this weekend. If I do, I may jump back into Jedi Survivor or find a real light RPG to play.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

@Dogbreath The only place I disagree is with your last statement. Care about your colleagues enough that you establish a solid network. It's the most important thing to continued employment. As you work and leave positive impressions, people disperse and move on, and they take those impressions with them. Caring for the product is also part of that - you still want to do good work because you want to be known for being good at what you do by those colleagues. Once Corpo A decides it either wants to move on from you or has dried up of opportunities, you start talking to the connections you've built up who have moved on themselves. Most of my career has been built on networking with people; it's only in the last few years that I've been able to move around based solely on competency. Without caring about colleagues or the work that I did, I'd still be stuck at a call center.

Working for a publicly traded company is like rescuing a baby tiger. You nurse it to health, feed it, love it, care for it, spend a ton of time and money on it, but at the end of the day, it's a wild animal and will at some point try to rip your throat out. It's in their nature. You can get mad at them or call them "gross" or claim that it's unfair, but it's part of a system into which we all feed. It's the reason I've worked for 5 different companies in the last 7 years. Each move was voluntary and was a benefit to me, and all but one was a raise. If in the year of our Lord 2026 people are still naive to how this works, they're blinded by some kind of bias ("this company would never..."), they have main character syndrome, or they're cripplingly unobservant.

@AhmadSumadi Agreed on Tekken being "mid" for years. I booted up my PS3 last week and played Tekken 5 Dark Resurrection - they really haven't improved upon that in subsequent iterations.

It's kind of wild to me - I assumed it was the younger generation lapping up the FF7RE games. I played the original just after it hit Greatest Hits, and my excitement for the Remake was off the charts. It's really unfortunate how they turned out.

RE2 '98 was the first game I got with my PlayStation. I play it a few times a year - what a masterwork.