IntrepidWombat

Sky 2nd Chapter will be the last game this year for me at launch. Waiting on that November / December time frame for some others to drop in price.

Still enjoying Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. I don't generally like open worlds, but this one has been really fun to explore. It doesn't feel like a slog like others do.

I'm glad a lot of people are enjoying Onimusha. It's on the shelf, and I'm really looking forward to it. Also added to the shelf this week were Dragon Quest III HD-2D (unplanned, the price was too good) and the Trails from Zero / Trails to Azure double pack for PS5.

Football is back, so I'll be watching Ohio State vs Texas today and Pittsburgh vs Atlanta tomorrow.

Hopefully this is the last week for temperatures over 100F. Fingers crossed.

Have. a lovely weekend, everybody.

@BusyOlf Pattern recognition is a very useful tool. It speeds up processing and allows us to assess what may happen in the future. It's why I can stand on a hill, spot a storm in the distance coming right towards me, and conclude that I'm about to get wet.

It's the same principle with Sony's live service track record. If you've played a lot of games, followed games for a while, and seen what's successful versus what's not successful, it's easy to follow that pattern to its conclusion. While you say that it's childish to make the prediction that the game is going to fail before playing it, I'd say that it's naïve to think that you may not get wet standing on that hill under the approaching storm since, after all, you've never stood under THAT rain cloud.

@dark_knightmare2 Where's the conspiracy? It's reasonable to expect first party titles to be above the bar in quality. These are supposed to be the games to which representatives of Sony point and say, "This software is what sets PlayStation apart from any other platform." That's not the case here.

Based on reviews that I've watched, Wolverine looks like a hand-holding hallway simulator with repetitive combat. For crying out loud, there's not even a fail condition for the QTE's - why are they even in the game?

My saying that a less-than-stellar first party title is detrimental to Sony is hardly controversial. You may disagree with the premise. Fine, your prerogative.

77 isn't a bad score for a smaller budget game from a plucky developer or even an indie.

For a first party studio - first party games are there to sell consoles, especially now that they're 100% exclusive - the score is a disaster.

I'm only grabbing P4 at launch for the collectors edition. I may just give it to my son and play this game instead. Really glad to see them doing these games some justice.

I'm a Vanillaware fan and skipped the Vita altogether, so I'll be picking this up for sure.

The artwork looks great, I'm just not sure about the character models.

@SleeplessKnight Agreed. PS5 has been a pretty good PS4 Pro Plus if nothing else. The solid state storage is cool, and I'm glad I picked up a 2TB drive before the silicon mafia decided that Sam Altman needed RAM more than us lowly peons.

I'm not a fan of Sony exclusives at all, but it's been a decent enough piece of hardware just physically speaking. The buttons still work, the cooling solution is adequate, and the liquid metal is a nice touch. I've had one for a few years, but I think Resident Evil Requiem would have been the first game that I absolutely had to have and couldn't have had on PS4.

@EfYI I heard it has a turbo encabulator.

For a number of years now, work has been proceeding in order to bring perfection to the crudely conceived idea of a transmission that would not only supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters. Such an instrument is the turbo encabulator.

Now basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it is produced by the modial interaction of magneto-reluctance and capacitive diractance.

Proper signposting is an art form. There are some great ways to do it that fit within a given genre, but the devs need to first be capable of it. I think many have lost that ability unfortunately.

Dino Crisis and Breath of Fire. Come on, Capcom.

They really don't even have to do anything special with Breath of Fire to start with. They can just do a glow up and re-release the first 4 as a compilation.

My Onimusha steelbook is delayed to Monday. Sad. I'll be continuing on with Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. I like this game a lot.

I'm turning the bottom half of one of the laundry room closets into a new litter box area, so I'll be expanding a shelf in the center and adding a cat door. Should be an easy project.

College Football is back! My son and I are watching UTEP get smoked by OU right now. Ohio State also plays tomorrow, so I'll be watching a bit of that with him.

Have an awesome weekend, everybody.

Love the write-up, thank you. I have the audio books queued up for the novels that were written to set up the world. Funny enough, the Mass Effect: Revelation book is what sealed the deal for me before Mass Effect came out for the 360. We'll see if this is the same.

@illegalmonkey Right there with you. The trilogy has been a massive disappointment.

This is the kind of SoP that makes me okay with not buying new PlayStation anything beyond 2027.

@TheArt They're completely different art styles. How do those two things even relate to one another? That's like saying, "If you like 90's R&B but hate K-Pop, you're an interesting fellow."

I like almost everything about this, but it's too fan servicey for me - shoehorning in characters from other games takes away from the narrative of this game.

SE's most valuable IP has been falling off a cliff in slow motion for 20 years. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is 36 hours of my life that I'll never get back. After the whole Dyne arc and how they royally screwed that up, I lost interest. Chadley is another symptom of the overarching problem with the whole remake trilogy.

This is one of those cases where we can say, "At least we have the original."

No discs, you say? That sounds like a challenge to me. I wonder if PSone guts would fit inside.

@J-Dubs At Naughty Dog's pace, we'll have to wait for a remaster of Intergalactic for PS6 first - optimistically, a PS6/PS7 cross gen title.

@BearsEatBeets I think it'll be a bit before we see that so that they can keep the hype for Onimusha cranked up. I do wonder what sort of 'ability' Claire might have - Leon parries, Jill dodges, Carlos punches, Ethan guards. Will she be more vanilla like Grace or will she have something up her sleeve?

@CheapMerc Just curious, why get rid of your PS5? You can still play your disc games, you can continue to buy games you missed the first time around, and you have access to two full generations. That's my disposition, anyway. Buy second hand only if you really want to stick it to them.

These articles are helpful for sussing out what you can get from PSN for the price of a Blockbuster rental.

Steel book doesn't arrive until Monday. Boooo.

One picture for each frame per second? Neat.

I bounced off of Zero Dawn twice. Just didn't care for it. I got a code for Forbidden West with my PS5, just never played it (they packaged it with the only PS5 that I could get my hands on - how much did that help with sales, I wonder?). I think that's why I didn't like the open world in Rebirth - it was very much a Horizon clone.

@Weebleman My teenage son is all about physical media. For him, it's mainly books, but he's starting to want music CDs and anime Blu-Rays too. For games, I think it just depends on what it is. He likes that I buy mostly physical so that he can just come in and grab what he wants from my shelf.

@Marquez The only tip I have is to play what you enjoy. Video games aren't homework or tasks to complete. Treating them that way introduces stress and can lead to burnout and loss of love for the hobby. Play your comfort games if it helps you unwind, and do it guilt free.

Playing through SMT V and thoroughly enjoying it. I like it a lot more after finishing SMT III.

I'll also spend some time with Blue Dragon. The Re:Blue recomp is really damn impressive, and I haven't played this game since the year it came out.

Also also, I just discovered Dusklight, and WOW. I was thinking about hooking up my GameCube to finally finish my Twilight Princess save from back in the day, but now I'm ready to start over. Some of these recomps are just incredible.

Woof. I haven't played V or even IV. Won't be touching this one either.

• Decade long dev cycle with an enormous budget
• Cut content from the game, charge an extra $30 to give it back
• No disc option AND a PlayStation exclusive; buy it from PSN or nowhere
• Gameplay trailer is locked behind a subscription service

Yeah, it's 2026 right. Sheesh.

Introducing PS+ Diamond - $69.99 per month to rent your PS6, includes PS+ Essential. Pay more to upgrade. Two year minimum. Early termination fee applies. Return the console at the end of the term or a $900 fee will be assessed.

The musical number was painful. Skillful, but still painful. Exodus is a big maybe, and I may actually dust off Witcher 3 and play it finally. Beyond that, meh. I'm a little interested to see what XBox has in store for their show.

I am mildly interested. I have the audio books queued up after I finish Dresden. If the story is engaging and the gameplay is mechanically at least as good as Mass Effect 2, we'll have a winner.

Sky FC is technically well done, but I just haven't been motivated to finish it. I'm also not excited for the prospect of a Trails from Zero remake, and the original is a top ten for me. I think that the Final Fantasy VII trilogy has tempered my excitement for such things.

@PuppetMaster Sort of but not really - same developer and tied loosely by themes, gameplay style, and things like that. Kind of like Final Fantasy or Shin Megami Tensei rather than a cohesive story.

This is great. I hope we get Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia / Time as well.

Oh CDPR, we know your tricks. 2028 release turns into 2029, but it's 2030 before game-breaking bugs are worked out, and it's not worth buying until expansions go on sale in 2032 or so. I'll hit up GOG around then, I guess, assuming I have a PC that can run it.

@outlawprophet Every point you brought up has been made before and argued ad nauseum, mostly by people more eloquent than I am, so I'll do my best to keep it short.

Yes, PC has been digital for a long time. PC gamers have choices. Steam, GOG, Epic, whatever. Windows, Linux, Mac. Intel. AMD. Nvidia. Choices.

Music still exists physically. In fact, both vinyl record albums and CDs are popular enough that new music is still releasing in both formats. Or you can stream from Spotify. Or Pandora. Or iHeartRadio. Or iTunes. Choices.

Obviously Blu-rays still exist. People can buy the movies from stores of their choosing. They can download them directly from the studio. They can stream them. Hell, DVDs are still an option. Choices.

Today on PS5, I can go to Amazon, Target, GameStop, or Walmart and buy a copy of GTA5. I can also buy it from PSN directly. Choices.

Sony wants to take away all of your choices except for the one that makes them the most money. Oddly enough, because it's the choice you would have chosen anyway, you think it doesn't affect you. Not only do YOU no longer have a choice on where to buy a PlayStation game, the lack of choice gives Sony complete control absent of competition to price the software however they want. They can change their terms. They can basically do what they want to anyone so invested in the ecosystem that they've become diehard loyalists.

Of course it's better for them financially; they get a larger cut of full price software. They don't just get a flat disc licensing fee; they get a percentage of the sale. Retailers have no motivation to lower the prices on their inert pieces of cardboard with inactive codes. The games can no longer go to the secondary market. They've removed those choices to ensure that more dollars go to them. One day, they'll have another solution that makes Sony even more money and is even less friendly towards its customers. You can be sure they'll force that one as well.

Something else you said was odd. You said VERY SMALL. Your numbers weren't quite right, but it's okay, I got you.

Imagine that YOU could be part of an industry that sold 70 million units in 2025 that represents 22% of a market. You'd jump on that, right? I mean, 70 million units? That's a huge number. 22% isn't peanuts either.

Those are the physical sales globally for Sony. In one year. If you can sell 70 million of something, you do it. In no way, shape, or form is 22% of sales with a raw number of 70 million "VERY SMALL." They're doing it because they're comfortable removing your choices.

AMD Radeon has about 5% of the global market share in discrete consumer GPUs. Should they hang it up? Just quit selling GPUs? No! They're profitable, and it's good for the marketplace to have a choice. The market loves choices.

Nothing here is a day one for me. Metal Gear down the line for my collection and maybe Zero Company in the future (I have barely read anything about it, but the concept is intriguing).

Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance on PS5 and Tales of Xillia on PS3. I picked up Redshirts by John Scalzi at the airport last week on our way home, and it's been a treat, so I imagine that I'll be finishing reading that as well.

I'll need to get some yard work done, but there's a fine line between the grass being dry enough to mow and the temperature being way too hot. I'm looking forward to getting temps back under 100F so that I can enjoy myself outside again. I have two ATVs that I'd like to get back up and running, but it's just so dang hot.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

@adge_uk Assuming roughly 80GB, it would take up about 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) IBM 80 column punch cards. The collection would weigh around 1,000 metric tons (or tonnes, I guess) and would stack up to a measly 178km. I wonder if it would still be eligible for Prime shipping.

I won't be playing day one sadly, as my preordered physical edition won't arrive until a few days after launch. I wonder what's up with that?

In any case, this has been a favorite franchise of mine since the beginning - still waiting for that Onimusha 2 PS4 physical edition, LRG!!

Love seeing this, I'll absolutely check it out. VideoGamesPlus gets reprints in stock quite a lot too - they've become my favorite online store.

@Gaymer90 Nice, thanks. I'll keep an eye out for it at the mom and pop store here in town. I'm a sucker for cringe anime - call it a guilty pleasure - but the hub stops in between battles break up the flow for me. Diofield was like that too.

@Dalamar I have! I grabbed the Switch version and have enjoyed it quite a bit, though it's quite story heavy. I also bought the physical PS5 version as soon as I saw that it was available. Great recommendation.

The demo wasn't for me. It didn't scratch that Unicorn Overlord (or FFT) itch like I was hoping. Man, I hope Vanillaware makes another one of those. FE Three Houses didn't do it for me either. They really wanted to wedge some Persona / Cold Steel elements into it, and man does it feel forced. Just couldn't get into it. I liked Path of Radiance though.

Anyone have recommendations for other FE entries / games with a similar vibe?

PlayStation is so poorly-managed that it blows my mind every time I read something like this.

This looks interesting indeed. Reminds me of the newer Alone in the Dark. On disc, I'd pick it up now at full price. Without, I'll grab it if it hits $7.99.