Matroska

I'm sure I'll get one at some point but so far it's a bunch of older games that will run and look better elsewhere (and have done for years) plus Mario Kart. The latter will obviously be fun but in exactly the same way MK8 is. Also, as I've got older I don't really play games with friends - if we meet up it's to go to the pub, go out for the day, see a band etc, so it's basically me driving in circles on my own if I get MK. Not really bothered about playing randoms online. So yeah, it'll take a new Zelda or some exclusive JRPGs to tempt me.

@DogPark Nope. It's "kooky". I googled "cooky" and it's a rarely used alternative spelling of "cookie" but that's obviously not what he meant.

@Oram77 Well as of a decade ago it had sold 9.5 million so it was a big hit. It's also going to benefit from anticipation for the next TES.

@ButterySmooth30FPS You can say that again (like these VAs do)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OX8najPmiyc

@Jorogumo These console specific sites always only mention their own platform for multiplatform games because that's the platform they're covering.

Here's an example from Pure Xbox
https://www.purexbox.com/news/2025/03/the-sinking-city-is-getting-an-unreal-engine-5-remaster-for-xbox-series-xs

And Nintendo Life with a list of upcoming Switch games that are almost all multiplatform.
https://www.nintendolife.com/guides/35-upcoming-nintendo-switch-games-to-look-forward-to-in-2025

Well I think of it this way: you know when an American movie depicts England in a film and it's all really off and kind of funny? Even just normal modern England? And it becomes its own genre of "the American version of England in movies"? Well this probably comes across something like that to Japanese people. The AC series has always had this thing with whatever it's portraying feeling like a pop culture version of that time and place, like Odyssey felt like Ancient Greece via Jason and the Argonauts.

I notice they've done various things to appeal to the Japanese more, like an in-game warning about climbing on torii gates, which would be seen as incredibly f'd up in Japan. And afaik they removed all mentions of Yasuke actually being a samurai from various official Japanese materials because a samurai isn't simply a swordfighter but was an actual social class you'd tend to be born into, iirc.

His inclusion does feel odd since, at least so far, he was there at the start and then I just becomes Naoe's game for ages with him never seen again since the start - though I am spending a lot of time exploring.

@dskatter Probably. I'm not a football fan but he's uncontested as one of the all time greatest players in the most popular sport in the world. He's definitely a household name around the world. Why he's in a Japanese fighting game is a different question though. 😅

@Chupa_loyzer There's more reason to pre-order a digital game than a physical one, really. Assuming you're saying it's justified to pre-order physical because you're reserving your copy, I've never found a new game to be out of stock when I've gone to buy it. However if you pre-order a digital game you can preload it. Once you've paid, the game will typically auto preload a few days before launch. Then you just turn on the PS5 on launch day (even the second it becomes launch day if you're really eager) and start playing. Then also add in pre-order bonuses, the same as with physical.

To be honest, this idea of "celebrating" what's basically the birthday of a franchise has snuck up on me. People celebrate the anniversary of their marriage, the birth of a loved one, religious ideas like the supposed resurrection of Jesus... And also the arbitrary point a videogame franchise happened to start.

It feels like celebrating the day your washing machine was delivered every certain number of years. "What? Hotpoint didn't send me a card and miniature bottle of champagne? Why don't Hotpoint respect me?"

@Slippship Well it's a Pro focused article so Pro owners are more likely to come into the article and also more likely to take place in the poll.

@Oram77 Yeah if a game was going to come out around then anyway, why not? But they didn't make it specifically for that. Also games with Mario come out so often (on average 7 times a year since 1981, or more than once every two months) I guess it's more likely to have one by around the anniversary date.

It should say:
"If you feel uncomfortable at any point while playing, that's intentional; it's a f**king horror game".

I think the actor who played a character in Furiosa looks more like him. Kojima pointed that out too.

https://geektyrant.com/news/hideo-kojima-says-furiosa-co-star-is-perfect-for-metal-gear-solid-movie-i-could-only-see-him-as-snake

@PuppetMaster Nintendo are at #22 with this statement:
"It's very unlike Nintendo to release so many middling products (such as Endless Ocean Luminous and Fitness Boxing 3: Your Personal Trainer) in one year. Even the company's go-to franchises delivered relatively lackluster results in 2024: Four different Mario titles scored 77 or lower, and the storied Zelda franchise produced its lowest-scoring release in two decades."

MS are in 9th place.

Interesting how 4/5 of them are Japanese and the last one is French. No North American publishers and 80% of them are from just one relatively small country. Clearly Japan is doing something very right and NA is doing things wrong.

@Jrs1 To be fair, it's an obscure enough thing that the sort of people that would know little enough to think it's a standalone console wouldn't know it exists in the first place. Most of my friends aren't gamers and didn't know about it until I mentioned it. Even several who have a PS4 or 5 hadn't heard of it. It's more of a hardcore gamer thing.

I take it it still has the thing where if you import your save into the sequel, you get an extra bit of story and meet some of the characters? And yes, Suikoden II is one of the best games I've played. The first one is great but was actually made as a practice run in order to make the sequel as good as it could be.

@Deadhunter Yeah, I'm the same. And thanks to the Dualsense having a mic, you can't pretend to not have one anymore. 🥲 Probably best to find someone on here with the game and just say you're not a fan of chatting while you play a game.

I don't want to @ him, but that first comment makes no sense. In the Best Game category you have a Canadian game, two Japanese games, a Swedish game, a Chinese game, and one British game. That's a great selection of international games, and only one is British and yet somehow that's chauvinism?

@Deadhunter I don't know but even if it does, the Dualsense has a built-in microphone. I doubt it would force you to use it, though.

@naruball Sure but this is one of the most famous and beloved WRPG franchises. Even unfinished, half-baked games in the same series like DA2 sold well because of the love for the series. This is like if the next CoD, GTA or FIFA flops and kills the franchise. Inquisition was controversial amongst fans and criticised in a multitude of ways but still sold 12 million and became Bioware's best selling game.

Those Prince of Persia games came after the series had faded into near obscurity thanks to various bad games and after the cultural peak of the series was all the way back in 2003 or so. They also weren't advertised much. They had an uphill battle. Veilguard could have simply been mediocre and would've sold well. Instead it killed the franchise and the dev team, it didn't simply sell badly.

@LifeGirl And that it did so badly it killed the franchise and decimated the developer. It was an enormous misfire. And I say that as someone who actually bought it and initially enjoyed it despite reservations, so I'm not just jumping on the hate bandwagon.

@Lindy01 Yeah but the £2000 to £2500 PC will pay games at far higher framerates, with far better graphics, the games are cheaper (or free 😉), you don't have to pay for online, and you won't have to buy a PS6 in a few years. It's actually way cheaper over time and for a better experience.

For context, if you'd bought a PS5, then a Pro, paid £100 a year for PS+, you'd have spent £1650 so far. Then if you bought 5 games a year, that's about £100 more a year than the PC versions each year for versions that look and run worse. It's really stacks up. Yes you can sell your base PS5 for say £300 but you've still made a net loss of £150 as I said above. And the money you made could go towards a GPU instead of a mild upgrade to a PS5. And then you have to buy a PS6 in maybe 2 years or so. It's really out of hand.

@ecurb7 "it's expensive, but I sold my base model for £300 on Ebay, knocking it down considerably."
This is a kind of illusion. You didn't make the Pro £400 (£700 minus 300), because what effectively happened is you made the original PS5 £150 instead of £450, then you spent £700 on the Pro. So you've spent £850 in total (down from £1,150 for the 5 and Pro if you hadn't sold the 5). So this gen has cost you £850 plus probably hundreds for PS+. It's really adds up without you releasing. 😩

This is one of those anime shows that a lot of people, me included, watched before they knew what anime was and didn't realise it was anime. Same as Wowser, and that Dogtanian cartoon. The Moomins too.

What stands out too is the almost total absence of any games made by Nintendo (just 1, right?) or even games that are on the Switch. It really is time for the Switch 2. Microsoft are on their knees in terms of the Xbox's sales and image but they did way better than Nintendo here.

I'm in a big Samurai Warriors phase at the moment so this came out at a good time.

I nearly bought Samurai Warriors 4 Empires for £45 yesterday but held off - and thank god for that. Now it's only £18. 🥳

Isn't there a rumour of a new God of War in Greece with a younger Kratos? Or was that a weird dream I had? Other than that, maybe it's finally time for the long rumoured FFIX remake to become a reality. Or maybe the presentation will be offline for 20 hours and well see nothing.

@Lowdefal It might be cheaper but by such a small amount. If it's £15 that's not even enough to order a pizza. For something you're going to be playing for weeks, months maybe, and can come back to for the rest of your life, the price of a footlong Subway meal deal doesn't seem like much.

But what you do get is never having to swap discs, you can't lose or damage the disc (e.g. once my dog knocked over my Xbox and made my Mass Effect 2 disc unplayable), you don't have to take the discs with you if you move house or go to someone else's house with a PS5. You usually get to play the game the second it's released rather than waiting for it to be delivered and then having to install it. And is it that much quicker to install? It took absolutely ages to install FFVII Remake and Horizon Forbidden West, and I had to stick around to swap discs during installation too. My internet isn't that fast but it doesn't take long to download most games - not to mention you can start the installation from your phone when you're out and get back and it's just waiting for you.

A few years ago I used to side with physical copies but there's basically no real practical advantage other than saving a small amount of money that you'd happily spend on some trivial thing without thinking.

I know this won't mean anything to people trying to play online games but I'm playing Samurai Warriors 4 just fine - I'm getting trophies but only locally, they're not syncing to the server of course. Like I said before, I can download games and play them. It's not actually making any difference to me but it's still not a great look that Sony aren't commenting on this. It feels like at this point it has to be a hack or DDOS. If it was simply a server issue I can't see why they wouldn't just say that.

England here, I can access the store and download things but the trophy list doesn't work and online modes in games don't work.

@Richy2025 Eh? You're off by about 34 hours there.

Of all these various Xbox games officially or potentially coming to PS5, the ones I'd want to see most are Avowed and Fable. I'm getting a new PC soon so it doesn't make a difference to me personally, but these are the game I'd most feel bad about not doing as well as they could by not having access to the PS audience.

@B0udoir Are you saying France isn't a Western country? It's kind of odd to point out something this basic but here we are; Western doesn't specifically refer to America either in general, or in terms of being a WRPG or Western game in general.

@PuppetMaster To be fair, in Advent Children Aeris is dead so Cloud can't exactly live with her. 😂 Not saying that as a pro-Aeris argument, the whole thing is silly to me.

@LifeGirl Exactly. Matchmaking fictional characters is so weird. I get looking at a character and thinking you'd like to sleep with them but why would your mind go to wanting another fictional character to sleep with them. It's like looking at some nice food and thinking "I want Goku to eat that".

@Member_the_game Yeah, exactly. And if you bring in the idea of the best hardware, then you're talking about PC which also has every Xbox game and pretty much every Playstation game plus countless thousands of games that are on neither platform.

So I don't see where Phil's idea fits in. If you want the best hardware and biggest game selection then there's PC, if you want something not on that level but still very good and with less upfront cost then you have Playstation... but he wants to make something with worse hardware than a PC and with less games than PC and Playstation? For people that want to play a relatively small library of games at not the best settings or performance, while paying more for it than other consoles? I think Phil needs to rethink it all.

@Faruko Yeah, for some reason gamers and game journalists seem to always forget about inflation. Like when people say "I'm never paying £70 for a game, I remember in the early 90s I'd just pay £40," and you can't help but want to say "okay so that's actually £80 in 2024 £GBP you used to pay and you were okay with that but make it £10 cheaper and it's somehow too much?"

@graymamba The importance of first-party output is overstated. If you look back at the PS1, it was the strength of third-party support and perceived exclusives (many games people strongly associate with the PS1 either came out elsewhere, sometimes before PS like Tomb Raider, or came out elsewhere a bit later). Wipeout and GT are cool and all, but the things people were really hyped about back then were third-party, like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, MGS, Final Fantasy, GTA etc.

The N64 had legendary first-party games like Mario Kart 64, Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye and Smash Bros and got absolutely crapped on by the PS1. It massively lacked third-party support, though. Same with the GC vs PS2. The consistent thing with PS is that almost all games are released on them, not great first-party support.

@PuppetMaster Well it's not really new, games like Street Fighter 3 had parrying for all characters and that came out 28 years ago. Loads of action games have had it going back decades (Onimusha, Devil May Cry, Dynasty Warriors, etc). I think this is that thing where as you get older, time goes faster so things that are quite old feel new. You might be thinking "yeah yeah, but Dark Souls really popularised parrying, that's what I mean" but, depressingly, Dark Souls came out 14 years ago. 🥲

@allergyboyfun Or maybe it's because one is a huge and heavy man and the other is a much smaller and lighter woman? It sounds like you're protecting your own weird views onto it, especially with the out of nowhere "bedchambers" part.

Wasn't tempted by the first one as it seemed a bit too gruelling to play but for some reason this one is tempting me.

@JohntheRaptor "By the way there is an error in the article. Skalitz is misspelled."
He also says Poland and the Czech Republic are in Eastern Europe when they're in Central Europe. Though he's still right that both devs are from the same part of Europe.

I would've got it but Tales of Graces came out at the same time

@MikeOrator You don't need a PSN account to launch a pirated version. That's the point of the last paragraph of my previous post. The whole point of a pirated game is it removes any enforced requirements to launch the game. So all this does is inconvenience or put off potential buyers while making it even more tempting to pirate it; you're basically paying to do something you don't want to, or you pay nothing and don't have to make a PSN account.

Definitely getting this kind of vibe from this game.

@Waa-Laa Well think about when shops try to get people to sign up to loyalty cards. A lot of people find it annoying and don't want to give their details or just find it inconvenient. Now imagine if you had to sign up to the scheme to be able to buy from the shop. Even the average person would find that really annoying and might even stop using that shop.

Now, as a bonus thing separate from the core issue, also imagine you could easily and without repercussions get all that food for free and with less messing around than paying for it. What shop in their right mind would do that?

@DennisReynolds Well not really. People don't buy clothes in real life to not wear them and for them to only exist in a certain piece of software that quite probably no one they know IRL will ever see. Don't get me wrong, I do it too - but I'm just trying to look at it objectively. It's like buying someone else some clothes, and it's a person that doesn't exist IRL and you only see on your TV. So it's kind of the opposite.

Whenever I preorder stuff like this, I find I couldn't care less about the thing by the time it eventually comes. Well, more like it's gone from my main spare time focus and passion to something I warmly remember but stopped engaging with ages ago. Happened with a few Nier books, happened with FFVII Remake Material Ultimania Plus, happened with the second of those Elden Ring guides, and many more instances.

I read one of these books and that's it. One's still in the shrinkwrap. 🤦

"Sinning system is frustrating"
Maybe I missed it, though I just scanned through again, but I don't see the review actually describe what this is.

@Jrs1 Okay, but they also somehow didn't have enough stock for the disc drive to beat the scalpers? This is my point; if they knew what the demand for each item was, they would have "beat the scalpers" in both cases. Instead they made way too many Pros and nowhere near enough disc drives. So the only logical conclusion is they thought they'd sell more Pros and less disc drives. When scalpers are selling Pros at a loss, and when the Pro goes on sale almost immediately at various retailers, that means not only did they make a few too many, but they made way too many. And at the same time made not enough disc drives - which in both cases is what my original point described.