Matroska

@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.

@Shepherd_Tallon Well when scalpers are selling them off at a loss due to lack of demand that does imply that the demand is nowhere near the supply. Whereas scalpers are actually profiting from the disc drive. You can say "healthy supply" but companies will try to get the production as close to demand as they can do they don't spend money on stock that's sitting around for months, not only not generating a profit but costing even more money on storage. They could've saved money by making less of them, and equally they could've made more money by making more disc drives.

@riceNpea It's not fan service, it's marketing. All this stuff like May the 4th Be With You, and anniversary editions of stuff, anything like that, is just marketing. For one thing, it makes you feel like you're part of something meaningful so you're more likely to buy something expensive. Honestly, it's the same with things like Christmas. I wouldn't have just randomly spent hundreds on my family if it wasn't for Christmas and I'm not even religious.

It's interesting how they overestimated demand for the Pro and underestimated demand for the disc drive. Probably that the relatively small niche of people willing to pay £700 for a console upgrade are more likely to be the type of person with a large physical collection.

An embarrassing flop, a game I played 12 years ago, and a game in a genre I have zero interest in, in a series I'd forgotten even exists. 😮‍💨

@Mikey856 And also the fact that apart from the Wii and Switch, every Nintendo console has sold worse than all the previous ones. So in terms of sales it goes Switch, Wii, NES, SNES, N64, GC, Wii U. Basically a decline generation by generation with the Wii and Switch being big spikes that go against the pattern.

That's why Nintendo basically dropped out of the home console market and decided to stick to a handheld with a TV out cable, basically. Some Nintendo fans will dispute that but if you criticise the Switch's performance they always say "but it's a handheld!" Their handhelds always did well due to lack of competition compared to the home console market. So the question is will that strategy work again or will the trend for generational decline happen again.

@Deadp001 It feels like at least 50% of gaming journalism is now reposting Twitter posts. Then you frame it as a big deal and have people comment on why it shouldn't be a big deal, even though it's only made into a big deal by the journalists. I remember reading EDGE back in the day and it would've been so weird if they had loads of articles on what a random man said and how it's bad and wrong, followed by dozens of reader comments about how it is indeed bad and wrong.

@themightyant All completely true but it's still odd to call it the holiday season since there are religious holidays all through the year. A Muslim wouldn't refer to Ramadan as the holiday season despite there being other holy days around that time. Look at this, it's neverending: https://www.xavier.edu/jesuitresource/online-resources/calendar-religious-holidays-and-observances/index

@dskatter They haven't done it like that, at least not much. Look, here's a BBC article on their site:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgnj7e8028o

And I just googled various newspapers from the 80s and headlines are either ALL IN CAPS WHICH WE ALL KNOW IS ANNOYING TO READ, or written like that BBC headline above.

>"And Charles Young, editor-in-chief of video game website IGN China, was equally effusive in his praise for the title.

>"We often boast about the thousands of years of splendour in Chinese culture, but this can sometimes come across as a bit of self-promotion," he told the ABC.

>He said he thought Black Myth: Wukong had "already achieved" great success in promoting Chinese culture overseas."

If you're using the phrase "thousands of years of Chinese splendour" then you know your brain has already been fried by BS. Imagine a British dev or journalist talking about thousands of years of British "splendour" and "promoting British culture overseas".

I'm doubtful of this. Both in terms of being individual, actual live viewers and also in terms of that translating to the "bigness" or cultural relevance of the show.

If you went into a pub and asked random people if they know what the Oscars are, everyone would. Now imagine asking random people if they know what the Game Awards are. Ask random people which game won GOTY in any year at the Game Awards. You might as well ask an 80 year old couple who their favourite Honkai Star Rail girl is.

On a different note, it's funny that Reggie is most surprised by it supposedly being watched more than the Super Bowl, a game in a sport infamous for only being cared about in a single country.

@RudeHero "You obviously haven't astro bots booster/hover jump is straight from mario sunshine for example.
Enough said."
So just out of interest, going off your own logic, do you think Nintendo copied Sega when they made BotW since the gliding and climbing is just like Sonic and Knuckles? Even being able to climb, then glide off and stick to another wall and climb again.

@LifeGirl I think it's that sort of game that's perfect for PS+. Broadly speaking, there are games you really want to play and you get them ASAP, there are games you have zero interest in and wouldn't play even if they were free, then there's games that you don't massively care about but there's still something interesting about them. They can put all the CoDs they like on Plus and I'll never play them, they could put a game I was hyped for like DD2 but I already played it. But something in that odd grey area like Forspoken or Sonic Frontiers and that's perfect.

I love how some people are saying it looks generic but those same people wouldn't have said a game where an American guy travels the world and shoots people is generic when ND made Uncharted.

Onimusha and Okami getting sequels makes me so happy. And a new Ueda game. My dream thing was seeing an announcement of FFIX remake but I still got a lot of good news from this.

Best game that wasn't mentioned: FFIX Remake.

Some points where my brain tuned out, but overall it was very good. New Ueda game, new Onimusha, new Okami - that is dream tier. Several other amazing things, not least of which are TW4 and the new ND game. But then various bouts of nothing. But I'd say it felt like a great E3 in general.

Thaddeus Sasser sounds like one of the super villains we'll be playing as in future seasons.

Well, I've been vaguely interested in Frontiers but wouldn't buy it unless it was like £6 so that's decent for me. Used to love Sonic as a kid, but like most people from that era, it stayed as something from my childhood rather than being something I kept interest in - at least post-Dreamcast. So it'll be interesting to see how the little smug git is doing nowadays.

Forspoken will be interesting to play just to have a nice soak in a warm bath of absolute cringe for as long as it's entertaining.

I just wish they'd make story mode easier (while still allowing the what-ifs). I bought this game at launch and only played it once because it was so horribly unfun. I loved BT1-3, by the way, and never found them particularly difficult, but this was the least fun I've had playing a game in many years. Well, apart from the minigames in Rebirth. Only case of buyer's remorse I've had in probably at least a decade.

@Briarback Well to be honest, the Game Pass defence doesn't really work on PC because every offline game can just be pirated for free. So every offline game has this free alternative and yet they still normally do way more then 12k. You get crazy things like Palworld being on GP but having over 2 million concurrent players. But like I said, even without GP most games have that free alternative option.

@ItsAlwaysSunnyyy It feels like a weird kind of QVC shopping channel for games. A QVC-type channel where they give awards for the best vacuum cleaners and watches to pretend it's not just a series of adverts. And yeah, E3 had this proper event feel to it, something more weighty and genuine.

@PuppetMaster Yep, I know. That's why I was asking if this restriction was only for GOTY because I knew Left Behind didn't get that but it did win something. It seems odd to count DLC as a game for all categories but one if they're going to take issue with it being treated as a "regular game".

TLoU: Left Behind won a BAFTA despite being DLC. It was later released as a standalone thing but that was the year after it won a BAFTA. Or is this only for the GOTY award specifically?

Yeah, like many others I get what is presumably the first page of it, that'd have my avatar and username displayed, but it just has loading swirls in their place. Then it does the error message others have posted. Sony seem really bad at the technical side of things like this. Same as how awful the PSN shop is, lack of folders etc.

@breakneck @LavenderShroud It sounds much more like he knows Geralt is in it but didn't realise he wasn't meant to announce it, then got told by CDPR to say it was just a misunderstanding.

It'd be kind of weird for the VA of Geralt to hear that he'd be returning to voice the character from some random rumour and not say to CDPR "I heard this rumour I'm coming back but you haven't asked me yet. So am I coming back?" and to instead announce it publicly several times even though, supposedly, no-one from CDPR has asked him.

@dskatter Rocksteady didn't make Origins so if you're okay with a game made by an entirely different dev team (from an entirely different country, even) the lack of original members in Rocksteady shouldn't really matter.

@Gunnerzaurus I was going to say the same thing until I actually read his tweet, so I'm guessing you haven't read it yet and just assumed the same thing I did. He specifically claims the name is copied because of the word "widow" and makes no other claim of similarity between them.

@MeanBeanEgg Yes, the market that Square Enix thought would dramatically change XVI's fortunes. Remember how it was only being on the PS5 that caused it to underperform? Then they release it on PC and it gets outperformed by a NES game with a fresh coat of paint.

The all time peak concurrent players is interesting. This very old school game with basic presentation has almost doubled the count of a considerably more expensive game that turned a JRPG into an action game in order to chase more customers.

@3Above For a basic remake of a NES game, the third basic remake of a NES game, to sell almost a million copies outside of Japan in this short time is pretty amazing.

"adapting this famous old franchise."
Something about that annoys me. I mean, it's a newer franchise than Star Wars, slightly, and I don't think anyone referred to Outlaws as "adapting this famous old franchise".

@LifeGirl How could you personalise the PS1 and 2? What really happened is with each PlayStation they added the ability to customise it and then recently they took it away. 60% of Playstation consoles had zero customisation. If you want to customise your system, why not get a PC? The whole console deal is incredibly limited control but, at least in theory, you exchange that for a really simple user experience. Don't get me wrong, I'd like themes too, but it's an odd complaint about things that are basically budget PCs defined by their total lack of user control.

@Balaam_ It's not as simple as plural and singular for those words, if you think about it. You wouldn't say "I has a sandwich". Nor would you say "everyone are happy", you'd say "everyone is happy" as if it was just one person.
Or "everyone has a problem", not "everyone have a problem". But then to really confuse things, "does everyone have a problem?" is correct, not "does everyone has a problem?"

@Azex Yeah, depends how you look at it. This is basically a birthday for PlayStation. Are these themes the equivalent to the present, which you keep after the event, or equivalent to the party, which only lasts a short time? Seems like they looking at it as the party and we're looking at it as the present.

@TheTraditional Pretty sure they are since you can pirate amiibos using your phone to write the data to NFC tags. And yeah, I agree. BotW becomes pay-to-win with amiibos. They also locked the TP dungeon behind Wolf Link.

@Oxy You're saying that while self-censoring on a site that doesn't allow words that everyone uses every day. I'm not defending Fortnite, I haven't even played it and don't typically like multiplayer games, but it's a pretty ironic post.

Big Big Small Land (it may have a different name, I can't remember) in Mario 64 was the best level.