Matroska

@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.

Finally a videogame character I can relate to.

@Robocrop_Duster Older consoles still sell in poorer countries. In their main run they're too expensive because console prices don't tend to scale for each country. So to make up an example, a PS4 could cost a month's wages on some countries until more recently. And apply that to each console generation.

Definitely, especially if they make all enemies visible. It's one of my favourite games of all time. I didn't like it at first, I think I expected all JRPGs to be like FF back then.

@Godot25 @KyushuTrail "We all live in a simulation" is a famous theory that states we are almost definitely living in a Matrix-like simulation. I have absolutely no idea why he's using it in the context of CoD selling well.

https://academic.oup.com/pq/article-abstract/53/211/243/1610975

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4wMhXxZ1zNM

@BlaizeV I know what you're getting at, but they didn't make or even publish these to begin with. Ever17 came out about 2002 and had nothing to do with them. Never7 is a bit older. These are just two old VNs being brought to modern consoles by them.

DQIII. Man, it puts most JRPGs released since the original to shame with the sense of adventure and exploration. It's brought my Veilguard playthrough to a screeching halt.

>"Sparking! Zero is based upon — the Budokai Tenkaichi series"
It's not based upon them, it's the same series. The Sparking series was called Budokai Tenkaichi in the West to tie them into the Budokai series for marketing purposes. You had Sparking, Sparking Neo and Sparking Meteor, which we got as BT1-3.

I really didn't like FFXVI but Ben seems really cool and like he really appreciates and respects his role in it, and the wider gaming community. "60fps, get 'em Torgal!"

@riceNpea I know, every time I see "tidbit" and stuff like that... I guess that's the issue with being an internet journalist, you're just embedded so much in American culture.

@Zemo55 It's a jokey word used in a lighthearted way, like yank and limey. Also, remember, a word is only offensive if you find it offensive. Australians use it in a bantery way, I can't imagine a British person in Australia being surrounded by Aussies as they're taunted with "pom" while crying. It's just a little fun jab, and we do the same back. Like how you're cheekier with your friends than you'd be with a stranger.

@LavenderShroud Well it should be the least English thing since he's using Australian slang (and is Australian, but he's playing it up here because the article's about Australia) whereas the other writers are English. 😄

@breakneck Wow, Astro seems way more recent to me. Time is going way too fast.

As always, some of these discounts are pretty weak. You can get Sonic for just £4 more on Amazon and that's not a discounted price.

@breakneck It was 45% off on Amazon the other day but sold out almost immediately. There are a few games up there that are newer than Metaphor, I think, like Astro Bot.

@Drago201 Well this one isn't even made by the same company. It's just the same Lego license. Everyone seems to think it's the same devs as the other ones. I don't think any of them are that good, but this seems to be an absolutely bare bones game that would basically be a minigame in another game. The others are basically Metroidvania collect 'em ups.