MrPeanutbutterz

This has 6/10 with a "we're sorry fans are disappointed so we'll work on it" redemptive arc written all over it.

Yours for €15 six months after launch.

@BearsEatBeets The appealing part is indeed the retro graphics. If you remove them for something else or more "appealing", then they lose the appeal.

@BearsEatBeets The fundamental appeal of games is, well, gameplay. Don't care what it looks like, as long as it plays good.

You're also comparing to forms of filmmaking that probably everyone alive today (who watches films) have only encountered as curios, or not at all. A lot of gamers today grew up with games looking like this.

Very tempted by the paid DLC, but feeling sketchy that there's no price for it yet.

@ZeroSum I'm sorry, loot ducks? Okay, now I have to check Arc Raiders.

@TDHorizon What's worse about doing easy trophies is they become "if everyone has it, no one has it".

I have a buddy who prides himself on his Platinum collection, yet they're all fairly easy to achieve. He was absolutely not amused at me Platinuming WipEout Omega Collection (0.1% of players have it, a third of the trophies are that percentage, and most of them are under 5%).

@Dogbreath You're amazed that a barebones port of a game released 15 years ago on 20 year old hardware looks fine on a 2025 console?

@Ahoyman That's a fair criticism, but it's also not what the person that I'm replying to is criticising.

@Balaam_ Change the record already about multiplayer trophies. Or you know, get good.

I'll take a console looking like a steaming pile of poop as long as it's close to silent in operation.

The PS5 is a beauty in that regard. PS4 is one of my least favourite ever because of how obnoxiously loud it was.

@Balaam_ "Trophies need to conform to my narrow skills set so I can somehow convince I'm great for flexing same" sure is a take.

@IronCrow86 That's definitely your choice as a consumer, and it's great that you can exercise it.

I'm just making the point that the for-profit, multi-billion dollar global corporation are doing gangbusters with their current pricing, therefore they don't need to change anything (I'm not defending them, just observing how late-stage capitalism works).

@IronCrow86 I mean, they don't.

That's like saying that there's a cheaper restaurant down the street and the other one "needs to up their game" when they're full every night.

@themightyant Yeah a lot of trophies feel like box ticking exercises for the developer just to say "yes, we have a trophy list". Even Titanfall 2, most of it is playing the short (but sensational) single player. The "... Becomes The Master" trophy is where it's at, as it forces you engage with the core mechanics. I remember when I finally got that one and I jumped back in online. I was spotting new routes to wallrun and got so much better at multiplayer because of it.

WipEout Omega Collection has one for doing a barrel roll on Moa Therma - the track is mostly flat with lots of mag strips. I'm a veteran of the WipEout series and always did a barrel roll here, so I popped it without even realising. But if you didn't know the spot, you'd look at it and wonder where can you squeeze that roll in, which will fundamentally give you faster times on that track. Similarly "Beat Zico" - I can race Anulpha Pass almost blindfolded from doing that trophy.

Best thing I ever did was turn off trophy notifications. They (well, achievements) sounded like a cool idea at the time - effectively "bragging rights" and a modern take on the hi-score table, but the vast majority of trophies are dished out for simply playing the content you've paid to play. Or they're boring collect-a-thons.

I've got some fairly spicy platinums (WipEout Omega Collection, Sekiro, Titanfall 2, amongst others), but they forced me to understand the games and achieve some level of mastery of them - which is what a hi-score table would do.

@Balaam_ "What shouldn't be permitted"??? The sense of self entitlement of "trophy hunters" is borderline parody at this point.

@Rich33 Horrified for sure, so much so that he's dropped the Xbox and will stick with his PS5.

I'm full sure the next cross-gen period will be there for keeps. I usually buy PlayStations within the first year (Vita, PS4, PS4 Pro, PS5 were all at launch), and given how this gen has played out, I've currently got no interest in PS6 at all.

Their games have become too repetitive, and I miss the days of more "gamey" games too.

Now if there was a new WipEout on day one I'd be there with bells on, but that ain't happening.

I got the Concord question right without even thinking. Because I pre-ordered it 🫠🫠🫠

@SMJ Oh don't get me started about those darn clouds 🤣

@SMJ Lol fair. My only saving grace is the bus pass can't be too far off now.

@SMJ Is that self-awareness? Lighten up.

@Rich33 It's goodbye to cheap consoles, sadly. Sure a buddy had his launch Series X fail there, hasn't been keeping up with what's happening in the industry and was shocked when he popped in to buy a replacement.

You make a good point about GTA and where we are regarding the generation. I would love to know how many monthly PSN users are still just on PS4. And if they're long-term holdouts who saw the protracted cross gen period and figure similar will happen with the PS6, so a PS5 this late in the gen makes sense.

Shout out to the 30 new Series S owners for going their own way 👀

@PuppetMaster I've shown EVO Moment 37 to a friend who doesn't play videogames when he was asking "why would you watch someone else play them?" and even he thought it was hype AF.

But "sequels = bad", apparently. Imagine applying the logic to other media - bands that tap out after their first albums, film franchises that never get a sequel, etc. Mad thinking altogether.

@SeaDaVie There's €40 off the Mario Kart World Switch 2 bundle here in Ireland too right now (at Smyths at least - they're basically the only real gaming outlet left here).

Having worked in GameStop many moons ago, and prone to mooching about secondhand shops/CeX looking at games, I'd be fairly confident in saying Nintendo usually does good business here too.

@Rich33 We're over five years into the generation, most people would opine this is what the console should cost as standard by now anyways.

This also feels like a push before the next (sigh) price increase due to the RAM shortages. And once GTA6 hits it will cause a serious upswing in console sales.

@PuppetMaster When you put it like that... ouch! Imagine thinking "wait, this is Final Fantasy SEVEN?! Must be a problem!".

Or to continue-ish from our other conversation... imagine thinking Street Fighter should never have got a sequel.

@PuppetMaster Oh I hated Gon and Dr. B. Complete waste of two slots (in a game that has only 24 or so to begin with).

I think people pining for the "good old days" don't really engage with fighting games on a fundamental level. And that's fine as people take different things from different genres (using myself as an example from a different thread - I skipped as many cutscenes in Ghost of Yotei as possible because I'm playing for the combat and exploration. I've a rough idea of the story and don't need all the exposition that goes with it). So they view fighting games as something that you blast through by yourself, picking up new characters for your troubles.

Like I'm okay at Street Fighter 6 (got Blanka to Master rank), but the entire pull of the game is fighting other humans. Learning to outsmart them, bait them, read them. The challenge of a game being a game.

Eh, SF2 on the 16-bit consoles "tutorial mode" was sitting with the instruction booklet in two player by yourself 😂 And hoping someone in school figured out something fancy that you could copy!

I genuinely don't think people understand how much work it takes to craft a good character - from the art design, animations that need to both look good and be readable, to giving them a toolset that works in most cases but is also balanced. Like I don't main AKI or anything, but she's genuinely one of my most favourite in the SF universe, and I've been playing the series since SF2 in the arcades. And even the classic characters - they've all been redesigned and retooled superbly. Like I don't think there's many people who prefer how Blanka looks and plays in SF5 vs. SF6.

And I'm convinced that SF6's netcode is some sort of witchcraft. Playing people in the same country feels like they could be on the couch beside me. Wired players in EU? Not far off that either. I've even had fights where the metrics at the top of the screen say "this will be ass" but it still felt fine.

@HRdepartment I'd say it's the opposite. The old games had junk characters aplenty (and awful game balance that couldn't be fixed with a patch).

SF6 is my main jam, and pretty much all the characters are viable. T8 - despite it's bloated roster - is similar too (though the gameplay feels like it's "find a launcher, juggle to the point of doom" and has robbed a lot of characters of their identity and feel from the old games).

Imagine sitting down with Sonic 2, Revenge of Shinobi, and Streets of Rage 2 and asking "does the Megadrive have a sequel problem?".

@PuppetMaster Amen to that.

I see those comments online so regularly about "the good old days" and I stop to wonder did these people play the games for more than five minutes? The content is a fraction of the modern equivalent.

Booted up Tekken 3 on PS5 there recently and the base is all of 10 characters. T8 is 32 base (with far more complex and varied movesets too).

@Shaw_Brothers As a "genuine fan" of fighting games (been playing since 1991, have 600 hours on Street Fighter 6, buy most fighting games at release), the paid DLC characters are a huge benefit.

Street Fighter 6 is a better game today than it was at launch due to feedback and how its been tweaked. There's also more content (like stages, soundtracks) that's easy to purchase with in-game money you earn just by playing the game.

But the biggest thing is the DLC characters keep the player-base together. If my buddy goes and buys the game tomorrow with all, none, or some of the DLC, he can hop online and play me (who's owned it since launch) no problem. I own a chunk of the DLC.

You know what happened back in the day? The new content was made anyways and sold as a brand new title via a "Super Turbo Whatever" edition. And it split the player-base. If this was Street Fighter 4, my base game copy is now junk because my buddy bought Super Street Fighter 4 and we can't play together. I bought the "DLC" for Street Fighter 4 by... walking to my local store and handing over the price of a new game for Super Street Fighter 4.

I'll also refute your "complete" game comment - SF6 was complete at launch. Highest base roster for a new gen of SF, best in business net code, robust training tools, massive single player RPG mode. They've simply added to all that.

The character unlock thing is also not what it seems - even with all the characters unlocked, the old Tekken games still only had about two-thirds of Tekken 8's base roster. They had significantly less moves, and a lot of them were palette/model swaps. And a lot of those unlocks were mostly recycled moves too - like in Tekken 2, Rodger and Armour King have King's moveset, Wang has Michele's, Devil/Angel are Kazuya with a cheesy unlockable, Kuma, P-Jack, Ganryu are all slightly tweaked versions of Jack-2.

Love the hardware itself (have one since launch day, and a 11xx series since May 2022 - this one has a fan without the "UFO" noise).

Wanted Demon's Souls Remake at launch. Astro's Playroom as well.

Have played and loved most of the exclusives (Returnal, Rift Apart and Forbidden West in particular), but there's just something missing from Sony these days.

I've got third person action-adventure fatigue. I'm a long-time arcade racing fan. My PS3 was partially bought to access the Motorstorm series. I was day one on DriveClub on PS4 and clocked over 200 hours on it. PS2 had some of the best arcade racers of all time and I bought the majority. This one hurts most - WipEout 2097 is my favourite game ever made, and that series is well and truly dead.

There's some wonderful third party games there too at least, and the (sometimes) "PS4 Pro-Pro" nature of the backwards compatibility really elevated some games - Sekiro in particular. I found parry timing impossible at launch on PS4 Pro due to the uncapped, fluctuating framerate, but it's locked at 60FPS on PS5. 100%'d it last year and it's one of my favourite games ever.

I also never understood the criticism about its graphical capability. I remember watching the first hour of Demon's Souls Remake the week before launch and could barely believe I was watching a console game. If you can't see the generational difference between Ratchet & Clank 2016 on PS4 and Rift Apart on PS5, or the gulf in quality between Forbidden West on PS4 and PS5, then you really do need to go to Specsavers.

So like any gen really - a few bits I don't like, but a lot to love.

@Uromastryx Ironic that you say play Minecraft where there's bugger all mechanics to engage with - if I wanted to build stuff out of Lego I'd buy Lego.

Look, what's so difficult for you to understand that if I want a story I'll read a book, and if I want an interactive videogame I'll play an interactive videogame with as little interruption to the interaction as possible?

My free time is precious, and I don't want to spend it listening to meh exposition when I've bought a game for the combat, the exploration, and the visual spectacle?

My understanding of the story didn't need to be any more nuanced than "Yotei Six bad, Atsu mad" to enjoy the game underneath, so why would I waste my time with the story?

@AdamNovice Because I've sat through enough of the ones that you can't skip to know.

It's also, you know, an ultimately derivative videogame. It's not going to be the troubling the ghost of Tolstoy.

@Uromastryx Believe it or not, there's a whole lot of old school players that buy videoGAMEs for the GAMEplay part, and little else.

If I wanted tedious storytelling and dialogue I'd ask my nephew now his amateur dramatics class is going.

@Striker21 I do - they increased the price because they want more money. Your plan would cost them more money, ergo the price would increase again.

@Neonix Microsoft have been developing and manufacturing hardware in-house for 43 of its 50 years in existence...

@OldGamer999 Adjusted for inflation, how much were the consoles you were playing on back in the day?

@DennisReynolds I'd say it's more a case of they did, but just don't care.

Xbox is dead as a console brand and I'd assume the main reason why you can even still go and buy a Series console is for when your own packs in.

It's seen enough Development Hell to ensure this'll be on my "wait for many reviews and community feedback" list.

Sony’s next-gen console

Launch was five years and two days ago...

That's like what, 40 laps of Sardegna lol

Insert "y'all got any more of those videogames" meme here.

@ATaco Oh I agree. Money is the devil. But unfortunately Greg my baker won't barter for a loaf of bread

@ATaco Funny how people on a gaming site have trouble understanding the fact that game prices have stayed well behind the inflation curve and as unsavoury as the recent bump in prices were, literally everything else you can go out and buy also saw price increases.

Stop calling them Activision. This is Microsoft, and Microsoft have a serous thing for AI.

Never really cared for the franchise, but the blatant enshitification of it continues unabated.

How the mighty have fallen.

@MamaSymphonia

I would like to see a stronger focus on making the next PlayStation either a very unique place to play or a better value place to play than my PC

.

The PS5 was great value. The €500 I paid for mine at launch five years ago wouldn't have bought me a PC that can run games like Death Stranding 2 or Horizon Forbidden West.

@RoomWithaMoose Quantity I agree with, but the quality has been stellar.

Of course what sort of games you want to play is subjective, but in technical terms Sony are one of the few publishers I'm okay with buying on day one.