MrPeanutbutterz

@Crimson_Ridley Oops yeah my bad! Guess I'm excited for RE9! 😁

@crossbit Thanks for the detailed answer, much appreciated.

That method of balancing sounds far more palatable to me and exactly what I was hoping for. I remember finally unlocking some weapon (genuinely over a year since I last booted it) and then the patch the day later nerfed in, which was a bridge too far for me.

Sounds like it might be worth dipping in for a look again (sure I still have it installed anyways).

@Steeleye25 Oh we don't mention the "B" word in my house, digital crack that it is, whoops!

Hope you get stuck into Absolum in a similar manner, it really is lovingly crafted game.

Have a similarly good one!

Art of Rally is a lovely little game. Played it on Xbox, so will be happy to try it out on PS5 (much prefer the ol' Dualsense).

Almost bought RE9 and Expeditions several times in the last few months (in fact RE9 is in my cart, but I bought Absolum instead).

On paper I enjoy the Yakuza games, but they do not respect the player's time.

How is the balance for the game these days? I played in the first six weeks but dropped off with all the chopping and changing.

@Steeleye25 I had a completely free day yesterday, the weather was dreary, so I said I'd play it for an hour or so and really give it some proper attention...

Six hours later I turned it off! My new game of 2025 (if I had played it then!).

@SMJ Yeah and I still need a plastic box to access the account to play those games.

@SMJ And if I don't buy the box to play them, they're worthless.

How is this even a conversation?

@SMJ and what is the software running on, exactly?

@SMJ And where do you think I've spent an easy five-figure sum of money on those games? Hint - begins with "P", ends with "laystation", precisely because I own one of their current plastic boxes.

@Scottyy Once you've finished the stages you can basically skip them and are handed a weapon relevant to the stage you're going to.

A run taking three to four hours for myself was perfect - I'm there for the tight Housemarque gameplay after all.

@datamonkey The pacing in Ragnarok was ass, the story limped to its conclusion, the puzzles were repetitive, and the level design is frustrating to navigate. Probably my biggest disappointment this gen.

Returnal for me is number one game here. Near perfection.

@Toot1st To me something that has proper skill checks and challenges. This doesn't.

Interactive TV show, barely a game.

@MB81 Forza Horizon is massively overrated IMO. It feels like you're turning a boat, not playing an arcade racer.

It's the antithesis of the Burnout series in terms of handling.

I snagged a physical copy of Gears of War Reloaded very cheaply during the week (for €15.99, new and sealed). I've played the first twenty minutes of it, and it reminded me why I stuck with PlayStation back in the early PS3 days - the dialogue is so utterly cringe, it's so gosh darn brown (plenty of PS3 games were as well in fairness), the AI enemies feel brain-dead, and it's honestly dull as dishwater to play - "roadie run" (or whatever nonsense they call it), take turns shooting from cover, rinse, repeat. I'll probably play another hour or so of it just to confirm that yeah, it's overrated and what I've been honking since 2010 - Vanquish eats this tripe for breakfast.

Picked up Absolum last night, and having a blast. Stayed up with a "just one more run" feeling longer than I should have.

Have more deliveries to make in Death Stranding 2.

Tempted to stick on Street Fighter 6, as the new Alex trailer has me hyped (I mained him in Third Strike and his early days in 5).

@somnambulance "like" 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

@Steeleye25 I've just put two hours into Absolom, and absolutely loving it so far.

How's the player-base these days on Rematch? Very tempted.

What I'm not tempted for is Absolum. That's an instant buy for me now. I actually picked up four new games last week - Shinobi, Divinity Original Sin 2, The Crew Motorfest, Gears of War. And I'm balls deep into Death Stranding 3... those will all be getting shelved this weekend for Absolum.

@Toot1st Me saying I don't want an Xbox but wouldn't mind playing a few select games isn't some random statement, it's a reply to someone repeatedly telling others to buy an Xbox. What I said is entirely within context of the conversation.

Reading comprehension - give it a go sometime, will make your own and everyone else's lives a bit easier.

@SMJ He didn't mean it literally...

@Balaam_ I say this as someone with several thousand physical CDs and records in the room next to me - physical media is dead, time to get over it.

@SMJ I mean, that's true, but also impactical for a lot of people. Do I want to replay Forza Horizon 2 and 3 again? I sure do, but do I want an Xbox One sitting under my TV? And the effort of tracking down physical copies of those games (since they're long delisted)? Absolutely not. I'll just crack on with the considerable backlog of games I already have on formats I already own.

Like the other commenters, if those games somehow launched on PS5, I'd buy them in a heartbeat. But they won't, so "meh" to the alternatives.

@nomither6 Wii smashed the 360 in terms of sales, PS3 overtook it and had vastly more daring games in the last few years of the generation (as did the Wii by default - Kinect was a lame attempt to emulate it and capture that audience).

360 was great, but never on top.

@SMJ Bugs are ironed out, QoL improvements abound, more content.

By all means, tell us how he's wrong?

@Oram77 Not just studios, but whole publishing houses!

Should bloody well hope so they (as a now-third party mega publisher who) can show PlayStation some "love", or whatever the other poster you were replying to called it.

@SMJ

But this site does enjoy whipping up the fanboys

Delicious irony considering you're telling people to "just play it on Xbox", or "buy an Xbox".

Pardon me/them for not wanting to spend money on a dead platform.

Love these, shame I find it hard going back to a regular Dual Sense after using the Edge for a year.

Games already feel like they've been dumbed down to be "interactive experiences" rather than "games" with proper fail states and skills checks.

At this point just lash on a YouTube or Twitch playthrough and save yourself the price of admission

@GamingGod Nintendo's market is people looking for a console to play console games, Sony's market is people looking for a console to play console games. They're the same thing, just slightly different flavours.

If I go and buy a Switch 2 tomorrow, that's almost €500 of my gaming budget that goes to Nintendo instead of Sony. Then I'll be buying games for the Switch 2 - same deal. But as it is, I'm not going to because I have a frankly embarrassing backlog on PS5, which means the money I paid to Sony didn't go to Nintendo, and it's also stolen the time away from them.

@NavalHistorian I'm a firm believer that the rot was setting in with Xbox before the Xbox One - they pivoted hard to Kinect with the 360.

I was working my way through university behind the tills in GameStop at the time, and early in that gen was selling the 360 to people who wanted titles like Halo 3 and Gears of War (the LE Gears of War console sold like hotcakes because it was damn cool). I remember selling a bunch of 360s for games like Dead Space, Fallout 3, Rainbow 6, GTA4, Final Fantasy 13, etc. at those games respective launches. The number of systems (and Live Gold subs) CoD helped shift needs no introduction.

Then Kinect shows up, it attracts the Wii "casual waggle" crowd, the killer first party exclsuves dry up, and no one is sure who the console is aimed at anymore.

@PuppetMaster Right? Like the two best burgers in my hometown are across the street from each other. One place does great pizzas as well and doesn't go too hard on chips/fries, the other great chips/fries.

Are they in competition with each other despite their products not being identical? Well if I want a quality burger with similarly good side, absolutely. Just like how Sony and Nintendo don't sell identical products, but if I want to buy a console + console games then they are clearly vying for the same people's time and money.

And wasn't it one of the big Nintendo honchos who said "everything is in competition with our products" (possibly the DS).

@TheArt Subjective opinion innit.

I think Spider-Man 2 and GoW Ragnarok are horribly mid games, yet I also think CO E33 is utterly mid as well, and Death Stranding 2 smokes it in every aspect.

But once again that's just my subjective opinion, and there's no right or wrong.

@RPGamer1994 And Japan is one country. Meanwhile in the rest of the world.

You're a hardcore PC fanboy - cool, we get it. Go play those games instead of trolling a site for a platform you have zero interest in.

@RPGamer1994 You recon AMD and Nvidia smell of roses?

Lol.

@GamingGod It's already been explained several times in this thread - Sony sells consoles and games, Nintendo sells consoles and games.

The exact same market.

@RPGamer1994 If PlayStation make the same bad moves as Xbox, then why is the PS5 another massive success for them while the Xbox brand is effectively dead and buried?

@Mattlong78 What made it "much better" for you?

When I had the Series X (did the exact same as yourself in terms of timing) I thought it was much of a muchness between them, bar maybe Quick Resume (which was an amazing feature).

By the time I sold my Series X it was louder than my PS5 (which saw the most use to begin with).

I worked at GameStop during the PS3/360/Wii era (was a handy job for university when you have a gaming habit - staff discounts were decent at one point). Used to trip over the number of special editions (I'm being hyperbolic here, but you know what I mean).

Really miss those days at times.

@saffeqwe What age range are you? Because this game is anything but obscure - released when the PS2 was really taking off, and the renewed hype for Star Wars was a thing.

@Jammer That's exactly what they did.

https://www.smythstoys.com/ie/en-ie/gaming-and-tech/games/avatar-frontiers-of-pandora/avatar-frontiers-of-pandora-from-the-ashes-edition-ps5/p/254352

@MasterChiefWiggum Microsoft haven't been competition since the late 360 days.

And yes, Nintendo are competition - the vast majority of people into gaming (or any hobby) have finite time and money to spend on it. Sony sell a videogame console, with online infrastructure, first party exclsuves, lots of third party games, which is the exact same as Nintendo.

Just because one of them is less powerful and can be played on the sh**ter doesn't mean it's not in competition with the other.

@RoomWithaMoose Different tone and context to what's been said though.

And Microsoft are one of the main companies enabling the enshitification of everything with AI. Not Larian, or Sandfall.

Nadella could do well to read up about The Streisand Effect.

Rare physical release ≠ obscure game.

@AhmadSumadi I loaded my save and was "refunded" a massive wedge of points!

I got as far as finishing Kiera Metz's questline on it (NG on Death March), but could see that the build just wasn't possible again, so noped out of it.

Then again, it's my second-most played game ever on my 17 year old profile (and most played single player), and the PS5 upgrade was free, so it's not like it owed me anything.

@AhmadSumadi Meanwhile my PS4 Death March toxicity build absolutely no longer works and is a limp biscuit compared to what it was.

I haven't booted the PS5 version in a long time, but if I recall, the branches take three points to max vs. five in the PS4 version, and you can't push the max stats as hard. Pretty significant difference there.

Saros and Tokyo Extreme Racer.

I've almost 500 hours on the PS4 version, but zero interest in the PS5 version as they decided to mess with the builds and stats of a then eight year old, single player game for no apparent reason.

Death Stranding 2. Went back and five-starred everything in Mexico for some juicy unlocks. Back in Australia, I just finished chapter four and unlocked the blood boomerang.

Shinobi Art of Vengeance. Really enjoying this, think I'm in the third area proper. Can see the legitimacy of the complaint that the stages are a bit too long.