NotTelevision

@NathanKang I’m going to be boycotting this so hard bro. Was hyped for this gahm but now I can see it’s just a cAsH gRabb! #Silksongate##

The first Hellblade was a misfire, but an interesting misfire. The game made great use of spacial audio and featured a really incredible boss fight in total darkness. But there were so many bland combat moments and puzzles that dragged the whole experience down. It seems like instead of taking what worked, they doubled down on the mediocre aspects from the first game.

It looks similar but it’s not enough to claim it’s copyright infringement.

@nessisonett Mostly agree with you but the combat elevates the experience in Ghost. Almost all current open world games I crank the difficulty down because I have no confidence in the combat mechanics being any fun to engage with. Here I was having fun, cranked the difficulty up, and had a blast with it for at least 50-60 hours. Lame story and historically inaccurate, but I felt more like a samurai here than an assassin in Ass creed or even as the Orkin man in Witcher.

Remedy games always sound better on paper than they do in the hands. They lack the ability to bring together all the various influences they were inspired by, into something that feels coherent and necessary. The combat feels off and the stories aspire to current prestige TV shows, but are really just CW drama tier.

Clearly talented developers on board these projects though, especially on the technical side.

@Propaperpusher There is so much in the game that tells the story though… lol. Dialogue, item descriptions, details in the landscape, notes, etc…

To be honest, I’m not really interested in getting into the weeds of what is going on beyond the basics, but to say there is no plot or story going on in the game is ridiculous.

I’ve often imagined Bloodborne would make a good movie… but Elden Ring is 150+ hour game. It might work if they cover a segment of the world and a character going on a journey of some type unrelated from the main narrative.

Never played a Forza Horizon game so I was super stoked for this. The controls and driving mechanics are fantastic. Loving it

@Ralizah Oh yeah I totally get it, and I consider myself to be pretty particular about games. I just consider this game to be an important contribution to the medium, similar to something like Breath of the Wild.

Even if it is flawed in some crucial ways and can be slow-paced and cryptic, it’s still something worth experiencing yourself.

@Ralizah Whoever convinces you not to pick this one up at some point, don’t listen to them. It’s worth a shot, even if you don’t like these sorts of games. A rare achievement.

@Westernwolf4 I loved the gameplay and combat of Wolfstein New Order and Colossus. Is the action comparable to that?

Already know Machine Games can deliver on the story front.

I can see an episodic “villain of the week” thing working for the story, but there has never been much intrigue in the games storylines. If they departed from the tone of the games it might work.

@Darude84 That’s not what shovelware is. A 70% review aggregate constitutes the majority of current Ubisoft releases, middling metriodvanias, and janky but still fun RPGs. Also Frogwares games.

Shovelware is typically made by developers who just want to release their game, regardless of the quality.

It’s acceptable. Great graphics and world but let down by glacial pacing and truly awful dialogue. I think when I was younger the Final Fantasy troupes were fine but now I just can’t get into the characters and the storylines are so trite. It wouldn’t be an issue if the plot was just in the background and I didn’t need to be invested in it, but given it’s prominence, it just feels juvenile but not in a fun way. Very 15 year old boy coded.

As a general rule it’s silly to buy consoles day one. I waited a year for the Switch1/ PS5 to actually get some momentum before diving in. The digital games are 60-70 bucks which is the standard price for games now. But leave it to the internet to make a mountain out of a molehill.

The silliest thing about the direct is charging for that Switch 2 demo game lol. The price for the console seems fair though. It’s a higher quality itineration of the Switch concept, and it’ll be awesome to play Elden Ring anywhere.

It’s a great game that is made a classic by the addition of the DLC. I’m a fan of the horror theming myself and the world is incredible. In terms of quality I wouldn’t say that it is any better than the first three Souls games but is better than Dark Souls 3 which felt sorta uninspired by comparison.

Go anywhere, do anything, eat a sandwich, take a nap with the game in the background, or don’t, it doesn’t matter to us. Are you unable to decide between Death Stranding or Elden Ring? Call 555-HELLISUS and talk to one of our licensed professionals.

I want to play Nine Sols as that looks right up my alley, but for me the game of the year was Animal Well. I don’t remember the last time a game so totally blew me away with its creativity and level design.

I don’t like Naughty Dog games generally, but this aesthetic is cool. Might be right up my alley. Fire me up some Pet Shop Boys, boys!

Man it’s desperate times out there for Bloodborne fans. They are running around like blood staved beast searching for 60 fps, no matter the price to their sanity.

And why Horizon Forbidden West? That’s a Sony exclusive property that should be one of the selling points of this service.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns just got added to the service in March and is already getting removed? That’s too quick of a turnover for such a big game.

@nessisonett I felt that way at first, but the more I dug into it, the more I realized how cynically designed the game systems are. I’m not sure if this sort of reptile brained “number go up, money get” approach to design is necessarily good. Unless the game is some meta commentary on the nature of video game content, divorced from context, about getting a bunch of stuff with higher numbers. I guess the experience sort of depressed me and made me want to go do something creative with my time. I’m not sure a video game should create that feeling….

Though I have increasingly become tired of JRPGs for similar reasons.

This is an awesome concept. Looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

I’m really looking forward to getting lost and running around trying to find a place to eat and take a bath lol. Love the first game.

@Max_the_German Indeed. Living’s mostly wasting time but to live is to fly, all low and high.

@Max_the_German Trying to be positive. The game is probably going to be a turd but maybe worth checking out for a 5er someday.

An unintentionally bad Deadly Premonition could be fun. Honestly the dialogue isn’t much worse than Death Stranding.

Yeah it’s a very good game. Though I think Dark Souls 3 is probably the better game, I prefer 2.

Depends on if the game is worth the struggle. I’ve powered through many games that were difficult because I was enjoying the experience overall. But then there are games where it isn’t worth it for me. A recent example is Tunic. Tried to get into it, but the difficult combat just didn’t interest me at all and the pleasure of exploration couldn’t overcome that aspect.

But some of the best games of recent years have had an effective difficulty curve. The recent trend of “cozy” games, have revealed how shallow an experience could be when everything is just given to the player by grinding. That’s why I’ve given up on so many Jrpgs as well.

I’m getting this dlc eventually but I’m not optimistic about it improving the quality of the final stretch of game. I’m not a fan of how From have ramped up the difficulty of the bosses, so much so you have to choose cheesy builds or memorize a dozen untelegraphed moves to defeat them. Dark Souls 3 had the perfect balance of difficulty and fun.

@Athrum The reason it was written that way was to emulate and partially parody noir fiction written by authors like Raymond Chandler. Also to capture the feeling of “thought” in text, you’ve got to include some digressions. But yeah I suppose it seems pretentious for the video game world, but for literature not so much.

On the “up their butt” end of literary games, see Norco and Kentucky Route Zero where you are forced to watch a 10 minutes stage play on the misery of late stage Capitalism lol

Yeah bring it on. KC:D is one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played. Really had to learn the rules of world to succeed. Hope the next game has a similar quality.

Might get around to Dragon’s Dogma 2 but overall this is looking like a backlog year for me. Other than Shadow of Erdtree and a couple of indie titles, nothing exciting on the horizon.

@thefourfoldroot1 Finally someone who gets it. Shareholders are coming to block our boners! This is starting to make me question my priorities, which is definitely not cool bro. I need a Pocky stick, pronto! Keep the dream alive.

I mean it’s fine, there have been plenty of games that have come out with sexy girl outfits though. I find it an incredibly boring hand to play. There are more exciting character designs than “Korean K-pop supermodel”. This coupled with the fact that the game doesn’t appear to much of a sense of humor, kind of puts it in the aesthetically bland category for me.

This looks pretty floaty hack and slash to me, which was fine a decade ago but now there are way better recent representations of samurai combat in games.

@showface But that isn’t really how electronic entertainment works. People bought an NES because it had Super Mario Bros. on it. They didn’t buy it in anticipation of a great innovative product to come along. PlayStation hasn’t really put their best foot forward in the space yet, and it’s their second iteration of a VR device.

I’m not buying it because the game library just isn’t there yet. I do feel like VR could be the future, but it’s too resource intensive and most of the best developers don’t want to bother with it.

Taylor Swift for MVP.

Not great, but I’ll give Rollerdrome a shot.

This is a really creatively bankrupt company. The last thing with their name on it that was worth anything was Sekiro and they only published that game. This isn’t so much a video game developer as a IP regurgitation machine.

It’s Baldur’s Gate 3, and by some distance. It totally blows away Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls, and many other story RPGs. My time with the game and its characters is one I will never forget.

Love the lineup! Games I’ve been wanting to play.

Has a Game Boy Color version been announced yet? Been looking for a reason to fire the thing up again.

I’ll admit. I’m a lousy save scummer. Not touching this mode. Might try to beat on tactician mode though.

None of these for me. I’m just waiting to see if extra subscribers are really going to get Teardown this month. Been waiting for that one.

I like the sound of this one, but I wasn’t a fan of Remedy’s other games. Control looked pretty and was really ambitious but the gameplay quickly got repetitive. I also felt the protagonist and the story wasn’t all that interesting. I’m definitely going to look into giving this one a go though.

I second others and will play in 6 months or so when it comes to plus. Looks fun though.

@Wilforce But a number will always be an internalized metric to some degree. Maybe the reviewer thought the game was below another platformer they gave a 7 to or it was below the designation of “Good”, which is what a 7 means on this site. “Not Bad” means this game is fine but the things that are unique about it aren’t necessarily well executed. The reviewer has justified that perspective in the written portion of the review.