oh look, the man who thought Dragon Age : Veilgard was so good it would single-handedly save Bioware is talking again... Hmmm...

Wait. Bioware is done for, but the IP is still owned by EA, so why would it be "essentially killed off now"? I agree on it being "on hiatus" as they say, but killed is a bit of an exaggeration, isn't it?

@Bluemoon2008 It's interesting how I am exactly at the opposite spectrum. What I expect from PS+ Essentials is this niche games and obscure indie games that I would never have tried if I had tp pay for them.

F1 : not a big fan of this kind of racing games but I'll try it, seeing if I may be surprised as this one got good reviews
Hunt Showdown : I"m not into online game but this one always intrigued me
Earth Defense Force 2 : definitely not something I'd pay for but I guess I can have fun with it for free.

So win win for me. You see, the big games and the well known smaller games I buy myself when they go on sale. I don't need them to go on PS+.

@AdamNovice I still don't see anything hateful. Finding a character not attractive, for whatever reason, is not hateful.

Wait, where was the "hate" in the original post D'Onofrio replied to?

Finding the design of the armor sets "unattractive" is not hateful. Disliking the appearance of a character model, even if more or less resembling the appearance of the actress playing said character, is not hateful. And seeing some kind of intent in these design choices is not hateful either.

Where is the hate then?

And before someone tells me there are other comments full of hateful attacks, let's stay on the subject of the article : D'Onofrio's reply. He didn't reply to someone calling Woll any kind of hateful names, he replied to someone voicing their dislike of the appearance of game assets and interpreting design choices.

@Krlozgod psprices tracks a lot more than just discount : prices around the world, prices over time, etc.
It's well organized, very easy to configure to your liking, very fast to update its db and regularly gets new features.
As you said, it's the GOAT in this category, to me at least.

Note : I couldn't care less for the number of copies a game sold, a number I would assume is not even remotely accurate, so yeah, not an important feature for me.

hmmmm... psprices.com would like a talk with you. Easily the best site I've seen for this kind of database, very user friendly and full of features.

I have to ask : how do they find the money to do this? One game 10 years ago with an incredible amount of completely free updates, no microtransaction. Sine then, just a small game made by 3 people and that didn't bring any substantial profit... So where does the money come from?

As I'm forced to take a few steps back from gaming and not be in the know of everything that is going on, these games starts to blend together : Black Myth Wukong, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, Lost Soul Aside, Where Winds Meet, Beasts of Reincarnation, now Phantom Blade Zero (and more I'm forgetting right now).

As I love the 3rd person action RPG genre, I should be thrilled, but seeing these games I can't shake the feeling the genre is being cheapened.

Well, it's not exactly a good time to be a Middle-Earth fan at all I'd say.

The Hobbit trilogy was a disappointement(unless you go and watch the M4 edit), the last "adaptation" we got was the terrible show Rings of Power, and we have an upcoming disaster with the Hunt for Gollum. Let's hope the team at Warhorse Studio can manage something good but I'll hold my breath until I see something worth being excited.

I'm looking at the comments and... sorry but are we really at the state in Hollywood when Dave Bautista is considered a good (I've even seen "great", "brilliant" being used) actor and not a C-tier action/horror/comedy flicks one? When did the bar get lowered that much?

yes, my current PC bought in 2020 is better than a PS5 and can rival a PS5 Pro for some games. And this is before any even relatively cheap updates.

So without any cost, and saving 72 euros every year plus having access to cheaper (and more) games, I'm making the switch this summer.

That will be 50 euros max for me when it goes on deep enough, after tons of quality of life and content updates.

What kind of title/article is this? A new game has better performance on the currently most powerful console? Color me surprised /s

@get2sammyb No issue, we all understood what you meant.

@DennisReynolds If you think that putting a transgender character in a more-or-less important role in your game in 2020 wasn't controversial, you need to take a better look at the world around you.

Druckmann knew exactly what he was doing (as shown with the marketing around Abby).

@Mythologue @Stale-Bread @TheFakulty The closest I got to the same feeling was Motorstorm Apocalypse but even then it never got to the level of Split/Second. It was really an incredible game, with so many different game modes, fluid split-screen, graphics that still somehow hold up today, banger soundtrack. Damn I miss those late PS3/early PS4 days.

@TheFakulty Since you're also on PS3, may I suggest to you Split/Second. This is by far the best arcade racer I've ever played, by far. I've been searching for a similar experience til then but never found any game offering it.

@nessisonett I mean... if you're into this, you do you. I'm not sure what your point is? Do you mean there are subjects that should be taboos in videogames?

"this delicate subject matter"

This is not a delicate subject matter, this is a simple point of view. If a movie takes the point of view of a woman taking revenge from the men who used her, nobody will say it's enforcing gender stereotypes. The amount of hypocrisy on display here is staggering.

The devs decided to make a game from one particular point of view, that's it. Anything else is pure virtue signaling, I was hoping we had gotten past this by now.

@GirlVersusGame agreed 100%

How could we have an article about outfits in SF6 without mentionning the insane price they cost? No way to buy them with in-game currency, no way to pay the exact amount for one skin, coin packets tailored to force you to buy more than you need for the amount of outfits you want, and general price insanely high.

This is why I haven't touched the store : it's extremely predatory, which is suprising because the base game is very much the antithesis of that : full of content, both base and unlockables, decently priced season passes.

Whoever is in charge of the outfits pricing either should be fired, or is doing exactly what Capcom wants if the numbers show people are really falling for these anticustomer tactics.

Heck yeah! Unity is my favorite Assassin's Creed and still holds up today, anyone who hasn't tried, please do, you can get it for dirt cheap almost all the time!

Best parkour, fantastic story, superb main character, incredible city, very good assassination missions, I know what I'll replay next!

@vikramsingh Thanks! Can you turn off the online part remove the other players completely from your game?

@vikramsingh may I ask you something : how is ESO as a solely single player experience? I always get conflicted opinions.

@wildcat_kickz @TheFakulty litterally in the article:

"This version gives you access to every expansion up until 2024's Gold Road."

Why keep Atreus dammit?

Wasn't the general consensus that Atreus is considered extremely annoying at worst and simply boring at best, and that the levels we play as him are just fillers that slow down the pace of both games?

Big fan of the series here, but this doesn't look that good.

Simplistic graphics with the kind of 3D sheen we've seen on a lot of anime adaptations for example, lacklustre animations and hitboxes, annoying sound effects, ...

They want people to come for the gore, but I'm not very hopeful this will be even fun...

Wait now you can stream games directly from the cloud without having to download them on your ps5? That's really a huge upgrade!

Ia there any info on whether it's available for PS+ Deluxe (what some countries get instead of Premium), since in Deluxe there is no streaming of PS3 games?

yeah nope, psprices(.)com all the way. I use the PS Store only and only when I've decided to buy something.

There is no reason whatsoever to use the store, and I just can't understand why. Isn't there some kind of research that shows you sell more with a tidy and easy to use UI in your store?

@Ricky-Spanish Because gore and sex have always come together. Nothing new.

@Elfuggingjefe @HRdepartment Let's do both : Pedro Pascal for old Kratos, and Tom Holland for the flashback to young Kratos

Perfection

That's not massive shoes she has to fill!

I'll see myself out...

I'm still surprised after all this time that people are not heavily criticizing this game for being very ugly (albeit with a lot of "cool"effects). These body models are just horrendous, early PS4 era at best, but you'd never see this mentioned in mainstream review for whatever reason. Pushsquare called it "An audiovisual feast" ffs.

I have high expectations for this game. Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed was fantastic both on PS3 and Vita, so I'd love to see a return to form.
I've been waiting for a good kart racer on PS5 (PS4 had Crash Team Racing which I'm still playing...), hopefully this is it.

@Jammer Exactly my thoughts too : it's so sad to see these beautiful worlds with at least mildly interesting stories and great art design getting completely ruined by over complex systems and aggressive monetization. Such a shame.

@GeneJacket Fair enough and thanks for the lengthy respectful and quite interesting reply.

While I agree the collection isn't just a bunch of roms on a disc, I'll push back on 2 points :

• "a ridiculous amount of time" : the time put into making such a collection can't be compared to the time needed to create a new game, and while work time doesn't always equate value, 50$ (or 60$ for Switch2!!) is not what I would evaluate the value of such a collection. If this collection is to be viewed as a preservation endeavor, well, the price of a museum ticket should be applied, something like 10$, 15$ max.
• you say the collection is for the hardcore fans, and I can't disagree on that as only these hardcore fans will find any value in it beyond a few minutes, but can we at least agree that Netherrealms is not marketing it this way, and is hoping for a lot more sales than just a few hardcore fans?
  And also, what is "hardcore fans" nowadays? It seems to me than anyone with an ounce of nostalgia for some games they played when they were kids/teens (and I'm one of them) want to feel included in this group. I've played countless hours of MK and MK2 on my Super Nintendo and in the arcade back in the day, but I wouldn't consider myself a "hardcore fan" and while I may enjoy some of the content of this collection, I'm sure a youtube video I could watch for free and/or a blog page from a retro gaming site like Time Extension would fully satisfy my curiosity. Now we can maybe pretend I'm in the minority here, but I don't think so, and if Netherrealms is producing such a game, it's because they count on people acting on their nostalgia and then very quickly regretting, or at least forgetting, their purchase...

I may be wrong, and the collection may well end up being an incredible work of preservation elevating all the games contained to a new level and offering buyers countless hours of gameplay and informative content... but somehow I don't think it will be the case and Netherrealms is in my opinion asking nostalgic gamers to buy what seems to be a nice, but in the end overpriced, collection of obsolete and/or bad games.

@AdamNovice Which is exactly the issue. If you're ready to pay full price for a few minutes of nostalgia with old games (most of them either bad, or now completely obsolete) when you could do it very easily for free, then we get this kind of packages. It's obviously a cashgrab, and like all cashgrabs, it'll work...

@AdamNovice There are countless devices, especially portable ones, made specifically for emulation with preexisting os and software that make emulation as easy as can get.

And any good guide will make the process of emulation very easy to anyone even without any technical know-how.

Now let's be serious : all these games are easily available via emulation and, in all honesty, how many of them are still enjoyable today, except for a few moments of nostalgia?

How big is the Mortal Kombat 1 download size?

@get2sammyb Don't they have market analysts paid a fortune to exactly make sure they see a success or a failure coming?

Proton Suite in general is a must in 2025. With AI everywhere, this last summer I went all in : Linux Mint on my PC, Graphene OS on my phone, Proton Suite for my mail, calendar, drive, passwords and VPN, and as much third party open-source apps for the rest.
All for a small 12€/$ per month.
Internet is really not the same after this.

@4fold agree to disagree then 😊 cheers mate

@4fold so first, the answer to your question : no, I don't want the end of porn for adults, but I wouldn't be sad if it were to end. Like cigarettes, we know it's bad for us but we keep it around because adults are free to do whatever they want.

Now about the gangb**g : ideally, a 18 yo who faced the opportunity of doing one would refuse, because he would have the maturity gained by years of restraints and good education. Because yes, I don't thing gangb**gs are good things in themselves (while I would bnever try to ban these kind of behaviors, people should be free to do what they want wiht consent) : diseases, promiscuity, lack of emotional weight linked to the sexual... All these things have generally a negative impact on the individuala taking part in it, especially lf they are young.

And yes, being desensibilized to these kind of sexual acts to the point of taking part in it being not only a fantasy, but an ordinary opportunity, by watching porn since 11, is not good in my view.

@4fold And in the land of pink unicorns, people were living in harmony without war, murder nor theft. It was a paradise akin to the Garden of Eden, and the children were pure and innocent.

More seriously, no amount of education will be efficient against the libido of a 13 yo watching gangb**gs.

@TimeDelayedGamer I see your point and agree to a degree.It was true though only before internet. Today, for a kşd to access internet, he doesn't have to find his father's badly hidden stash (which would put the responsibility on the father), he accesses the porn directly from.any device. Parental controls work up to a point (believe me, my 11 yo students have explained me at length how they bypass them), so we need some responsibility to be taken by either the service provider (here, the porn site). Now, how this responsibility will look like is the crux if the matter.
While I'm absolutely against gov imposing these kind if measure, if the result is simply people consuming less porn because they fear for their privacy, maybe it can be a goos thing (even though, since I'm a pessimist/realist, aI know people will not reduce their porn consumption and their data will end up everywhere...)

@Contimaloris agree 100%