Pandalulz

Ok, I lied actually. The game installs off of disc and runs without a PSN update. But then it downloads a bunch of data once you are in game. That's even scummier because I can't download the update with my console in standby mode, the game has to be actively running. Bleh...

I am having a blast with the campaign though.

Huh, look at that. After all the rabblerousing, Halo is copying 68.4 GBs of data off the disc with no download required. Seems like somebody lied on the internet to get a rise out of people. Imagine that.

I played multiplayer so much on a friend's XBox way back in the day but never actually touched the campaign, so it seemed as good a time as any.

Also, I picked the option on waiting for a price drop, but it's not really that, it's more about waiting to see whether I have a reason to move to PS6 up front. I don't imagine the gains will be high. I doubt there will be exclusives I have to buy. And if they do release this rumored handheld, I am definitely not going to buy that version since I do not like that type of experience, and I even fear it will lead to a Series S situation where it holds games back and makes them even harder to develop for. If that's how it plays out, I will be using my PS5 Pro for a good long time.

Nah, I was PCMR for 20+ years before COVID when my last gaming PC died and I went full Playstation. The hardware manufacturers along with MS have done everything they possibly can to drive me away from coming back. While I dislike that Sony is doing away with physical discs, the neverending enshitifcation of Windows and the active hostility towards gamers by the hardware folks I find much more distasteful.

I bumped up to a Pro with a disc drive when it launched. I still have a pretty ok sized physical backlog. If there isn't an option to buy a disc drive, I am not really in any hurry to upgrade until I make my way through that pile if I ever do. The price isn't really the deterrent.

@16BitHero I dunno. I remember when everybody bought a new TV and there were a hundred articles about why you should turn off motion-smoothing, and well, this just seems like the same thing, but different. All I read articles about is how it makes weird shimmery effects and strange artifacts. I still need to be convinced.

I could see myself paying that price at some point, I am lucky that I have the money to spend. It's a box I pay for once and gets used for years and years. It will pay for itself eventually, and it will still be cheaper than an equivalent PC. The question is why to buy one. The PS5 Pro seemed a no-brainer at the time, with everything being such an upgrade from my PS4, especially the loading times and all. But if it's mostly just the same, but 10% faster, especially if it's just more frame-generative AI bells and whistles, then eh, I can wait for a while.

I have had Essential pretty much since it launched on PS3 paid in annual installments.
I am finally going to let it lapse when it expires in a month. I have zero use for it. I don't play multi-player games except ones exempt anyway like FFXIV. I almost never touch the "free" games. I was holding onto it for the PS5 cloud saves that will be held hostage, but oh well, if I lose something, so be it.

Sounds like they got the same voice actor with same intonation as the new show's dub, for better or worse. It's definitely a choice, and unintentionally hilarious.

I had the Recently Played not load for a minute but the weirdest issue was actually security related. I wiped my phone last weekend. No biggy, I normally log into the app with email, pass, 3rd party 2FA. That wasn't an option. The only options were to scan the QR with the phone app (couldn't for obvious reasons), login via passkey (never set up), or recover account. So I did the last one and the recovery method was a text from my phone, which would be less secure than the 2FA I already enabled. I went through the passkey setup this time but that means they actively removed my 3rd party 2FA without asking which kind of bothers me a bit. All of this was stumbled across completely by accident since I never saw any notification about the change.

@Swandivetotheasphalt That's valid. Just not that into 3rd person action games, all 3rd person action games, all the time.

@charbtronic So one interesting thing to me, is that from the little I did play of the game, it didn't really have the HD backdrops, so I think they might be doing at least a little bit of remaking and I think that's pretty neat.

So apparently the Nintendo Direct is everything I really wanted out of the PS State of Play is where I am at today.

Huh... so... they took the Brave Exvius protagonist and all the other character models and are using them to make a single-player non-gacha game? Very curious. I don't hate it. I really liked BE's sprites. I didn't play enough of it to know if this is just it remade or what.

@Nei That's just Rain from Brave Exvius, so I don't know what's actually happening here.

XBox needs to decide if they want to sell a few more boxes or a lot more software. After decades they are still so undecided.

Will it be the most watched? I doubt it, but who can say. I can guarantee that somehow it will be the most complained about either way.

@RoomWithaMoose Legend of Dragoon

@rjejr Once you go OLED, you can't go back.

I fell in love with Playstation specifically because of the third party content in the PS1/2 eras. I didn't really care about first party then or now. The only difference is that the third party exclusives have gone multi-platform, but Playstation is still the place where I play them. I can't stomach the price of a PC, I am certainly not buying an XBox, and I don't want a Nintendo handheld.

Personally, I am much more interested in Dawnwalker than GTA6 anyway.

@B-Real Oh interesting to know. I read the comic years ago. I have not kept up.

Still sounds like pulling a slot machine handle 89 times too many to me.

I never did beat this game. I got to the sky dragon and it skill-checked me on the hit/jump traversal gimmick and I just never could get that down. It was a great game for everything I did play. I definitely keep the OSTs in my rotation.

I did beat Sea of Stars though. That was a great game as well.

Sony is also retaining full control of their commercial business according to our sales rep and have new displays, projectors, DVLED walls, cameras, and other things in the pipeline so they aren't getting out of the hardware business by any means. I assume that's where a lot of their R&D dollars go anyway. I don't know how much I would trust their consumer OLED displays and other home lines in the future though. That's to be seen I guess.

@VeganH They are increasing the minimum PC requirements though. You need a slightly larger toaster to run it. https://genshin.hoyoverse.com/m/en/news/detail/158502

@Gbarsotini This was my imagination of the events too.
Nintendo: Sign this contract stating you won't release on PS and we will give you money.
Squenix: signs What about XBox?
Nintendo: Who?

I am going to put my target price into Dekudeals and wait either way. If Deku sends me an alert and I go to the site and it's more than the price Deku told me, I will just wait some more. Nothing different than normal.

@BAMozzy When Windows launches, and you click on Steam, and you tell Steam to launch God of War, there is nothing stopping GoW.exe from using Windows APIs to ask Windows what the very specific name of the CPU is and doing whatever it wants with that information.

@ElectricWizard The cynic in me just assumes the worst case scenario unless they specifically come out and say otherwise. This is Microsoft after all.

@BAMozzy I would assume the Helix will be running a custom CPU that shouldn't be hard to identify by the software, if Sony wanted to do something that silly.

@wildcat_kickz Hahah, this is my belief is well. She said you could play your PC games on the Helix. She didn't say you could play your PC games, purchased outside of the Microsoft store, on Helix. I imagine this thing shipping with one of their weird neutered tablet editions of Windows or whatever.

@get2sammyb To #38, I am mostly curious what "running XBOX games" means exactly. Like is there a Windows app that does a full emulation of an XBOX UI so you can download all of your back catalog natively, or is it like a dual-boot mode, or is it all streaming, or...? I don't even care about XBOX games, I am just curious what the technical solution is.

Personally, keeping me on any system in the past had much less to do with how many exclusives they had, and much more to do with whoever was doing a better job of courting third parties onto the system. I have played very few of Sony's first party games the last two generations, and if all the third party RPGs and indies start just sticking to places like Steam because Sony is too busy focusing on their own BS, I will VERY BEGRUDGINGLY go back to PC.

@Fizza It should still give you the option to download the PS4 version by hitting "View Product" and "View Versions" assuming it doesn't just ask you which one to download up front. That's what previous upgrades have done.

It's stupid but I hope this "stabilizes" the new animated backgrounds. The old ones work perfectly fine, but if I do the fireplace or animated seasonals, whether from hard off or standby mode, half the time the animations doesn't kick off until I move away from the page and back or sometimes even have to scroll down into the page and fiddle with something before it will start animating. This is on a Pro as well, so don't know if that's specific to that or not. It doesn't even really matter, just first world problems.

I just picked up my preorder on my lunch break. I'm doing my part! insert Starship Troopers meme

I'm going to start it installing tonight and then I have to leave town for four days, but next week...

@Runex2121 Interesting take. I am glad to hear that it's not as terrible on newcomers as I have built up in my mind (after playing everything over 2.5 years).

I kind of like them, but they also mostly remind me of the rear end of a diesel truck.

So for Metaphor in particular, I am still waiting around to see if they make a "Royal" version of it. They poisoned that well pretty hard. Why would I buy one of their mainline games in the first three years?

I am completely caught up and ready finally. Even played through the TitS1 Remake. Let's do this thing.

@Gremio108 I dunno, it's pretty warm if I stand next to my PS5 Pro while it's running.

@Topov81 Because technically it is still Autumn until the Solstice on the 21st.

I remember renting this as a kid and thinking it was garbage then.

If it wasn't for the animal iconography I would say it's related to the new Darksiders. The faces look like the collectible souls, there's a bunch of skeletons in armor, and I would absolutely be using the throwing glaive to stab that giant eyeball thing to open the door.

I rated the library as great, but not for anything Sony has specifically done. It's been a really good run for 3rd party RPGs these last few years. The console itself has been really good, but I will never forgive how big and ugly it is.

The answers are all always a bit nuanced. I won't play mobile games. That's just a me preference. I don't care if they make mobile games. To answer the actual headline question, I don't think they will be successful, because mobile or not, they are just pushing their GAAS agenda on a different platform. Who knows though, maybe they will get lucky. Being a giant publisher with all the money in the world still guarantees nothing.

I finally completed my Legend of Heroes journey by finishing Daybreak 2 this last week. I am now completely caught up with the series. So what do I do to celebrate, I start Trails in the Sky FC Remake. Honestly, the battle system is kind of a breath of fresh air. You get the free move system Daybreak added, but with no weird SCM positioning constraints, no Boosts required for S-Breaks, everything is simple and open, at least in the early going.

I already bought a little mini-pc running bazzite for the older lower resource PC games in my backlog. I don't need a second one.

@REALAIS People play a lot of games that I personally find very boring. shrug

I just realized that I have 1000xRESIST and Hundred Line Defense Academy confused. I don't know that I necessarily care about either, but oops anyway.

This has me thinking now. I get that the high-stakes action style spy novel wouldn't work as an open-world game, but what if it were lower stakes, cold war maybe. Just wandering around, setting up listening posts, sneaking in as a plumber to drop some audio bugs, spend a while doing some stealth surveillance with a camera through a window, maybe leave some dead drops. Do all the boring spy ground work that James Bond never seems to actually do because he's a super hero and pretty bad at actually being a spy. Would it actually be fun, I dunno?

I don't really care what they do with multiplayer, just let me backup PS5 saves locally and easily for goodness sake!