Pandalulz

I really enjoyed Trials despite the incredibly simplistic combat. This looks like a nice upgrade to that so I am looking forward to it.

Ender Lillies has been sitting on my wishlist for a long while for a day when I needed a new Metroidvania. So one out of three games is better than most months.

I work AV IT at a university so Summer is our busy time while we get as much maintenance, upgrades, and construction done while the least number of students and faculty are on campus. Once the new semester kicks in, it's busy for about two weeks and then everything for us mostly goes into autopilot until the next break. Right now I am slowly working on the new FFXIV expansion while I am not exhausted, but then it will be backlog time.

It looks interesting, but is interesting enough when I am drowning in other games I want to play is the question?

@doctommaso Agreed. I would rather see what my friend list is up to than what some random streamer uploaded.

@CrispyMango92 It gave me the points from when my PS Plus renewed on the 3rd so hopefully game purchases are being recorded as well.

It did require a force-quit to refresh the app, but it is up in Atlanta now.

@ShogunRok On one hand, excellent, but on the other, darn, now I need to reshuffle my backlog.

@ShogunRok I haven't caught up to the end of the series yet. Just finished Cold Steel 2 so I have a ways to go. But, assuming I do manage to catch up this year, does the game have a satisfying conclusion, or should I assume, like many of the arcs, that I should wait and play it back to back with the next one?

EDIT: I will forever be scarred by the wait from playing Trails in the Sky FC at PSP launch to them finally releasing the localization of SC, for example.

Oh good, Discord update just in time for the FFXIV expansion since I currently voice chat on my phone with my friends who play on PC. Maybe now I can do it more natively.

Heh, this is what we get from the Bungie acquisition I guess. twitches from Destiny 1 lore card memories

I don't hate the idea. It's funny because the majority of games being released are still targeting the PS4 hardware, yet the stuff that targets the PS5 hardware seems to already be hitting a performance wall. If they do actually announce it, and if enough developers state that they will be supporting it with stronger graphics modes, then I will probably buy one eventually.

I can't wait to turn this on, so people can think to themselves, "Why is this guy so bad at this? Sure, he did the thing, but in the most roundabout and clueless way possible."

This honestly has me curious if there will be some kind of curation to pick the best capture to show to other people. Every week or so, a new clip replaces it, until only the most efficient speedrun version is left, like some kind of twisted leaderboard.

I got rid of my PlayStation credit card years ago. It started out as a CapitalOne card and then they sold my business and info to some other company I had never heard of so I just noped back out of it.

I am catching up on a few smaller games while I wait for Rebirth to drop so have been bouncing between Darksiders: Genesis and F.I.S.T. I am enjoying both pretty well.

I stopped the FFVII OG play through from last week. I just wasn't enjoying it. I loved the game 25 years ago or whatever, but now, there are too many old-school design choices that I can't get past.

That being said, I randomly picked up Darksiders 3 and beat it in a day and a half. And now I am working on Darksiders Genesis. The weekend took a turn I did not expect.

Pre-ordered, against my normal judgement, so I am just going to wait until the game launches and play it then.

@Kraven Remake was the final straw where I had to figure out how to repaste the processor on my PS4 Pro. The fan went from jet-engine to space-shuttle and kept popping up a "Your PS4 is overheating and will shut down!" message.

In preparation for the FFVII Rebirth release, I did Remake and Crisis Core, and am now just working through the FFVII OG PS4 glowup. It's funny playing through the Midgar section now, it feels so abridged. But also, it's really convoluted how they dump you into the world, and then next thing, you are piled on with the exposition dump in Kalm, the weird Chocobo catching thing, and then Ft Condor in like the next 30 minutes. The original game really is wild. I haven't replayed it in something like twenty years.

I am at about the 75% mark on digital to physical in games. Mostly if I buy physical, it's about sales, because I am cheap. I Marie Kondoed all of my movies and music into oblivion years ago. Once in a while though, I play a game so good, that I start evangelizing it to my friends. It's a hard sell if they have to buy it, but if I can just hand them the disc, the barrier to entry goes down so much. I miss that when I realize it's a game I bought digitally.

Like last month, three games I don't own, probably wasn't going to play, but might be motivated to try now, so sounds good enough to me.

FFXIV, always FFXIV, but I think I put more time into the Legend of Heroes series than FFXIV, so that's a thing. Finished both the Liberl and Crossbell arcs this year. Plan on starting the Erebonian arc sometime next year after I get caught up on the FFVII remake stuff.

@Shepherd_Tallon I love my Linkbuds Sssss... They do ANC on a budget price, are still small enough to be comfortable, and since they do the dual-pairing thing now, they are super easy to bounce between a couple of devices.

Honestly, I think this is one of the better months for me. They are all games I don't own, wouldn't have bought otherwise, but look interesting enough to mess around.

It's fine. I think I have played less PS5 exclusives on it than I can count on one hand, but the loading seems faster even on PS4 games so that can't be discounted.

I booted up my PS4 the other day, and you know what I saw: I saw an activity list that showed me what my friends were up to, what new games they were playing, the achievements that they had gotten. I felt a little more connected to my friends list, even though we were all in our own lanes, playing single-player games. And then I logged back into my PS5 and saw a bunch of garbage content that streamers I didn't care about had posted. And that sort of sums up how I feel about the PS5's UI three years on.

Hmmm... It is very pretty, but that weird fish-eye FOV on the fixed outdoor camera also made me motion sick after 10-15 minutes, so I guess I am skipping this one.

@MrMagic https://twitter.com/charlieINTEL/status/1716958629184622762/photo/3
I am so confused, people keep talking about this being for the digital console, but if you guys bother to follow the Twitter source, this asterisked line is directly under the line that says, "Disc Drive (attached to console)* *Internet connection required to pair Disc Drive and PS5 console upon setup" and is written on the combo box that comes with the disc edition Slim. Even if it comes with the drive already attached, you will need to connect it to the internet at least once.

@The_Pixel_King The other day I installed both Genshin and Honkai just to boot up for some Stars rewards and while they have vastly different library artwork, both install with exactly the same icon that says Hoyoverse at the bottom. It's so dumb.

I bought the PS4 Slim because it fit comfortably in my backpack and I could take it on business travel. It's a very solid piece of tech.

The PS5 Slim is still too big and, more importantly, awkwardly shaped to do that with. More than anything, I wanted the Slim to be a normal functional shape that fits in standard size locations and doesn't look like it's going to just fall over no matter which orientation it is in. But here we are. No reason to buy one beyond the big guy I already have.

I bought the game when it went on a dirt cheap sale and then just dumped it in my backlog, assumed I would play it eventually one way or the other, so I am glad it is now much better. But I still don't have time for it and it will continue to idle in my backlog for a bit longer.

@Czar_Khastik I played the first one on PSP when it came out and then waited and waited and waited for the second. I don't really like playing on handhelds though, I find it terribly uncomfortable. So when I decided to finally decided to play through the trilogy now, I bought them all on Steam, my PC is plugged into my living room TV, Bluetoothed a Dualsense and played them with my butt on my couch. The first game is pretty slow for about the first half and then barrels towards the end. Then the second resets and it takes a bit to start up again. The third is a different thing as it's a straight dungeon crawler. It's hard to not recommend it because it's effectively an epilogue to the other games and has probably the best combat and soundtrack, but I just didn't enjoy it as much.

A business card case?
insert obligatory American Psycho Christian Bale meme

I do need to get caught up on this series. I plowed through all of the Trails in the Sky over the last month or two and am taking a break with Sea of Stars before I jump back into Crossbell.

There's a very miniscule chance that I play any of them in June or any time soon (working on backlog), but of the three, FFXVI is the one going on my wishlist for a later sale. I'm not a fighting game person, and I've never been able to get into the neverending looter cycle of Diablo and similar types of games. Plus, I know people are praising D4 for having a "dark and gritty" aesthetic but it just reminds me of the PS3 era of endless grey and brown (now with splashes of red!)

People clamoring for a Destiny 3 seem to have forgotten that there was a Destiny 1, and jumping to a new game is how we got here in the first place. Destiny 3 would just be the same terrible design and you would end up paying $70 for it. I don't think the problem is Destiny 2, the problem is Bungie. Reboot Bungie.

I'm not sure the full-on Devil May Cry action combat is my thing yet, seeing as I haven't really played too many games of that type, but I'm willing to give it a try. i very much enjoyed FF7R's combat. That being said, the darker direction is fine. Every FF is different and I have no issues there. I think the most hilariously appealing thing about it is how straightforward the release is. There aren't any movies, or prequel games, or books or other cross-media involved. It's just a game. Thank goodness for that. The team seems very confident in their ability to tell a story and that gives me a lot of hope.

@Toypop I mean, I’ve been wearing earbuds, wireless or not for decades for everything that’s not my PlayStation. It’s a little late for it to matter now.

I think I tried on a pair of 598s maybe or something equivalent in Sennheisers at some point. The giant velour pads are luxurious, but they still didn’t fit my head quite right.

At the end of the day, I already found my own workaround, in that I just pair my earbuds to my LG TV.

@Perryg92 I too, am wearing my Linkbud S set at the moment.

@Toypop I just find earbuds way more comfortable. I have a Pulse, and they are too big for my weirdly shaped head. I discovered if I wear a thick hat, they sit correctly. But then I have to wear a hat, indoors, sitting on my couch. I hate hats.

I backed it on Kickstarter, so I sure hope it's good. It's looks and sounds fantastic. But like others have said, the Messenger was really good, so I am interested to see them try their hand at something else.

On one hand, none of these games in particular does it for me, but on the other, it's the first month in a long bit where I didn't already own some/all of the games, so I guess that's a plus. OlliOlli seems like it would be fun though, so while I wasn't interested enough to buy it, there's nothing stopping me from trying it for free™.

@Gbarsotini Right? I can only imagine a scenario where this game is just a nonstop series of Adol crashing the ship on every island and then having to either fix it or find a new one before they can leave, to just do it again.

@LordOfTurnips it seems to only count as “online” if it required PS Plus, so ignoring F2P and subscription games. I spent 500+ hours in Final Fantasy XIV and one hour in Elder Scrolls Online so I only spent one hour “online”

@theheadofabroom It's even weirder than that, I played around with it, and basically the only way to back up the PS5 saves, is to do a full on System backup, and it doesn't restore the saves, it literally wipes the console with an initialize and restores it to whatever system settings it had at the time of the backup.

@belmont You can back up the "PS4" saves the same as you could before by just copying them to/from a USB stick in Saved Data settings. I think you can "Backup" your PS5 saves but it's a whole different convoluted process from System settings and you can't copy them easily or individually. It does a backup/restore of every thing.

Yay, now my Slim is stuck in an upgrade failed reboot loop. I can't seem to get it into Safe mode even. :/

I voted that I hate it, but it's absolutely a thing I've done to myself. I want to play all the games, but I'll never have the time, and stupidly I go and buy them anyway when they're on sale. I've put myself on a moratorium now. No new games for at least a year. Play what you have.

I've hit that saturation point where I either already own the game before they give it away or I wasn't going to play it anyway, even for "free." I don't have enough time as is. But I prepaid my Plus account from black friday deals years ago so I think it's still good for at least another year.

@GigaGaia I just tested mine, and I take back my hypothesis. I don't think it actually downloads any faster in Rest Mode. In my head, it always seemed like it did. But I also get about 350mbps down, and I think it's downloading at a little more than half that, jumping about 20MBs every second or so, since it doesn't actually give me a specific number.

@GigaGaia I think the PS4 throttles downloads while it's "Awake". If I start a download and then put it into "Standby" mode it downloads much faster. I'm guessing people are comparing awake vs awake speeds, maybe.