RadioHedgeFund

This is less about a copycat and more about a failed collab between Tencent and Sony being repurposed. Sony knows firsthand what happens when you continue such a project as it’s what lead to the PlayStation even existing.

It wasn’t that Light of Motiram copied Horizon; it was that it reskinned a Horizon project.

SWOS was the most accessible football game of all time and it’s been downhill ever since. I don’t see how this will make a difference.

It’s a shame they never gave this a wider release too. The first 2 are still available on Xbox, with the Dreamcast original still the best one.

It’s an even bigger shame we will never get a rerelease of Soul Blade because that had a banging soundtrack and the best intro sequence in gaming.

@TerranIV The ‘fans’ have no idea what they want. They complained Force Awakens was too close to A New Hope in themes and structure so we got The Last Jedi, an imperfect yet often brilliant movie that would have segued in to Duel of Fates really well. Despite critical acclaim and decent box office returns for both movies, ‘fans’ disliked that as well. Disney decided to scrap DOF and pull something contrived out of its ass instead and we got Rise of Skywalker that made nobody happy and killed their plans for a post-trilogy era dead.

The terrible movie we got was rushed because of fan backlash to the other two yet the oxymoronic responses prove that the fans had no idea what they even wanted to start with. And to make matters worse the fandoms are actually a very small but loud percentage of people who pay to watch these things. Lucasfilm should have had the balls to just stick with its original creative vision. They had the Rotten Tomatoes scores and bank balance to back up that decision but instead they used Reddit as a barometer of success.

No, they didn’t ask for Rise of Skywalker but it was their loud minority voice that resulted in it being made in the first place.

Post-Endgame they pivoted Marvel to satisfying fans instead of a larger audience and you can see how the diminishing box office returns this has brought with it I would argue only corrected by Thunderbolts and F4 which feel like the movies of old. Everything they have made to appeal to a wider audience (Mandalorian, Andor etc) has been a success. Lower budget fan fare has been ok (Bad Batch) but when they throw money at a big budget attempt to just appeal to the core audience we get things like Kenobi and Ahsoka which were average-to-terrible in quality.

Star Wars inspired a fandom but it never started out trying to appeal to one. We’ll see what happens with Fire and Ash but James Cameron gets how it’s ok to just give people spectacle at the movies without any homework required.

What they should have done is canned the whole idea and designed a new character for a new generation with no expectations.

Imagine dropping the price to a sensible level and seeing people buy it!

It’s alright. By the time they start manufacturing the PS6 eBay will be flooded with cheap RAM chips and graphics cards.

@Fluberuper Here’s hoping for Jorgen Van Strangle from Fairly Odd Parents

@MrGawain Video games are video games. Some of the more haughty hobbyists might like to live in ignorance but the fact is that consoles, phones, retro consoles, portables, tablets and PCs are all in direct competition with each other.

Saying otherwise would be like saying that Disney aren’t in competition with Paramount.

This is what happens when you charge customers the expected lower-than-launch price of £300 rather than the RRP of £430.

I’ll pay whatever they like for a Momo or Pabu

If they’re not going to uncut Sony on price then what is the point of buying one, really?

All of Sony’s current retro titles are or have been on the PSN for sale separately and are still there now.

It seems the snobbery from console gamers towards the mobile platform is largely baked into the controls rather than the F2P elements. I mean 70% of Fortnite players are on PlayStation so clearly the financial elements are not as off putting as they may seem.

They do have a point in controls. Just like VR, shoe-horning existing genres in rather than attempting to build anything bespoke rarely results in a quality experience.

It boils down to cost. If Valve charge $500 for a machine without a controller then you may as well just buy a PS5.

@KoopaTheGamer It rather depends on your broadband. I’m not trying to brag but I have a 1gig connection at home which is flawless with game streaming. On the road though hotel WiFi at anything less than 100mb is awful.

They need to open this up to mobile now. Heck, charge us more money and we’d still pay for the ability.

No WipEout. No dice.

Now bring the ability to the iPhone. I’ll happily pay for it.

I still play weekly with my other friends and we’re all in our forties. I know people say the game is for kids but they know exactly who they’re aiming some of the collabs at with Terminator and the X-Men. I like to think of it as a video game version of the wars I used to act out with my action figures in the early 1990s.

The draw is the chaos. Very few games ever really end in the same way. One match could be a shoot out, the next you’re the last guy left in your squad trying to use a car to knock the enemies into the storm.

Given how useless LLMs can be, the rampant hallucinations that only increase with the size of the model and the lack of any profitability from AI companies likely forcing a big ‘pop’ in the next 2 years or so any company reorganising itself around AI isn’t a very sensible one.

@Corc11 I did. There are too many ‘hold for this’ buttons to comfortable switch the controls around in the settings which I call an abject failure of accessibility on behalf of the devs. You count the buttons, add this many actions and leave it at that. If your game requires more, it needs to be simplified

I’m going to assume the game still remains unplayable for those of us who prefer the classic AC control scheme with face buttons for attacks and shoulders for parkour?

If we’ve learned one thing from the Rise of Skywalker it’s to always ignore the fan base and trust in your creative gut instead.

Whilst I can understand the criticism of the actual software, there is a thread of console and PC gamers who need to get rid of the chip on their shoulder about mobile gaming in general.

There are still plenty of decent premium releases, innovative mechanics and indie hits to make you completely ignore the F2P cash grabs. Being able to do something as simple as play a few rounds of Balatro whenever I want is enough to make me pick that version over the rest.

I could perhaps understand the sentiment if Square Enix had abandoned traditional platforms but the last decade has seen an obscene amount of quality games from then on consoles.

If anything my criticism is where the heck is the mobile port of Final Fantasy X?!?

The irony being that Destiny Rising has got the player base excited again. It’s actually really good with a good foundation to build on. Perhaps the future of a game like this was always going to be mobile where the weight of mechanics is expected rather than tolerated?

The industry has been Sony vs Nintendo for nearly a decade now. I stuck with Xbox because it still played my favourite 360 games, not because its first party output was any good. That and Forza Horizon.

Perhaps it’s not Sony vs Nintendo at all though. They both seem to coexist by serving different markets.

Xbox on the other hand has no big single player adventure titles and has blindly ignored the family market since the Xbox One launch.

It’s worth a mention that EA has to take out a $20bn loan secured against itself for the buyout which means layoffs, consolidation and even more aggressive monetisation.

@EYEBALL I theorised years ago that the merger was partially a protectionist move to protect those IP from going to Amazon, Google or worse.

Still waiting for a PS5 that fits under my TV.

@JayJ To me that has personal GOTY written all over it. Lumines is my favourite puzzle title and Tetris Effect is phenomenal. Mix them up and….. woah

@Almost_Ghostly Time remains a great judge. The greatest board game of all time is Chess. Tetris is surely the video game equivalent?

@Almost_Ghostly ?????

I stated some facts about Tetris. It is easy to pick up, infinitely replayable and unreplicable in other mediums. Whether someone likes it or not is beside the point.

My opinion is Balatro is up there with Tetris. Why do you think it’s not?

@Almost_Ghostly Personal opinion has nothing to do with it. Objectively the greatest videogame ever made is Tetris. It's easy to pick up, infinitely repayable and cannot be replicated in any other medium.

Balatro is up there with Tetris. Whilst perhaps not as immediate over it gets it's claws into you you know about it. You don't need to know a thing about poker to have any fun with it. Even if you don't get on with it on a personal level, you cannot deny it's plaudits and impact.

But on topic, it could also run on a SNES.

If you treat this as an open-ended freeform space RPG it's actually a really good game. There are loads of things to do and lots of ways to approach it all.

If you've come for the story you're best completely ignoring the main quest line altogether.

The specs arms race is dead anyway. The best game of the last decade is Balatro and you could probably run that on a SNES if you tried.

How is it any different to porting the games to PC? Has this hurt the brand in any way?

@3Above After the island parts of Forbidden West I am kind of hoping they take Aloy to what's left of Hawaii (some secret Faro facility?) and make the next game a futuristic Wind Waker, where you get to hack and ride the tiderippers.

NOW DO LOCOROCO

Microsoft just don't know how to run things as a publisher. They should just set the budget at the start, give them a 3-year timeframe and let them get to work.

These sorts of moves are inevitable. It's not 1992 anymore and kids aren't arguing about whether Nathan Drake or Master Chief is the better character. Most online games are cross platform anyway. Who the heck to they think they're playing Call of.Duty or Fortnite against?!

If everyone becomes 3rd party so be it. It didn't hurt Sega.

I'm totally on board with the idea but publishers cannot keep the servers on forever for just a few hundred players.

What they should of course is mandate that offline play modes be baked in from the beginning so that players can continue to enjoy their purchases in future.

Apple defenders keep bringing up the Games Industry as examples of closed platforms people are content with, yet there is no gaming platform to my knowledge that has only one storefront. Even digital only consoles like the Series S with no disc drive add-on can purchase discounted codes from places like CDKeys.

A more pressing matter is platform lock-in via digital licences and a lack of consumer ownership. There needs to be a way to let you take your digital purchases from one platform to another (eg PlayStation to Xbox) without paying for everything again.

@Jrs1 There have been rumours about them doing a retro streaming service for ages. Given the mysterious delisting of their own internal titles (which are not 'expired' and the lack of extra games for the Switch Mega Drive app it's only a matter of when, not if.

@Woods-PS Come on, you've got to admit that disembodied hands and teleportation is no way to offer immersion in a game. It's the VR equivalent of touchscreen buttons: a shoehorned control method for games better suited to other platforms.

But the games made specifically for VR, the ones that couldn't have just been done on the Wii? Those games are insane. Tetris Effect is worth buying a Quest 2 just to play. This is what I meant about not needing an expensive headset when a cheaper one will do the job. It's not the same playing it on a TV.

Ultimately the best VR games are titles like Tetris Effect and Rez Infinite that try to do something original with the hardware instead of just shoehorning in a title that would be better elsewhere. Beat Saber could have been a PSMove title and lost nothing.

You don't need an expensive headset to enjoy Tetris Effect.

Sony crashed the bus with the PS5. When parents buy expensive consoles to play ok themselves they will inevitably look for titles to play with their kids. At launch Sackboy was a great example of this strategy.

Since then we've had naff all in terms of family titles. The PS3 was a fantastic console for this, from titles like LBP, Singstar, Super Rubadub etc. This has since fallen off a cliff.

Sony have loads of great developers. Let them make smaller, cheaper titles or something I can play with my kids.

@Jeaz All I'm saying is that to have a valid opinion, to be taken seriously on your thoughts and feelings on a videogame you need to have played it first.

This is why the comments the article mentioned are embarassing for the people who made them. Had Sega released a playable demo, it would be a different story.

@Thumper Absolutely. A trailer is designed to peak your interest, not form an opinion. There is a big, big difference between 'Everest looks really hard to climb' and 'Everest /is/ really hard to climb'.

@Jeaz I will always give a game a fair shot, even if it has reviewed poorly so long as said game is within my tastes. I've enjoyed loads of rough-edged titles over the years that has otherwise been rubbished in the press, conversely I have also disliked a lot of well-rated games I thought I might like.