RadioHedgeFund

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.

@Jeaz But there is a big difference between 'This doesn't interest me, so I'll ignore it' and 'This is crap'.

I don't drive and have no interest in cars. I seen maybe one car commercial over the years that made me consider buying a car. I've never driven any of them so cannot possibly comment on whether they are rubbish or not as I have no first-hand experience. So I ignore them.

Its like saying a band is trash without ever listening to their music or saying a food is horrible without tasting it. Its not a valid opinion because it lacks a citation. You wouldn't pay attention to a review of anything if the writer had never actually properly experienced the subject matter.

We cannot possibly comment on the quality of a game until the final gold release is in our hands and we can experience it ourselves.

@Deoxyr1bose It’s a game. You play it. It’s like saying you don’t like a book because you don’t like the trailer when you haven’t read it!

@naruball It’s like disliking something has become a form of entertainment. Maybe someone should make a game about it!

“It’s not out yet and I haven’t played it so cannot form a valid opinion…. But I hate it!”

Is the dumbest thing the internet ever does.

“Tetris Effect, but Lumines” is the most exciting gaming news I’ve heard all year! Sign me up.

I’d genuinely miss the voices from Golden, but it might be that they are just being cheap!

Imagine if they’ve done a remake in the style of Octopath.

This is why I don’t engage with the internet when I’m watching a show. Just take it as it comes: it’s a lot more enjoyable. (Lost taught me that endless theorising with strangers is a waste of time)

The series has been great so far, with the one exception of Dina’s hair looking a little too well styled for 2 weeks in the wilderness. But then I’m a guy with guy hair so what do I know.

It’s more of an anti-consumer move than you’d think. UK law at least allows you to extract data from a disc or cart for your own enjoyment (ie to play the game on a foreseeable emulator). You can lend, borrow or resell that disc or cart all you want. It’s yours.

‘Buy’ a download and your consumer rights disappear. You have no product for your money, just a lease that lasts as long as the platform holder likes. No resell options. Crucially no data extraction option either.

We buy physical copies to keep consumer rights, collect copies and potentially enjoy them when the console servers are in silicon hell. Requiring a download is essentially removing all consumer rights when it comes to physical media.

Imagine if your local supermarket tried this with your groceries.

Not really. They can polish the graphics all they want but for me it’s still GTA: a weekend rentals’ worth of messing around in a cool game world but not much else.

This said I wonder if they’ve still got push-button cheats in there? Why don’t we get those anymore?!

I’ll pass comment when I see some stable frame rate gameplay rather than cut scenes likely running on an RTX5090 PC. Or did we forget the lessons of Killzone 2?

They pulled it off really well I thought but my take away was that there is no way Abby’s squeamish crew would follow her through a wilderness of sheer peril for 5 straight years looking for a person they don’t even recognise. They’d have drugged her in her sleep and left her for the infected years ago.

Video-put from laptop/phone + Game Pass streaming = immunity to console price hikes?

I’m not there yet but the increasing prices of console gaming makes the PC, and by extension handhelds like the Steamdeck seem like the future.

You have a back catalogue of decades of releases, multiple storefronts, can store away your digital purchases, hoard free giveaways and emulate anything else.

1. Hire Studio Mir
2. Make it into an Anime

It’s a lot cheaper, lets you use the voice actors from the games and still lets you do the whole story properly. Horizon is too expensive on CGI to make live action.

We as gamers never asked developers to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on game development.

As sales of titles like Hades, Stardew and Balatro will attest, graphics are still second fiddle to a game just being fun.

The answer to spiralling development costs is to just not spend that much money on making a game.

The fact Ubisoft still think the modern day story is anything other than a waste of development time speaks volumes about the company.

The whole premise of the Animus was added in to the first game so they could market a title in the USA, against a backdrop of the ‘war on terror’ where you basically play as a historical Muslim out to kill Christian Invaders. (The premise of the Crusades)

Except you don’t play as the Muslim character; you’re playing as a white American barman in the socks of his ancestor. They even have the same voice!

The ‘Assassins vs Templar’s’ historical conspiracy was enough of a plot driver. It’s what makes AC2 such a compelling game in spite of Desmond. They should have ditched the whole Abstergo premise after AC3. Surely nobody enjoyed the forced breaks in piracy in AC4 where you have to wander through offices of Google?!

You had me at ‘Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture X Fallout’

Microsoft may finally achieve the ‘dream’ of the Nuon and create not a console but a chipset that can be integrated into a variety of 3rd party devices. This would mean you’d be able to buy an ‘Xbox’ from ASUS or some sort. I could see them allowing 3rd party store access as a Trojan horse to get Sony’s PC titles on Xbox platforms.

Unless it’s primarily a streaming platform a handheld Xbox will be terrible. Games will have to be properly ported over like they will on Switch 2 for ARM compatibility. Anyone launching an x86 handheld will have about 30 minutes of battery life.

I never really clicked with XIII but XIII-2? Now that was a game!

@Frmknst I’m not disagreeing with you but you can’t say ‘at least 10 things better’ and not mention what you think they were!

That moment will be the end of season cliffhanger. No way it will happen halfway through.

Weird this comes from the same Microsoft who let me play Xbox games I bought 20 years ago on modern hardware.

@Balosi The early days were games between £Free - £5. It quickly became a consumer mental image that £5 was the top of the pricing scale. It’s all very well hobbyist devs making a free app (with some ads?) but how do you monetise a games studio from that? There was an FPS called ‘Eliminate’ in the early days of iOS that used a daily energy limit to stop its servers being hammered. They knew most people wouldn’t pay for more time but some would. Freemium gaming was born.

To its credit mobile gaming tends to wear its IAP on its sleeve. It’s obvious to most customers that a game like Genshin or Nikki contains some optional purchases with the initial game being free. Contrast this with an EA Sports game that makes you pay £60 for the privilege!