RadioHedgeFund

Slim as in 'I lost 3ib by giving up one chocolate biscuit'.

It's only 5mm shorter than the old model and still too bloody tall

This was inevitable. Players only have so much time and the market is saturated as it is. Fortnite doesn't get the attention it once did from Epic having morphed from a live service title to more of a bi-monthly update one. They've not for example done a good live event scenario in over 18 months.

I would argue strongly that Final Fantasy VII is in fact the worst PS1 FF game. Despite still being a bloody good title in and of itself (don’t forget I said that!) VIII and IX had much more believable, cohesive worlds and IMO better battle systems.

No effort is made in VII to really explain how the heck an evil utility company came to replace all world governments and why their endgame was in fact cheaper bills for their customers.

@Smash41 It would be alright if they actually wheeled out some decent titles but the selection of PSP and PS1 games has been terrible.

It’s only games they already sell (sold?) on the PS3/PSP store. I can understand why the likes of MGS or Final Fantasy haven’t come out but how about Alundra, WipEout or Soul Reaver?

Converting people who already paid for online services into subs was pretty easy as on the whole they are getting a better deal. Expanding that service is another thing entirely. We can see by the sales of Sea of Stars that people still like to own their games rather than perpetually renting them.

“Spin the wheel for a chance…”

Loot box mechanics inbound then?

Say what you like about Fortnite’s battle pass but at least none of it is random

As Shigeru Miyamoto once said: “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”

I think this maxim is still true even in an age of instant updates. I can’t think of one live service title that was crap at launch that eventually became something actually worth playing.

Even the poster boy for post-launch updates. No Man’s Sky was still a good game at launch; it just wasn’t what was promised. That’s a very different thing. If it wasn’t for Hello Games’ push to make it better it would have been another indictment of entitled fans.

@KaijuKaiser Starfield is No Mans Sky x Destiny.

In Destiny you have superb gunplay but can’t fly the ships; in NMS the combat is kinda sucky.

Brought together and strained through Skyrim it could be something very special.

It’s probably worth mentioning that if you already bought these games in the past on PSP or PS3 then they’re available to re-download for free as your licences carry over.

Are they available for sale?

But can I buy them selerately?

I thought there was just supposed to be one model with an external drive? That one has it built in.

What was the point of even ‘redesigning’ it?

I assume it will be a collection of outfits from previous titles like Altair and Ezio.

And whilst we are there they really need to remake the first game.

Despite being a big name franchise in gaming and always being marketed well FF is still a niche title. 3m sales is pretty bloody good on a console the majority of players are buying just to play the next iterations of Call of Duty, FIFA and Madden on.

This isn’t a knock on those players; it’s just PlayStation is a mass market brand. Had the game come out on the Switch I imagine it would have easily don’t 5m by now because those players buy into more niche titles.

Given Sony is going to flood the market with a slimmed down £400 model in a couple of months a lot of that scalped stock for the old models is going to be worth a lot less.

😂😂😂😂😂😂

@Czar_Khastik You can, but you have to watch it 50 times first.

Don’t apologise to these infantilised fans. You only Make them worse.

I imagine it won’t be more than an average movie but I’m looking forward to it all the same. It’s been a while since we had a good motorsport movie.

I liked the use of the fixed 3rd person camera on that police chase!

The need for it to be always online was enough for me to ignore it. However games like this get balance updates all the time and you have to roll with the punches. It’s like in a war game when your favourite unit gets nerfed. You either act like a little kid and rage quit or you grow up and take it on the chin.

The PSP has replaceable batteries. Being able to take a few spare cells on a long trip was a godsend.

@djlard If I can enjoy the book on a weekly basis with some friends on the other side of the country/globe with a plot that reacts to our own input as much as changes every few months, why not?

@playstation1995 All the money that bankrolls the big tent pole titles comes what Sony takes in on IAP from other service titles.

Not a lot as it happens. Microsoft know that the CoD market on PS is massive and will be wanting some returns on that deal.

At the same time there isn’t really anything else from Activision they’re going to miss. Overwatch 2? Crash Bandicoot? Spyro the Dragon? Do me a favour.

Microsoft’s big play was King, because $80bn is a small slice of the console pie but a big one on mobile. Those are the revenues they want streaming into their coffers.

What will be interesting is seeing if Sony retaliate. They already took away their only chance of redeeming Halo. I do wonder if they will start to sew up the Japanese market a little more. Square Enix have got to be awfully tempting. Promise to keep releasing games on Nintendo platforms and that will sail through regulation.

@Nepp67 Right? I’m not against it at all but unless it adds anything to the plot (say, Outlander) or adds something to flesh out a character (Game of Thrones) then what’s the point?

If it adds nothing to the story (as in this is to point out its some warped villain or something) then what’s even the point? It’s about as artistic as a porno.

Now can we get a new wipeout?

Given how much they managed to shrink the boards in the current revision the new model might be smaller and cheaper as Sony pass the cost savings onto consumers.

I also wonder if they would release ‘PSFour’ to go alongside it?

@UltimateOtaku91 You reckon? I think they’d make a big effort to rebrand the Series S as a Sega console. Plenty of space for a nice orange swirl. They could have offered every retro Sega title as a Gamepass addition.

It does warm my heart a little to see the top 3 selling games in one week in 2023 be Final Fantasy, Legend of Zelda and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Microsoft still have themselves to blame. They wouldn’t let Square launch FFXIV on the Xbox because they didn’t want them to have a way around taking 30% of that sub fee which Sony were happy to accommodate, for example.

In that case it was a combination of MS burning that bridge and the 20% sales share of FFXV on Xbox. (Stats from UK, not Japan)

Microsoft could have done their homework. It took Nintendo 2 generations to recover from the loss of FFVII to the PS1.

Honestly I’d like Ac!d and the Gameboy Color versions in there as well, if only as a portable Switch release.

@Matroska It’s a completely original work of fiction. I like the newspaper but the Guardian would complain if all the characters had blue skin.

Not unexpected at all. It sounds like they’ve gone back to the 16bit era of warring nations, dungeons and battles. VI is still considered the best in the series and it has no mini games, logical side quests and a compelling plot.

Some will see this as the series moving forward; I see it as throwing off the goofy shackles of the PS1 era once and for all.

Most welcome.

It doesn’t even need live service titles. They could comfortably port the entire PSP library to mobile with save states, rewind/FF and touchscreen controls.

PPSSPP is perfectly playable on most Android devices and iOS would run it easily. Make every game free with an IAP unlock to get around piracy.

Charge £8/$10 a pop and you’re golden.

1. It’s out in a week.

2. If you want to avoid spoilers, use some self control.

Then start putting some better retro titles on each month than Disney PS1 games nobody will play. They’re only porting over games that are on the PS3 store. How about Tomb Raider, WipEout, MGS or Parasite Eve?

@rpawlos15133 I’m all for new games but if they take forever to make pad the calendar with some cheapo remasters and rereleases.

You’ve got Final Fantasy XVI out next week. Cut the Xbox some slack with an exclusive JRPG.

And bringing it to mobile when?

I know Sony want to drip feed older titles from the PSN to the top tier but it wouldn’t kill them to offer some big PS1 titles, would it?

They’re just porting over games you can buy on the PS3. They’re sat on Suikoden 1+2, FF1-9, MGS, WipEout, Motörhead, Castlevania, Alundra, Front Mission 3, Parasite Eve 2 and a pile of other games.

And we get Herc’s Adventures.

Seriously Sony.

Apple have built more of a generic computing device than a dedicated entertainment one.

Our only comparison is gaming and it's Apple Arcade Vs the PS5 software Library which isn't really much of a competition.

You can also buy a PS5, VR2 and every game worth owning and still have enough change for a MacBook for the price of the Vision Pro.

@Shadcai I hope it's a 2 minute cut scene. That was the second worst part of VII to Midgar itself.

All I wanted to do was escape the damned city and journey the world map. Seeing it in an advance US players guide in the UK blew my mind as a kid in 1997.

I finally escape Midgar and they make me play an hour-long flashback before I can go anywhere? No thanks.

Most people know that a preorder is largely a waste of time unless you're ordering from a website that will historically ship it to you a few days early.

It could be argued that PSVR2 has served its job.

Sony wants the PS5 synonymous with forward thinking Gaming and just having it as a capability makes it look better hardware than the Xbox.

It doesn’t need to sell: it just needs to exist.

That’s not much comfort is you bought one and there are no games but still. I’d imagine more than a few titles will be arriving after the Apple headset reveal on Monday.

It would not have killed Guerilla to add the new outfits to the PS4 version.

Help us all if Destiny 2 is what they are trying to emulate. Destiny tried it's hardest to emulate diablo 3 and repeatedly fell short in the simplicity of its mechanics. Diablo 3 is a wonderfully streamlined title, from it's skill unlocks to its transmog mechanics and Destiny gets it wrong every step of the way.

The lack of offline play in number 4 would rip at least 3 marks off the review for me.

No thanks. Id rather enjoy the game at my own pace, even if this is a decade down the line.

In other words I will still be playing Diablo 3 well after the servers for 4 have been turned off and all your progress was for nothing. Games that require an internet connection to be played should be banned.

I can still load up my character from Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast and have a play; will the same be said of Diablo 4 in 20 years?

I also wonder if this explains the lack of an Xbox version? The Series S is a punchy console but maybe Square didn't want to have to scale it back to fit it on the little box that could?

@practicein2021 As soon as they release one that fits under my TV I'm in.

Since I saw this in Edge years ago my overriding thought was 'who wants to play a game as Gollum?!'

The answer remains nobody.