RobN

I didn't play Space Invaders in the arcade (until I found a free play edition once) - just on the 2600. That was long after most of the arcade cabinets had been repurposed to play something else.

This is an OLD game - it's a definite step up from Pong, but it's not much deeper in gameplay, really. It just gets faster - that's it, that's the variation in the original game play. The 2600 at least had a variety of options - shields, no shields, invisible invaders, and more. That's honestly a better version in many respects.

I mean, if you want to pay $10 (with a $2 premium for a platinum trophy) knock yourself out, but I would recommend it for completionists rather than nostalgia buffs. If you played this in the arcade, you probably played many more interesting games in the years after.

I'm seeing a lot of "AI is here, use it or be left behind!" posts in this thread, and it feels like a lot of those posts and the replies to them are from people who haven't actually lived through a technology upheaval as adults who could think about what was happening in real time.

I'm not old enough to have known people who worked in the horse and buggy industry, but I am old enough to remember when VHS was new, and remember using the Internet before the first web browser was invented (telnet primarily, but also ftp, irc, and even Veronica), so this isn't my first technological rodeo. What I think some of you are missing is that the push and pull of what is or isn't appropriate use of a technology is absolutely part of the process of adapting to it.

Yes, I expect that using AI in some capacities will become common place, but that doesn't mean everyone will use it all the time. It makes a lot of sense today to use AI to generate mock artwork you hire an artist to replace later. The reality may be that premium games will continue to do that and use it as a selling point (maybe even elevating their artists' reputations), while smaller indie games may try to leverage that as a way to avoid hiring more people. Heck, indie artists may try to leverage AI to write a game to put their artwork into, rather than hire a coder, some day.

If you think you know how AI use will shake out in the next 10+ years, then you're fooling yourself. It's almost certainly not going to be used the way we think it will be used today. Except for porn. I'm sure it will be used for porn, somehow. That's the one thing about new tech that's inevitable...from VHS to downloading GIFs over dialup to VR....

@carlos82 Thanks for the heads up on that (King's Canyon Christmas level in Kayak VR) - I'll have to check it out. I wasn't sure I was going to fire up Kayak this season (with the sales that just dropped, I'm picking up about four new PSVR2 titles, so I'm not sure I'd have thought to play this one again).

Any details on when it's available?

This game is in my stocking ($33 US from Costco last month), so I probably won't get to play that level this year.

Since the only screen these wallpapers appear on has a whole lot of stuff in front of the wallpaper, you can't really see them that well. Given that...who cares?

Haven't picked up the game yet (definitely on my list), so while I'm grabbing these while I can, I'm not swapping my avatar yet (which I just switched to one of the Motorstorm avatars, I miss that series).

You can say it has nothing to do with Playstation, but now any game that can have crossover characters has a much simpler path to including Peanuts characters in the mix.

Hopefully they won't put them in games where they don't belong, but it gives them an option. There are already Peanuts tables in Pinball FX - so Peanuts on the Playstation isn't unheard of.

What do people think "big game publishers" do for a game?

They don't (necessarily) help with development - someone can shop a finished game around to publishers to find a willing partner. Why does it matter who they partner with?

If it doesn't have a physical release, then the publisher is just helping the developer navigate the stores (PSN, Microsoft, Steam, etc), and maybe offering some advertising assistance. In that case, does it matter if the publisher is someone small or someone huge, if the game was made by someone in their garage on the weekends? Does a game suddenly become not-Indie if the developer gets help getting the game in stores and publicized by someone like EA instead of someone like Team17 (or is Team17 too big - or bought out by someone too big - too)?

In the end, "Indie" is an arbitrary label that doesn't mean the same thing to everyone who hears it. Presumably The Game Awards sets some definition for it when it picks candidates for the category, and whatever criteria they use is correct for their award - if you want a different criteria, create your own award and apply your own criteria.

What difference does it make? The game is good or it's not, right?

Low budget and small team go hand in hand, because you can't increase the size of the team without increasing the budget. So that's a distinction without a difference.

But honestly, I don't care about the definition of Indie. If some small team inside one of the large corporations is allowed to build their own thing on a small budget, it may not be Indie because it's owned by a major studio, but it can still be functionally Indie if it's a small team and small budget building it.

I suppose arguing the difference between AAA and AA and sub-AA might be a bit better, but even that is just a rule of thumb. Who gets to define if you spent enough money to become AA or AAA, and how do you adjust that over time for inflation?

Don't sweat the arbitrary definitions - just enjoy good games, no matter who makes them.

Looking forward to buying it 6 months after release for 20-50% off, like everything else. By then all the fixes for the inevitable bugs will be available, and I'll get the best experience.

Nothing against Capcom - that's the industry standard any more. So I save some money AND let other people be the day 1 suckers who find the bugs the QA team missed or the development team weren't given time to fix before release.

I love a good arcade racer.

But I hate preorders. I don't trust them any more, so I don't care what they're offering, I'll wait until release for the reviews to roll in, and make my decision then.

Maybe if studios released demos before release, I'd take a chance on a preorder if I loved the demo. Lacking that, there just isn't a studio I trust to deliver a solid day one experience.

Waiting for PSVR2 support to be added and the reviews to come out once it is.

Sounds consistent with other reviews. A lot of potential defeated by a lack of polish and bad enemy AI.

This is 2025, why is enemy AI still so broken, especially in stealth games? Is there anything out there who does a really awesome job?

Many of the game-inspired DualSense controllers have felt like they were thrown together by AI - slap a couple graphics on it that vaguely reference the game, and call it good.

I'm surprised to be a little tempted by this one. I play a lot more Genshin Impact than I ought to (my backlog is complaining), and it does look better than a lot of the others out there.

Having ponied up the non-sale price for the second Astro Bot controller, though, I don't think I'm ready to pull the trigger on yet another one. So I'll probably pass...but one of my kids who is heavy into it has a birthday in Feb when it finally drops in the US, so.....

That works. My Plus subscription expires Nov 29, and auto-renew is disabled - because of a deal just like this, last year.

So the 29th or 30th I can subscribe for a year on whatever level I want (currently premium, because of a sale and a library of PSVR2 titles that used to be on premium, now I'll probably go for essential). Then next year I just have to hope the deal goes at least through the 29th or 30th.

I'm sure Sony wants to be absolutely positively crystal clear that this is not the next Horizon game in the mainline series. Let's face it, many games made for mobile first aren't as good on a console and a big screen. There are exceptions (Genshin Impact may be one), but even those exceptions often aren't the kind of visual and play experience we expect from the next mainline Horizon game.

If it releases on the PS5 day one, it's going to be VERY hard for Sony to manage the messaging around it. Reviews will moan the step back in visual quality from the previous Horizon games, even if they acknowledge this isn't intended to compete with them - it still carries their banner. I would bet there is no way the PS5 version would get net positive reviews, it just wouldn't with the inevitable comparisons hanging over it. And that would be a black eye against the franchise, in a way that poor reviews of a mobile game simply won't be, if they happen.

But if it's well established as a mobile game and later comes to PS5, that may be different. If it comes out after Guerilla's next mainline release, the comparisons won't hurt the franchise.

Won't GTA6 be considered a PS6 game, even if they drop a year or two apart? Nobody considers GTA5 a PS3 title these days, do they?

1.5k for something that looks cool is a lot of money.

1.5k to be able to do more work so you're not replaced by a robot might be worthwhile.

1.5k for a mobility aid that helps someone get around when they have issues might be a steal (though it's not clear these are really in that category).

Of course "to me" - I assume every opinion posted here is the personal opinion of the author. Don't you?

I think the ads without any real gameplay but referencing outrageous events which aren't actually in any games are more likely to sow confusion to casual gamers. Where's the game where you can jump skyscrapers in a tanker truck? What title is that - where can you buy it? Wait, you can't? It's not anything that happens in any game on the PS5? Well, why is it in the ad, then?

The better the hook works, the more likely Sony ends up with a potential customer who feels cheated. That doesn't feel smart to me.

Every single fool - yes, I mean fool - who buys this at $60 or even $40 is encouraging more of this.

If it doesn't sell, then in 6-12 months it will be down around $10-20 where it belongs. If it does sell, then it will take a bit longer - but honestly, look at the prices for Fallout 4 recently. They're about as low as they can be without giving it away, even for all the DLC. They'll realize selling a few copies at $10 is better than selling none at all at $40 sooner or later.

If you've made up your mind who is right or wrong based on the few details publicly available, then I sure hope you never end up on a jury.

So many people are so pro-union or pro-business that they make assumptions based on their beliefs, and not on the facts. Try not to do that, it's not healthy for you personally, or for society as a whole.

@Wiceheid This may be a nuanced point of argument, but I think it's important.

I would argue that machine learning would be even better than human QA testers at trying strange things that weren't intended - heck, it could throw billions of random keyboard/controller inputs at the application in more iterations than a human tester ever could, 24/7 for however long you let it run.

However, training it so it understands when the results aren't acceptable is going to be difficult. Humans will need to be heavily involved, probably manually reviewing results - to an extent that you may lose the benefit of millions of attempted playthroughs, because nobody can review all that output and see game-breaking bugs the AI didn't realize were bugs.

So I agree with you - to a point. But there are certain strategies QA teams are going to try with certain objectives in mind - can I find some way to move that gets me "out of bounds" in the game? Those strategies can probably be taught to AI and it can try many more permutations than the human testers can.

It won't be perfect. But it might do a better job capturing the low-hanging fruit that the current QA system seems to be doing. That's not a knock on the current QA testers so much as, as you pointed out, the industry not devoting the resources to them at all the right stages of development.

There are things current AI can do well, and there are things it can't. Creativity is one it can't.

Debugging is one it might actually be useful - if the computer can find a bug in a tenth of the time it takes a developer, the developer likely isn't out of a job so much as they're on to building the next thing. An AI can play a game thousands of times and be taught to look for certain QA issues, and find them faster than real play testers. But at the same time it may not recognize other game-breaking issues as problems if it hasn't seen them before to be trained on them - it won't understand the way a human does what is acceptable and what isn't.

I'm generally pessimistic on AI as we are currently building it - but this is a use case that might actually make more sense than 98% of the use cases I've seen out there.

@Exerion76 Cutscenes from actual game are still better than dramatic cinematic clips that aren't directly related to ANY game, as the ads they released last week depict.

This ad helps tie the others together better. It ties the "extreme experiences" to actual games, where the prior ads were just sensational, but not actually tied to any real PS5 experience.

I'm still waiting for the game that lets me jump a tanker truck over a skyscraper, though. Motorstorm isn't a surprise drop on the PS5, is it?

I couldn't choose Alan Wake 2.

I know, it's not a new game for October - but since it hit Plus in October, it was new to me, and I'm enjoying it. Hope to finish it before my Plus subscription expires.

I even picked up the DLC on sale - I was thrilled to see Jesse from Control show up!!!

Here's an attempt to get at perceived value.

I got an email from Sony today bragging that the free Essentials titles offered "More than $99 worth of games for you to keep"

So I went to psdeals.net, looked up the lowest recorded price (US dollars) for each of the three games:
Stray: 17.99
TABS: 9.99
WRC 24: 12.49

That's $40.47 of "value," not "More than $99" as Sony is claiming (which I assume is based on MSRP).

I think the best sale price is a reasonable indicator of value, as it's a price you realistically could have paid and typically reflects (at least in part) the age of the game.

It would be hard to do that for all the titles for all time - in part because you'd need to stick with pre-Plus sale prices only. But I think tracking those numbers would be more interesting than the metacritic numbers.

I'm old enough to remember when MySpace was some new thing the kids were doing, and thought every page I saw was horrible and it wouldn't last.

Screen shot reminds me of PC Link, I think it was - exclusive to Tandy computers (from Radio Shack), and a precursor to AOL. It was DOS-based (or rather, tied to their proprietary GUI on top of DOS, which was an early competitor to Windows before Windows was anything anybody used), with an interface that looked a lot like that. It was screaming fast on my whopping high-speed 2400-baud modem, too!

I get the idea of advertising the brand, but this feels odd to me. What happens when someone says "That looks awesome! I want the game where I jump a tanker over a skyscraper - where do I buy that game?"

It doesn't feel as obviously abstract as some earlier examples of Playstation advertising, where players encountered game characters from multiple franchises, or put on gear over their work clothes and started fighting.

First off, you CAN argue with numbers and charts - saying otherwise tells me you haven't ever looked at sports statistics. Who's the greatest basketball player EVER?

But second, I think the methodology used here has a fatal flaw. It bases everything on the metacritic score - EVERYTHING. Which is fine, you need some metric to measure. But I argue two games with the same score might have a very VERY different value.

Here's a simple example: a game with a 90 metacritic score that was just released and has never gone on sale from its $80 retail price is not the same as a game with a 90 metacritic score that's been out for 5+ years and has regularly been on sale for $10 or less. This chart would treat both game identically, but fans are going to be a lot more excited about one over the other - for good reason.

As a specific example, the Plus list is padded with sports games (Madden, NBA, FIFA, etc) for the prior year dropped into Plus just before the next year's edition rolls out. Anyone who really cared much about those titles already own the version that's being retired even as it's dropped on Plus, so the metacritic score doesn't really mean much for that title - most people either own it or don't want to own it, with a very small group in between who might appreciate the prior-season's game that's also $10 in the bargain bin.

So I'd tinker with the metric, and add something like a "lowest sale price prior to release on Plus" value as another factor in the calculation.

I see a LOT of people here saying some variation of "the next Xbox will just be a PC." You're all missing two points.

First, the CURRENT Xbox is basically a PC - it's running a version of Windows under the hood, with DirectX for everything just like a Windows PC. It's just a locked-down game-centric PC that can only play games from the XBox store.

Which brings me to the second point - if the next XBox can play games from the XBox store, then it won't be "just" a PC unless they open that XBox store to all PCs. If the store remains locked to XBox-branded hardware, then that hardware won't be "just" a PC, even if it's even more PC-like than it is now (with the ability to run Steam or Epic or GOG or whatever).

Now, there's a lot we don't know yet, and a lot of time for Microsoft to change their mind on anything we think we know.

I don't pay for PS5 multiplayer now.

I pay for Plus, but not for multiplayer.

I pay for the online game backup (especially since the PS5 doesn't allow local backups to an external device), I pay for "free" games in the Essential or Extra tier, and - because they had more than 2 of them when I got a deal on an upgrade to Premium - I pay for "free" PSVR2 titles that were exclusive to the Premium tier.

The fact that Plus is required for online multiplayer has ALWAYS been ridiculous, even though I rarely ever take advantage of that benefit from my subscription.

I will definitely give this a shot - though not day 1. I've worked up a backlog of some PSVR2 titles that I'm having a blast with, so I can wait for a sale (and, of course, the inevitable patches).

First off, the people who frequent a site like pushsquare are not representative of the general public, so don't read much into the survey results.

Secondly, physics is a thing. Time is real, at least to the way we experience reality. You only get 1440 minutes in a day, and each minute you spend on social media is a minute you're not spending playing a game, more or less by definition (I'm sure someone will point to some game leveraging social media, but my statement is still generally true).

Gaming competes with all other forms of entertainment, gaming competes with work time, gaming competes with sleeping and eating and going out with friends or family. That's just reality.

@KillerBoy Can we normalize releasing a finish product on release day

Unfortunately, that ship has sailed.

@Americansamurai1 Maybe.

They weren't asking "can it recoup 3 years of development plus what it will cost to finish," they were asking whether spending the next year (or whatever the expectation was) finishing it would be more productive than spending the next year starting over. The expected quality of the end product certainly matters in that decision, as does expected sales based on that quality and the overall market.

But the time and resources you've spent so far matter less than how close to the finish line you are - so the progress is important. Add to that the pace of the prior three years, as opposed to the pace needed to wrap it up and sell it (and no guarantee you can change the pace), and the progress so far is incredibly important.

@Americansamurai1 You're falling into the sunk cost fallacy - because they've spent three years on it, they have to keep spending on it or they've lost all that time and effort and money.

But that time and effort and money is gone no matter what happens.

Moving forward, can they be more successful working on something new, or trying to work themselves out of a dead end? Sometimes you need a fresh start, because what you're trying just isn't working.

Let's be honest about Day 1 releases in 2025 and beyond - they're almost always a beta version, even with the Day 1 patch. In most cases, you'll be better off waiting 3-12 months for the bulk of the patches to be released (and you'll save money waiting for a sale, too).

If it's a multiplayer game where early play gives you an advantage, you might have an incentive to jump in early. And if it's had an extended early access period or some form of real beta test, there's a chance Day 1 will be great. But if it's single player and it hasn't been through some sort of early access/beta window, there is no good reason to buy Day 1 unless you're a reviewer.

People say "support the devs," and I get that - but what about supporting the customers?

A suggestion for this and future reviews of headsets for the PS5 - test it with PSVR2, and cover how well they fit when wearing both.

@AdamNovice THIS. I want The Motorstorm Remastered Collection, with all the titles in one massive PS5 super bundle.

The sales for Motorstorm must have been really awful, for them to go this long without touching them as remasters/remakes. We're getting remakes of everything else.

For a lot of us, Burnout Paradise is the only game in the franchise we've played, so comparisons to earlier games in the series just aren't possible. The PS3 was my first Playstation, and while I played some racing games on PC before then, I'd go back to arcade games (as far back as Night Rider - yes, I'm that old) before I'd go to prior Burnout games.

So I'm interested in comparisons to Burnout Paradise - it was the first (and maybe still ONLY) online multiplayer where I really enjoyed the online component. As @Member_the_game pointed out, it's got competition with Forza Horizon on the Playstation now, but I'm not sure how big a deal that is for me - especially given how much I fell in love with FH4 but was underwhelmed by FH5, which felt like a cookie cutter clone on a map that somehow wasn't as interesting to me.

I want to give it a shot, but I get the feeling I'll be disappointed if offline play is seriously lacking.

The ability Epic has to print money thanks to Fortnite keeps turning a lot of heads - just like the big Powerball jackpots have millions of people buying lottery tickets. From a big-picture perspective of someone managing a portfolio of studios, having 10 studios each try to make a game where just one moderate success can pay for all the other failures seems like a good bet.

What are acceptable odds for someone managing a lot of studios are lousy odds for any one of those studios. And that's assuming the 1/10 chance of getting lucky holds - but when everyone else is making the same bet, it's more like 1/100 chance, if that.

What's even worse is that if one of your 10 studios has a hit which pays off, that means 9 studios fail. It's tempting for the portfolio manager to let those 9 just fold up and go away, rather than leveraging the one success to keep the other studios alive.

Studios have to start making some games that can turn an acceptable profit on lower overall sales (lower prices, fewer sold, whatever). Have your blockbuster releases, but mix in some smaller experiences which don't take so many resources to make. If your game has to break sales records to break even, you're in trouble.

Let's say this prediction is 100% correct. I guarantee that day one, PC enthusiasts will be complaining about how bad the new XBox is (compared to what they bought for 2-4x the price), and of course they'll absolutely hate the PS6.

But third party developers will optimize for both pieces of hardware as they'll become standard platforms to target, and they'll both do really well for several years.

I don't buy multiplayer military shooters, unless I'm doing it just for the campaign - so I'm rarely interested in Battlefield or COD.

For those of you that love this stuff, hope it's good.

I might install this and run around a while to see what it looks like now, but it's been so long since I last played, I don't know how much fun it will be trying to relearn the...Control controls.

But hey, new outfits to try again, why not? Because dress-up is why I play these games. (no, not really)

The snarky part of me wants to know why you gave short shrift to [checks notes] Barbie Horse Trails. Surely something with a built-in fan base.

The serious part of me says "PixelJunk Eden 2? I didn't know PixelJunk was still making stuff! Cool!!!"

@Oram77 True, I didn't listen to any of it - just reviewed the chapter stops.

"And for the record, we're not including PS5 ports of existing PS4 games here;"

Umm...you're not? How did these make your list, then?
TLoU Part 1
Cyberpunk 2077 (PS4 only at launch)
Demon's Souls

I guess a PS3 port isn't the same, even if it had a PS4 port in between.

Or did you mean you're not including PS4-native games which perform better on the PS5?

This sounds like a critique from someone who has never read literature.

Shakespeare dealt with these themes. You'll find these themes in some of the oldest surviving writings, and in modern movies. They're appealing because they're universal.

Get off your PS or PC and go read a good book, if you can handle encountering some of these same themes yet again.