RobN

@Mephisto2869 There were some 3D games, yes - not many, though, and I don't recall ever playing one and getting excited about it as much as I was excited about the IDEA of a 3D game. I always really wanted to play the Zen pinball in 3D, but I never bought the tables (you had to pay for them again even if you owned them, for the 3D version).

The early TVs that required expensive, battery-operated glasses kind of ruined the market - by the time TVs came out that used the same glasses you wore in the theaters (I still have one), consumers had turned on the technology and it was already dying.

Studios releasing movies where the 3D was added post-production (with varying levels of quality from decent to deplorable - nothing as awesome as Avatar) didn't help matters, either. One of the last movies I saw in 3D - Ready Player One - also felt like the last one I cared to bother seeing in 3D.

The gimmick will come around again in another decade or two, I'm sure, and will be better than before, used well by some and poorly by most.

I enjoyed the first Avatar, but the movie was always best because of it's immersive, innovative use of 3D rather than for anything else about it. It single-handedly drove a decade of 3D copycats and even 3D televisions - which dropped off the market just as they became good, which frustrates me immensely.

If this game somehow leveraged 3D tech, which would require using VR at this stage, then I'd be very interested.

As it is, I'll wait for the reviews - and regardless of the reviews, wait for the inevitable price drop. And honestly, no matter what the reviews say, I'll probably play this in a year when the bugs are squashed and the price is low - maybe two years if the reviews of the full game are awful.

Some of those jobs go in cycles. You don't need the same type of PR team when your company is mostly heads-down in development and not releasing new content for a year or more as you do when you're fully supporting a community-driven game.

Hopefully this is just a matter of adjusting resources while they work on the next big thing, whatever that may be.

Wow...amazing differences. I'm not sure how much is color palette and textures for some of those shots, but there's a lot more detail no matter how you look at it.

Love the comparison, and the lack of spoilers - thanks!

This iteration of the PS5 isn't about the gamer - it's about saving Sony some money in parts and manufacturing. I'd bet that when someone does a teardown and looks at the internals, they'll find plenty of cost savings in there. That's why, with inflation still higher than most gamers remember it ever being in their lifetime (I'm old enough to remember 70s gas lines, even if I was too young to be driving then), Sony isn't raising prices again with this model...well, with the disk model...well, with the disk model if you want it to lay horizontally.

The point is, this upgrade isn't about delivering something new to us - but the Slim models rarely were. The PS3 and PS4 slim models weren't better than the originals, just smaller, sometimes with fewer ports, often with lower power usage, and sometimes a lower price. Why does any of that interest someone who owns one already, except MAYBE the power usage?

Thank goodness. I'd be happier if there was an option to auto-update all installed games, because I really don't understand why that isn't even an option on the PS5. Go use bandwidth at 3am, I'm okay with that.

At least now if I'm considering a couple games I haven't played in a while, I can check to see if there are any updates before I try starting them. It lets me download an update even if I'm not sure that's the game I'm going to fire up, so at least it's more likely to be ready next time.

I wasn't thrilled with the original. I enjoyed it for a few weeks, but then fell out of it to the point I deleted it.

The loot box mechanic was very, very annoying - but the worst was that races were 100% about boost. The cars were all but identical, what mattered was how much boost each one had and how effectively you could maximize it. A few tracks had shortcuts that were mandatory to know for certain races/events, but most the time it was about picking the car with the best boost, because no other car was worth it. That made me and my Sopwith Camel Snoopy car very sad.

"you are welcome here – and will remain welcome," until the deal is fully closed. Or until we release the next generation of games that aren't already so far into development that it will cost us too much to change course to make them exclusive.

You don't spend billions of dollars to keep the status quo.

Not interested in another gacha game - one is more than enough, and Genshin takes up too much of my gaming time as it is.

@Americansamurai1 With the price difference shrinking for the digital vs disk version, is the digital version still compelling for anyone? If they'd done this day 1 when these were so hard to find, so people buying the digital version knew they had an upgrade path...it wouldn't have mattered, because the digital versions were hard to find, too. But at least people who got one because it was all they could find would have an upgrade path.

On the plus side, a removable disk drive makes repair/replacement simpler if the piece with the most moving parts breaks down.

I'll buy that for a dollar (because SOMEONE had to say it)

I've seen a lot of speculation about the "real" reason he's stepping down, but nobody seems to be thinking what my first question was - is this related to the alleged hack? As CEO he'd bear some responsibility if SIE was the source of the hack, and after knowing how much they're a target given previous hits perhaps one more was too much? Or perhaps what may leak is too much?

Or perhaps the two have nothing to do with each other. On the outside looking in it's easy to speculate, hard to know.

I'll probably start first of Oct, actually, but I went ahead and marked that I'm playing now, for the first time. I did enough missions to get into town on a prior save, but not so far to encounter Johnny, so I figure this counts as my first time.

Haven't played past the opening sequences, looking forward to firing it up once 2.0 hits to play it "for real." Sounds like this is finally up to what they should have released in the first place.

@Nepp67 Didn't they say at one point that any series that was on Playstation would be kept on that platform? I'm confused.

And Trump said he'd build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it. What's confusing about promises never meant to be kept?

Maybe I needed to spend more time in the control configuration, but I found it more than a "little slippy," I felt all over the place. I deleted it Saturday and didn't give it the full trial over the weekend.

The cutscenes...SO MANY cutscenes, and SO SLOW when it's trying to show you the new events it's unlocking for you. Load times were an embarrassment for a PS5 game - it's cross-play always-online roots REALLY show there.

Maybe I'll try it again when they're desperate for new players and drop the prices way down (and have a few more patches on board). But I was not impressed at all.

I thought I'd really like the first one, and I did for a while, but I burned out on it quickly. The gameplay just wasn't that deep - nothing about your car matters but the boost. I don't even have it installed any more - and I have a 2TB SSD, so I've got a lot of stuff I hope to get to "one day."

I'll be hard-pressed to put down real money on this one.

@Gator_Rican That never happens to me, but that's because I don't have the HDMI set up to turn on everything from turning on the PS5, I use a Harmony remote instead.

@Gator_Rican Your Internet speed has NOTHING to do with how well you can use Remote Play on your home network.

Remote Play has EVERYTHING to do with the quality of your home network, including what else is using it (whether for Internet or for cross-device traffic, which is what Remote Play is). Using wifi on both ends (PS5 and remote device) is a big lag inducer. Hard-wire your PS5 to your router and the latency will probably be cut nearly in half - your perception of lag may be cut even more than half.

You can get rid of the beep or just quiet it down - I turned it down.

Don't sleep on that assist controller feature - my kid and I played through parts of Inside with that, swapping who was controlling the character seamlessly (at least, when we weren't intentionally messing with each other). The second controller doesn't get haptic feedback or trigger resistance, which is a small disappointment, but it's a lot faster than handing off a controller and works great.

Nier Replicant has been on my list since it came out, just never found a sale that worked for me. That will be day 1 for me.

I wouldn't have touched 13 Sentinals without all the callouts here for it, maybe I'll give it a shot.

3-day holiday weekend is a great reason to play.

But with college football Saturday and NFL Sunday, when is there time to play Madden? A free mid-week period would work better for me. There's barely time to play, between the games to watch and the microtransaction ads to click through on startup.

@AverageGamer If it causes a noticeable or annoying stutter, then it matters. If you can only tell it's dropping frames with a fancy technical tool to count frames, then it doesn't MATTER that it's dropping frames.

@Oz_Momotaro So what's not clear to me - if I have 12+ months already subscribed, then this suggests I can keep getting that price until I need to re-subscribe (if I read this correctly).

You're not quite reading it correctly, perhaps. Your current expiration will not change when the price changes - they aren't calculating it like you have a balance they're applying at current rates. What you've already spent got you the expiration date you have, and that's locked in.

HOWEVER, and this is where I think you might not have it quite right, the next time you add on you pay whatever the current price is. It doesn't matter if you do that at your expiration date or months/years before, the cost at the time you give them money is the cost that's used. Plus, if you switch tiers at any time before your expiration, the balance can be recalculated then in a way that may not be in your favor and can change your expiration date.

Future sales may make an annual subscription the same as it is today - or even lower, or higher, it depends on the sale. Based on past results, I'm not too worried about it - they have solid sales at least once a year.

Four reasons why I'm not bothered by the price hike:

1. If you pay monthly or quarterly, there is no price increase. You'll still pay what you've been paying (at least in the US, correct me if that's not true for all regions).

2. My subscription has 18 months left on it, I'm not that bothered. It has that much on it because....

3. Don't pay full price for an annual subscription, when 1-2x a year they offer sales that offer solid discounts on annual subscriptions. Those discounts likely won't be as low as before, but they're still solid, especially compared to...

4. Their competitor, M$, offers no annual discounts at all and rarely offers any deal on their competing plan.

As for this month's titles - I'll give the updated Saint's Row a kick in the tires to see if they've fixed it enough to be as fun as any earlier entries. It's worth a shot, given how much I loved some previous entries. If I don't like it, I've got lots of other stuff to play, largely thanks to Plus.

It's worth noting the monthly and quarterly prices are UNCHANGED (at least for US, which is the only one I looked at that closely). They've just made the annual cost a smaller discount than before - which is still better than the discount M$ doesn't offer for annual subscriptions of their service.

So you can pay for an annual now, or hope they have another sale before this kicks in (not impossible), or wait for the inevitable Black Friday sale in November which will probably bring the annual price back to what it is today as a discount.

If it's delayed so they can clean up bugs and have a better game, I'm all for it.

If it's delayed to avoid competition with other games coming out in September, I'm slightly annoyed, but not much - because I rarely buy anything outside a sale, anyway.

Menus wouldn't be sluggish if they stripped out all the in-game ads and promos for microtransactions. They take up SO much space on the screen and in the menus - strip it down and it would work a LOT better.

@cloud36426 Fair enough - apparently it's possible to get a 4-year-old used iPad for under $200 now. That would definitely do more than this.

But the controller wouldn't be integrated, you may not have all the DualSense functionality (not sure if you can pair a DualSense with an iPad - maybe you can), and it wouldn't be as convenient. But it would be a bigger screen, so that may be a worthwhile tradeoff.

There's no one right answer here. I have a dislike for Apple, so an iPad isn't on my radar, though a tablet might be. I've used remote play from my phone connected to a 40" television (before they made it simple to use the PS4 as a remote play client). There are plenty of solutions. I doubt Sony expects this to appeal to a majority - or even a large minority - of Playstation owners. It's a niche product, but they have to promote it to get the people in that niche to hear about it.

As I said in another thread - it doesn't need everyone to like it to be successful. If that 10% who will "be buying it as soon as it releases" (based on survey results at the time I post this) happens to apply to the entire PS5 user base, that's 4 million units.

It won't do that well - but I don't think Sony expects it to. I don't know their internal numbers, but I bet they think if it sells 1 million units it's a success. That means they'd need just 2.5% of the people with a PS5 to buy it. As much as people may hate on this, do you really believe 2.5% of PS5 owners is too high a hurdle?

I don't know how many DualSense Edge controllers really sold, but reporting on this site from earlier this month says it was "the best-selling accessory in the US for the month of June," which was a surprise to the reporter because most PushSquare users aren't interested. Well - adjust your expectations for what numbers are considered a success.

I'm definitely interested, and $200 is a lot less than the $300 I was expecting, or the $100 that would be a day-one purchase for me.

@deadfred77 First day buyers had a real mess getting refunds, particularly on Playstation - where Sony has no official refund policy and was reportedly blindsided by the developer promising refunds for digital purchases. While it's never been said, I suspect that's the real reason Sony pulled the game from their store for months.

As for me - I picked up a pristine used physical copy for $10 while it was banned from the store. I still haven't played it (too many games, too little time), but I expect to fire it up once the new release drops (and there have been some reviews to evaluate performance on the PS5 post-patch).

@sop Not a big deal to me. If I'm desperate to take it with me on a trip and use it from a hotel room, I'll connect my phone or laptop to my home router as a VPN connection, fire up the wifi on the phone/laptop, and the device will think it's on the same network.

But while I'm reasonably confident I can fake it out, I probably won't bother. I've tried those connections before, and they aren't great. Streaming over a cell connection or a hotel wifi is tolerable only for very short sessions with very forgiving games, and I've got decent (though not outstanding) upload bandwidth from home, around 20Mps.

So this can't do something that nothing else seems to do well...big deal. If that's a major requirement for you, then this probably isn't the right product - but it doesn't bother me.

EDIT: Though now I'm thinking, I can do that VPN trick to my router to let me stream from my antenna when I'm out of the house, without paying extra for a subscription for my Tablo.

This clearly isn't for everybody (I didn't have to read the 144 (EDIT: 150) posts in front of mine to know that), but at $200 I'm interested. If it doesn't sell out, it will probably go on sale at some point for around $150, and if I haven't picked it up by then I'll definitely grab it at that price.

Look, people pay $100 for a BACKBONE One, which is a controller that clips to your phone. Yes, your phone is more capable, and can play more than just streaming Playstation games, but for $200 you're getting a better controller than the BACKBONE (with all the DualSense features) plus a built-in screen and compatibility with the new audio devices Sony announced at the same time. If you're considering spending $100 on a BACKBONE (as I am) primarily for remote play (as I am), than $200 for a dedicated device may not be a bad idea. It's not competing with Steam Deck, it's competing with BACKBONE.

It doesn't have to appeal to everyone to be a success.

@Stnkygrngo Absolutely - but they're probably afraid too many adults would just turn on parental mode for themselves to avoid all the ads. I know I would.

If you've never played it before, sure, it's worth $50 for the game. It's a great game. The biggest argument against the $50 price is that it's been a lot cheaper for a long time on other platforms.

If you've completed it once or twice and are considering going back to it, that's a lot of money for very little improvement. I won't bite, personally, even near $10 - there's too much else I haven't played yet to go back to this a third time if it's not remastered to make it worthwhile. I might think differently if I had a Switch and wanted to play it on the go, but probably not.

I'd encourage people not to buy it at this price, to send a message that this isn't treating customers well. Just to be clear, however, feel free to disagree - and spend your money however you want.

Part of me wants to see if my old character I built on the PS3 and leveled up as high as she could go back in the day still exists. If I can download it, log in with my PSN credentials, and fire up that character again, I'll give it a shot.

If I fire it up and have to create someone new, I'll probably just delete the thing.

@thiagoauler You're welcome to buy it at whatever price is offered and play it on whatever platform you want. But many of us think nearly full price is too much to pay for an old game we've played before that has apparently had almost no effort put into it to improve it for maximum performance or quality on the new hardware.

If they were selling this for $10 like Quake 2 is selling for, I don't think anybody would be complaining.

If they were upgrading it to full 4k and including multiplayer capability and adding features to the game (like Quake 2), a lot of people would be okay even with a higher price.

But to do nothing to improve it AND sell it for nearly full price, that's something that won't appeal to many people. You're certainly free to disagree and go buy it if you want to - but I'd strongly suggest you wait another year and pick it up on a sale for next to nothing. If you've waited this long, why not wait a bit longer?

@Dark_Knight Why doesn't Ford make an emulator so a Mustang can haul a load like an F150? Because they're fundamentally different and it's difficult to make one behave like the other.

We're spoiled with the PC era where things changed surprisingly little in many areas - chips just got faster and added more functions, but are fundamentally the same x86 architecture for at least three decades (except for Apple, who went from Motorola to x86 to ARM). That means reach generation added more on top of the old generation, it didn't throw it out and start over - the old ways of doing things were still there or emulated for compatibility. That's the XBox hardware and software (Windows DirectX) in a nutshell, too.

PlayStation did custom chips, and the one in the PS3 was a beast unlike anything seen before - or since. It had different limitations than other environments and excelled in specific things, but it was built differently. Read some articles about how developers had to learn new ways to code to get performance out of it - it wasn't just a PC with a brand logo stamped on it. Trying to emulate something that's built and works differently is a lot harder than something that's basically the same, just slower and missing some features.

Now, how much time and energy and money do you want Sony to throw at building that emulation, when they could be spending all that on making new games or new hardware? How much money will that investment return to them?

That's why.

@Beerheadgamer82 Xbox backwards compatibilty costs huge amounts of money,

Really? Do you have a source for that?

Because I bet it costs very little. It's the same architecture. It's like upgrading your PC and the old games still work on the new hardware.

PS2-to-PS3 required special hardware, and PS3-to-PS4 was effectively impossible, while XBox didn't have that same problem over the same generations - because it didn't have the same type of architectural change at any point in its history. Sure, they may have had to do a bit of work here or there, I'm not saying it was free - but I very much doubt it cost Microsoft even moderate amounts of money to implement backwards compatibility, much less "huge" amounts.

@GKT Been using a LAN cable since PS5 release day, and the only time I've had it "disconnect" is when I've bounced the router. Sounds to me like you have a bad cable or a bad connection - I haven't heard anybody else complain of disconnections before.

It's not just on/of, there are volume choices as well. I'm trying it at low.

The strike issues WILL be resolved - it's a matter of time. We aren't going to go 10 years without making any new movies or TV shows - 12 months is about the most I expect either side can stomach, and under 6 is a lot more likely. People got to eat, and there will be increasing pressure on both sides to make even a bad deal to get back to business.

For every actor making millions, there are thousands of actors and screenwriters and camera operators and other people on relatively-modest incomes involved in making content that are out of work waiting for a resolution. The studios also need to keep content moving through production as they have taxes to pay and investments to show a return on and they'll start seeing revenue impacted as they run low on new content to sell. If it weren't for reality TV and the [*$%!] people who eat it up, they'd wrap this up even faster.

Sure wish Gran Turismo had a steeper discount. It's still more expensive than I'm willing to pay for something I'm not sure I'll enjoy.

@Korgon Primarily what you're missing, I think, is someone who buys a Playstation in September and signs up for Plus for the first time then should still be able to get it if they sign up for Extra or higher.

Or someone who just doesn't have Plus could sign up any time in September or beyond (at least as long as it's still in Extra) and play it then.

But given it's been down to $10 and less, anybody who really wanted it has it by now. I picked it up, got lost in trash stuff that wasn't fun, and never got back to it to find the hidden treasures I suspect are there.

Since it's on the Extra and Premium tiers, it means you don't own it - only rent it while it's on the service. Wonder how long they'll keep it there, and how many will finish it while it's available.

Perhaps they're hoping in addition to whatever revenue they get for putting it on the service, they hope to get sales once it leaves from fans who don't want it to go and want to keep playing.

Without knowing the contractual details of how the developers get paid for these deals, it's hard to speculate...at least to speculate wisely, with anything other than gut instinct.

Aug 31 date doesn't sound like a likely Playstation Plus title, for any tier, at least not for day 1. Maybe in 6-18 months, though.

I played a little of 2 and 3, never enough to finish them. Interesting, but sooner or later I fall out of them (get stuck and give up, I suppose).

@thedevilsjester I think a lot of it depends on WHY it has such a generic name - is it just trying to show up high in generic searches (because that's the only way it will sell)? Or is it just focused on outstanding core game play without a lot of stupid gimmicks which don't contribute to the experience?

One of those things is relatively easy, so you see a lot of it. The other is hard, but still exists.

Personally, I'm very excited for Sniper Elite 5 - it's been on my wishlist for ages, I just haven't pulled the trigger yet.

Sorry for the pun, I couldn't resist.

If you go in with low expectations, this might be fun.

It's not like the Fast and Furious franchise is highly-intelligent drama - this feels like a low(er)-brow version of that, which takes itself even less seriously. I think it will all depend on the pacing, it could be painful or ridiculous (in a good way).

I'm just worried all the best bits made that trailer, and there's not much else worth watching.

@Sil_Am It's also documented that there are three different fan manufacturers building PS5 fans, and one of them is known to have more coil whine than the other two. It could be that you got a noisy fan, while @Northern_munkey and I got quiet fans.

But no, you tell him the noise is definitely there - your ears are sure great to hear his coil whine in his house when he can't.