Comments 1,196

Re: Rumour: We've Been Robbed of a Soul Reaver Reboot

Shinnok789

"established vampire IP" could also mean the Kain centered Blood Omen that started it all.

I would love to see those games revived one day, through a full on reboot, starting with BO1, ending in Soul Reaver Defiance, with revamped and enriched story (either by the same Amy Hennig or an equally gifted writer), thus also adding more lore and game content in-between the old titles.

Re: Valve Won't Subsidise Steam Machine, Expected to Be Pricier Than More Powerful PS5

Shinnok789

@LogicStrikesAgain Steam as a platform maybe, but not necessarily as a store... They lowered the "meaningful discount" cases bit by bit in recent years, and show no indication of stopping (personal overall observation over the years).
For some time now a better way to buy cheap games for the Steam platform is not from their own store, but from cd key sites, especially outside of Steam's promotional periods (sometimes even within...). It's not all sunshine on those sites either, not as it was 4-5 years ago, but you can still get lucky more often than on Steam's store.

Re: Valve's Steam Machine May Not Be As Affordable As a PS5

Shinnok789

As I've said before in a previous comment, Steam machine will be sold at around 700$ price, a lot more or a bit less depending on the SSD storage and other components if they vary (RAM for example).
500$ is not realistic, given the PC parts costs nowadays, even for bulk purchases on Valve's part.
Should I add that RAM and SSD costs have just skyrocketed to kingdom come (with no deliverance ha ha) ?

Re: Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 (PS5) - The Most Absurd Game in Series History

Shinnok789

CoD has been running for so many years, maybe it needs to stop?
As an IP, it definitely peaked some years ago and since then, on average, it's been on the downward slope.

At least change the devs, bring in new teams, fresh blood, fresh visions. Battlefield 6 as a direct competitor is doing great so it's time to change some core pillars in CoD if they are so set to keep it going.

But then again it's Microsoft, and like any big corporation "biggest profits with smallest investments" is in their nature.

Just like the Diablo IP has become a vision-less mess of non-cohesive stupid ideas for the sake of profit, I'm not surprised CoD is on the same path.

Re: PS Plus Gets a Decent Black Friday Discount, But There's a Catch for Existing Members

Shinnok789

For those interested, to profit from BF discounts on PS+ you can use 2 accounts.
Make a new PS+ subscription in one of them, for 1 year for example.
Next year let it end and make a new PS+ subscription on the other.
As long as both accounts are on the same console, all games installed on one of them will also be playable on the other.
Use wallet top-up cards/codes to refill your PS store wallet if you use an account for a different region in which you don't have a bank account (if you live in Europe and want to use a US account for example, Sony won't let you use a european card to pay for stuff on US playstore, but you can top-up the wallet on the US account and pay that way).

Sticking it to your existing customers is not part of the "Playstation exclusive" portfolio, and it's not even new...
Without proper legislation to prevent it, all we can do is find ways to stick it right back using various tools at our disposal.

Re: Poll: Does the Steam Machine Pose a Threat to PS5?

Shinnok789

Steam machine vs PS5 - the PS5 should be worried only if the SM costs about 400$... which it won't. Valve already stated "it will be priced as a PC" so I don't expect it to be cheap (my guess is around 700$ average, maybe higher for bigger storage, lower for entry level).
You can play many of Sony's exclusives on it since they are already on Steam, but don't expect them to look as good as they do on PS5 Pro, it doesn't really have the GPU to handle it.
However I'm very happy for the competition, especially if Valve could price it better than expected.

What I'm very interested in is the controller.... at least until they announce its price ha ha. I don't expect it to be lower than 200$...
Hopefully it gets to cover both the Dualsense Edge and the Elite Series 2 in complete shame from a "features/price" p.o.v....
Enough to shake Sony and MS into doing better? We'll see.

Re: PS5 'In the Middle' of Its Lifecycle, Claims Sony

Shinnok789

Imo they won't delay it, because Microsoft is keen on releasing it's Xbox Magnus console-PC hybrid in the coming ~2 years or so, so PS6 could still be released in 2027-2028 due to competition.

Anyway, it's all speculation right now, 2027 is still 2 years away, we'll see in time.

Re: Some PS5 Owners Might Be Paying More Than Others on PS Store

Shinnok789

Plane companies have been practicing dynamic pricing for years on their plane tickets and most of the time in the detriment of the buyer instead of the advantage... You have one price now, go away for 10 minutes, come back and refresh the page only to see it increase by 10-15%... call a friend, he goes to the same site, only to see a different price. And all that doesn't generate so many complaints. And that's just one example.

Not a justification for the practice, I'd rather have them sued to the shores of bankruptcy and then some, but without proper legislation all this is in vane... that's where the complaints should be aimed.

Re: Sony's Allowing Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection Refunds Because the PS5, PS4 Compilation Is a 'Downright Nightmare' for Some

Shinnok789

He implies growing up with the original MK games, and complains of input reading as if it's added to this collection ha ha

Input reading was implemented in those games from launch, every version of those games has it, Arcade and Consoles alike.
Arcade are faster to react though, console versions are somewhat slower.
The reverse of this "feature" is that the games become predictable and you can take advantage of that.
The trick is to look for patterns while playing, learn and exploit them to make your life easier in Single Player.

Here are some xamples:

  • MK2 Arcade - Single player, medium difficulty: after the first 2-3 characters of the column (that are actually on Easy mode), you can make you opponent stop and jump after you when you jump backwards. This only works if you play with a few select characters: Cage, Jax, Baraka, the 3 ninjas, Shang Thung - it doesn't work with the rest of them. Iirk it doesn't work on consoles. The Genesis version though has it's own tricks that don't work on Arcade (for example Sweep followed by a step forward and a roundhouse kick rules supreme with many characters.... Or you can use a combination of roll + drop-kick + sweep + roundhouse kick with Mileena, I don't remember the exact sequence but it can be done fast and easy).
  • MK3 Arcade - Single player, medium difficulty, middle column: after the 1st opponent (which again is on Easy mode), if you move backwards a lot of times you will determine your opponent to run towards you, and you can round-house kick them when they get close - works with every character. Works on consoles too.
  • UMK3 Nintendo (Genesis too) - Single player - last column: from time to time the opponent stops at a certain distance and tries to maintain that distance by moving backwards if you move forward. You can move forward (which is a bit faster than his moving backwards). When you see you've shorten the distance between you by 1-2 steps, do a jump-kick towards the opponent. He will get lower, as if preparing to do an uppercut, but won't react until 1 second after you land - plenty of time to start a combo that starts with a kick (one that starts with a punch won't hit him while he's crouched). Does NOT work on Arcade.

Those are just some examples, there are quite a few other tricks on exploiting the AI of those games, some more difficult to explain than others.

Re: Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection Underfire for 'Atrocious' Input Lag on PS5

Shinnok789

we suspect it’s only the most hardcore players who are going to be really bothered by the input lag.
No... It's like adding lag to a souls game, it will make it very hard to play...
Take for example MK2 arcade - there is a rhythm with very tight timings that need to be respected if you want to beat Kintaro. Lag will make it a lot harder if not impossible to beat him.
Combos will also be impacted in MK3 and UMK3 of course, especially the Arcade versions that are harder than the console ones.

Re: Obsidian's Already Trying to Improve The Outer Worlds 2's Poor Presentation on PS5 Pro

Shinnok789

This is disappointing... And I don't mean for this game in particular, but for PSSR in general. It's either avoided by the devs, or poorly implemented, and it's supposed to be the best up-scaling tech at the core of current and future PS consoles, the main ingredient in Sony's marketing campaign etc...

Is it so convoluted and difficult to use that the devs prefer other solutions? Or are they just lazy af and don't want to learn the necessary skills?

Maybe Sony should get involved... I mean
If the former, Sony should offer (more) training seminars, and tech support during the dev process. Invest heavily in support offers if this is supposed to be such an important tech for PS going forward.
If the latter... As I said in a previous comment, Sony could (and should) put together a team to test all games that are supposed to be PS5 Pro enhanced - and if problems found, publishing is stopped until the game is properly patched.

Also, Sony's 1st party studios do make proper use of PSSR on PS5 Pro, so it doesn't seem to be such an obscure and nearly impossible tool to learn... so the problem is in the training or on the 3rd party dev side (money to invest in learning, time to implement before launch because PSSR was launched too late in the dev process, problems encountered while implementing etc...)

Whatever the case, this whole πSS϶R situation doesn't bode well for PS in general, present and future cosoles...

Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 605

Shinnok789

Helping my son to solve some community puzzles in Talos Principle Reawakening on PS5 (the Schrodinger Cat puzzle pack is quite good), and with his trek in Keeper on PC (he's playing, I'm... throwing suggestions from time to time if he gets stuck).

For myself... I'm a bit in between games right now, so it's nostalgia time until I find something better. Started some Serious Sam Fusion, with The First Encounter HD, loved those games back in the day.

Have a fun weekend everyone!

Re: Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection (PS5) - An Almost Flawless Victory for Fighting Game Fans

Shinnok789

Not exactly worthy of praise, especially given the price.
Tried it on PC, left me disappointed. It's mainly a collection of content, where the games are there as part of the package, and not the main attraction.
First of all no graphical improvements. I don't mean HD textures or anything like that, but TV scanlines or pixel galore the only options offered?? There are alternative ways to play the Arcade versions of MK 1 2 3 4 and UMK3 since many years ago, and they look a lot better. With so much AI around and scaling options available nowadays, this is just plain sloppy work by a team that doesn't really give a damn about those games...

And then there's the occasional stuttering... really?? In 2025,and for games from 30 years ago?? What kind of crap emulators are they using? The mentioned alternate ways are perfectly stable and have been for many years on far older and lower end PC's....

Not to mention 1080p is the max resolution... this one left me scratching my head while scrolling through the list of available values... even tried to look beyond the edge of the screen maybe the list continued there and I just didn't scroll enough ha ha...

The menus are convoluted, game options are sparse, was expecting more in this area too, a lot more.

Not worth the money, not one bit, especially if you have a PC around, with ANY hardware config that can run windows 7 and up....

Re: Poll: Do You Play Horror Games Around Halloween?

Shinnok789

The Last Of Us a horror franchise? It has them shroom infested zombies but I never considered them horror games, seems a bit out of place here. Oh well, selected it anyway, 'cause I like it very much.

The other 2 options are Silent Hill and Resident Evil of course, best of the bunch

You know... I would have made the poll about IP's not franchises, and added Bloodborne too. It's atmosphere alone would earn it a place on this list.

Re: Halo PS5 Is Great, But Why Doesn't It Have Competitive Multiplayer?

Shinnok789

Played this title's campaign back in the day on PC, and found it boring and uninteresting compared to other titles of the time... I don't think it will reach the >30% profitability MS is imposing nowadays, especially without the competitive MP.

How about making a new title instead of rehashing old ones? Oh, let me guess, profitability risk...
MS - where creativity goes to die, eh?

Re: PS5 Pro Is Definitely Not the Best Place to Play The Outer Worlds 2 at Launch

Shinnok789

What a surprise... right now, no 3rd party dev/pub seems to care too much about PS5 Pro enhancements.

Sony needs to take a stand on this, since its the main advertised attribute of the console. Placing blame on the devs is not enough...
Make a team to test 3rd party games that are to be released on the console. Problems found - stop the release until the bugs are fixed.

But no... it's much easier to turn a blind eye, do nothing and still enjoy the revenue, customer satisfaction be damned...

Re: Bonus Elden Ring Items from New Tarnished Edition Delayed to 2026

Shinnok789

@8bitOG Well I had it since launch, and it's still there even with the last patches. Problem encountered by many others, you can see that with a simple google search.
I may not have the latest tech in my rig, but a ryzen 7800X3D, an RTX 3090, 32GB RAM and NVMe GEN4 SSD's are more than enough to handle the game if we look and its HW requirements.
It doesn't impact everyone, and it's not even related to how new the PC is, as it affects people with good ones as well as people with older rigs...
The problem is real, and From does nothing about it, hence the previous comment.

Re: PS6 Could Be Less Than Half the Price of Microsoft's 'Very Premium' Next-Gen Xbox

Shinnok789

This Sarah will end up burying Xbox altogether in a few years, if she continues making stupid anti-consumer pricing decisions.

They had a hard time selling Xbox Series X/S at launch prices - her "curated" handheld console/PC will catch dust on the shelves if it costs north of 1000$, despite it's more "open-doors" OS.

It will not be the only Windows gaming handheld device available that offers access to every launcher and store from PC. Not to mention the idiotic decision to increase Game Pass Ultimate's price, severely corroding the most important pillar the Xbox console had...
From the current situation, her decision will only make things a lot worse for the platform...

Maybe if they make some outrageously radical decisions in the near future, like restricting access to OS or Game Pass to their console.... or worse, making huge titles like GTA 6 an Xbox Exclusive... but most likely not even then.