StrickenBiged

I’m glad, personally. After the first few I got that Atsu had a fantastic family before the Night of the Burning Tree. I didn’t need any more motivation. Taking players away from the core gameplay to give them a nerfed player character can get old real fast: see also the Peter Parker & Harry Osborne sequences in Spider-Man 2.

I just hope that the creatives at Nintendo are watching this project very closely. Knowing how careful they are with their IP gives me some faith that this might turn out alright.

I don’t play anything on mobile. I don’t like the platform for gaming: I find it imprecise and you can’t see what’s happening because your thumbs are in the way. I also probably wouldn’t attempt these games on PS5; they’re not the sort of thing I’m into.

I think it’ll be more of a problem for Xbox than PlayStation. it’ll be a cheaper alternative to what Microsoft is trying to do with the PC pretending to be a console thing. Except that Steam Machine (I prefer Gabe Cube as a name) runs Linux, so it’ll probably run a lot better without all the Windows bloat under the hood.
Still, I hope it does well, PlayStation could use the competition to keep them honest.

Wow, I don't think a pause button has ever been a selling point before.

Mobile is a big no from me. I try to look for ways to interact with the damn thing less, not more. It could be the best gaming experience I'll ever have, I'm still not doing it on mobile.

Thanks all, I get the idea now.

How does locking the language and region lead to such a dramatic price cut? My layman's guess would be that this is just a software issue, and that it would be cheaper to just have one operating system for the PS5, with all supported languages available, rather than have to maintain separate operating systems for multiple regions.

I'll probably watch, but I do hope the writing improves in Season 2. Season 1 didn't make a tonne of sense if you stopped to think about it.

That gameplay trailer is unrepresentative: it doesn't show my fat thumbs obscuring half the screen.

Who're all these other lombax? Lombices...? Lombaxes?

Everything aside from the main story is better in Yotei. I replayed the PS5 version of Tsushima recently and found I really enjoyed Jin's struggle between the honour system of samurai culture and the more effective tactics of the Ghost. While I'm fully behind Atsu's quest of vengeance - who doesn't love a good revenge plot? - it just doesn't have the same depth of character development, IMO.

I don't think it's completely out of the question that Sony would delay PS6 slightly to allow GTA6 to sell-through a few more PS5s for them, but given everything is backwards compatible these days, I don't particularly see the need for that either.

Honest question, because I've never played Destiny, but how would people have handled ending the main story differently so as to retain more of the playerbase?
As an outsider, it seems fairly obvious to me that once the story had finished, you'd see the playerbase drop off significantly.

I’m just laughing about these delays at this point. It’s comical.

Sure the game will be great in the end though.

Chris Raygun did it again…

Those old graphics have such an unmistakable charm, don't they?

Looks like they hired the same artist that draws all the characters for the travelling fun fairs. XD

@LifeGirl I've heard Disney described as a law firm that just happens to make movies, it has that many in-house lawyers.

Interesting side-note: that whole thing in the 2010s where the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse started turning up before the films in anything put out by Disney Animation Studios was an attempt to establish the character as a trademark (where he'd enjoy ongoing trademark protection for as long as it was used) and in anticipation that the copyright was going to run out. They failed in that attempt in the end, and you can now use Steamboat Willie's version of MM for whatever you like, but it was a good try.

Wow, big nostalgia vibes from the promotional videos. But I've only just platted BALLxPIT and need a wee break from this sort of thing before I jump in again.
So many good roguelites coming out in a bit of a flurry at the moment.

Depends. There’s so many other great games to play. I’ll be waiting on reviews and performance results.

All depends on how it's used, in my view.

Personally, I'm kinda hyped for the first game on the scale and depth of BG3 that uses something like Ubisoft's Neo NPCs. Imagine a fully fledged RPG where you can have natural conversations with every NPC, not just select between 2-3 pre-scripted lines.

Edit: Oh yeah, and this AI announcement shouldn't come as too much of a shock: they'll be those intended costs savings that EA's buyers will be interested in. That slipped my mind.

Sounds like something a AAA, multi-format publisher would say. Xbox is a publisher now, that just happens to make a console too, not the other way around.

@TBubs311 The latter. At least according to their latest filed accounts. All these content drops generate positive word of mouth and articles like this one, and they get another spike in sales.

Graphically, I don't know where we go from the PS5; from across the room on a massive 4k screen, many games look amazing and run well. But surely there's a direction to go in with increased computational power and being able to simulate more things at once. Imagine being a soldier in a battlefield with hundreds of other soldiers, but the others (aside from the one's you're expected to fight) aren't just props carrying out pre-scripted animations, but NPCs reacting to one another in real-time that you could go and interact with - maybe an RTS game where you could possess any individual character and take part in the fight. Or more realistic physics and fluid dynamics engines enabling more realistic destruction or interactivity with the play space. Or entire ecosystems could be modelled and messed with - what happens in a survival game if you hunt the apex predators to extinction, etc.

Shu's imagination may be limited by what has come before. Now that games are basically photorealistic, it's maintaining that while pushing for bigger, more dynamic games that can literally do more that will be the next step, and may even lead to the creation of new genres.

This game's dangerously moreish. I was playing on Saturday night, in my head I thought it was maybe midnight, but I hadn't looked at my watch in a while. It was, in fact, 2:30am. Yikes.

Powerwash Simulator 2 baybee!

I’ve been looking forward to that one.

Nah, too expensive for what it is.

If you’re into this sort of game, grab Ball X Pit which came out this week. It’s cracking, and will scratch your PvZ itch very nicely.

Commendable, at least, that they haven't embargoed reviews until the day of release, like so often happens when the publisher knows its got something underbaked to sell.

It's kinda weird that an XBox studio is re-releasing, on PlayStation, a game made by a PlayStation studio. Funny how things work out.

That new-manual, freshly printed smell to this day knocks me back to my childhood, sitting on the bus riding home from town, excitedly opening up a game I've just bought from EB with my summer-job money, and reading the manual cover to cover. Tempted to pick this up as GoY is worth it.

Cracking month for me, all 3 will not just get added to the library, but actually downloaded in readiness to play.

I don't know what everyone's complaining about. That little trailer has cheered me up no end. XD

XBox've basically put themselves in a situation where the least profitable place for people to play their games is on their own platform (using Game Pass) so it's no surprise to me that they might be questioning whether they even want to bother researching and developing a physical device when they could just bung everything on the cloud.

it needs matching white sticks, in my opinion, like the Astrobot one had.

I know this one has got a lot of flack, but I don't dislike it (aside from the sticks) personally. I dig the minimalism and how it hasn't got some garish "God of War 20th Anniversary" logo on it., which they could have easily done.

I'll take just a straight port, thanks. No need to go to great expense.

My 2 year old is obsessed with this film. I'm just glad we've moved on from all things Frozen.

@LiamCroft Is there a transmog system for the armour perks this time around? One of my few complaints about Tsushima was preferring one armour set cosmetically, but another for it's gameplay perks.

Just be grateful it's not crypto, I guess.

Ah, now we know why it ended up on PS+ Essential a few months back.
I've never played JSR (I was a Nintendo kid back in the day) but I really enjoyed Bomb Rush. I will probably pick this one up!

I don't think it will be the biggest launch in videogame history, personally.

I think it will be the biggest launch in entertainment history.

I'm still waiting for reviews before I buy, though.

I'm more concerned about PW-B in the writer's room. I have yet to see anything that she's written that I've enjoyed, I seriously don't understand the hype around her.
But the proof of the eating will be in the pudding, so let's see.

That's AAAA game dev for you. It's given us Skull & Bones and a cancelled Perfect Dark. Off to a great start.

"honour and expand upon what has made this franchise great in the first place"

I don't even know if the people making CoD know what that is.

"honour and expand upon what has made this franchise lots of money in the first place"

Fixed it.

@Bramble Thanks. And I agree with you, PS+ essential has been killing it lately. If I'm bored of my current games I can usually find something to play in my backlog of PS+ games. I love that they're in a special tab in my PS5 so that I can review that library easily.

Y'know, just last night I was thinking I wanted to jump into a 3D platformer...
Is the first Psychonaughts recommended/required playing before jumping into the sequel?

10 years has gone by already! Damn, that flew by.

After Herman Hulst's comments last week about failing sooner and more cheaply, I think it's a coin toss whether this ever sees the light of day now.

Mirage is definitely worth the £13.50. I enjoyed it very much as a return to the more limited AC experiences.

Prince of Persia: Lost Crown is well worth £12 too - had a blast with that one.

Might pick up Brothers and Tiny Tina Assault for the backlog.

Nice selection, IMO. I like it when Essential throws me a curveball and gives me games that I wouldn't normally buy; it expands my tastes.