StrickenBiged

If Asus can make the official XBox handheld, then couldn't Dell, Hewlett Packard, Lenovo, heck, even Sony, make the next XBox that goes under your telly? (For those that want a dedicated device... I notice my TV now has a native XBox streaming app available.)

Hell, all of them could put XBox consoles onto the market at different price points and spec, just like the pre-built PC market.

I can't blame them really, customers have sent the publishers and platform holders the message that they'll pay silly money for 'early access' periods and whatnot.

Gaming is really cheap for me these days. I've got such a big backlog that I've got games to play for years without having to buy anything new. Bar one or two releases a year - Helldivers 2 and Astrobot got me at launch last year, and Death Stranding 2 might this year - I can usually wait for a deep sale.

No review codes going out is usually a massive red flag. I'm still interested in the game though so will wait for those before considering a purchase.

Going off the general vibe though, I'm feeling like this is a RoboCop: Vice City or Callisto Protocol kinda release - not great, but there's something going on in there though - and that it will be on PS+ Essential before very long.

Managed Democracy and Managed Economy, together at last.

Well... it's been tried before I suppose... didn't end well...

@Lup Oh yeah... clearly a memorable choice! :S

@Brundleflies21 Ellie with her trusty shiv taking on all of Marvel would be awesome.

Not gonna lie, until the bit at the start started talking about "lunafilaments", and given that this opened the show, I thought this was a surprise hardware announcement from PlayStation, or possibly just one of those "aren't we amazing, here's a sizzle reel" sort of intros.

That looks pretty cool. Here's hoping they've also figured out the weird flickering affect that has afflicted some UE games this gen.

Cookie Clicker by default, for me, as I didn't buy anything else that released yet. And no, I'm not embarrassed.

I played through DOOM: Eternal (at last) though, in readiness for The Dark Ages at some point down the line, and that's excellent.

I don't remember these games from my own youth - I think I was mainly gaming on the SNES around then - but this one looks like it'd be a great game for the kiddos.

@AshleighKinsella Pyre is possibly my favourite Supergiant Games release. I loved it so much I wrote a platinum trophy guide for it. Great pickup.

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare "I think it was the complete apathy towards the game that was the real problem."

I think it was worse than that. There was apathy towards Helldivers 2, for instance, which I think worked in its favour because people didn't have many preconceived ideas about it when it launched and good word of mouth and social media allowed it to be a nice surprise.

The vibe I got was that people were not apathetic towards Concord. Concord was actively being hated on from it's first proper reveal in the State of Play around this time last year.

I thought that scene was weird and, on reflection, was also completely pointless. I suppose they have put it in so that season 3 can call back to it at the same point in the timeline when we see events from Abby's perspective, but by then I doubt that any of the audience will remember a throwaway scene like this.

I thought that there was at least one sequel planned was obvious from the ending of the game.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk seems like the one I'll actually play, but I'll add the others to my library in any event. A good month in my view, as BRC is not the kind of game I see myself spending money on, but kinda wanted to try.

I still have plenty of amazing games to play and a massive backlog. Sony can do what it wants at this point, it's only one publisher among many.

If you know you're into this sort of thing and want a cookie clicker with a bit more gameplay, I highly recommend Vostok Inc, which came out a few years ago now on the PS4. It combines a twin stick shooter with clicker mechanics and was an excellent dopamine rush.

I'll probably end up getting cookie clicker too... I'm an addict.

I'll wait for a very deep sale on this one based on the reviews. But nice to see another previously exclusive game come over.

That's a shame, as I enjoyed occasionally finding I had enough points to get myself a little store credit for doing things that I was going to do anyway.
I think its a bit unfair of PlayStation to blame poor engagement with the system when they half-arsed the implementation. If it had been properly integrated into the consoles I'm sure it would have seen much higher up take by players.

@Max_the_German I hope so, I find those lists helpful!

"PHYSINT". It's not Kojima or the marketing department being cute, in this instance. The project's title makes reference to the suffix "INT", which in intelligence and defence circles is used to denote that the intelligence in question has come from a particular source.

For instance, HUMINT is intelligence from a human source, SIGINT is intelligence derived from intercepting signals, IMINT is intelligence derived from analysing images, etc. The point is it's always capitalised.

PHYSINT isn't a real-world category of intelligence, so my guess would be that Kojima intends that this would be a reference to intelligence derived from some sort of sci-fi source, maybe fundamental physics or somehow meta physical.

There are just too many good games coming out demanding people's time. I'll be playing on PS5 when I get to DOOM: The Dark Ages. But I have so many games to play (I only just started DOOM: Eternal for the first time, bought for £8 in the last sale) that I rarely buy anything at launch anymore unless it's really special.

I'm interested, but will wait for reviews. It looks like the kind of thing that will be on PS+ Essential before too long, like Robocop: Rogue City or Calisto Protocol, that sort of tier of game.

Hey, PushSquare, I know you don't slavishly follow kooky game names (you call Fairgame$ "Fairgames", for instance), but PHYSINT should be capitalised. It isn't just Kojima or a marketing department trying to be weird.

The capitalisation of "PHYSINT" is a reference to shorthand used in the intelligence and security services for various sources of intelligence, e.g. "HUMINT" is short for human-intelligence, "SIGINT" is signals-intelligence, "IMINT" is images-intelligence, and so on. They are always capitalised.

PHYSINT isn't an official term, but given the game's themes of espionage, it's a fairly clear what Kojima is getting at with the use of the "INT" suffix.

I feel for Ubisoft when it comes to SW: Outlaws, in particular. Maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but I feel like Disney's over-exploitation of the Star Wars IP has just killed most interest in it. It probably felt like a sure-fire hit whenever Ubi and Disney made the licence agreement for the game, but the intervening years have not been good for SW.

I don't know why people are saying that this is a nonsense story when WB themselves blame the 48% decline on SS:KtJL. This is the direct quote from their quarterly earnings report:

• Games revenue decreased 48% ex-FX, due to the prior year release of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
  compared to no releases in the current year quarter, as well as higher carryover from Hogwarts Legacy and
  Mortal Kombat 1 in the prior year.

(Emphasis added.)

So WB is saying that sales are down because nothing released this quarter compared to the same quarter last year. And this article is pointing out that nothing released in Q1 2025 in part because of the ongoing impact of SS:KtJL's blast radius on their other studios.

The gunplay looks a stiff, but it overall looks like a perfectly acceptable AA shooter that I'll happily play. Definitely on my radar now.

@PuppetMaster Brother, if you want to get into 40k lore, there is an absolute ocean of stuff available to you. If you're coming from the games then you might start with the Wiki page for one of the characters from the games (like Lieutenant Titus from the Space Marine games) and clicking off from there.

@Haruki_NLI Not necessarily... but it's a problem once your girlfriends get old enough!

Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia can't (a) say he's shocked at the criticism; and then (b) spout a load of impenetrable technobabble that not a single one of his critics will read or understand.

You're dealing with fanboy emotions here dude, logic, evidence and reasoned arguments won't cut it. Just tell them that you're sorry and the Switch 2 is literally the best console in all ways to all people and you might have a chance.

Aaaah, to live in the 2010 CoD:MW2 lobbies again. Those were the days, when some 12 year old screaming racial epithets would get absolutely dunked on, and maybe learn something about being a decent human being. Good times. A shame that those that think they know better are preventing the moral development of arseholes these days, but what can you do...

I'd say the main difference with Helldivers 2 is that it's different to everything else. The co-op-only gameplay, the tongue-in-cheek "are we the baddies?" setting, the reactive story, I can't think of anything else off the top of my head that's doing what Helldivers 2 is doing.
With Marathon, Bungie seems to be just riffing on a fairly established (and quite niche) part of the live service ecosystem, and trying to make it more mainstream by (seemingly) reducing a lot of the friction you see in Tarkov or Hunt Showdown.
Maybe it will come to redefine the genre in the way Fortnite did with Battle Royales, but I think it faces an uphill struggle when launching with an entry fee.
At least it looks distinctive (even if it's too cold and clinical to my personal taste) which might grab it some attention.

I seem to be the only person who dislikes the art direction. It’s just too clinical and devoid of character to me.
I hope it does the business for Bungie and Sony, but it isn’t for me. I don’t do competitive multiplayer.
I think it will find more of an audience than Concord did, but I have my doubts that this will be the hit Sony is after either.

I've never played these sorts of games, but this seems tame compared to the vagina textures they patched out of WatchDogs 2, or even the nudist NPCs you'd occasionally catch wandering around the city in that game.

Fix the levelling and world-scaling issues, and I'll double dip on this for the incredible Dark Brotherhood storyline alone. (In fact, I don't think I ever completed the main story on 360 back in the day, I'd always get far too side-tracked with the Guilds and what have you.)

Hrmm, I'm getting The Witness vibes from those excerpts. And I loved The Witness. Will have to check this out.

@DrVenture69 There's no platinum trophy on the Tolos Principle Remake, which is bizarre when the PS4 version had one. And will likely cost them an appreciable number of sales from those trophy hunters who would have otherwise double dipped.

I'll wait to see if they've addressed the busted levelling system and difficulty scaling before I double dip on this.

Hey! Cartman wasn't a hacker in that episode of South Park (and nor was the griefer, if I recall correctly he just had "no life"). Cartman is many things, but the use of his image here is downright libellous.

Reminds me that I found HiFi Rush to be unplayable until I realised that the PS headphones solved the audio-lag issues I was experiencing.

MNIM has a hell of a lot more work put into it than most of the "here's an almost free platinum" games you see on the store now. I played some absolute dreck just for the trophies back in the day, before AI-generation was a thing and the floodgates truly opened.

I thought it was interesting to note that the order of popularity of those games is exactly inverse to my own levels of interest in each...

Looks fun, I likes me a good metroidvania.

Three levels of pre-order and collectors editions for the first game out of the gate though... ew...

Not great news, IMO. One lesson that CDPR could take away from the whole Cyberpunk 2077 affair is (a) invest in marketing; (b) release minimum viable product, make loads of cash in pre-orders and on Day 1; (c) fix it later, benefit from even more positive coverage about the redemption arc.
I'm not saying that the game isn't great now or that they haven't done an amazing job in fixing it post launch - I've not played it yet.
To quote George W Bush: "There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again." Hopefully gamers will have learned their lesson and be far more sceptical of Witcher 4, etc, and wait for reviews, but I doubt it.

Please, god, don't do side- or back-stories. I am bored to the back teeth of franchises that don't know when to quit and wring themselves absolutely dry.

I honestly don't give a monkeys what Joel's aunt's third-cousin was doing for dinner on the evening that Marlene had a bit of the sniffles because the Fireflies were wandering through an area with a high pollen count or whatever.

Robocop looks good fun, I doubt I'd try it otherwise. More excited for these than I was for March's offerings.

Some absolute bangers in here.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is also on sale, so to get the base game and the expansion for under £40... it might finally be time for me to jump in.

@Ken_Kaniff Only triple?

I'd bet that most Indy players did so via Gamepass, and that many more than triple of its actual unit sales will be PlayStation.

Heck, I've even heard of people signing up to Gamepass for a month to play Indy, cancelling their sub once they finished the game, and receiving a full refund from Microsoft. What an incredible business model. No wonder Nadella and the other Microsoft big-wigs took Phil Spencer to one side and told him that Xbox was effectively going to become a third party publisher.

If the Creek calls for aid, I shall answer. The Socialist Bots shall bitterly rue the day they decide to set another steely claw on that planet.