StrickenBiged

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.

For me, Sekiro has to go on top as From Software's best game. That combat was just so dialled in, it had a story that you could actually follow, and because it focussed on a single weapon your options for cheesing hard fights were more limited ('git gud' actually means something in Sekiro).

Bloodborne is second - the setting and trick weapons were incredible.

Not sure where I'd place everything after that. Probably Dark Souls 1 is third for the interconnected world.

Great advert. Loved all the little in-jokes.

Will probably pick this up at some point.

Sounds spiffing, wot wot.

It speaks to something existential in my core, seeing all those post-it notes...

Ooooh, hellooooo. Wishlisting this for sure.

Saber Interactive have been killing it lately.

Laughed my ass off at that trailer, will have to give this a look. I love that they seem to be playing the story really straight against all that comedic carnage, it only makes it sillier.

Also "We Deliver" makes me think of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN74u6UQ79s

I am astonished that there's an in-game challenge in today's world that didn't get beaten within a few hours of release. It must be really tough and/or very well hidden.

Some absolute bangers in here. Anyone who hasn't played Supergiant's back catalogue really needs to get on that though, they are all superb.

The Vita version of this game was one of my very first platinum trophies. I tried the other games in this franchise but bounced off them. If this is a remake/reboot of the first game I'd happily dip in again.

@aj21009 the Bloons games are great, I agree!

80 hours... eeeeeehhhhh...

I enjoyed playing Mirage last year, but I had platinumed that after around half of this estimate. 80 hours seems far too big.

I really regret this larger RPG version of AC, and that some of my most anticipated settings for AC games (Ancient Greece, Vikings, and now Feudal Japan) have been wasted (from my perspective) on this format of game.

Since getting my Portal, I love it when Mrs wants to watch a show that I have zero interest in, and I can say "that's fine honey, I'll just noodle about on my Portal".

They've nailed the use case with this ad as far as I'm concerned.

But no way am I just handing over a game in progress to some idiot kid to screw up for me. My saves are mine, get your own.

@PrincessPeach11 No need to go into the store to test for stick drift. You can test your controllers with various apps on your phone. Pair the phone with the dualsense via bluetooth and a diagram of the controller on the phone screen will tell you which buttons you're pressing and where it thinks the sticks are (which can be useful for diagnosing drift).

On iOS the one I use is called "Game Controller Tester Gamepad". https://apps.apple.com/us/app/game-controller-tester-gamepad/id1497587957

I spotted this on the PSN store a couple of days ago while browsing. And the art looked eye-catching. But then I saw "Free" and thought "ah, not for me then" and scanned my eyes elsewhere on the screen.

I love Powerwash Simulator for chilling out in the evening while listening to podcasts or an audiobook. Will definitely give the second one a look.

Well I bought two of those! Amazon lost my first one, so I had to go to HMV of all places, which still had some in stock!

Awesome. Here's hoping we go up against some Tau for a bit more ranged gameplay - some use of vehicles would be nice - and Emperor's Children would be cool for the heretic faction, and are a bit more into melee and swordsmanship than the Thousand Sons are.

I refuse to believe that there isn't some amount of money which would be fair compensation to licence someone's voice to use with AI.
The VA get's a reduced paycheck compared to giving all the lines their personal touch and the benefit of the performance, while the studio benefits from reduced overheads.
But importantly, the VA gets their time back to go and do more lucrative VA work, for the studios that are interested in an actual performance, and not just having words read off the page.
It should go without saying that this should require a bespoke contract covering the use of someone's voice with AI. I don't think it's moral or fair for studios to train AI models on voice recordings which were not made for that purpose.

This looks great, I'm looking forward to learning more.

Would other manufacturers be able to make an Xbox for under the TV too then? Like how Dell, Sony, Lenovo, etc, make PCs today?

Now that could be interesting, if Xbox effectively became a user friendly back-end that automatically scaled the experience in the background to run best on whatever version of an Xbox you have under your telly.

Let's face it, "early access" release day is the true release day now, and games cost c. £100 or whatever they charge for these "early access" versions. And what was formerly the release day is now the day on which you can buy the game at a discount.

The publishers just found a way to increase the retail price of games beyond the new-normal of £70 without most people noticing or getting upset about it.

Colin, if you’re reading this, did you get got?

Only reason I’m not playing it yet is that Amazon was uncharacteristically late with my delivery and my copy isn’t here yet! 😠

This would only make sense for short term rentals. Anyone looking at the 3 year option would do much better to explore buying the console on credit.

But to get hold of a device cheaply without a long term commitment, to blast through a particular game like GTAVI or something when it comes out, I can see there maybe being a market for something like this.

It's a shame that it's fallen to Epic to do this. I dunno about the USA, but here in the UK those would be criminal allegations. With the vast majority of crime being online these days, law enforcement really needs to get with the times.

And when are people going to get the message and stop re-using passwords and enable 2FA.