TimeDelayedGamer

Still slogging through Dark Souls 2. I say slogging, but I'm still loving it. It's just so looooong. I'm up to the Ivory King expansion, so plenty of snow in a nice bit of still-not-very-Christmassy-really synchronicity.

Also started playing R-Type Final 2, which as a big fan of the series since about the age of 12, I've been really looking forward to since I got it. So between those two, lots of death for me this Christmas!! 😳🙄😂

"The PS5 was in my basket. My hand fumbled with the mouse, feverishly aiming for the checkout button. I clicked. And that was when the scalper struck..."

Woohoo! This is some of the best gaming news I've heard in ages. Cannot wait.

Still soldiering my way through Dark Souls 2. Still loving it. Been throwing myself repeatedly at the Iron Keep and making steady progress. Just beaten the Smelter Demon (eventually). No idea how on earth you go in an elevator from Earthen Peak to Iron Keep, that was a bit random. The visual continuity of the world seems to break down a bit there 🙄😁

@dschons Puppeteer is a great game with an amazing art style and sense of imagination, you should have a lot of fun with it. It's also a perfect game to play in the lead-up to Christmas - like a videogame pantomime (cue someone responding, "Oh no it isn't!") 😃

I've always been thankful for video games, because they've been such a huge part of my life. Everything about them has always fascinated me, the visuals, the music, the design - and as well as that they are my escape from the world, and my stress release. I've often found that games tend to synergise with my experiences in the real world - playing Death Stranding for the first time during the pandemic, for example. I couldn't imagine a world without them.

Still working my way through Dark Souls 2, still loving every second. Also showing my trusty PSP some love and playing R&C Size Matters. It's hamstrung somewhat by the PSP's limitations, but still good, clean fun 😁

Currently playing Dark Souls 2: SotFS. First playthrough, and I'm loving it. I'd heard it was the low point of the series, but so far I'm lapping it up. Just feels like 'classic Souls' to me.

@Saitama117 Have you ever played The Adventures of Alundra? An absolute PS1 classic in my view. Lovely 16 bit pixel art and tough but fair gameplay and puzzles. I first played it a couple of years ago and it was one of the highlights of my gaming year

Meh. I'll wait for the remastered version on PS6 😂

Well, that's quite surprising. With all the negative reviews I was expecting it to bomb.

Haven't played it and currently not intending to, but if they feed some of the profits back into improving the game a la NMS, I might be tempted down the line.

I'm losing track of all these Trails... but in the best possible way! Ys made me a Falcom fan, can't wait to get started on the Trails series as well. I guess I'll start with Trails in the Sky FC?

Good work NIS America. Think I'd better start saving up for the inevitable collectors editions...

Sony needs to enact a seal of quality that guarantees a minimum standard for new releases. Too many broken and unfinished games being released to line the pockets of shareholders.

@Omniicron Yeah, I have a feeling they're going to miss out that whole section, darn it.

I've got a 2D retro itch to scratch at the moment. I was playing Flashback earlier in the week but found it horrendously clunky even by the standards of the time (I grew up with 80s/90s 16-bit games), so I've sadly given up on it. Now playing Axiom Verge and loving it. It's scratching the itch nicely 😃

Ratchet: Zero Dawn? It looks pretty cool, actually. I'll wait some for review scores to drop though before committing.

Bah, you all know what we think of Konami.

Nah, they ain't no Kojima 😁

I'm hoping to play the original this year at some point. Some people seem to have reported serious issues with the PS4 version, then other people seem to have no problems with it at all. Hopefully I'll be in the latter category! From what I've heard about it, it sounds absolutely brilliant.

Limited edition with goodies been pre-ordered for a month. I love the Ys games so this is a no-brainer purchase for me.

@Ear_wiG I'm playing Ni No Kuni for the first time just now as well! Something told me it would be a great choice to play at Christmas and I wasn't wrong. What a charming, beautiful little game.

Prior to that I had my annual one-session playthrough of Journey, which has become a bit of a Christmas tradition for me, and also did a playthrough of Puppeteer, which is about as close as you'll ever get to playing through your own pantomime.

@vict0RGM Hmm, I dunno... ET on the Atari 2600 was pretty bad.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T.the_Extra-Terrestrial(video_game)

😂

@Steel76 Exactly, thank you for stating it so succinctly.

The only reason publishers get away with this nonsense is because we gamers allow it to happen.

Knowing Kojima, it's going to be some sort of tease of a tease of a tease mind-f***.

(Which is fine by me) 😁

@HotGoomba___Rebrand A worse launch? ET on Atari 2600... Doesn't come much worse than that! 😂

On a more serious note, I sometimes wonder if the videogame industry is heading towards a crash similar to that early 1980s one... Hopefully not...

Backlog? I've still got PS1 games I haven't got round to playing... Hence my username!

@naruball If it wasn't for borrowing ideas, we wouldn't have genres 🙂

Flipping scalpers. String them up by the dual shocks.

@PhhhCough That's what I like to hear 😁 Yeah, I suspect that they probably are screwed twice. Caveat emptor and all that.

Personally, I'm quite happy to wait a while for a PS5 yet. Let the early kinks be worked out. I've got dozens of games in my backlog as it is.

@PhhhCough Buying from scalpers is like negotiating with terrorists. Just don't do it. Ever.

@naruball The Wii U was a bit of an unusual situation though in that it was generally badly marketed. What I'm talking about is that when choosing between two well-established giants of the industry, both launching consoles at the same time which have broadly similar capabilities, it's the games that will make the difference.

I gave the Xbone a skip because there just wasn't enough on it that really interested me. PS4 on the other hand has lots of fantastic exclusives. When it came to choosing between them, PS4 was a no-brainer to me because of these games.

Ultimately, it's not about the hardware; it's about the games. The console with the best exclusives will win the day.

"The woman was badly injured, but she was able to say goodbye to her beloved beast before kicking the bucket. Touching stuff, except seconds later, she snapped to her feet and stood there looking at us like nothing had happened. Then she shouted something and ran off into the hills. Then the fox just blinked out of existence"

😂

@SoulsBourne128 It would be great if they did that as an option. The raw sound of the original recording perfectly complemented the corrupted, desolate world you explore. A smoother, bigger, more 'glossy' soundtrack just won't have the same effect.

"bleak, decrepit, and macabre" is exactly what I want.

Love the Mass Effect trilogy. I hope they fix the crappy inventory management in the first game. I think about five hours of my playtime was spent just junking upgrades I didn't need anymore.

@Olmaz I finally got round to playing DMC4 this year and I gave up on it after a few days because it just irritated the heck out of me. Nothing worse than something that thinks it's cool and just isn't. The combat system felt so awkward and outdated as well (to me personally). I really loved DMC1 back in the day, even finished DMD mode on that... but 4 just left me cold. So I was already hesitant about DMC5 and I think your comment has confirmed my suspicions and convinced me to give it a swerve.

I'm quite interested to try out the DMC reboot though (it's in my ridiculously large 'still to play' pile... somewhere...).

Help videos are almost the antithesis of what a Souls game is about... at least on your first run through. Having said that, there are some obscure mechanics in Demon's Souls that could probably do with a little more explanation (World Tendency, I'm looking at you).

I'm really hoping to get into this series soon. I've had Trails in the Sky for ages on my trusty PSP and just haven't got round to playing it yet. Downloaded Second Chapter earlier in the year on my Vita and hoping to launch into a mammoth playthrough of both shortly... Then onto the Cold Steel games... Err, at some point!

I've heard so much love for these games and their world building. They sound right up my alley.

I'm still getting a PS5. I'll just look at the position of the sun to work out the time 😂

@Unlucky13 Lol, I know, it's bizarre. I do find the trophies quite interesting from the point of view of seeing the proportion of gamers who have achieved a certain task. It does amaze me how many start playing a game and then never see it through halfway, let alone to the end.

@Unlucky13 Sometimes it's nice getting them, like you say it depends on the nature of the trophy. If it's just for doing ten million headshots or something, then no thanks, can't be bothered with it.

I also hate the trophies where you get a reward just for starting the game for the first time or whatever. So pointless.

In the end, I like to set my own goals in games and tend not to worry much about the trophies, unless I feel specifically like I'd really like to do one of them. Chasing platinums just feels like a waste of time to me.

One of my proudest achievements in gaming is still completing DMD difficulty in the original DMC with an S rank on every level. No trophy to prove it, but I have the memories 🙂

@Unlucky13 Nope you're not. Though I find them more an intrusive nuisance than a pleasant surprise 🙂

Is it bad that I've never given two hoots about trophies? There's two or three games that I've platinumed, but it was sort of incidental to me just playing and enjoying the game. I've got too many games in my backlog and not enough free time to worry about trophies.

If that's your thing though, then more power to you.

@pip_muzz Sony Pictures presents...

Never had a fan noise problem with my base PS4... My Xbox 360 on the the other hand... I needed some good noise-cancelling headphones.

Good to hear the PS5 is sounding stealthy though.

@RBMango Antisocial media.

But can you sell any fine leather jackets?

I haven't really noticed this, but I usually play games using the disk... Would that make a difference?

The only games I buy digitally are ones where that's the only option. I'm old school like that.

@ChipBoundary I never saw a single one of those problems you describe in Death Stranding, in over 200hrs of playtime. I guess I was lucky!

In my time playing on my PS2 I came across bugs and glitches now and then, but very few of them were 'game-breaking'. Developers couldn't release games with 'game-breaking' bugs because there was no recourse to patch them afterwards. So they had to be playtested to death. Perhaps you have a different definition of game-breaking to me?

In the current gen you can have Control (a superb game that I absolutely loved) released with serious performance issues from the get-go. These were genuinely game-breaking, and it shouldn't have been released in that state. A few months down the line and it plays great, even on my base PS4.

Like I said, it is what it is. I know the score, and I know to wait a bit for most games, when the DLC is out and they tend to be cheaper anyway. It doesn't bother me one way or another. No rose-tinted glasses here.

@ChipBoundary I take your point about games being more complex these days, but when did I say that games are worse than they used to be? I was talking specifically about games at release, rather than the state of games in general. I was just making a 'philosophical comment' about how things have changed since, say, the PS2 days (when there were no patches or updates, and I played dozens of games without 'game-breaking bugs, clichés or problems' - not sure what you were playing at that point?). That's why I tend to wait a bit now until problems have been ironed out.

Incidentally, one game I didn't wait for, and which ran superbly from day one (in my experience at least) was Death Stranding, because I was confident that Kojima's perfectionism would allow nothing less.