johncalmc

I always play Infinity Nikki first thing in the morning. Do my dailies. Ease myself into things. Now I can't. So I gotta play the last thing I was playing on disc. Silent Hill 2. Silent Hill 2 at 7am. I suppose I could always turn my Switch on. Silent Hill 2 before breakfast then.

I will always remember where I was when I saw this news.

I'm not doing them in a couple of days because I have an actual job and stuff, but I do tend to play through games very quickly. Not that I'm good at them, I just don't really have any other hobbies and stuff and my partner is a gamer too so it's not like I have to turn Cyberpunk off to watch Love Island with her or something. I average 50+ games a year and finish all of them and a lot of those are big boys.

Dragon Age "failed" because EA had unreasonably high expectations for a game that shipped a decade after its last entry that had been through substantial development turmoil precisely because of an attempt to make it live service. Stop expecting everything to sell twenty million. Stop wanting everything to be a forever game. Stop obliterating teams because upper management made terrible decisions.

Pretty sour we're not getting macho Abby. I wanted to see her snapping fools necks.

I don't really like racing games and I like open world racing games even less but I do like the look of the arcadey-ness of it. If it's cheap I might give it a go but I'm not rushing out to buy it day one.

Looks like Phil Spencer is doing another interview for some reason

A million and a half for Dragon Age sounds alright to me.

I know Inquisition sold over ten million but that was like ten years ago. I think the appetite for a follow up to that game has perhaps subsided over the years somewhat. I mean, I played it and I couldn't remember anything about it when I played Veilguard. People kept turning up in "remember me?" cameos and I was like errrrr.

Still, I thought Veilguard was great. It's a shame that inevitably the sales on this one being perceived as soft will lead to cheers from culture war morons on the internet. Another game caught up in tedious online drama for no reason.

I know a lot of people are hatin' on this game for nefarious reasons but I have quite a different one for why I'm just not going to touch it. I just can't with Assassin's Creed anymore. I actually really really liked Valhalla and played it for ages but then they went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like, "hey what if we throw all that future storyline rubbish in at the end?"

I just can't. I have too many games to play and even if this one looks cool the thought of watching them scramble to somehow tie this to the greater lore with more dreadful future bits puts me off totally.

Obviously, we haven't seen it. Maybe they could have done something super interesting.

But on paper, and with nothing more than "Bluepoint were making a live service God of War game" to go on, it sounds like one of the single stupidest things I've heard in years. Bluepoint - a studio famed for superb remakes - being bought by Sony in an era of quality remakes of beloved franchises... obviously you'd expect them to be remaking a classic and not live service slop.

That alone is bad. But then just the central idea of a God of War live service game. It just doesn't sound appealing to me in any way. I like God of War a lot. But I like being in there, having a story for twenty hours, getting out. What would a live service God of War even be? It just sounds like such a terrible idea.

I probably wouldn't have announced it four years ago then.

Sweet. I'll sign up to anything if it gets me a cool new outfit to wear in a video game. And if it's our lord and saviour Kiryu's outfit? I'd sign my own death warrant.

Well, this was the Sony live service pish I was most interested in so it would be nice if it has survived. I don't know if I'll play it but if I can make my own person and dress them up in cool clothes and fight things without having to really talk to anyone then I'll probably give it a go.

Oh. Well. A few more to go and then maybe we can get back to normality and hopefully have a few new games before PS6. What a colossal waste of time and money this whole thing has been.

Unreasonably excited for this.

It's not like we have nothing to play. There's loads of great third and second party games.

But given how many fantastic studios Sony has, to see them wasted on live service slop is a disgrace. Really shocking stuff. I guess this is what happens when you're winning by default and have no competition to worry about.

I'm like that Vince McMahon meme where he's getting progressively more hyped with each word in the title of this game.

This is catastrophic levels of mismanagement. Imagine buying Bluepoint - a studio known for best-in-class remakes and remasters and ports - during an era full of great remakes and remasters that sell well, and getting them to make a live service game. It's like putting a baseball cap on a statue of Horatio Nelson. Farcical.

Sony working with outside studios like Arrowhead for this live service stuff doesn't bother me. Sony wasting internal studios on this pish is a catastrophic error in judgement.

I don't think it'll compete with either of the big boys and it doesn't need to. Switch does enough different to the PS5 to be a perfect complement to it and vice versa.

I imagine this is not going to be as wild as the trailers look. Infinite Wealth had a really kinda grounded - relatively - story compared to all of the side shenanigans. Which is true of every Yakuza, of course. So I'm imagining that this is going to have all the standard Yakuza drama - probably a crying Majima - and also swashbuckling nonsense. I'm into that.

Pre-ordered the Japanese special edition with the Majima Pop Up Pirate for my girlfriend. Pre-ordered the digital deluxe so we can both play it. Never been more in on a game.

I don't do the thing where you have to play certain games or whatever. But I have redeemed quite a bit of credit from them. I bought Phantom Liberty for Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake II using credit earned from Stars.

There's simply not enough room in the tiny little Hobbit houses in the UK for a vast video game collection.

I think that this might the rare occasion where offering an early release for pre-ordering might have been a bad idea. The super-fans (aka the ones who hate the games the most) were the ones who pre-ordered the game to get the first two episodes early, and then by the time the game actually released in complete form they'd all been on Twitter for a week moaning about how bad the first two episodes were and how they'd ruined Life is Strange (again).

Not exactly glowing reviews and negative online chatter probably hurt it.

Imran Khan - and other criers on Twitter - should probably remind themselves that most people who buy video games are casual gamers who see ads on TV, catch a review, hear from a friend etc. They're not the people who spend their time whinging on Twitter about everything.

Horizon sold, so it makes sense Sony would make a Horizon movie. Twitter is not real life.

Top pun in the header. We should have a header of the year awards and nominate this.

Shoutout to Returnal which is an absolute banger. Hopefully their next game is another Returnal.

I pretty much only have PlayStation Plus so I can play Elden Ring with my girlfriend at this point. So I don't really care about the free games. I hardly ever play them. I don't think this is a bad month though. Obviously Suicide Squad is a shrug. But I'm into Stanley Parable.

I really liked the first one so I'm looking forward to this.

Has anyone checked that Jez Corden is okay

I got Stellar Blade for Christmas so I hadn't played it when I did my GOTY voting but this absolutely would have made my list. I'm an hour or so away from getting the platinum and I've spent around 100 hours on it since Christmas Day.

I honestly thought this game was like a ten or fifteen hour Devil May Cry type thing. I didn't realise I could go fishing and stuff and collect a billion different costumes.

I like the story and the characters and the world. It looks amazing. The combat is fun and doesn't annoy me. The music is S-Tier. I really, really like this game. Genuinely surprising.

I've never played any of these free to play games before but I did try this because I liked the vibe and I needed something to play on the side of other games.

I've got 100 hours in this now, finished the main story, and not spent a penny doing it. I'm surprised by the monetisation here. Yes, there's lots of different currencies and I can see how you might end up spending a fortune if you wanted everything, but I've fully unlocked all of the timed outfits so far just using the currency earned in game.

It's a really great game and I would have voted for this in my game of the year picks if I'd played it before voting.

I don't know what any of this means but it looks nice.

It was always Tifa. Aeris just got in the way.

Playing Yakuza in English should get you sent to prison for ten years to think about what you've done.

The modding scene for that game is gonna be a hive of scum and villainy within like four minutes.

This seems like a weird decision, and quite annoying as playing in a duo would be the only way I'd likely play this game.

It's weird that Black Myth Wukong became the thing a bunch of people were willing to totally embarrass themselves over. I could at least get it if it was something great like Metaphor ReFantazio or Treasure Island Dizzy. But these lads are embarrassing themselves over a pretty whatever monkey game. I mean come on.

Good. The best one Geoff has done. Intergalactic looked delightful, happy Astro Bot cleaned up, and the bit with that Amir fella was great.

I really like the 80s vibe, the music, clothes etc. Space. Very much into this game.

Think Astro Bot will win. I'd personally pick Metaphor but Astro Bot got that feel good, everyone can enjoy it charm. As long as Final Fantasy VII Rebirth doesn't win I'm fine with it.

I'm into this because I love character creator nonsense, even in a game that desperately needs more third person scenes so we can actually see our character.

One thing - in the bullet points at the top it lists new hair options but then in the more in depth bit below there's no mention of new hairstyles. I'm not being nitpicky, I just care about hairstyles in my games.

I feel like I'm going to be more on the 6/10 and 7/10 end just based on what the reviews are saying but I love Indiana Jones and a 6 or a 7 is fine so I'll definitely be playing it.

They should have a tournament to see how long they can go without having a showcase.

@Oram77 It's kinda the problem with scoring games generally. Like I 7/10 liked this game. It's a 'Good' on our ranking scale. But I can easily see someone giving it an 8 or a 9. I really think it'll come down to how much you like the combat. The story is whatever and the characters are stereotypes. That's all fine. They're not going to be the dealbreaker here. It's how much you jive with the combat that is going to determine if you like this game or not, and from about the halfway point I hated pretty much every boss fight.

when it comes to these live service games they should probably just start cutting out the middle man and never release them. save everyone some time and money.

@SuperSilverback Oh. That makes more sense then. I don't play these games and I just thought it was always on PlayStation.

So this is how I find out The Finals wasn't already on PlayStation.

It's wild that we've been having PlayStation showcase rumours for like three years or something. They even had a showcase during that time but it was rubbish so everyone just kept rumouring that there'd be another one to make up for it. We're still at it. Hermen Hulst is probably laughing his back off seeing how long he can get away with it.