I’ll play Ninja Gaiden and it’s more just bad timing for Ball x Pit because I literally beat the final level on Switch last night. I could always move to PS5 for the platinum though. If Mega Man X has trophies then I’ll play it but if not then I’ll stick to emulating it.

@GirlVersusGame Bond’s been great so far, I love the Hitman games so it’s an interesting base to build another franchise around. Cake was good too, Colin the Caterpillar cake in the UK is a classic. Thanks again!

Look how much money they’re spaffed up the wall on nonsense. And this is where they draw the line? I hope they enjoy their future of single player games making zero dent critically and meandering along commercially.

Who thought mashing up Payday and Gotham City Imposters would work?

@belmont The trilogy has HD remasters on mobile that honestly should have been ported instead of this. Those remasters are basically perfect and available on all modern phones.

I absolutely love these games. That being said, I’d put money down on that ‘remastered’ art being AI generated. Level-5 are all in on it and some of the changes are a bit odd and inconsistent compared to the original scenes.

Yeah, this is kinda what I expected. Not a disaster by any means but the story elements in the trailers didn’t grab me at all so hearing that the finished game is similar doesn’t shock me. If it’s a fun enough romp for 10 hours or so then it’ll be worth playing when it hits PS Plus. I think the Spider-Man games honestly have some of the same downsides but traversal being that good really makes up for those, replacing that with invisible walls and such is bound to be more polarising.

It also means those who want to spoil the game have to actually play the game.

@SodaPop6548 Each to their own, I’ve been playing Nintendo consoles since before I could talk and I thought the Direct was largely atrocious 😂

@Czar_Khastik £70 is just Sony’s equivalent of Nintendo’s seal of approval after all.

This is a humiliation ritual. Genuinely a mess. Hulst has to go.

@TDHorizon I’d understand adding it to Essential later but surely everyone who has Extra has already added the Essential games for the month?

Slightly confused by Sniper Elite being here when it just got added to Essential? Ball x Pit is fantastic and have been playing that on Switch and Ninja Gaiden looks like good fun. Mega Man X Command Mission is a game I have a lot of fondness for but I’m not sure how well it’ll hold up!

I don’t have a Switch 2 and also don’t have the disposable income to get GTA VI at launch. So uh, neither for now?

@For-Kier It was called Google Stadia 👍

God I love these guys. ‘Insiders’ shown up to be complete frauds too.

The skill tree and crafting stuff just doesn’t sound like a good idea within the context of Tomb Raider I. I’ve played the entire series barring Shadow over the last year or two and one thing I’m massively missing in the newer entries is platforming being deliberate. I am sick of games that handhold and have vacuum suction towards ledges and so forth. Just give us free rein over Lara and build the platforming accordingly, they literally have the layouts of the original game to work from. Underworld managed to marry the wider linear gameplay with actual platforming and that’s even with the jank. It’s coming out in 2027, it’s time to actually innovate when it comes to the nitty-gritty with these games instead of utilising the gameplay loop of games from the PS3.

@ShadowRJ The Persona 2 duology are incredible. Some of the most fascinating RPGs out there and tackled some interesting themes. I’m not a huge labyrinthine dungeon lover to be fair but those games really hit the spot for me.

@8th_Observer My old PC was a hand-me-down from an uncle and that was right at the end of the disc drive era, maybe about 10 years old? It was also bloody heavy compared to my one I was (very kindly) gifted last year which is so much lighter, quieter and streamlined without the drive. I love having those drives for posterity but on PC it’s nowhere near as much of a dealbreaker for me where it’s a lot easier to download from different sources.

I’m genuinely impressed. RPCS3 has come on leaps and bounds. These drives came and went from builds in the period of time I wasn’t really on PC so it’s not a feature that I’d use as such even though I have a pretty decent selection of PS3 games. Enjoying playing games like Skate on PC though!

Cultural preservation is a straight port. Remakes (even in the vein of the PSP remakes of these) fall into a different category.

It’s a bit silly is all I’ll say. All the nonsense about characters being ‘ugly’ is just that, nonsense. But giving a character a different character’s traits is just going to cause confusion. Like if Cyclops showed up with claws.

@clvr There’s a certain level of exploitation in any gacha based game, that’s a given. But including AI chatbot elements in a genre where people are already obsessing over certain characters and spending actual money to clothe them/level them etc - that just encourages parasocial behaviour. There was a story a while back about that CharacterAI thing where the user mentioned that they were going to delete their account and the characters were pleading with them not to, as that would ‘kill’ them. So much so that the devs themselves made the screen where you delete your account emotionally manipulative and talk about destroying the memories that you’ve built with these chatbots. I’d put money on the user data collated by Hoyo in these smaller-scale beta features being used to train more sophisticated models that will eventually be rolled out in their other gacha games. What next, your characters begging you to spend money on them? Chastise you for not spending enough time with the game? There’s already issues with people not socialising or developing human experiences. Let’s face it, they’d make a shedload of money abandoning literally all moral objections to such scummy practices and so that seems the logical outcome.

@RogueSpyke And that didn’t find its way into the article?

More HoyoVerse slop dear god

Venom was totally messed up in SM2 so it remains to be seen how they even start to fix it. I could see them doing Flash rather than Eddie but honestly, they should have had Flash in the games already, he’s Peter’s best friend for far longer than Harry ever was. I’m pretty much certain that the 3rd game will be Superior which does feel like retreading ground with the Peter Miles dynamic so screw it, give me Ben Reilly instead.

I do miss the cartoony style, and Denshattack shows that you can still deliver that on modern consoles. I just love the Dreamcast look in general and the homogenisation of art styles is a wider issue in the industry.

Catching up on the news, I’m not sure we’ve seen a worse presentation from any of the big 3. Ever. If that’s not a 1 or 2 out of 10 then the scale is broken.

The only platinums I don’t have in the series are this and the PS4 remake I think. Will be nice playing it again, I was contemplating playing the series on RetroAchievements instead.

Command Mission is legitimately one of my most beloved games of all time. Possibly the first RPG I ever played? Up there with Skies of Arcadia Legends anyway. It’s probably not going to hold up particularly well but I just have so many fond memories.

Not a chance without Grasshopper involved. Same devs that have been pushing AI and nonsense culture war stuff with the remaster too.

@Skyliner Because this is GTA. It’s a life simulator. Running full pelt taking actual effort is true to life and locks you out of performing any other action than jumping naturally rather than artificially making no other button than Square work. If it’s mapped to L3 then your right thumb now has plenty real estate but only one button will actually respond. It’s less creative, less responsive and less tactile.

@Converge If you’re not wanting to start hate against any race then maybe not use the word ‘coloured’. It’s not 1965.

@Leinad7 Scotland has black people. I live here. You don’t. Take your nonsense about ‘forced diversity and inclusion’ and peddle your sh*te somewhere else.

Who knew that Silent Hill in Millport would look good?

@fasoooli Because tapping X to run is tactile and feels like you’re actually exerting effort to run. There’s also a difference between holding X to jog and tapping it at different speeds to control your pace. I don’t know why anyone would want every game to control the same, this is the exact same issue that hit Assassin’s Creed, R2 to toggle the high profile actions like running was far more engaging than clicking in L3.

@Stonecold730 If I owned a store that sold games, I didn’t make the vast majority of the games being sold. Therefore, I didn’t have any say in which other stores the manufacturers were selling them in.

Rubbish news. Hope you can put it back on X. God forbid people engage with controls, everyone’s far too lazy.

I wish I had the sort of friends that would want to actually play this. Think the last time I did anything like this was Portal 2’s multiplayer.

Mahler needs to go if they’re ever going to be a serious developer. He makes Jonathan Blow look like a humble well-adjusted dude.

@ShadowRJ I meant for the next Persona.

I think there’s a really interesting story to tell about deflection and biases rooted in Yosuke being closeted with his treatment of Kanji. However it’s Atlus and I genuinely do not trust them to have told that story back when Persona 4 came out, and honestly not now either. The whole ‘it’s a remake’ argument falls a bit flat when you see their changes to Yosuke’s relationship with Kanji so this does seem a bit of a mess. I’m also not a fan of the ‘everybody is bi’ approach of some games though, I’d rather games were like Cyberpunk and that you can date whoever is actually interested in you. I just think we’re long overdue a Persona with either a true female MC or a gay one though, dating your way through high school girls has been the way for 20 years at this point.

@get2sammyb There aren’t exactly enough games to justify the lack of effort. There’s been months with 1 retro game added.

I wasn’t massive on Zero Dawn so Forbidden West was less of a disappointment and more just another entry in a series that did absolutely nothing for me.

Is nobody else going to mention that MJ isn’t even the correct model? That’s a blatant yassified mod. That just isn’t MJ to even start with, never mind after the oversharpened mess filter.

Utterly honking. To see anybody even attempting to say this looks good makes me lose faith in humanity.

Awful idea. Way to burn through ideas.

@carlos82 Love the series, Resistance is the only one I haven’t played yet!

Sniper Elite is fantastic for me. The Show 26 I really wish came a couple of months ago but hey, I’ll take it.

So I didn’t really miss anything! Stage Tour I’m super interested in but i’ve been on their mailing list for months now anyway.