nhSnork

Vita 2 would even still make sense if Sony put all of its Gen 6-8 exclusives from Ico, Folklore and MotorStorm to Tearaway, Gravity Rush and Concrete Genie on Steam for Deck to play. Maybe admittedly less so if they put all the aforesaid straight on Switch or "Switch 2". And since neither appears to be within the realm of remote probability... we can only sigh because neither does a Vita 2. Sony needs to focus on living room boxes for teens and lucky-scheduled adults.

@Majk_SVK mobile phones deliberately evolved themselves into a dead end of gaming hardware evolution. They'll need proper physical buttons and flexible storage management back before they need software, and, being GSM-equipped palmtop PCs in all but name, their specs will always have to be shared between games and a ton of other purposes, with all of it for the same battery to shoulder as well.

Forget multiplat software, this generation has seen a whole bunch of native mobile games migrate to Switch, often even adopting the retail model for the cause.

@nicugoalkeper cloud gaming, especially portable one, still has a damn distance to go before we wouldn't. Sleep mode alone has been among the definitive perks of portability since Gen 7, and it's still cryptonite for many server-based games (except ironically in mobile freemiums although I reckon theirs was a sink-or-swim case in particular), let alone fully streamed titles.

So Premium games can be fine but the only middle ground for Extra is "meh, okay"?

Jet skis in the game confirmed?

SAO tier AI? Absolutely.

Modern AI? Not nearly as much.

This is VR and cloud gaming all over again - people in a clueless hurry to monetize a tech whose capabilities and/or contextual infrastructure are still deep in their infancy.

Mafia 2 (amusingly dished out on the borderline anniversary of leaving Extra) seems like the main event here, although I see commenters here turn up their noses even towards it now - based on a Metacritic "score", no less! Did fans not swear by this game when they needed it to bark at the third entry in comparison? Face it, even a lineup of Horizon, Spider-Man and GTA 5 will be "scraping the barrel" in your eyes.

Between the expected heavy online focus and the already existing Switch port, I don't see myself downloading Breakers but the Aliens game might receive some spotlight someday as its respective Switch incarnation is a glorified streaming app. For now, though, Mafia 2 is the only one that might actually compel me to delete something from the packed PS4 storage (and its free space calculation UI from Mars🙄); as with most Switch-absent third party stuff these days, its full playthrough is a Deck prospect, but my Deck storage is routinely packed at the moment as well.😅

Is it a habit or a conscious clickbait to call Gen 9 "new" almost seven years on?🤔😅

@NinjaSixx define a historical fan. Since beginning my binge in 2007, I've beaten every offline flagship except for the ongoing yet variably advanced XII, Revenant Wings and XV playthroughs. Each and every one of them, the aforesaid three included, has proven to be a legitimate and recognizable Final Fantasy game. I have all the reasons to expect the same from XVI, especially given what I've seen in the presented footage before - although I also have all the reasons to expect XVII to be a yet different Final Fantasy (and yet again send the fandom out on a witch hunt) because that's how the franchise has really rolled for decades. Perhaps experiencing it at the natural release pace has left "historical fans" at the disadvantage of forgetting how the old and the new are juggled here from game to game.

@TripleEyeGaming which they can roll out how many of per year? Then again, perhaps they are banking entirely on third party publishers and indies to diversify and pad out their hardware's library (indeed, even EA-helmed titles like Lost in Random, Unravel and It Takes Two tend to give off a fair share of "golden age SIE" vibes). Except these aren't Wii U and XBO times anymore - the majority of these games are also found on consoles like Switch that also maintain their own palette of exclusives. Can Sony shine on while largely limiting their output to photorealistic RPGs/actventures and chasing [the will-o-the-wisp of] "service games"? I unironically enjoy the likes of InFamous, TLoU, Spider-Man and Days Gone myself, but out of this whole bunch, IMHO, so far only Horizon series has managed to offer the kind of an imaginative journey through an exotic world once found all over the PlayStation legacy from LocoRoco, Shadow of the Colossus and LittleBigPlanet to Tearaway, Gravity Rush and Concrete Genie.

Is that what they call battle royales these days?🤔

So lemme get this straight: Netflix, offering Take-Two to limit one of their biggest cash cow franchises to a limited userbase expected to stream this franchise AND control it with a phone touchscreen?

This is why I rarely even bother to parody this kind of "journalism". I couldn't make up this magnitude of stuff if I tried!

@Voltan guess you'll have no choice but to go outside now... ouch! Okay, okay, I'm shutting up now.

@Jimboss I mean, the oh so "underpowered and barebones" Switch from the same generation has done it for years (unless I also missed it being a case of later system update, but even then I believe it's been around since before PS5 launch).

Unless Sony used to expect all of your PS5 exclusives to fit on the home scree- gets dogpiled

Would it perchance work on PS4, seeing as there's already an app supposedly doing this from a console? Given the track record with DS4's touchpad (largely used as a glorified Select button) and gyroscope, I'm not holding my breath for most of PS5 library to make indispensable use of DualSense features anyway.

Most of the stuff is on [its way to] Switch, but I may give Dead Island and Elite Dangerous a roll.

I mean, Japan is among the few countries where game streaming is reportedly at its most modernly viable. I was always mystified why Google never really tried to push Stadia there first and foremost.

@InsaneWade "tied" sounds like a rather misleading word since all of my Remote Play (and native Vita multiplayer) experience has relied on phone hotspots instead - after all, dedicated 3G cards were never an option here; I doubt you could easily find any Eastern European MSP even knowing what a "Vita" was.

@Fiendish-Beaver and all this stuff sounds a lot more interesting than 60 fps, too.

Callisto Protocol is neat although I'm even more curious about Weird West which is likewise absent from Switch eShop (somewhat surprisingly for an UE4 top-down action game published by Devolver but I likely don't know half the situation). On that note... huh, Farming Simulator isn't on Switch either?🤔 Guess it makes this lineup all the more topical (until/unless I haul the respective PC versions over to Deck, but seeing as the latter didn't prevent me from getting the PS4 ports of Avengers and NFS Heat for the time being...).

So I'll be able to play ALL of Horizon portable on Deck after all? Especially since the first game was available for purchase like everything else Sony (with the odd sole exception of first Spider-Man), leaving me with few reasons to expect otherwise in FW's case as well - possibly a rare ironic upside of Sony still thinking that "Belarus" is something edible.

I'm still gradually retracing what progress I made in HZD on PS4 early this year, but this is still promising news.

@Grumblevolcano Gravity Rush 2 when? The game's five years old, too, and a bit surreal to see stuck on home hardware after the series' portable origins. As long as Sony's only Gen 9 portable is a streaming tablet, I'd be in the Steam marker for other stuff like Uncharted trilogy, LBP3 and Concrete Genie, too.

The game, similarly to Night Trap, sports some of the most realistic graphics known to video games, so it particularly feels at home on PS5.

I briefly tried the game on PS4, even claiming a few exclusive items on my otherwise largely laptop-based playthrough, but the lack of motion aiming quickly salted me away - this is exactly what I hoped to find here over the PC version (which might support gyro for all I know, but my budget CBR gamepad doesn't), and it's present even on mobile. Does anyone in the industry even remembers that Dualshock 4 has the functionality? New Saints Row's only downside so far is of the same kind and all the more bafflingly so because it came out in the wake of SR3 and SR4's Switch ports with legit and highly helpful motion aim.

I suppose GI's own long-brewed Switch port is likewise my only hope left to use ranged characters in style.😆 Not a hoot in this Direct either, though; better luck next February.

Huh, Direct and SoP on one day? And both in the same month as TGS? Talk about a wishlist feast.

As if the Essential lineup wasn't unironically impressive enough, September had to become the month of tri-Ace and Vanillaware - plus Cloudpunk, Civilization VI and some Yoko Taro goodness on top.🍻 As usual, I don't see myself touching the stuff that's already on Switch and/or Vita, but with my Deck storage packed full for the visible future, I expect to once again be tempted to have an advance sampling of later Star Ocean entries (franchise binge queue be damned, much of the series seems to be a chronological salad anyway), NieR Replicant (already tried it on my laptop but it's noticeably sluggish there) and Tails Noir which oddly doesn't seem to be on Swi- never mind, it is but titled "Backbone" thereon.

Thanks to Premium (and this year's still fleeting but nonetheless a bit more recurrent home gaming opportunities), I don't even need to measure these appetites up against my PS4 storage which is nice because eagerly installing the month's whole IGC bundle has left me increasingly fed up with it. Dear system UI, you can't tell me I "still need 5 more Gb of free space" while simultaneously boasting almost 60 in the storage menu.

@Skeletor85 "another 20 crap games"

"Will you even bother redeeming these PS5, PS4 games?"

Just did and I even intend to give all three a roll this weekend. For all my generally positive attitude to the Essential lineups, it's been a pretty long while since I could last say that about a single month's offerings.

You guys are welcome to mope your fan organs off until another CoD shows up on the menu. ¯(ツ)/¯

@Cashews and the resulting opinion, once expressed public, inevitably becomes the subject of opinions in itself. Alongside the attitudes and mentalities behind it.

Price increases are never welcome news on the customer side, but I've already renewed my Premium at a discount until late next July, and chances are next year's renewal may likewise strike a sale. If anything, more depends on the eventual estimation of whether I'll still need the current tier and even Extra or not (I intend to maintain Essential in any case), but that's a bridge to cross when I get to it.

As for September lineup, I've already commented favourably elsewhere. IGC can never have enough freeroam actventures and RPGs in my book, so the fanheaded drama across the article and the comments here looks smirkworthy at best.

Pretty damn neat. Two action open-worlders including a driving one from a renowned series, as if to "make up" for me missing out on NFS Heat last September, and an MMORPG I would have quite enjoyed during my mobile acquaintance therewith if not for the touchscreen controls. And while the former two are more likely to be experienced on Deck in due time (although a legal access box to check somewhere is still welcome since Volition stuff is locked on Steam these days), MMORPG compatibility remains anything but a given there, so chances are I'll revisit this one on my PS4 for the time being.

Reported hotspot support and a stomachable threshold of 5 Mbps at least make it a viable Remote Play successor after all, and raise my odds of ever buying a PS5... above zero, anyway.

On the other hand, being limited to PS5 is a bit of a flipside, especially disappointing with a fully equipped controller that could have addressed all the control scheme issues PSP and Vita faced when streaming their respective peers before. And PS4 was something to buy on top of the handheld I had plenty of use for in general; Portal's $200 apparently net you a glorified paperweight unless/until you spend another $400. When you factor in myself already paying out a Steam Deck loan, saving up several hundred bucks within the next couple years would probably require me to lock all or most of my remaining allocatable hobby funds, and an eventual Switch successor is the only new piece of gaming hardware that could realistically compel me to do so. Colour me vaguely in the market for PS5+Portal combo, but with a bold type "maybe someday" footnote.

In related [shower] thoughts, I just realized that PlayStation Portal abbreviates to "PSP".😄

No chance. You've all seen the announcement - how, indeed, would I be motivated to buy the game for my PS4 after an announcement like this?

...

😜😜😜

"It appears you will be able to choose a streaming resolution of up to 4K"

Cool, I didn't know NASA breakrooms had PS5s installed.

@Jayslow ah, I see. Indeed, in this case PS4 may have been a more familiar platform to port to as well.

@Jayslow "This probably started as a Nintendo switch port. Having it on PS4 so we can play on modern consoles is just a bonus"

You know the fandom has sent the concept of console generations out the window when a previous generation machine is called a "modern console" in contrast to a current gen one.🤔😅

laughs in Crush Crush

@Luigia holding it back from what, tracing more rays or tasking the draw distances with yet more skin-pore-magnifying resolutions for wall carpet TVs and/or PSVR2? Or has the industry come up with something yet unheard of in terms of gameplay and worldcraft proper that wouldn't have been technologically possible over the last two or three generations?

How exactly would it work, though? A demo-like compilation of memorable moments from the games or the whole thing? Because the latter case automatically encourages a playthrough and once you commit to a playthrough, you find yourself playing 8/16 bit games... with a whole Gen 7 MMORPG for a launcher? The novelty might surrender to the tedium rather quickly.

If I'm forced to choose just one, then Lightning it is.

Unlike Death's Door, PGA Tour 2K23 isn't on Switch [yet], but Dreams - the glorious analogue of Nintendo's Game Garage Builder from one of Sony's most Nintendoesque studios this side of the late Japan Studio (they're behind LBP and Tearaway, after all) arguably steals the month's spotlight. One of the best IGC offerings this year, that's for sure.

Phew, always reassuring to know a modern game won't be offering me extensive amount of gameplay routines and other content as opposed to... the arcade-inherited trollish difficulty of the past classic I grew up with and am nostalgic about.😁

@Triumph741 well, I'm playing AC2 these days (following AC1) and I'm fine with the current state of AC, so I guess I can fathom it alright.😄

I've yet to beat this dude in Tekken 7's campaign.😅

Ouch. Guess Bamco's freemiums can't stay afloat for long even on consoles.

"You're going to Luffy it"

I'm used to the puns from NL and this site, but bruh... how do you guys pronounce Luffy's name, again?🤔

@Th3solution Borderlands 3 is even featured in one of the current PS Stars tasks. Which has 22 days left, meaning the game will be leaving shortly after.

It'll be funny if the sale finally discounts NFS 2015 (multiplat yet fully online which obviously rules out sideloading its region-locked Windows port) for the first time since February. I had kept wallet funds for it on standby for a month or two... before pulling the trigger on the [still] platform-exclusive Sakura Wars the other day instead.😆

@WolfyTn "but Your Honor, this whole case of sexual assault would have never happened if she had agreed to date me in the first place"

Nobody owes us entertainment, even the industries making money on it.

I've yet to look into BOCW as the only non-Switch title here. If it has a single player campaign akin to Modern Warfare games, colour me curious. If not... ¯(ツ)/¯

@Logonogo I'm not sure if "playing games and going about their lives instead of publicly embellishing their underwhelmed parasitic hedonism" is quite within the definition of "hiding".😅

Between Switch and Deck, a lot of these are a hard sell on a home/streaming console (barring the cases that may bonk you with a compatibility bat Deckside), but Far Cry 6 may come in handy since, despite making a spare US Ubi account for the respective PSN one, I have yet to investigate if it's any viable for purchasing PC versions as well (the website accepted my bank card as a saved payment method but may yet rebel at potential billing address/location discrepancies), and first party exclusives like Killzone Liberation go without saying.😆

How does fans being perpetually mad - and Sonic fans at that - still qualify as "news"?

"For all platforms" - well, we Switch users will be the judges of that.😜 And with bold statements like this, he may come to be thankful that Amico is in apparent limbo now.

Also, is the logo meant to be an optical illusion, or are its middle part's vibrations purely on my owl brain after getting up at half past seven?😵😅

After all the time it took Catherine Full Body and Persona flagships to get announced for Switch, I can't say I'm sweating much about this one.😄 We'll get there when we get there.

@KaijuKaiser sequels sticking to newer gen I can understand - it's the DLC cases that are actually odder. If you already play the base game on PS4, then it better have a cross-save with PS5 (like, say, Horizon Forbidden West thankfully appears to) or you'd be forced to start the DLC on a clean run or even replay a fair portion before accessing it (the kind of FWP I ended up facing with Ace Attorney SoJ for other reasons last year😆). Then again, perhaps FFVIIR DLC is a standalone mode in the first place?

Wham of the month so far. A racing open-worlder RPG with animesque visuals and a female protagonist AND Switch among the announced platforms. Don't wake me up just yet.