theheadofabroom

@Almost_Ghostly it's the jump scares that get me, and that's something FEAR did very well for its day

This sounds awesome and I hate it. I don't ever want to play anything that does this. Nope. Take it away.

I'm glad this will add new tools to developers' arsenal, but this is something I already know would be too much for me (FEAR freaked me out enough back in the day with things happening just off-camera which you only notice when you look around)

I'm happy that this is a good selection, but I'm not looking forward to any of them because I already own the ones I would want to play. I'm looking forward to seeing what I can get for my physical copy of Fallen Order though

@IOI it's a thing journalists do to avoid repetition, and then end up using the phrase "Japanese Giant" 3 every third article

@GalacticBreakdown RE Fallen Order

I was about to disagree because I got confused about dates, I miss the Kyle Katarn SW Jedi Knight games and how flexible their saber combat was (saber combat improved further in Jedi Academy, but pretty much everything else was worse in that game), but when I checked the dates, Jedi Academy came out before the first KOTOR.

It still feels like the apt comparison, and I still feel like Fallen Order feels lacking in something that was in the Jedi Knight games

@themightyant the trackpad annoys me because of how often I miss one of the little buttons either side and jab one corner of the trackpad. I wish it was just 20% smaller

@Toypop I'm curious as to how you're defining "practically DLC", which you're excluding from that, and whether you've played all the games in question.

@WCamicase @NeThZOR

PS2 emulation might be realistic, but would take time to reach the level of accuracy demanded of a paid product. The hardware of the PS3 was very exotic and unlikely to be able to be emulated in software to the required degree of accuracy on the PS5.

What they may be able to do, is create an accessory that contains an amount of the required hardware which the PS5 could hand off to, but it would likely be expensive to manufacture, and too niche a product to recoup R&D costs.

It's all stuff which can be worked around but Sony are a business, if there's no potential profit to be realised then they're not going to do it.

@OrtadragoonX eh, you do you - I always have a phone charger by the sofa so I can give my phone a quick boost before leaving the house, etc, which means that it's no problem to plug in my controller even while it's in use

@TechaNinja just so you know, you can charge your controllers with a standard phone charger (although some chargers only seem to work if you plug them in whole the controller is off)

I'd be highly shocked if the disk drive didn't connect via USB - it's an incredibly flexible set of standards (for instance keyboards and mice still use the PS/2 protocol over USB, as it's part of the spec for HID).

That said there's nothing to say that the firmware will allow it to talk to anything but a Sony device, and I'd expect all traffic between the console and the disk drive to be encrypted so it's not a vector for piracy. I'd be shocked if you could plug it into your laptop to read 4k Blu-ray discs, for instance.

Is he calling us all w******?

Edit: I know it's just the logo, but it looks like motion lines around his fist

@Flaming_Kaiser when did I say they should work for free? In what way would making more money due to more sales mean people work for free?

I said it's a misstep because they've taken it from a price point that for many would be in impulse buy territory, and placed it at a price point which is not in that realm. This means that much fewer people who own the games already on PSVR will buy the next generation version than otherwise, especially with the psychological effect of "I already own this, why buy it again?" versus "I enjoyed this, let's see what the upgrade brings", which harms the studio's reputation and decreases sales both for these two games, but also for future titles.

But sure, I'm checks notes asking people to work for free (people who have already been paid by the time the game releases, I might add)

@sanderson72 it may be running in the same engine, but evidently the main game wasn't pushing the engine to its limits. I'd guess because everything had to be optimised for asset streaming off a 5400rpm hard disk, rather than the SSD

If I were her I'd be distancing myself from this game as much as possible - she sees to do a good job of the script she's given, but the script is dire

@DiscoStuUK eh, he was pretty good in Luther where he wasn't trying to do an accent. It just feels like more and more he's trying to pretend he's from Compton rather than Brixton? It feels like when he remembered being a Brixton boy, he put more effort into his American accents.

@Dezzy70 the thing is that back then there was a much greater difference between hardware generations (to the point where backwards compatibility was often done by including previous generation silicone within the new generation hardware) and so much more effort needed to be put into porting between generations (even more than porting between PSVR and PSVR2). Meanwhile there was no digital store so you couldn't check whether someone had a license for one version and offer a paid upgrade to the new one. The benefits we see now are because the technological improvements we've made since then have followed a path chosen to enable them.

Things were worse back then, but having made such progress in terms of both developer experience and customer expectations then "things used to be worse" isn't really a valid excuse to roll back what we've gained through technological innovation.

All of this said: I'm sure there's good reason why the DLC won't be coming to previous generation hardware, but we'll have to wait until April to find out what they're bringing us which wouldn't be possible on decade old hardware.

So Payday, trying to be GTA Vice City, but they blew half their budget on big name has been actors?

Or am I missing something that makes this look interesting?

We all love Idris Elba, but what was that accent? He did so much better back in The Wire

Cool, I enjoyed the last one, can't imagine preordering it, but I'll probably pick it up when I can find it for £20 or less (all praise eBay)

@Flaming_Kaiser the marginal cost of a digital game is precisely £0, so any sales made at a discount which wouldn't have been made at the usual price are (minus the platform-holder's take and taxes) extra money the studio wouldn't have seen. Obviously you have to take into consideration the money lost from people who would have bought it anyway without the discount, but if you consider that Moss is £19 (currently £17 with the 10% discount) then if they'd sell twice as many units at £10 then they're already £1 per sale ahead. A £10 upgrade seems fair enough, right?

@Flaming_Kaiser nothing beyond what anyone who didn't own the original would pay, I don't think?

I saw the other article first with mostly the same info, so I'll copy my comment from there:

I can understand not being a free upgrade for the reasons stated, but not offering a discounted route for those with the originals seems like a misstep

I can understand not being a free upgrade for the reasons stated, but not offering a discounted route for those with the originals seems like a misstep

Is there any way to jump into ME3 and tell it where you were up to in the other two? I played the first two on Steam back in the day, but then the third required Origin, which at the time was essentially malware.

I'll probably give Biomutant a go at some point, but based on reviews my expectations are low.

All in all, a great month for some, and I'm mostly happy for me.

This is roughly what I was hoping for:

Graphics have never been Firaxis' strong point, and are arguably a waste of performance budget in a complex tactical game. The thing which made me nervous was the state Xcom2 released in, which was fun enough to be worth it, but laden with performance issues, hitches, crashes, and the sort of bugs that would end an Ironman run through no fault on the player's part. War of the Chosen (the expansion) was a vast improvement and it seems like they've learned their lesson as a studio.

I'm looking forward to picking this up, but not day 1 like XCom 3 would be, especially at I still have to play GoW:R (although I finally have a moving date and it's next week)

On top of @Jaz007 's statements which I agree with, I'm not sure that clubbing people over the back of the neck after interrogating them with a gun to their head counts as nonviolent? It's great to have clean hands options, but it feels like it's easy to overstate things.

this fresh take on Sam Fisher's origin story can also apparently be completed without violence

@Pandalulz yeah I think it's an attempt to prevent cheating with save editors. Honestly though multiplayer stuff should be saved on the server and never trust client-side data, and if people want to cheat on single player games I don't see why anyone should stop them

It looks great, don't get me wrong, but £550? I'm going to need to see what the library looks like in 12-18 months

@thedevilsjester I knew he'd killed the Greek pantheon, that he'd been somewhat of a rage monster, but I didn't know it was because he'd been tricked into murdering his family

@thedevilsjester huh, I went in blind(ish) and loved it, maybe I should watch some let's play videos

I'm in the middle of a house move so I'm saving this for when I'm in the new place (an indeterminate number of weeks, but hopefully before Xmas)

Honestly since I moved over to Mastodon and a lot of the folks I follow have also moved there, every time I look at Twitter I get the impression that all the decent folk have left, are no longer posting. Its been a pure trashfire for the past week or so there, which is just polarising stuff like this even more.

I can't say I ever had any doubt that this one would be a right barnstormer

@Ravix @huyi 3 was on Extra, 2 and the remake were Premium

Great games, and I'm glad I bought the collection second hand a year of so ago

@The_Flapjack £480 + 20% VAT = £576, so there's actually a slight discount, likely to factor in that the Tories keep tanking our economy so the basic cost of living has shot up, affecting affordability at a given price point.

I'm disappointed, but not all that surprised, I was thinking £50 less than the console, not £75 more, but this thing will still sell

I'm pretty sure that in the UK this would fall under the Sale of Goods Act, entitling the customer to receive what was advertised. A bit like how if a shop mislabeled the price of an item them have to offer it at the advertised price. (I know about 7 people who got a Sony Bravia entertainment system (TV, stand, speakers, VHS) for £199.99 back in the late 90s because there was a typo on an advert (was supposed to be £1999.99 which was already a bargain)

Having lived and worked in Hoxton/Shoreditch during its gentrification this hits hard

@racinggamefanatic this exactly,

Embrace a competing product
Extend it with content exclusively available on your platform
Extinguish it once they're reliant on you, so your own product can flourish

The tune has never changed, but different leaders have emphasised the first and second stages differently.

@andy24king seems pretty simple, implement an allowlist (aka whitelist) of available games on the console which is updated every time you're online. If you put in a disk that's not on the list then it tells you that you can't play it, and if you're offline it prompts you to connect to the server. The whole thing could be implemented in the part of the OS which deals with installing and launching games without being active at any other time.

While toying with the idea as a thought exercise I considered allowing an entry with a date in the future when it becomes available, but without verifying against a server then it becomes vulnerable to people messing with the system clock. As proposed it would still be vulnerable to people with hacked consoles, but you'll never fully deal with that, and people who haven't installed the update that added the allowlist feature.

It sucks that it forces you to connect to servers to play a physical game, but you should be installing firmware updates anyway, and you can play anything that was released prior to the last time you connected without issue.

@Pokemaniacal why's that?

I'll give Heavenly Bodies a go, but Nioh isn't the sort of thing I generally get along with, and I'm not even claiming the Lego TERF game

I think I saw something online saying the first Witcher game is getting a UE5 remake, which could be cool

https://twitter.com/witchergame/status/1585270206305386497

Can't say I'm a fan, I'd prefer they find other ways of making things one-way, like ledge drops.

If the devs say it's not to hide loading though, I'll happily believe them

@Steve30000 to be fair I haven't missed seeing any of their views since I added them to my ignore list a while back

@EquiinoxGII one imagines they're doing it for Xbox but including PS5 because they want the CMA to let them have ABK

@UltimateOtaku91 that's how it has worked for all my other physical games that got upgrades: Mafia Remake, CP2077, Fallen Order, Borderlands 3, etc etc