Huh. I thought if they're using someone else's work they had to credit it, but I suppose where the logo is based on Sony's IP it's a gray area.
As usual, sad to see how much emphasis gaming companies put on Metacritic. And amusing to see VIllage getting a mention as a "never been better" game when it's had pretty mixed reactions, especially from fans of the series.
I think now that you mention it you could say that it's an either/or situation, but I find Quantic Dream games have a less linear progression due to result of QTEs offset by dialogue/exploration choices. Whereas Naughty Dog the story is basically the same every play through interspersed with "don't die in this linear gameplay section" bits to get to the next cutscene, unlike say Detroit: Become Human where I've completed it 4 times and had pretty different experiences each time.
Only 5 hours in, goofing around exploring the world and hunting the robot monsters but it's quite the game. Really does make use of the PS4 Pro's extra horsepower and I'm very surprised how much they've been able to squeeze out of the console - even with checkerboarding the image is super sharp and yummy looking in 4K. I like the way Aloy's inner monologue is spoken out to the player so you know how she feels about a particular situation. And the video game world really does need more female badasses - I used to count Lara Croft as one but since the reboots, sure, there's character development to make her more complex and real however she comes across as unsure of herself, whereas Aloy strikes me so far as overall more confident even though some doubts etc linger in the background. Really a very polished game that steals an hour from you without you even realising - the "just one more quest" thing any good open world presents where you find it hard to pull yourself away from the immersive experience.
Call of Duty: Black Ops (Zombies Mode) Xbox One X
Nothing beats a good round of co-op on this old beast. I recently looked at the tech specs for the Xbox 360 version and although it is superior to the PS3 version it's actually rendering the game below 720p. I wonder how many games of that era were struggling to render the games above 600p or so even when the Xbox 360 itself was outputting to 1080p. Probably quite a few. My guess is the HD consoles were often that in name only... even now we're seeing the same sort of thing with DRS, that a game renders 1080p-1440p or so and then the result is scaled to fit 4K. Still, it's a big improvement. And there's more to games than resolution, after all...
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Xbox One X
Had less time with it this week but been on Skellige doing side missions and some main quest ones like The Last Wish. I had Enemy Scaling set to ON and it makes the djinn ridiculously strong, so I ended up dying 20 times before looking up and finding this out online. Switch it off and... way too easy. I just figured originally that the idea was the djinn would be tricky on any level/difficulty due to being a super powerful genie but no, game bug. 😂
What I always find odd is how many space games there were in the early days and how few good ones there are now (with the exception of stuff like No Man's Sky and Elite: Dangerous I suppose; YMMV) so if Returnal knocks it past the stratosphere I'll be genuinely impressed. I'll still probably buy it when it's on sale though, same as everything else - then a decent amount of actual trustworthy reviews will exist and any major bugs would hopefully have been squashed in the first few big update patches that all big games seem to have these days.
I was given this free on disc when I bought the PS4 Pro, haven't played it yet. At least now I won't have to find the disc to not play it. 😂
Seriously though, well done Sony for this. Although booting up the PS4 Pro reminds me why it doesn't get used - it never downloads updates when in sleep even though it's been set to and added about 4 to the list before Horizon which I decided to pause, it whined about being out of space even when I changed the location of the download (you have to delete and re-add it for it to "notice" the Application Install Location had been changed...) and it takes like 10 presses to turn the controller off compared to the One X's 3 presses. 🤮 It might have a ton of great games but it also has a truly crappy, cluttered UI where I still can't easily find things years later.
This has been an ever-increasing problem since the start of the previous gen's era, I find. Developers all assume that gamers are running things on 100-inch 4K projection screens and have perfect sight, I'm sure.
@mariomaster96 Oh yeah, I think they went for 45FPS for Return To Arkham release of Arkham Asylum, which makes no sense because it causes judder. Totally stupid.
I prize 60FPS above almost everything, so I'd have whatever keeps a solid 60FPS, wouldn't be fussed by the lack of ray-tracing.
Still amuses me that PS5 boxes have 8K proudly displayed on the outside. Yep, like we'll ever see any graphically complex game running that, no developer with sense will ever target it. Guarantee you the next PS5 model/iteration with a new box will just say 4K HDR and maybe VRR/ALLM if they bother to implement those, plus whatever the higher capacity models will have in terms of onboard storage.
@HMazzy111 I'd like that. I still use my Vita. Over the weekend I was playing The Pinball Arcade which still looks and plays great, especially with the overclocking home-brew to push the FPS up on the more complex/poorly optimised tables.
Woah woah woah. Let's not think Sony did this entirely out of the goodness of their big corporate hearts, yeah?
I reckon this is motivated by the fact they changed the servers prior to shutdown, it caused a bunch of new problems, and that combined with the bad press made Sony realise it was easier to just revert all changes, like what happens after a bad game patch (revert to previous working version). It was probably cheaper to rollback like that. Probably the extra profit from all the additional sales that wouldn't have existed prior to the announcement of the closure didn't hurt, either.
I'd like to credit this as "listening to fans" but I think that's just a pleasant side effect. Usually big companies just make decisions like this based on "what makes most profit and minimises overheads".
"Upon further reflection, however, it’s clear that we made the wrong decision here."
Translates to
"Upon further reflection, our devs told us it would cost more to fix the problems than it would to revert and keep the stores open, so that's what we went with. Thanks for all the extra sales chaps, we thought some might panic buy, in fact we were counting on it. Also, you're welcome, suckers." 😂
@Phelaidar "People are more willing to pay a subscription than full price, which honestly, subscription is really bad since you don't own anything."
While I see your point, that's not necessarily true when you can buy the games you like on 20% discount and if you choose, cancel your Game Pass subscription. Or isn't a concern for people who buy games once, play them until they complete/get bored, and then would have sold the game anyway, they probably won't ever feel like they've lost out due to the way they consume their content.
@The_New_Butler Very true, for those with poor self control who don't mind being exploited by shady developer practices, loot boxing and MTX is a huge issue, as are "remasters" when they just end up being straight ports of "Complete Edition" type games. Nintendo is getting guilty of the latter now, after holding out for years.
I have the Complete Edition on disc but happy to have it digitally as well so I can leave something else in the drive like Red Dead Redemption II. Well done Sony! I look forward to downloading this and never playing it like the other 15 or so PS4 games I haven't gotten around to yet 😂
There's always an easier way to do these things - a lot of people struggle with the initial Griffin fight, including a close friend of mine, but when you learn the trick(s) to it it's really easy.
@get2sammyb Exactly Sammy. When you can wait and get more for less (a "fixed" game with everything included), why would you pay full price to be a beta tester?
""If you love a game, buy it at f***ing full price."
Sure, if more developers want to put out working games that don't require endless patching in their first year to iron out a multitude of issues including performance, broken quests, crashes etc, I might consider it.
As it is, I know if I wait I can usually end up getting fully-patched GOTY or similar "complete" editions with all the DLC they'd normally expect extra for, and have no incentive to change that behaviour when I've been burnt several times in the past, thanks Mr Garvin.
Maybe now he's not part of Sony Bend he can work towards making that happen, rather than trying to lay down the law with savvy gamers who know better 😂
@djdizzy You've just started The Witcher 3 as a first play through? Wow, lucky devil if so. I'd like to go back and start it again for the first time, it's such a deep and engaging world.
My personal tip is it's well worth going on fetch quests for the Witcher armour sets initially rather than hodge-podging your own together out of loot drops - they tend to be stronger, more durable, and come in light/medium/heavy type variations. Cat (light) and Griffin (medium) school types are personal favourites, but you can also get Wolf (medium-heavy) when Kaer Morhen opens back up and Bear (heavy) too. That's definitely a "fact I wish I'd known when playing The Witcher 3 for the first time" type of a thing, as is using red mutagens to increase your attack stats and buying the Gourmet upgrade first to unlock regenerating health - you'll see the You Are Dead screen a lot less this way.
@Bluetrain7 This is an intriguingly interesting thing in gaming - main story take or leave, side quests are the draw. I have a feeling it ties into not being obligated to do them, and that possibility of stumbling upon them organically leading to a more unique feeling player experience. There are so many games where this is the case, and I seem to remember it's been more and more of a thing since 2015 and The Witcher 3.
@JohnKarnes Agreed. The important thing to remember is that although the storage amount is limited, it beats the hell out of the long load times and dirty/damaged disc problems of PS1-PS3 era gaming where we were hamstrung by optical storage media. Now we're beyond hard drives and onto SSDs which is getting gaming closer back to the cartridge era where we saw instantaneous load times, like in the 80s and 90s except with magnitudes more complex graphics/sound/AI...
@airhead190 I wonder if it's using some kind of proprietary communication bus method that Sony developed, i.e. Cerny's team.
It's funny to think that not so long ago, they'd basically engineer and produce a lot of custom chips or custom solutions either on their own or in conjunction with other companies (MIPS processors in the PS1/PSP/Vita, EE/GS in the PS2, Cell processor in the PS3) and since the PS4 era it's been a lot more off-the-shelf stock PC components.
@Richnj Very well said! It's funny how Cyberpunk 2077 was taken down from the PS Store for being a buggy, unfinished and feature-reduced product while Sony had just released an entire games console that was a buggy (remember all the sleep crashes causing external storage to need "repairing"?) , unfinished and feature-reduced product themselves. Pretty hypocritical when you think about it.
@The_New_Butler Yeah I'm not saying the PS5 OS and core design is bad - although if I'm honest it's pretty iterative compared to the PS4, more tweaks they could have implemented on that system than something groundbreaking, beyond integrating the heavily-pushed-by-Sony Cards, soon-to-be-ignored Accolades and the actually-quite-useful Tips and Tricks (although this relies on whether the developer can be bothered to do it - in my experience just having a laptop open with YouTube reveals plenty of fan created content that shows you how to get through tricky sections etc) it's not reinventing the wheel, although it is fairly attractive. Same old Sony problem though - horribly organised menu systems. This is true on their cameras, their TVs and anything else I've used; nothing is in a logical place at all, it's scattershotted all over the place.
I'm in the minority of people who actually quite like the interface of the One and Series consoles - the layout is more logical, jumping between games/apps/settings is really easily and I don't ever feel I'm wasting minutes at a time searching for something. It's all pretty polished. It's based on Windows 10, but I don't get ticked off like it like I do with the desktop UI of W10.
While there's no doubting the PS5's internal SSD chips are blazing fast, they're too small. We are 100% guaranteed to see models that address the complaints about the console's size in terms of both physical size being too big (it's more huge than original XBOX HEUG) and ironically internal storage space being too small. Incidentally they could do with improving the internal airflow for the console as well - I saw a teardown and temperature test on a YouTube video channel who do these kinds of things regularly and the conclusion was that when a game is playing, the PS5 is cooking it's rear-mounted RAM chips at a toasty 95ºc when really as a rule anything above 70ºc is too hot for RAM chips and can lead to shortened lifespan and potentially memory-corruption related crashes.
"it’s worth noting that the drives expected to be supported are seriously expensive"
Same deal on the Series X, but at least those were available and working at launch.
I think the M.2 SSD expansion slot on the PS5 not being enabled at launch at all is partly the sign of an unfinished product being brought to market. If it were done it would have launched with expansion options available.
@Vincent294
"The original SSD is soldered according to iFixit, so you can't replace it without a good hot air station, and good ones cost more than a good soldering iron"
Yes but even if doing that there's no guarantee the PS5 OS would know how to address the extra storage space, or even boot at all. Potentially the size limits are hardcoded into the OS - without any data it's impossible to tell.
I still find it funny that Sony's new flagship games console (PS5) launched with much less storage space than their previous flagship (PS4 Pro) - seems like a step backwards, perhaps made to help keep costs down because they're at that point of losing money on every one built and sold, and will be for a while longer.
@playthedangame So true. Despite some weird gameplay/story choices (acapella theme tune while Snake climbs a ladder for 3 minutes, anyone?) Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is a brilliant, memorable game. I've replayed it a fair few times over the years including on the PS Vita. The Subsistence versions with the camera control rather than forced perspectives are my favourite.
@lolwhatno In my opinion, video games can help prevent violence. I lose count of the amount of times I haven't turned around and hit someone, but have used video game violence as a more healthy outlet when I've had a bad day or something. I'm sure your parents mean well, but that blanket statement they made isn't true of everyone. Not everyone who plays an FPS will one day pick up a gun and go shoot up their school.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [GOTY Edition] It's one of the greatest games of all time, even in light of CDPR pooping all over their good guy reputation. And I don't even really care for medieval might and magic type RPGs at all. Spent some time finding Witcher armour and having it crafted (Cat and Griffin sets, Cat being the favourite for my play style), plus finding all the ? points of interest in Valen.
Call of Duty: Black Ops [Zombie Co-Op Mode Only] Not a big fan of regular CoD by any means, however Zombie mode really shows off just how right the controls on this 10 year old shooter really were. Mostly a steady 60FPS too, apart from when there's too many hoards of the SS Waffen Zombie Nazis on screen. They must be stopped, at all costs, and 2P Local Co-Op is a real h00t.
Forza Horizon 4 Sometimes, nothing beats tooling around a great digital facsimile of Scotland, launching sports cars off of huge ramps to get ⭐️⭐️⭐️ or drifting a 240SX around a snow-covered dirt track to see how good your control of the car is.
"A 2tb SSD is going to cost you around £165 - 200"
Um, not necessarily. The one I had in my PS4 Pro that I moved to my One X is a 2TB SanDisk SSD, and on sale I got it for £100, new including P&P. Pays to shop around and make full use of the Best Offer option search on eBay. 😏
Sometimes it cuts load screens down from about 3 minutes to 10 seconds on The Witcher 3: GOTY Edition. Sometimes.
Depends how many pets, how many children, if they're having renovations done, even stuff like "do they live by a sandy field" can play a part... there's some internal and external factors for you. Oh, and if people run them close to the carpet, because carpets are better dust catchers than the ones designed into the PS5. 😂
"The former is designed to promote a more inclusive PSN community where users can reward medals to the people they play with."
Not to editorialise (although of course, by pointing this out it is pretty much exactly what I'm doing) but in this context I believe the word you wanted was award, rather than reward, Liam. You can use reward but you would need to restructure the sentence to accommodate, such as "a more inclusive PSN community where users can reward the people they play with with medals" which obfuscates the point with too much word surplus, so I'd just swap out reward with award, personally.
I look forward to this comment not being read (by Liam at least) and the correction not being made. 😂 (Yes I do love self-deprecation.)
To be honest I think Accolades is Sony's attempt to set up a "user feedback score" style system similar to how you might rate a seller on eBay. Time will tell, but at this early vantage point I would speculate that it's something they spent an inordinate amount of developer time on, only for it to be mostly ignored and eventually kinda fade away into obsolesce, like Stadia is doing.
I think if you bought this game digitally before it got pulled off the storefront you're now at the point where if you downloaded all the patches that it's now more GBs than the base game was.
Have they written AI for the cops yet, rather than better disguise the spawning in? Have they finished the metro station? What's that CDPR, no? That's okay - if people moan harder you can always take to YouTube and make another "apology" dripping with insincerity. That's what a "good guy" developer does, right, lie about things like this?
Ha. Well I got about 70 hours out of the game and most of it was fun but what's even more fun is writing things like that. 😂
Anyway, the issue is, the word "fix" doesn't cover what's needed to make it a truly great game. "The state" is a good phrase to use when describing it, as the article does, because it'll always kind of be in one won't it.
There's so much cut content and clearly unfinished parts in it that it would be a waste of time/effort/money to spend forever trying to bring it anywhere close to The Witcher 3 - that ship has sailed. For example the abandoned metro station. All the things they promised 3 years ago like wall-running. They can't live up to those promises, they've made their money on the game so maybe now is the time to go make a decent game that isn't released early and brokenish.
Cyberpunk 2077 is kind of a lost cause, is the way I see it. Even at it's very best (i.e. when not crashing or spawning lazy police behind the player character) I don't think it ever quite hit the highs of their last game, which was a study in how to do branch narrative choices incredibly well, on a scale never seen before. This one, all the choice included is basically token and the life paths make no difference at all.
One final fun thing to note is that Sony pulled the game from the PS Store, a game many people have called "unfinished", yet were happy to launch an entire console in an unfinished state. Pretty hypocritical 😂
Fair point, if true I'll take that correction! Just never remember reading about it on, as you put it, a massive scale. Guess years of poor networking in Windows (and the resultant scambling to fix) gave Microsoft the edge over Sony when it came to fixing hacks, or "plugging firewalls" as Pritchard might put it. 💻🔥🧱
@thefourfoldroot Well said, I agree with that. There's enough people having kids anyway, I'm happy skipping out on that too. Very true about the lack of original thought and for some reason a sort of self-imposed censorship going on - I think one may feed the other in perpetuity, the way things are going. People too scared to state their own opinion for fear of ostracism.
@thefourfoldroot This is surprisingly deep and interesting, thanks for sharing! I like philosophy too but it seems fewer and fewer people these days are capable of it - too distracted and too busy having their attention span shot to pieces overdosing on their smartphone digital facsimiles of lives rather than living in the real world. As a former introvert turned (mostly) extrovert I've found it fascinating watching other people kinda go towards what I once was, while I move away from it.
@TrueAssassin86x That's a pretty lame attempt at an insult, which is why it failed.
Actually I own more Sony consoles than any other (PS2/PS3/PS4 Pro/Vita/PSP) but I do have a Switch and One X too. It's called being "platform agnostic", but you probably don't know what that means as you seem like a pretty ignorant would-be rabble rouser. It is possible to say things are good or bad without being a fanboy, but it sounds like even grasping that concept would be far beyond what your tiny, closed mind is capable of.
Why is it so many gamer trolls think it works to call someone a kid? Like literally it's so unoriginal and 🥱 it's like you're all reading from the same hackneyed troll handbook.
I have a great life, thanks. Maybe you should take a look at yours though - being a pitiful keyboard warrior lashing out at random strangers on the internet is usually a sign of poor self-control and other such issues well-served by counselling.
I guess the first seven letter of your username are correct, you really are behaving like a TrueAss 😂
(EDIT: Oh my god this gets better and better. According to his profile he's 34, cares about "games not consoles" - not that he acts like it what with his nascent fanboy talk- and hosts a deserted forum called Mature Gamers Alliance - you can't make this up, can you?)
@Flaming_Kaiser Well yeah I wouldn't expect in-depth crafting mechanics like a full RPG, but I think what I'm asking for is too much for that type of game. It's odd though - if the combat etc is varied enough then I often like it even if it is linear, like the original God of War which had a variety of different combos and things to link together. Not the games which have the "one button does most of the work" type design philosophy.
Yep Ellie's voice actress is super-talented. I like the part where she snidely says something like "is that all girls had to worry about back then, makeup and boys" with total disgust. Who knows, maybe that's why her sexual orientation was what it was in the much less narratively stellar Part II.
@thefourfoldroot Agreed, it's nice to have a civil conversation with a fellow gamer such as yourself rather than be trading jabs back and forth which gets tiring. I'm also a talkative fella yep. Sometimes discussing gaming is nearly as fun as actually playing the games.
EDIT: Oh one thing, what's the basis for your username? Talking about ones that are unique, unlike my SameOldGamer0001 example.
I think if you bought this game digitally before it got pulled off the storefront you're now at the point where if you downloaded all the patches that it's now more GBs than the base game was.
Have they written AI for the cops yet, rather than better disguise the spawning in? Have they finished the metro station? What's that CDPR, no? That's okay - if people moan harder you can always take to YouTube and make another "apology" dripping with insincerity. That's what a "good guy" developer does, right, lie about things like this?
Ha. Well I got about 70 hours out of the game and most of it was fun but what's even more fun is writing things like that. 😂
@thefourfoldroot In my case as far as I remember I only ever downloaded free games, and wouldn't have been annoyed if they deleted my account. Perhaps it was the fact I paid for Xbox Gold that kept it alive. Either way, it was pretty impressive to be able to jump back into several Xbox 360 games as if I never left.
"It was funny they used the excuse that they wanted to free up gamer tags for other people though"
Yeah when people have such memorable ones like SameOldGamer0001, by which I mean it's always something with a number on the end rather than doing something smart like using your name or a screen name and replacing any i letters with 1 and o letters with 0, for example. 🤭
"I personally would have been more likely to come back as a customer if I hadn’t had my gamer points deleted with my account."
For me I never really cared about stuff like that, it was just the convenience of logging into an old account rather than setting up a new one, which I later changed the primary email and gamertag for anyway. 😃
"It was a strange decision by them but too long ago for me to care."
I'm teasing rather than trolling, but you cared enough that we're here talking about it, eh? 😉
@TrueAssassin86x I love it when people say things like "speak English" when 1) we're all writing it not speaking it and 2) the person saying it has poor spelling and/or grammar themselves, like using "your" instead of "you're" and not capitalising the letter "i" when used as a pronoun. Both of which you did.
Ah well, another day another negative comment by NotATrueAssassin69x 😂
"I did lose my Xbox gamer tag and account, but that was because I never had an Xbone so didn’t access my account at all for over 5 years. MS didn’t tell me I needed to so I lost everything."
Uh... ok. That's odd. I didn't use my Xbox account in nearly 7 years, then got an Xbox One X and found that not only did the old gamertag/login details work perfectly, with all the gamer points retained, but old cloud saves from my Xbox Live Gold days still worked. I booted up Red Dead Redemption and there were my old saves from 2012/2013 made on my long-sold Xbox 360. I was suitably impressed.
So what happened to you doesn't happen to everyone.
@Sebatrox "I didn't use my Steam Account for almost 7 years and Valve didn't remove my account. It shows just how stupid microsoft is."
Actually it doesn't. Stupidity isn't a factor here if they've already told you they're culling old unused accounts with no purchases made on them. Wait... arguably it's the stupidity of the user for not logging in for over 2 years if they wanted to keep that account. 😏
I mean, if you don't care to use them then it's one less thing with your personal details on it to potentially be hacked when they auto-close the account, although really Microsoft haven't had that problem (Sony has, though, more than once).
@Flaming_Kaiser Good suggestion. SSDs are surprisingly cheap these days too, not that the PS3 with it's ageing SATA-I bus would benefit hugely but it would still be noticeable. I paid £100 for a new 2TB SanDisk model and I tried it in both the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X - it helped in the Pro, and it really flew in the One X.
@Flaming_Kaiser Agreed, the storytelling is great. I've watched those YouTube videos where people just edit together the story (and in rare cases when needed to make sense of the story, short sections of gameplay) and the first The Last of Us title is an epic. Sadly having tried to play the game myself several times, it's gameplay is not similarly engaging and engrossing to me at all, it's about as basic as it gets. I feel Naughty Dog were doing that to pull in a bigger audience, which is understandable, but it made it very cookie-cutter.
Like I said though, doesn't diminish the story, and maybe if the Uncharted movie with Tom "Spider-Man" Holland in it is a success they'll consider making The Last of Us into a cinematic epic too, which I'd watch.
@twitchtvpat Neither was Xbox 360 game compatibility for the Xbox One, but it's had that for years now and it's excellent - works as if it were designed to be there from the start. What's your point?
Comments 654
Re: Sony Uses Fan-Made God of War Ragnarok Logo in Official Presentation, Fools Us All
Huh. I thought if they're using someone else's work they had to credit it, but I suppose where the logo is based on Sony's IP it's a gray area.
As usual, sad to see how much emphasis gaming companies put on Metacritic. And amusing to see VIllage getting a mention as a "never been better" game when it's had pretty mixed reactions, especially from fans of the series.
Re: Mini Review: Hitchhiker (PS4) - Intriguing Concept Can Be Monotonous
I think now that you mention it you could say that it's an either/or situation, but I find Quantic Dream games have a less linear progression due to result of QTEs offset by dialogue/exploration choices. Whereas Naughty Dog the story is basically the same every play through interspersed with "don't die in this linear gameplay section" bits to get to the next cutscene, unlike say Detroit: Become Human where I've completed it 4 times and had pretty different experiences each time.
Re: Mini Review: Hitchhiker (PS4) - Intriguing Concept Can Be Monotonous
"closer to an interactive experience than a traditional game."
So... it's like a Naughty Dog title?
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 373
Horizon: Zero Dawn
PS4 Pro
Only 5 hours in, goofing around exploring the world and hunting the robot monsters but it's quite the game. Really does make use of the PS4 Pro's extra horsepower and I'm very surprised how much they've been able to squeeze out of the console - even with checkerboarding the image is super sharp and yummy looking in 4K. I like the way Aloy's inner monologue is spoken out to the player so you know how she feels about a particular situation. And the video game world really does need more female badasses - I used to count Lara Croft as one but since the reboots, sure, there's character development to make her more complex and real however she comes across as unsure of herself, whereas Aloy strikes me so far as overall more confident even though some doubts etc linger in the background. Really a very polished game that steals an hour from you without you even realising - the "just one more quest" thing any good open world presents where you find it hard to pull yourself away from the immersive experience.
Call of Duty: Black Ops (Zombies Mode)
Xbox One X
Nothing beats a good round of co-op on this old beast. I recently looked at the tech specs for the Xbox 360 version and although it is superior to the PS3 version it's actually rendering the game below 720p. I wonder how many games of that era were struggling to render the games above 600p or so even when the Xbox 360 itself was outputting to 1080p. Probably quite a few. My guess is the HD consoles were often that in name only... even now we're seeing the same sort of thing with DRS, that a game renders 1080p-1440p or so and then the result is scaled to fit 4K. Still, it's a big improvement. And there's more to games than resolution, after all...
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Xbox One X
Had less time with it this week but been on Skellige doing side missions and some main quest ones like The Last Wish. I had Enemy Scaling set to ON and it makes the djinn ridiculously strong, so I ended up dying 20 times before looking up and finding this out online. Switch it off and... way too easy. I just figured originally that the idea was the djinn would be tricky on any level/difficulty due to being a super powerful genie but no, game bug. 😂
Re: Poll: Will You Be Buying Returnal?
What I always find odd is how many space games there were in the early days and how few good ones there are now (with the exception of stuff like No Man's Sky and Elite: Dangerous I suppose; YMMV) so if Returnal knocks it past the stratosphere I'll be genuinely impressed. I'll still probably buy it when it's on sale though, same as everything else - then a decent amount of actual trustworthy reviews will exist and any major bugs would hopefully have been squashed in the first few big update patches that all big games seem to have these days.
Re: Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition Is Free to Download Now
I was given this free on disc when I bought the PS4 Pro, haven't played it yet. At least now I won't have to find the disc to not play it. 😂
Seriously though, well done Sony for this. Although booting up the PS4 Pro reminds me why it doesn't get used - it never downloads updates when in sleep even though it's been set to and added about 4 to the list before Horizon which I decided to pause, it whined about being out of space even when I changed the location of the download (you have to delete and re-add it for it to "notice" the Application Install Location had been changed...) and it takes like 10 presses to turn the controller off compared to the One X's 3 presses. 🤮 It might have a ton of great games but it also has a truly crappy, cluttered UI where I still can't easily find things years later.
Re: Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (PS5) - A Hauntingly Brilliant RPG That Lives Long in the Mind
"Tiny, tiny text in some menus"
This has been an ever-increasing problem since the start of the previous gen's era, I find. Developers all assume that gamers are running things on 100-inch 4K projection screens and have perfect sight, I'm sure.
Re: Resident Evil Village Is 4K at 60 FPS on PS5, And 900p at 45 FPS on PS4
@mariomaster96 Oh yeah, I think they went for 45FPS for Return To Arkham release of Arkham Asylum, which makes no sense because it causes judder. Totally stupid.
I prize 60FPS above almost everything, so I'd have whatever keeps a solid 60FPS, wouldn't be fussed by the lack of ray-tracing.
Still amuses me that PS5 boxes have 8K proudly displayed on the outside. Yep, like we'll ever see any graphically complex game running that, no developer with sense will ever target it. Guarantee you the next PS5 model/iteration with a new box will just say 4K HDR and maybe VRR/ALLM if they bother to implement those, plus whatever the higher capacity models will have in terms of onboard storage.
Re: Sony Backtracks PS3, PS Vita Online Store Closures
@HMazzy111 I'd like that. I still use my Vita. Over the weekend I was playing The Pinball Arcade which still looks and plays great, especially with the overclocking home-brew to push the FPS up on the more complex/poorly optimised tables.
Re: Sony Backtracks PS3, PS Vita Online Store Closures
Woah woah woah. Let's not think Sony did this entirely out of the goodness of their big corporate hearts, yeah?
I reckon this is motivated by the fact they changed the servers prior to shutdown, it caused a bunch of new problems, and that combined with the bad press made Sony realise it was easier to just revert all changes, like what happens after a bad game patch (revert to previous working version). It was probably cheaper to rollback like that. Probably the extra profit from all the additional sales that wouldn't have existed prior to the announcement of the closure didn't hurt, either.
I'd like to credit this as "listening to fans" but I think that's just a pleasant side effect. Usually big companies just make decisions like this based on "what makes most profit and minimises overheads".
"Upon further reflection, however, it’s clear that we made the wrong decision here."
Translates to
"Upon further reflection, our devs told us it would cost more to fix the problems than it would to revert and keep the stores open, so that's what we went with. Thanks for all the extra sales chaps, we thought some might panic buy, in fact we were counting on it. Also, you're welcome, suckers." 😂
Re: Days Gone Director on Skipped Sequel: 'If You Love a Game, Buy It at F***ing Full Price'
@Logonogo Hahaha no worries man, I usually write a comment and then go back and read the rest... it just made me chuckle. 😃👍
Re: PS4 to PS5: All Games with Confirmed Free Upgrades
MISSING GAMES or INACCURACIES
Just a few as I skimmed the list, might be more.
Re: Days Gone Director on Skipped Sequel: 'If You Love a Game, Buy It at F***ing Full Price'
@Logonogo Hehehe you're only about the 50th person in the comments to point that out 😏😃
Re: Days Gone Director on Skipped Sequel: 'If You Love a Game, Buy It at F***ing Full Price'
@Phelaidar "People are more willing to pay a subscription than full price, which honestly, subscription is really bad since you don't own anything."
While I see your point, that's not necessarily true when you can buy the games you like on 20% discount and if you choose, cancel your Game Pass subscription. Or isn't a concern for people who buy games once, play them until they complete/get bored, and then would have sold the game anyway, they probably won't ever feel like they've lost out due to the way they consume their content.
Re: Days Gone Director on Skipped Sequel: 'If You Love a Game, Buy It at F***ing Full Price'
@The_New_Butler Very true, for those with poor self control who don't mind being exploited by shady developer practices, loot boxing and MTX is a huge issue, as are "remasters" when they just end up being straight ports of "Complete Edition" type games. Nintendo is getting guilty of the latter now, after holding out for years.
Re: Here's When Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition Will Be Free
I have the Complete Edition on disc but happy to have it digitally as well so I can leave something else in the drive like Red Dead Redemption II. Well done Sony! I look forward to downloading this and never playing it like the other 15 or so PS4 games I haven't gotten around to yet 😂
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 372
@djdizzy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeOrzZSXojY
There's always an easier way to do these things - a lot of people struggle with the initial Griffin fight, including a close friend of mine, but when you learn the trick(s) to it it's really easy.
Re: Days Gone Director on Skipped Sequel: 'If You Love a Game, Buy It at F***ing Full Price'
@get2sammyb Exactly Sammy. When you can wait and get more for less (a "fixed" game with everything included), why would you pay full price to be a beta tester?
Re: Days Gone Director on Skipped Sequel: 'If You Love a Game, Buy It at F***ing Full Price'
""If you love a game, buy it at f***ing full price."
Sure, if more developers want to put out working games that don't require endless patching in their first year to iron out a multitude of issues including performance, broken quests, crashes etc, I might consider it.
As it is, I know if I wait I can usually end up getting fully-patched GOTY or similar "complete" editions with all the DLC they'd normally expect extra for, and have no incentive to change that behaviour when I've been burnt several times in the past, thanks Mr Garvin.
Maybe now he's not part of Sony Bend he can work towards making that happen, rather than trying to lay down the law with savvy gamers who know better 😂
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 372
@djdizzy You've just started The Witcher 3 as a first play through? Wow, lucky devil if so. I'd like to go back and start it again for the first time, it's such a deep and engaging world.
My personal tip is it's well worth going on fetch quests for the Witcher armour sets initially rather than hodge-podging your own together out of loot drops - they tend to be stronger, more durable, and come in light/medium/heavy type variations. Cat (light) and Griffin (medium) school types are personal favourites, but you can also get Wolf (medium-heavy) when Kaer Morhen opens back up and Bear (heavy) too. That's definitely a "fact I wish I'd known when playing The Witcher 3 for the first time" type of a thing, as is using red mutagens to increase your attack stats and buying the Gourmet upgrade first to unlock regenerating health - you'll see the You Are Dead screen a lot less this way.
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 372
@Bluetrain7 This is an intriguingly interesting thing in gaming - main story take or leave, side quests are the draw. I have a feeling it ties into not being obligated to do them, and that possibility of stumbling upon them organically leading to a more unique feeling player experience. There are so many games where this is the case, and I seem to remember it's been more and more of a thing since 2015 and The Witcher 3.
Re: PS5 Doesn't Like It When You Put an Extra NVMe SSD Inside
@JohnKarnes Agreed. The important thing to remember is that although the storage amount is limited, it beats the hell out of the long load times and dirty/damaged disc problems of PS1-PS3 era gaming where we were hamstrung by optical storage media. Now we're beyond hard drives and onto SSDs which is getting gaming closer back to the cartridge era where we saw instantaneous load times, like in the 80s and 90s except with magnitudes more complex graphics/sound/AI...
Re: PS5 Doesn't Like It When You Put an Extra NVMe SSD Inside
@airhead190 I wonder if it's using some kind of proprietary communication bus method that Sony developed, i.e. Cerny's team.
It's funny to think that not so long ago, they'd basically engineer and produce a lot of custom chips or custom solutions either on their own or in conjunction with other companies (MIPS processors in the PS1/PSP/Vita, EE/GS in the PS2, Cell processor in the PS3) and since the PS4 era it's been a lot more off-the-shelf stock PC components.
Re: PS5 Doesn't Like It When You Put an Extra NVMe SSD Inside
@Richnj Very well said! It's funny how Cyberpunk 2077 was taken down from the PS Store for being a buggy, unfinished and feature-reduced product while Sony had just released an entire games console that was a buggy (remember all the sleep crashes causing external storage to need "repairing"?) , unfinished and feature-reduced product themselves. Pretty hypocritical when you think about it.
Re: PS5 Doesn't Like It When You Put an Extra NVMe SSD Inside
@The_New_Butler Yeah I'm not saying the PS5 OS and core design is bad - although if I'm honest it's pretty iterative compared to the PS4, more tweaks they could have implemented on that system than something groundbreaking, beyond integrating the heavily-pushed-by-Sony Cards, soon-to-be-ignored Accolades and the actually-quite-useful Tips and Tricks (although this relies on whether the developer can be bothered to do it - in my experience just having a laptop open with YouTube reveals plenty of fan created content that shows you how to get through tricky sections etc) it's not reinventing the wheel, although it is fairly attractive. Same old Sony problem though - horribly organised menu systems. This is true on their cameras, their TVs and anything else I've used; nothing is in a logical place at all, it's scattershotted all over the place.
I'm in the minority of people who actually quite like the interface of the One and Series consoles - the layout is more logical, jumping between games/apps/settings is really easily and I don't ever feel I'm wasting minutes at a time searching for something. It's all pretty polished. It's based on Windows 10, but I don't get ticked off like it like I do with the desktop UI of W10.
While there's no doubting the PS5's internal SSD chips are blazing fast, they're too small. We are 100% guaranteed to see models that address the complaints about the console's size in terms of both physical size being too big (it's more huge than original XBOX HEUG) and ironically internal storage space being too small. Incidentally they could do with improving the internal airflow for the console as well - I saw a teardown and temperature test on a YouTube video channel who do these kinds of things regularly and the conclusion was that when a game is playing, the PS5 is cooking it's rear-mounted RAM chips at a toasty 95ºc when really as a rule anything above 70ºc is too hot for RAM chips and can lead to shortened lifespan and potentially memory-corruption related crashes.
Re: PS5 Doesn't Like It When You Put an Extra NVMe SSD Inside
"it’s worth noting that the drives expected to be supported are seriously expensive"
Same deal on the Series X, but at least those were available and working at launch.
I think the M.2 SSD expansion slot on the PS5 not being enabled at launch at all is partly the sign of an unfinished product being brought to market. If it were done it would have launched with expansion options available.
@Vincent294
"The original SSD is soldered according to iFixit, so you can't replace it without a good hot air station, and good ones cost more than a good soldering iron"
Yes but even if doing that there's no guarantee the PS5 OS would know how to address the extra storage space, or even boot at all. Potentially the size limits are hardcoded into the OS - without any data it's impossible to tell.
I still find it funny that Sony's new flagship games console (PS5) launched with much less storage space than their previous flagship (PS4 Pro) - seems like a step backwards, perhaps made to help keep costs down because they're at that point of losing money on every one built and sold, and will be for a while longer.
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 372
@playthedangame So true. Despite some weird gameplay/story choices (acapella theme tune while Snake climbs a ladder for 3 minutes, anyone?) Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is a brilliant, memorable game. I've replayed it a fair few times over the years including on the PS Vita. The Subsistence versions with the camera control rather than forced perspectives are my favourite.
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 372
@lolwhatno In my opinion, video games can help prevent violence. I lose count of the amount of times I haven't turned around and hit someone, but have used video game violence as a more healthy outlet when I've had a bad day or something. I'm sure your parents mean well, but that blanket statement they made isn't true of everyone. Not everyone who plays an FPS will one day pick up a gun and go shoot up their school.
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 372
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [GOTY Edition]
It's one of the greatest games of all time, even in light of CDPR pooping all over their good guy reputation. And I don't even really care for medieval might and magic type RPGs at all. Spent some time finding Witcher armour and having it crafted (Cat and Griffin sets, Cat being the favourite for my play style), plus finding all the ? points of interest in Valen.
Call of Duty: Black Ops [Zombie Co-Op Mode Only]
Not a big fan of regular CoD by any means, however Zombie mode really shows off just how right the controls on this 10 year old shooter really were. Mostly a steady 60FPS too, apart from when there's too many hoards of the SS Waffen Zombie Nazis on screen. They must be stopped, at all costs, and 2P Local Co-Op is a real h00t.
Forza Horizon 4
Sometimes, nothing beats tooling around a great digital facsimile of Scotland, launching sports cars off of huge ramps to get ⭐️⭐️⭐️ or drifting a 240SX around a snow-covered dirt track to see how good your control of the car is.
Re: March 2021 NPD: PS5 Is Still the Fastest-Selling Console in US History
@Immortal_Barnet Just totally inaccurate, really. 😂
Re: PS5 Firmware Update: All the Features You May Not Know About
@The_New_Butler Fine deals are regular if you know where to look and how to haggle, I'll allow that. 😃👍
Re: PS5 Firmware Update: All the Features You May Not Know About
@The_New_Butler @0niguy
"A 2tb SSD is going to cost you around £165 - 200"
Um, not necessarily. The one I had in my PS4 Pro that I moved to my One X is a 2TB SanDisk SSD, and on sale I got it for £100, new including P&P. Pays to shop around and make full use of the Best Offer option search on eBay. 😏
Sometimes it cuts load screens down from about 3 minutes to 10 seconds on The Witcher 3: GOTY Edition. Sometimes.
Re: PS5 Firmware Update: All the Features You May Not Know About
IF
$PS5_FIRMWARE_UPDATE includes ENABLE_M.2_SSD_SLOT
then
👍😃
ELSE
🤷♂️
Re: Poll: Do You Use These Two Forgotten PS5 Features?
@Mintie Excellent use of the word dander there.
Re: Poll: Do You Use These Two Forgotten PS5 Features?
@thefourfoldroot "how dusty are people’s houses?"
You'd be surprised.
Depends how many pets, how many children, if they're having renovations done, even stuff like "do they live by a sandy field" can play a part... there's some internal and external factors for you. Oh, and if people run them close to the carpet, because carpets are better dust catchers than the ones designed into the PS5. 😂
Re: Poll: Do You Use These Two Forgotten PS5 Features?
"The former is designed to promote a more inclusive PSN community where users can reward medals to the people they play with."
Not to editorialise (although of course, by pointing this out it is pretty much exactly what I'm doing) but in this context I believe the word you wanted was award, rather than reward, Liam. You can use reward but you would need to restructure the sentence to accommodate, such as "a more inclusive PSN community where users can reward the people they play with with medals" which obfuscates the point with too much word surplus, so I'd just swap out reward with award, personally.
I look forward to this comment not being read (by Liam at least) and the correction not being made. 😂 (Yes I do love self-deprecation.)
To be honest I think Accolades is Sony's attempt to set up a "user feedback score" style system similar to how you might rate a seller on eBay. Time will tell, but at this early vantage point I would speculate that it's something they spent an inordinate amount of developer time on, only for it to be mostly ignored and eventually kinda fade away into obsolesce, like Stadia is doing.
Re: Talking Point: What's Next for Cyberpunk 2077, and the State of the Game on PS5, PS4
I think if you bought this game digitally before it got pulled off the storefront you're now at the point where if you downloaded all the patches that it's now more GBs than the base game was.
Have they written AI for the cops yet, rather than better disguise the spawning in? Have they finished the metro station? What's that CDPR, no? That's okay - if people moan harder you can always take to YouTube and make another "apology" dripping with insincerity. That's what a "good guy" developer does, right, lie about things like this?
Ha. Well I got about 70 hours out of the game and most of it was fun but what's even more fun is writing things like that. 😂
Anyway, the issue is, the word "fix" doesn't cover what's needed to make it a truly great game. "The state" is a good phrase to use when describing it, as the article does, because it'll always kind of be in one won't it.
There's so much cut content and clearly unfinished parts in it that it would be a waste of time/effort/money to spend forever trying to bring it anywhere close to The Witcher 3 - that ship has sailed. For example the abandoned metro station. All the things they promised 3 years ago like wall-running. They can't live up to those promises, they've made their money on the game so maybe now is the time to go make a decent game that isn't released early and brokenish.
Cyberpunk 2077 is kind of a lost cause, is the way I see it. Even at it's very best (i.e. when not crashing or spawning lazy police behind the player character) I don't think it ever quite hit the highs of their last game, which was a study in how to do branch narrative choices incredibly well, on a scale never seen before. This one, all the choice included is basically token and the life paths make no difference at all.
One final fun thing to note is that Sony pulled the game from the PS Store, a game many people have called "unfinished", yet were happy to launch an entire console in an unfinished state. Pretty hypocritical 😂
Re: PS Plus Oversight Is a Bummer for PS3, PS Vita Owners
Fair point, if true I'll take that correction! Just never remember reading about it on, as you put it, a massive scale. Guess years of poor networking in Windows (and the resultant scambling to fix) gave Microsoft the edge over Sony when it came to fixing hacks, or "plugging firewalls" as Pritchard might put it. 💻🔥🧱
Re: PS Plus Oversight Is a Bummer for PS3, PS Vita Owners
@thefourfoldroot Well said, I agree with that. There's enough people having kids anyway, I'm happy skipping out on that too. Very true about the lack of original thought and for some reason a sort of self-imposed censorship going on - I think one may feed the other in perpetuity, the way things are going. People too scared to state their own opinion for fear of ostracism.
Re: PS Plus Oversight Is a Bummer for PS3, PS Vita Owners
@thefourfoldroot This is surprisingly deep and interesting, thanks for sharing! I like philosophy too but it seems fewer and fewer people these days are capable of it - too distracted and too busy having their attention span shot to pieces overdosing on their smartphone digital facsimiles of lives rather than living in the real world. As a former introvert turned (mostly) extrovert I've found it fascinating watching other people kinda go towards what I once was, while I move away from it.
Re: PS Plus Oversight Is a Bummer for PS3, PS Vita Owners
@TrueAssassin86x That's a pretty lame attempt at an insult, which is why it failed.
Actually I own more Sony consoles than any other (PS2/PS3/PS4 Pro/Vita/PSP) but I do have a Switch and One X too. It's called being "platform agnostic", but you probably don't know what that means as you seem like a pretty ignorant would-be rabble rouser. It is possible to say things are good or bad without being a fanboy, but it sounds like even grasping that concept would be far beyond what your tiny, closed mind is capable of.
Why is it so many gamer trolls think it works to call someone a kid? Like literally it's so unoriginal and 🥱 it's like you're all reading from the same hackneyed troll handbook.
I have a great life, thanks. Maybe you should take a look at yours though - being a pitiful keyboard warrior lashing out at random strangers on the internet is usually a sign of poor self-control and other such issues well-served by counselling.
I guess the first seven letter of your username are correct, you really are behaving like a TrueAss 😂
(EDIT: Oh my god this gets better and better. According to his profile he's 34, cares about "games not consoles" - not that he acts like it what with his nascent fanboy talk- and hosts a deserted forum called Mature Gamers Alliance - you can't make this up, can you?)
Re: Reaction: Days Gone Was PS4's Black Sheep, But a Darn Good Open World Game
@Flaming_Kaiser Well yeah I wouldn't expect in-depth crafting mechanics like a full RPG, but I think what I'm asking for is too much for that type of game. It's odd though - if the combat etc is varied enough then I often like it even if it is linear, like the original God of War which had a variety of different combos and things to link together. Not the games which have the "one button does most of the work" type design philosophy.
Yep Ellie's voice actress is super-talented. I like the part where she snidely says something like "is that all girls had to worry about back then, makeup and boys" with total disgust. Who knows, maybe that's why her sexual orientation was what it was in the much less narratively stellar Part II.
Re: PS Plus Oversight Is a Bummer for PS3, PS Vita Owners
@thefourfoldroot Agreed, it's nice to have a civil conversation with a fellow gamer such as yourself rather than be trading jabs back and forth which gets tiring. I'm also a talkative fella yep. Sometimes discussing gaming is nearly as fun as actually playing the games.
EDIT: Oh one thing, what's the basis for your username? Talking about ones that are unique, unlike my SameOldGamer0001 example.
Re: Cyberpunk 2077 Patch 1.21 Out Now on PS5, PS4, Features More Crash and Bug Fixes
I think if you bought this game digitally before it got pulled off the storefront you're now at the point where if you downloaded all the patches that it's now more GBs than the base game was.
Have they written AI for the cops yet, rather than better disguise the spawning in? Have they finished the metro station? What's that CDPR, no? That's okay - if people moan harder you can always take to YouTube and make another "apology" dripping with insincerity. That's what a "good guy" developer does, right, lie about things like this?
Ha. Well I got about 70 hours out of the game and most of it was fun but what's even more fun is writing things like that. 😂
Re: PS Plus Oversight Is a Bummer for PS3, PS Vita Owners
@thefourfoldroot In my case as far as I remember I only ever downloaded free games, and wouldn't have been annoyed if they deleted my account. Perhaps it was the fact I paid for Xbox Gold that kept it alive. Either way, it was pretty impressive to be able to jump back into several Xbox 360 games as if I never left.
"It was funny they used the excuse that they wanted to free up gamer tags for other people though"
Yeah when people have such memorable ones like SameOldGamer0001, by which I mean it's always something with a number on the end rather than doing something smart like using your name or a screen name and replacing any i letters with 1 and o letters with 0, for example. 🤭
"I personally would have been more likely to come back as a customer if I hadn’t had my gamer points deleted with my account."
For me I never really cared about stuff like that, it was just the convenience of logging into an old account rather than setting up a new one, which I later changed the primary email and gamertag for anyway. 😃
"It was a strange decision by them but too long ago for me to care."
I'm teasing rather than trolling, but you cared enough that we're here talking about it, eh? 😉
Re: PS Plus Oversight Is a Bummer for PS3, PS Vita Owners
@TrueAssassin86x I love it when people say things like "speak English" when 1) we're all writing it not speaking it and 2) the person saying it has poor spelling and/or grammar themselves, like using "your" instead of "you're" and not capitalising the letter "i" when used as a pronoun. Both of which you did.
Ah well, another day another negative comment by NotATrueAssassin69x 😂
Re: PS Plus Oversight Is a Bummer for PS3, PS Vita Owners
@thefourfoldroot
"I did lose my Xbox gamer tag and account, but that was because I never had an Xbone so didn’t access my account at all for over 5 years. MS didn’t tell me I needed to so I lost everything."
Uh... ok. That's odd. I didn't use my Xbox account in nearly 7 years, then got an Xbox One X and found that not only did the old gamertag/login details work perfectly, with all the gamer points retained, but old cloud saves from my Xbox Live Gold days still worked. I booted up Red Dead Redemption and there were my old saves from 2012/2013 made on my long-sold Xbox 360. I was suitably impressed.
So what happened to you doesn't happen to everyone.
@Sebatrox "I didn't use my Steam Account for almost 7 years and Valve didn't remove my account. It shows just how stupid microsoft is."
Actually it doesn't. Stupidity isn't a factor here if they've already told you they're culling old unused accounts with no purchases made on them. Wait... arguably it's the stupidity of the user for not logging in for over 2 years if they wanted to keep that account. 😏
I mean, if you don't care to use them then it's one less thing with your personal details on it to potentially be hacked when they auto-close the account, although really Microsoft haven't had that problem (Sony has, though, more than once).
Re: Some PS3 Games Supposedly No Longer Downloading Patches
@Flaming_Kaiser Good suggestion. SSDs are surprisingly cheap these days too, not that the PS3 with it's ageing SATA-I bus would benefit hugely but it would still be noticeable. I paid £100 for a new 2TB SanDisk model and I tried it in both the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X - it helped in the Pro, and it really flew in the One X.
Re: Reaction: Days Gone Was PS4's Black Sheep, But a Darn Good Open World Game
@Flaming_Kaiser Agreed, the storytelling is great. I've watched those YouTube videos where people just edit together the story (and in rare cases when needed to make sense of the story, short sections of gameplay) and the first The Last of Us title is an epic. Sadly having tried to play the game myself several times, it's gameplay is not similarly engaging and engrossing to me at all, it's about as basic as it gets. I feel Naughty Dog were doing that to pull in a bigger audience, which is understandable, but it made it very cookie-cutter.
Like I said though, doesn't diminish the story, and maybe if the Uncharted movie with Tom "Spider-Man" Holland in it is a success they'll consider making The Last of Us into a cinematic epic too, which I'd watch.
Re: Some PS3 Games Supposedly No Longer Downloading Patches
@twitchtvpat Neither was Xbox 360 game compatibility for the Xbox One, but it's had that for years now and it's excellent - works as if it were designed to be there from the start. What's your point?