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I think the main issue people have is that they got Peter Molyneux’d on it. Which is fair enough, and why I don’t really read much about games before I play them.

I’m glad I held off until PL came out, because it looks like the 2.0 update fixed a lot of things that would irritate me, like gear and levelling blocking off missions. It does rob you of a sense of progression, but I’ll trust their decision to drop that.

There’s enough RPG elements to get in the way of it being a shooter, but not enough to actually satisfy anybody who wanted a full blown RPG. Decisions especially are very binary and I gave up on the platinum trophy after seeing I’d have to save a guy I let die about 60 hours of gameplay ago, in a save long since overridden.

I guess I’ve been around the block enough times to filter out any claims of amazing AI and day/night cycles. We’ve heard those claims before with Fable and Oblivion, and all it really meant is “the shops shut at night”. And here it didn’t even do that, at least beyond a handful of locations where you had to press a button to wait until they opened before you could do the quest inside.

I think I’ve had a lot better experience going into this late and blind.

Patches mean we’re no longer in the days of bad games being bad forever, but they’re certainly remembered that way.

I’m not sure what most people were expecting but I finally got around to playing the GOTY edition recently.

I got a game with great characters, writing and story, slightly average gameplay, all shackled to a bizarre open world that completely destroys any pacing and urgency. It really did not need all those fixers and like 150 police mini missions, which detract from it all in a major way.

Having also played Witcher 3, that’s kind of what I was expecting, I guess. I genuinely think CDPR should abandon their open world ideas, because they’re excellent at story telling, but really bad at filler bullshit.

Phantom Liberty ups the package to a flawed masterpiece.

That’s not going to mean shit when it downloads a 100GB day one patch.

As long as Fortnite prints money, Tim gets to cosplay as a consumer crusader.

I think both Steam and Epic will let you generate codes to sell your game yourself, but this will attract a shit load of fraudulent credit card sales, and it’s pretty much not worth doing.

Yeah, there’s probably a fair bit of overlap between GamePass and PSN Premium games.

I suspect to try and push their own products, we’ll be entering an age where games are $80, and almost never go on sale, purely to make their own subscription services seem better value. And then they’ll crank the price of those as well.

EA Play is on PS5.

Assuming MS exit the console market, I don’t see why Sony wouldn’t allow it (as long as they get their pound of flesh from every sale of it). They’d basically just be another publisher.

A 2TB Xbox Series X now costs more than a PS5 Pro (in the US at least).

That is mental. Xbox hardware division must be bleeding money hand over fist. I honestly doubt they’ll do another generation, and stick to trying to monetise GamePass through PC and streaming. Maybe you’ll even see GamePass for PS6 since they own so many studios now.

That’s fair enough. They still need to be a business after all.

Id open sourced Doom and Quake decades ago, but you still can’t just have all the assets for nothing.

Does it freeze up all the time like in the Digital Foundry video?

If not I’m wondering if it’s that stupid shader compiling thing that has plagued PC games all generation.

The half price games on various platforms (“Platinum” on playstation, can’t remember what they were called in other platforms) were great and made me get into consoles.

Feels like the PS4 gen when that stopped happening. Shame, because it’s not like you can magic your customers into having more money to spend. They’ll just buy fewer games.

Man, that demo that cut out shortly before the first RTS section was pure fucking bait and switch. Maybe even more so than Metal Gear Solid 2.

No he meant it had a butch woman he didn’t fancy.

Outer Wilds.

I think it’s only Nintendo published games that basically never go on sale.

Rabbids is unusual because it’s got Mario in but it’s not by Nintendo.

Their whole policy on never having a sale makes me not want a Switch 2 at all.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was well received.

Their “AAAA” output is pure slop, but the smaller games can be OK.

That’s one of the many reasons why I never bought it.

Sounds like the EU needs to mandate user expandable storage next.

Put it alongside the USB-C and replaceable battery rules.

rtx 3070 which will be getting too old soon for new games

Neither

While rubbing their hands fast enough to start a fucking fire.

GPU prices never recovered. I’m still on a 1060.

Guessing there’s a lot of DLSS going into those resolution and framerate specs…

I’m going to contradict myself a little, because Vice City is the better game. It’s got an actual story, a great voice cast, helicopter gunships, and the finest soundtrack of any game ever made.

But it was very much built on GTA3. The mind was already blown. It wasn’t going to happen again.

I’m not sure there can ever even be a “best game ever”, but in any case mine is Grand Theft Auto 3.

Picture the scene. You’ve got your shiny PlayStation 2. You’ve got a bunch of games, but honestly, a lot of it could have been done on the PS1 with worse graphics.

And this bad boy drops, and never stops surprising you with all the absolute chaos you can cause. Not much of a story to go on, but the sheer scale of it was amazing. A whole city of driving, slightly wonky shooting and even flying (a bit). It was a game that just felt like the hardware was designed specifically for that.

We were no longer just playing games. We were living in the future. And we’ve never gone back.

The headsets have (if you can stomach Meta). Thanks to the combines efforts of Nvidia, scalpers, crypto-bros and AI-nerds, the hardware cost has been sailing into the distance and shows no sign of stopping.

It took me a long time to get used to VR locomotion.

I still really can’t handle smooth turning at all, but using VRChat a lot (where the teleport movement is terrible) made me get used to the left stick movement at least which is really all you need.

While I really enjoyed Alyx, it’s very much a game built around it’s own limitations. It’s more of a survival horror game in a way, because of the limits on ammo and deliberately mechanical reloading. There’s no melee at all, so once you’re out of bullets you’re done for.

For all the roughness of Half Life 2 VR Mod, I find myself enjoying it more because it has fewer limitations imposed by the move to VR. It doesn’t always work (and the vehicle sections in particular really push it), but as a mod of a 20 year old game, it’s really good.

Instructions unclear.

Locked it behind a Discord community instead. 🤡

I’m not sure what the intent was, but the message we took was “children ruin everything”

The kid looked creepy as fuck too.

It’s not a single player game. Or did you mean Forza?

Although if you’re offline you won’t be able to make an account anyway.

Exactly. You’d have a blurb, a barcode, and some screenshots from a better looking platform than the one you had.

Sounds about right. Needing an account for third party crossplay is nothing new.

This is the back of the Split Fiction box warning about needing an EA account and a billion other things.

Gravity Gun.

Consoles are only “concurrent” when somebody is actively gaming on them, while my PC is active all day long and I might not game on it at all.

Steam (and presumably however MS count Windows gamers) will always lead on that particular metric.

Mario Bros.

Literally every gamer has played it or a game like it. Even non gamers recognise it. It’s copied and iterated on to this day.

It certainly wasn’t the first 2D platformer, but it’s success made everyone else go “that’s what we’re making now”

Depends on your hardware. I ran the benchmark tool for a laugh. I don’t think I quite meet minimum spec, but not far off I think. If you’re down that end, I’d avoid it.

https://i.imgur.com/JR1YNxE.jpeg

Lots of upscaling and frame generation options, which honestly make it look shite.

Guess we’re never getting that remaster of No One Lives Forever, huh…

There’s been a handful but nothing I could name off the top of my head and the specs meant anything more impressive than Super Meat Boy might be out of the question.

Just cheap crappy Windows 8 tablets for the most part, with controller buttons tacked on.

Making gamers pick one or the other is peak baiting, and I’m here for the inevitable fury from people who think Elon Musk is a genius.

It’s apparently pretty rough and “doesn’t represent final game quality”, so get ready for the day one patch to fix exactly none of the issues in this build, and instead just ram a bunch of pointless funbucks in there instead.

I’m not sure I’ve had a single console game where that’s the case. Everything has multiple GBs to install from disc.

Closest is the Spyro Trilogy that only had the first of the games on the disc. But what else do you expect from Activision…