Fath

"The story will span decades, as you’ll follow Clive through his teens, 20s, and even 30s..."
AKA anime/gamer culture adulthood, middle-age, and elderly.

Player: "Hi, I'm The Mountain."

Ok, but seriously, don't drink and drive, halvesies or otherwise.

No thanks; Twitch chat is already horrifying enough tbh.

"Like it's 2005?" Think you're conspicuously one year off there, natch; this song screams (literally) big "His World" (https://youtu.be/ej5MN9lPZXw) energy... which I'm actually totally there for, but should really lead to a substantially more salacious headline, if we're being honest.

Innit really a "New Games" ribbon if it isn't sorted by release date anymore, though, is it? There's nothing inherently wrong with headlining your store with a What's Hot banner instead of a New Releases one (well, except for the self-reinforcing feedback loop it creates), but you've gotta call it what it is.

That's not a pillow, it's a home security system - any would-be burglar who comes face-to-face with that monstrosity in the shadowy night's gonna be noping right the heck out faster than you can say "palamute."

I'm still over here scratching my head over how this game is any more diorama-like than... pretty much any game since the invention of the 3-D overworld; meanwhile everything about it just exudes such excruciating ponderosity that it leaves me with absolutely zero desire to play it whatsoever.

PushSquare: "Guys, we really need to talk about the PS store's downward spiral into Pavlovian trophy hell."
Game dev: "Ok, I'm going to start a conversation around this by insurgently using the medium itself to tell a satirical story about it."
PushSquare: "Can you believe the nerve of this guy? Burn 'im at the stake, he's a witch, Harry! Blarglgarblblah!"

I'm no fan of endless remasters, but wow, it's clear from this video that the devs really went the extra mile on this one. Practically every environment looks like it's been rebuilt from the ground up, even to the point of near-absurdity (like, there's no reason why even the layout and contents of fictional business signs had to be changed up).

If anything more than this had been changed, it'd be a different game from the original entirely - which I'm sure some fans not-entirely-unfairly would've liked, but which just ain't the mission of the project at hand. We're still empirically 1-2 generations too early on the endless-remaster train for full-on mechanical overhauls ala FF7 or RE2, after all.

Eh, the Bloodborne demake actually looked amazing, with sublime atmosphere and obvious care put into making it awesome. This... not so much; it reads more like a bad joke.

The vibes from this are that it was made by somebody who has only derision for the 'bad old days,' instead of an earnest appreciation for them.

It's an interesting philosophical bugaboo for a world where all it takes to cast a spell is a wand, the right incantation, and some practice: the mere existence of such a curse, however Unforgiveable, means that every student is essentially coming to school every day with a loaded gun in their pocket.

In today's US, that'd be a recipe for disaster. We can all be thankful that in Rowling's magical UK, society at large appears to be a bit more peaceful, for whatever reasons.

That nose is a dead giveaway; it's incredibly distinctive (in a good way!). Both the real and virtual girls are totes cute; hope the former's out living her best life, wherever she is.

Oof. Any graphic designer incapable of making the few trivial tweaks necessary to fit those icons in without cutting out an entire swath of the image doesn't deserve their job, even before the casual ironic misogyny of deciding, for an International Women's Day promo, that as long as the picture still has some amount of the wimminfolk innit, it's all good; no need to treat them as actual (virtual) people with individual identities and value or nuthin'.

Yeeeah, no; while Tweaktown's idea of travking Sony's internal shipping is a novel idea, Occam's razor suggests that this is probably a whole lotta nothing, aggressively misunderstood.

Not only did the source for this miss you guys' obvious inference that it's only natural for a point of import to line up with the border it entered in instead of its final destination (even failing to make the connection after noting that Sony's made numerous contemporaneous shipments from Japan and Korea to California), but the entire premise that a worldwide consolidation of miscellaneous dev hardware to a central location correlates to a mass distribution of next-gen hardware from that or another location is a wildly unfounded reverse-logic leap.

I've worked in QA for a world-class computing company before (not Sony), and let me tell you, developing and validating this sort of stuff generates a lot of alpha-and-beta e-waste in the form of both major and minor hardware revisions. New stuff is continually fanning out, and every batch of trade-secret chips, every stick of next-gen RAM, every preproduction system chassis has to be tracked, monitored, and safely locked up when not in use. It's a necessary, but costly and, frankly, risky amount of overhead to duplicate across multiple sites in multiple geos.

The PS5 launched, what, 16 months ago now? Even with the notorious supply chain issues, Sony has had plenty of time to bring all their sites up to speed with production hardware now, which means that all the thousands of pieces of half-functional, half-assembled preproduction units that have accumulated in sites across the world are now officially obsolete and useless - but still carry the risk of myriad trade secrets locked within. I'd bet dollars to donuts that this is just a global housekeeping push to audit and centralize all leftover stock from PS5 development, nothing more and nothing less.

@Jaz007 See https://www.pcgamer.com/square-enix-could-no-longer-invest-in-hitman-but-knew-it-wouldnt-be-hitman-unless-made-by-io/ - Cyn's point isn't that Hitman was a failure, but that the bloodless suits leading SE considered it a failure, despite freely admitting that both the games and the people making them were awesome, because the franchise just wasn't panning out as a low-effort license to print money like they were looking for.

Eh, "Game of thrones" is a decent subhead, I suppose, but I would've gone with "One ring to rule them all" for this bit, myself.

"The PS5 console has flat edges as it is meant to be displayed on a flat surface..."
The sheer audacity to not only claim, but actually brag about this, lol. The only way the PS5 could have less flat edges or be less suitable for putting on a flat surface is if it were actually BB-8.

...That said, I wish the PSVR2 all the best; the technology has such cool potential. Still a crying shame that they couldn't have managed to ditch that cord (and I don't know if I'd reeeally be hyping up a "360 degree view" with it as such, for liability reasons alone), but tech's gonna tech.

@GeneJacket Your assertion is missing a control case - like, for example, the first six (non-video-game) movies in RT's "popular in theaters now" section:
Jack### Forever: 85/92
Moonfall: 38/69
Spider-Man NWH: 93/98
Scream: 77/81
Sing 2: 71/98
The King's Man: 42/80

Audiences and critics score all movies differently, not just game adaptations; you can almost think of movie critics grading on a 0-100 scale, while movie audiences grade on a 50-100 one (ironically more like video game reviewers often tend to!). Audience scores in the low 60's, like some of the legitimate stinkers you referenced, are bad.

That said, Uncharted's 39/90 is entirely decent by that scale, and not nearly as contentious a discrepancy as it looks like - by the conversion I proposed, a 39% critic score should correspond to right around a 70% audience score (or a 7/10 game score), which would be entirely unobjectionable. It's punching above its weight in audience reviews, then, but hardly by the night-and-day levels the raw scores would suggest, and not because of some critical conspiracy to underrate game movies.

"Of course, it was always going to be difficult to transition the Uncharted games – which are heavily inspired by adventure films like Indiana Jones – into something that universally appeals to critics."

...Bit of an odd statement to make, considering that the Indiana Jones series (setting aside the rebooted stinker of Crystal Skull) are beloved cinema classics with critic ratings of 95%, 84%, and 88% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Good news for gamers, but make no mistake, Microsoft would never have risked the blindingly obvious PR blowback of not making this crystal clear from day 1 if they hadn't been trying to get away with much worse intentions before the backlash got too hot to handle.

@GreatAuk re: your paean to capitalism, allow me to point out that it's a logical fallacy to credit it for as much as you do when it's been basically the only economic system in use for nearly all of the last 500 years (which, due to the exponential nature of population growth, has likely seen more people live and die than any other time in history, period). To put it scientifically, you can't draw conclusions from an experiment with no control case. To put it nonscientifically, more people have also been thrust into poverty under capitalism than at any other time in human history .

There's a lot more in your post I could unpack if I really wanted to (how your 'utopia' strawman reveals an odd conflation between capitalism and work itself, how the devil's in the detail of regulation, and how a storefront setting different prices for the same good totally is a valid critique of capitalism by showing that reality is much more aberrant than the ideal behaviors that economic models of it blindly assume), but I really didn't intend for my post to be some high-minded critique of our society's socioeconomic underpinnings. It was just an occasion to share one occasion of silly self-defeating pricing with another, coupled with a laughing exclamation remarking on how strange things can sometimes get in our world where an object's natural value is abstracted away into a universal, but completely alienated, artificial token with which to quantify it by.

So, enjoy your capitalism, and please also join me in laughing at its occasional silliness. This is neither the time nor the place (well, ok, maybe it is the time, but it's certainly not the place) for heated economic arguments. Have a good day, friend!

Apropos of nothing, my local grocery store regularly sells reasonably-sized packs of ground beef for a dollar per pound more than their giant "value packs" (which, when the latter are on sale for a fantastic $3/lb as they were today, is a significant markup)... unless you buy it from their actual butcher's counter, in which case they'll happily go to the extra trouble of wrapping up a single pound for you at the bulk-pack pricing. It makes no sense whatsoever .

Capitalism is weird, yo!

Yeah, wow, the real deal's still lodged somewhere in my backlog, so I can't comment on accuracy, but that trailer oozes style, looks smooth to play, and hits the ol' nostalgia bone in all the right ways. Hats off to the creator.

More philosophically, who actually has a reason to care if Sony overpaid or not? Whatever price they settled on is obviously not going to be something that'll put Playstation at any risk of bankruptcy, and having billions of dollars sitting around idle in corporate war chests does nobody any good.

It's telling that Pachter is the one complaining about this, because the only ones with their knickers in a twist over it should be the parasitic investors who might otherwise have been able to wet their own beaks in Sony's sweet, sweet profits. Us gamers, frankly, shouldn't give a flip what they paid (in a good way).

@themightyant I must've missed those, then, despite scrolling through it several times and doing a text search for 'Playstation'. My bad.
@Jeevz Fair criticism. My hot takes can sometimes come out a bit spicier than might be deserved, though I stand by the overall point. Sorry to offend.

I get that you guys have some liberty to be enthused about games, but excuse me while I roll my eyes so darn hard at your boast that "clearly it’s leveraging the power of its contemporary target platforms to do so much more than Nintendo’s legendary purple portable ever could."

For one thing, this game's only been confirmed for Steam so far; while odds are good that it'll come to Playstation (and Nintendo's own modern-day 'legendary portable'!) in some form, actually trying to smartly comment on its capabilities based on its target platforms is utter speculation when there are no target platforms yet.

More importantly, though, what the heck are you even on about? The entire point of this project is that it's something that entirely plausibly could have been achieved on the good ol' GBC, and nothing I've seen in its trailer or screenshots betrays that. Even the game's own Kickstarter page boasts of its source fidelity:

"We’ve taken great care to faithfully craft a deliciously authentic 8-bit aesthetic, and we think it shows! What exactly does it mean to be a next-gen Game Boy Color game?

Compact Resolution - Game Boy’s screen resolution was a tiny 160x144. Mina’s is 256x144, essentially the same screen real estate, but widescreen. This small resolution (smaller than Shovel Knight!) gives a close-up view at the expense of screen real estate. Each pixel is very impactful!

Finite Color - Art assets in Mina the Hollower all conform to the Game Boy Color's palette restrictions, limiting sprites to only 4 colors per 8x8 pixel tile. That even includes black and transparency!

Focused Tech - Mina features sprite art with no 3D, scaling, or rotation, just like the classic 8-bit handhelds. Instead, we use a lifetime’s worth of 2D wizardry knowhow to bring the world to life."

Crow as hard as you like, but you ain't gonna find any benefits from ray tracing on this lil' gem.

@tselliot What part? I could respectfully agree to disagree with a difference of opinion, but I'm genuinely interested in keeping my facts, at least, straight.

And yet, you're going to continue paying Sony $5-10/month for the service, just as you do every month, because if you don't, that Handsome Collection from 2019 will still go poof, right into the ether, along with every last one of the probably hundreds of other Plus games you "own," with dozens, at least, that you still haven't gotten around to playing or finishing, to say nothing of every game save you've ever made being stored in the cloud.

PS+ (and GwG/Gamepass/whatever MS is calling it, for equal opportunity bashing) is the gift that keeps on taking.

@ShogunRok Haha, yeah, it would've been a pretty big blab to just toss it in like that, wouldn't it? Thanks, that's reassuring .

...Oh. Is the protagonist being Garland something that's already been well-known about this game, or something that would be expected to be established in its opening act? Because all I really knew about this game (and the reason I clicked) going into this interview was Chaos memes, and it kiiiinda feels like I just got spoiled on the game's key plot twist.

@EclipseZero Human beings quite often like and want things that are neither useful nor of any substantial benefit to them; it's part of the gestalt irrationality we all suffer as squishy psychotic apes.

Besides that, the drawback of sequestering every story (because if you're going to cater to the theoretical most ascetic fans of one game, then you'd better be ready to cater to those of every game) behind a "SPOILER: <game such-and-such> news inside, click to see pics" warning is that it would render the PushSquare front page a sterile, meaningless moonscape that neither humans nor search engines (which, because they're running a business here, do matter) would have any interest in or gain any insight from reading. When you're visiting a gaming news site, it's nice to see pics and new info about, y'know, games.

The guys crying "spoiler" at this would do well to reflect on what an insignificantly fleeting dopamine hit they're freaking out over, that they think a single piece of promotional art - not even an actual in-game screenshot - would ruin it.

"We're spending as much money as a medium-sized African country's GDP in a brazen power play to buy out one of the world's most prolific, yet least reputable, gaming companies just so that we can keep their biggest IP's multiplatform instead of shoring up our own console's longstanding lack of compelling exclusives. Trust us, guys!"

@kingbreww You probably won't see this and certainly won't reply to it since you're banned and all, but just fyi, the profits from your digital property game that you bragged a ways up about being "untaxed and now in [your] bank account" are fully subject to US (I presume from your choice of currency) capital gains taxes, just as if you'd made it playing stocks.

If all you're playing with is a few thou, nobody's going to care, of course, but if you're regularly passing SUV money through your federally-insured-and-regulated bank account and thinking you're living in a tax-free wonderland, you're going to find yourself in for quite a rude awakening sooner or later.

This is so aggressively dumb, in addition to being phony, that even the fundamental premise of it is backwards. "You can have a free PS5, but only if you don't kiss(?) this weird sad-sack dude" is hardly a choice at all.

Try "giving away PS5's for love" instead of 'or' love as a Tiktok premise, and then you might - might - end up with something worth watching.

Ok, yes, a Dragon by Daylight mashup sounds ridiculous when you put it that way, but "a gaggle of underpowered scrubs with no chance of survival pitted against a stupidly-strong sadistic behemoth" is actually a much more faithful gameplay premise to DBZ's storytelling than a 1v1 fighter's ridiculous matchups of "Yamcha goes toe-to-toe with Beerus" or whatever such nonsense.

DBZ is all about impossibly absurd power differentials; it's kind of their thing. "It's over 9000" and all.

So can we sum up this whole debacle as SE GaaSlighting us?

...I'll get my whale-oil-slicked coat.

@Jayofmaya Ah, thanks; I can't deny that my own life is indeed in a rather dreadfully dismal state, so the well-wishes are appreciated, but I'd been aiming for a tone of laughing wryly at the world in this instance rather than bemoaning it. Guess I missed the mark a smidge!

"...who's also a depressed raccoon."
Aren't we all, though - masked dumpster divers desperately rooting around for meaning in this trash bin called life.

The idea some people seem to have that this would ever be implemented in a situation without the explicit consent of all players involved is absurd. This is clearly targetting the subsegment of streamers who're actively willing to give their audience control over the hardships they encounter, through various official and unofficial methods of integration, to increase viewer engagement and memetic moments.

This is a patent on Crowd Control, not swatting, and certainly not Squid Games. It would never be used in situations where the participants can't roll with being booted from a game as being just another aspect of play to be taken in good fun.

@AgentGuapo Availability notwithstanding, it's almost cheaper just to buy an entire second PS5

I know it wouldn't be exactly on-brand, but you guys really missed a trick IMHO in not just casually subtitling this piece "Hey, listen."

(OoT, for the record - at least the 3DS version I could readily whip out - would be an example of a classic game that organically tutorializes a great many things, but not its basic movement controls, nor, interestingly, its dialogue boxes that it expects you to advance even during the opening cutscenes.)

Anyway, generally speaking, I'd propose as a rule of thumb that a player can be reasonably expected to press each button exactly once upon gaining control (leaving the matter of clearly signaling to the player that they've actually gained control as another can of worms). If a button's functionality is added or conditionally changes after that, it might be a good idea to do some 'splainin.

@GreatAuk Just because somebody can afford a PS5, it doesn't automatically mean that gigabit internet makes economic sense for them. Compared to, say, my own functional-but-frugal plan, you're basically shelling out for an entire PS5 extra and then some every single year just for the sake of being able to finish large downloads in minutes instead of hours.

If Amazon was selling a subscription service for unlimited sub-one-hour delivery of physical purchases for $500/year, it'd be seen as a quite expensive luxury; if they tacked on a rider saying <*digital goods only>, people would be lambasting it as a scam for the ages. That's basically what you're paying for above and beyond a slower internet plan.

US link doesn't appear to work (it goes to the store, but the sale is nowhere to be found).

Kudos to Sony on fixing this.

I agree that they look hideous, but to be honest, if you have FIFA and NBA icons on your system, you have no one to blame but yourself for buying them.

Given that "Lost Judgement" is literally a synonym for "Missing Review," this seems not only reasonable, but 100% appropriate.

"It's like they're not even trying to psychologically manipulate their consumers with structured dopamine surges! What do these jabronies think a video game is supposed to be, anyway?"

@art_of_the_kill Yeah, the people deriding this story/comments as frivolous Kremlinology could use a reminder that this particular Kremlin really does have nukes, and they remain particularly eager to fire them.