Fath

@Ralizah RIP indeed; I suppose Sony thought they should hurry up and get him spinning in his grave before his corpse deteriorated too badly.

I'm curious exactly how one would "literally kick-off" a series of digital showcases; every time I try to punch or kick a video file, I always seem to end up breaking my computer.

Also, it's worth mentioning that that button sequence is basically the Konami Code, though it probably goes without saying for anyone who would find that interesting.

@everynowandben And who ever heard of a 14% discount? A straightforward 15% discount would've taken that down to $59.49, which should logically be a substantially more marketable number both in price and percentage, but Sony went out of their way to not do that.

It's weird.

Value or lack thereof aside, what the flip is with the (US) sale price of $X0.19 on a good lot of these games? The point of the ubiquitous $XX.99 or $X9.99 pricing of goods has always been to exploit the customer's psychology and trick their brains into treating the price as a dollar or ten lower than it actually is; pricing games the way Sony is for this sale defeats the point entirely, and is just uneven numbers for uneven numbers' sake.

Is the new psychology that consumers have become so accustomed to the hassle of 9's in their prices that they'd actually be spooked away be a $X0.00 flat price, or have we entered a bizzaro world where digital goods are intentionally priced a bit higher than their real price instead of lower just to push customers into buying the next-higher chunk of ten-dollar store credit?

Speaking of Nier and Balan Wonderworld, it was a pretty big "oof" moment to crack open my copy of Nier Replicant and see a flyer in the manual side of the case for Balan Wonderworld, confidently urging me to "download the demo now!"

Might've gone gold with that packaging just a smidge too soon there, Square Enix...

Considering that the supposedly-interesting exclusion of PS4 from this game's release announcement (http://r.newsletter.pqube.co.uk/mk/mr/0efUdAeoN6SdRmuBnnBhisx152B3AX7RBuWD6sw3Xhyk2thUMlKC3DFLfB7VOGC8l2iLI2gbjcXJmDGVQzy-txJX1qc-k24MNWeIetFUO4vWh0jZaSdjvPeWMB6T337T6g) comes in the form of declaring that it's coming to "PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch and Steam," I wouldn't advise getting one's hopes up that it's being developed with haptics and SSD loading being central to the experience as this article supposes.

What game this is, I think I know
Its home is on Playstation, though
It will not mind me reading this
Since I couldn't be assed to watch the show.

@Cheems https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/piqued

@AJDarkstar I'd like to think that I'm as much a critic of unprofessional bias on this site as anyone, but the linked article does mention Playstations in its free section, and the PushSquare article (as opposed to the headline) acknowledges in at least a roundabout way that PS5's aren't the only things being stolen.

Without at least being able to read the remainder of the source article, I don't think it's fair to jump to the assumption that this site's done a notably poor reporting job here.

Oof. This is the kind of bad decision that makes perfect sense at a corporate level (keeping the original edition around was only drawing attention to the fact that their "definitive edition" had distinct graphical downgrades from it, whether overall superior or not) but is 100% needlessly anti-consumer. Bad move, SE.

@JohnnyBastos The emotional metaphysics of corporate apology are an interesting philosophical subject, I'll grant you that. Who even is the "we" that's sorry, really, since corporations don't have emotions? The PR rep running the Twitter account? The nameless stocking manager who's probably getting fired over this? The CEO? The shareholders?

But expressing emotion is only one aspect of apology as a fundamental concept. Probably more important is that it's an act of social contrition, that allows for the smoothing over and healing of mild grievances in society without formal punishment or revenge by letting the offender ritualistically surrender an indefinite measure of their dignity and power instead.

Invoking the ritual of apology without surrendering anything would be offensive, for sure, but in conjunction with the juicy credit they're offering, and with the understanding that it's purely a social resolution because a corporation can't feel anything, it's... fine, IMHO (and certainly not worth as many words as I've written now discussing it). Sure, the language is a tad boilerplate, but... not getting a PS5 by Black Friday really is just an inconvenience in the big picture. "We're sorry that your joyless days must continue to be filled with non-raytraced suffering for another few weeks, and that your spoiled children might hate you for not handing them the world's most powerful gaming system with a literal bow on it this Christmas" would come off a bit condescending.

@JohnnyBastos You must've missed the part where they're giving each customer $180 in store credit to go along with that apology, probably because this article's headline is weirdly focusing on the niche-case negative (that multi-unit scalpers are only getting a single $180 credit instead of one for each console) instead of the very substantial positive that everyone who placed an order is getting, y'know, $180 in store credit.

Individual scalpers are one brand of scum, but a coordinated attempt to capture and extort a market like this strikes me as something that has to be actually illegal in some fashion. Ugh.

This guy might be a real piece of work, but he did nothing wrong. Scalpers are evil because their actions crowd out honest buyers from being able to get a good fairly; while this guy sold his PS5 at a price dramatically shaped by scalping, since it was an unsolicited freebie to begin with, he never took away the chance for somebody else to buy it at retail from the start.

If anything, this guy did a good deed, by infintessimally expanding the market supply and relatively lowering demand (that's one less £1200 mark actual scalpers will be able to profit from), and it was Sony themselves who've to blame here, by reserving stock to bribe influences with that could've otherwise been dedicated to meeting retail demand.

This guy may well not deserve to be given free stuff, but it doesn't appear to be his fault that he keeps getting handed blank checks by society.

Interesting to compare sister site NintendoLife's mini review of this game ( https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/switch-eshop/five_dates) with PushSquare's. One goes into controls, game flow, length, and acting quality (admittedly a subjective judgement), while the other is basically framed throughout as a monologue unabashedly roasting the game for its characters and writing.

I don't really care about the game itself, but I'm still baffled that the art direction on this remake was so irreverent, cel-shading aside, that they couldn't even be bothered to part the hair of the character in that tweet on the same side.

Somebody tasked with rebuilding the model from scratch actually sat down, studied the original, and said "Let's change the hair's parting, not because it looks any better or worse, just as a poke in the eye to the idea of fidelity to our source material."

Don't ask me how I got ahold of it, but I actually have a video clip of not only this larger prototype itself, but the actual meeting where it was pitched to the aforementioned engineers. Here it is: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6fZSoiMKW5M

Everything about this change seems designed to ensure that I won't be purchasing any more digital Playstation games for the near or foreseeable future, but I'm just a pleb who isn't rushing out to buy a PS5 on day 1, so I guess Sony probably already hates me and wants me to suffer.

The Vita's onboard equivalent to the PS4's "My Library" menu is a single-column, unsearchable, unsortable, unfiltered list of everything you've ever purchased on PSN, for any console - every game, every theme, every demo and DLC - ordered by date of purchase.

The prospect of having to rely on it instead of the web store to curate and re-download one's collection (a necessity due to the Vita's inevitable data corruption problems, in my experience at least) is enough to make a man shudder with revulsion.

If Sony's really trying to kill off their rich gaming history piece by piece, this is the way to do it, and it's senselessly boneheaded and anti-player as heck.

So, taking Sony at their word that about 4000 games have been released for PS4 (though Wikipedia only lists 2943...), the incompatibility rate is around 10/4000 = 0.25%.

That makes Sony's public estimate of "99% compatibility" not only safely correct, but pretty close to the actual best estimate they could've given - even the next natural step of claiming 99.9% compatibility would have been a lie.

Kudos to accurate and precise messaging.

@iamtylerdurden1
"Not sure what else Insomniac could do..."
They could, er, not. Just sayin'. I get that you're - what do the kids call it these days, "stanning," I think? - pretty hard over this remaster, and that's your prerogative, but when an inordinate amount of effort results in a negligible impact, as it seems to have for a lot of people, it could be argued that it might've been better not to have wasted the effort in the first place.

In other words, there're too many versions of too many games out there competing for people's attention as it is; a paid remaster of a game that's just two years old is just too damn soon, no matter how much you think you can shine it up.

I just don't get why, if you absolutely need a mo-capped face actor that matches the VA's bone structure, you don't just use the actual person speaking the words for it from the start.

@Matroska So... it's complicated. Fair enough
Thanks for the explanation!

Is Demon's Souls actually a first-party game? Not trying to be snitty here, just confused; I'm pretty sure at least some of the Dark Souls games have been pretty widely multiplatfotm.

@Paranoimia You'll have to check with your local aquarium.

Yeeeeah, most of these examples sound hypothetically interesting, but a literal pain to deal with in reality - even in the best case, intentionally fatiguing players' hands sounds like a recipe for long-term injury, and is pretty much a guaranteed disablable option for accessibility's sake, which means the devs still have to put the effort into making and balancing a traditional alternative anyway.

To add insult to injury, the Butterfingers promotion had originally couched the redemption of these DLC items as an "only available while supplies last" sort of deal.

Nearly every aspect of this is simultaneously silly, stupid, and sleazy, but whatever. The Tifa theme is still absolute top-tier, and I don't much begrudge the pair of Baby Ruth bars I bought to get it.

@playstation1995 Well, for the sake of agreement, I can at least get behind Sony's ssd being a game-changer. Loading data's been a bottleneck for a while now, and clearing that up should be pretty huge. Word up, as they say, indeed.

@playstation1995 Just FYI, and it's not really relevant to the article, but with the Xbox One having already had impulse triggers this whole generation, and with the Switch doing it's own thing with HD Rumble, Sony is actually the last one to the party in bringing haptic feedback to its controllers. It's great of them to get with the times, but it's not going to be a system-seller.

Whole buncha people in the comments who've never touched an actual program, I guess. The Switch version came out over two years after the original release (in JP, at least) - that's two years of ongoing changes, tweaks, and optimizations to the game's codebase all intertwined with and tested alongside each other. The S edition is simply a different program, as a cohesive whole, than the vanilla game.

You can't just do a ctl-f and search for "only the good changes, 'k?" and then simply copy-paste them back into the original version. The planning, reintegration, and comprehensive testing and bug fixing to do what you guys are asking would likely end up being an amount of work on par with the original effort to create the S version in the first place, and while that might've made sense to do for a pristine audience on the Switch who'd been waiting for a promised release literally since before the Switch itself even had a name, the market for a rerelease of this edition on a system in its last year of life that'd already had one version of the game for several years was bound to be... lesser.

Take what you're getting or leave it, but don't cry that anything more is owed to you.

"PLAY HAS NO LIMITS" is a pretty cheeky slogan for a picture showing off a console version limited to digital-only, innit?

I guess they must've ran out of space to fit in "PLAY HAS SOME LIMITS IF YOU CHEAP OUT."

My memories of the original Crash trilogy as a kid were that each of the games was very satisfying to play through to 100%, but I think any one would've overstayed its welcome if it'd been significantly longer.

Hope they aren't going for quantity over quality here in an attempt to "justify" the game's price.

What an intriguing-looking game... the trailer feels like about 65% breathtakingly beautiful art direction, 25% interesting blends of combat mechanics, and 10% depressingly lazy game design tropes. I'll bet it'll look absolutely stunning on a good HDR tv, at the very least.

Color me, er, having-put-game-on-radar...ed.

@Ichiban Crash suffers from a tragic medical condition known as "Resting Derp Face," which has been known to flare up from time to time. Have a little sympathy!

@kyleforrester87 Hah, fair enough; thanks, I'm happy I was a bit jostled over nothing

Just curious, as someone who still hasn't gotten around to playing the original yet, how much have I just been spoiled to read that the games are set on actual future Earth?

The existence of this article is an artifact of a blindingly biased perspective, and I mean that in an entirely factual way with no insult intended.

The responsible headline for this article would have been "'PS5 is Gorgeous in Person,' Says PS Marketing Head." Bit of a journalistic circle-jerk to leave that attribution out, though it's at least touched on in the article body.

@Zeke68 It's unmistakably trying to be a piece of art, and I guess art, abstract sculpture especially, will always be in the eye of the beholder.
Personally, it's just as unfathomable to me how so many people could like this design as the opposite is for you, and I guess that's just the way it is.

It's kind of unfortunate that people that don't care for these looks are being forced to bring into their homes an aggressively gaudy piece of plastic if they want to play PS5 games, though, compared to, say, somebody who didn't like the PS4 design (if such a thing is possible) only having to put up with a box that was understatedly minimalist at worst.

@skaarj217 American here. News coverage of Russia's invasion of Crimea is ashamedly absent in the current day, but if it means anything... I haven't forgotten about it, at least, even if I'm pretty oblivious to the ongoing atrocities there. Just brought it up in an unrelated post on another site a day or two ago, actually.

I'm very sorry for what your country is going through, and that my own's attention to it departed along with our last president.

@gbanas92 Considering the physical board game still regularly retails for over $40 (so many little wooden trains), it strikes me as kinda weird to recommend starting with that - a big part of the appeal of the software version is not having to cough up the dough for physical (at least, I assume this person's much cheaper)!

Can vouch for the game being a good time if you've got people to play with, though. It's easy and fairly intuitive to grasp the gameplay, and there's always a strategy each player can pursue that feels productive, whether they're a beginner or a pro.

Where's the option for "I have a PS+ subscription because it's the only way to get online play and cloud backup of my saves, and I literally couldn't care less about what random games Sony would like to stuff into my already-full backlog without letting me actually own them outright?"

Looks like Sony's praying to the hardware gods to keep their system quiet too, because that thing isn't a heat sink, it's a freaking heat Parthenon.

About eight or ten years back, I was an avid World of Warcraft player while that game implemented showing quest objectives on the map and added minimap arrows as an optional update - basically, waypoints. The before-and-after experience, and the contrast between content designed pre-and-post update, was striking.

Playing content designed without waypoints in mind with them turned on was a degenerated experience - suddenly, instead of having a reason to explore, you were reminded at all times that you were either playing correctly by following the arrow, or wasting your time. It was definitely less effort to play, but it was also definitely less immersive for it, buzzwordy as that sounds. You just didn't have a reason to care about most of the world anymore (incidentally, that wasn't something the game fixed until years later, when they started filling areas with unmarked cool little items and trinkets to stumble on).

Meanwhile, playing content designed for waypoints with them turned off was just... unplayable. Pre-update quests either naturally gave you the context you needed to find their targets, or the world was designed so as to guide you to them. Post-update, though, quests still had rich descriptions, but the location context just wasn't there - it would've felt paradoxically hand-holding to come out and tell you where to go, when the game was already literally showing you. In any case, playing these quests without waypoints enabled was an exercise in futility.

Sorry to ramble - tl;dr, my big takeaway is that whether waypoints are more convenient or degenerate is impossible to objectively say, but having them as an option is a false choice, because whether they're on or off has real, significant game experience implications that the world itself needs to be designed around. I applaud any designer wise enough to see that, and passionate enough about polishing their product to come out and say "Yes, there actually is a right way and a wrong way to play this as it's been designed, and we're going all-in on the right way."

@LiamCroft You guys zoomed in on a single picture, tried to figure out how smooth or rough the analogue sticks are from it, then proudly trumpeted from that that the sticks are "vastly improved."

Report on whatever you like, but the substance of what you're reporting here is 100% bs.

Ok, now you guys are just out-and-out trolling your readers, right?

@Incarna It's not so much that it's a remake of an earlier theme as that both iterations are remakes of one of the most iconic pieces of FFVII key art

I want to say that the Cloud image was even the original box art for FFVII on the PS1 (speaking for NA, at least).

Ha ha, leading off a news article with a jerk-off joke is funny and professionally appropriate because anything anime-styled isn't legitimate art, and anyone drawing it can only be a deviant who only cares about jerking off, right?
Ha.
Ha.

Criticizing the game as "Needs more explanation" is pretty rich coming from a review as sparse as this.