Picked up a couple of Baby Ruth's yesterday for the theme, but whenever I tried to upload the picture of my receipt, it said "An unspecified error has occurred." Guess I'll try again today =/
As far as I can tell, the Butterfinger website is absurdly devoid of any detail on what these prizes actually are/do. I'm no fan of this promotion - this game is sliding from bad to worse on its DLC usage shockingly quickly - but it'd be nice to get an updated article when anyone can figure out just what it is Butterfinger is asking people to buy its stuff for.
@Grindagger That's actually an interesting question - I'm not sure if I'd be more or less ok with that, honestly.
But reading over my last post, more importantly, I want to back down a bit, since I was getting pretty doom-and-gloom, and that's not the way I want to call it a night over here. It's not the end of the world either way, and I'm not going to say I've never enjoyed a piece of DLC handed to me in a game myself.
I appreciate you giving my opinions some thought, and I can respect your own that there at least shouldn't be any harm in tossing a few pieces of fluff on top of the game so long as everything from the original game is still properly integrated. Most importantly, if you're looking forward to having fun with these little guys, then by all means, enjoy them.
Anyway, yeah, time for bed for me. Wish me luck on my dreams not being haunted by that nightmare chocobo
@Grindagger Opinions on these buggers' aesthetics are subjective, of course
When I said DLC tends to be anti-immersive, I had in mind its method of acquisition, or lack thereof - an immersive, non-DLC implementation of these summon materia would have Cloud coming across them naturally in the course of the game, perhaps finding them tucked in some hidden corner, or winning the as prizes in a minigame, or even used as plot devices amongst main characters.
As DLC, though, since they have to be implemented in a way that doesn't impact the base game for them to be missing, and since developers don't want to put roadblocks in the way of people getting the items they've paid for, they'll probably just be shoved unceremoniously into the player's hands via some marginally-relevant menu, mailbox, or NPC at the earliest opportunity, with some terse note of "Thanks for your support of this commercial video game!" attached.
From a player's perspective, content in a game is a product of gameplay. With DLC, though, content becomes a product of paying money, and hitting "buy" on a real-world storefront supplants gameplay. It's anti-immersive.
@Grindagger IMHO, people are annoyed because DLC encourages and excuses bad game design - content anti-immersively airdropped into the game as a random mishmash of pointless eye-catching tat, rather than as elements carefully crafted and organically introduced to be part of a cohesive greater whole.
Also, two out of the three of these... things look viscerally awful, but that's beside the point.
This news is much appreciated as someone who picked up the game on sale over the holidays, and the direct link to the store in the article was a nice convenience. Thanks, PS!
@leucocyte If you're entirely sure you're not mistyping anything, you could try making a PSN account in another region, and using the code for that one - I can confirm that as of just a minute ago, the US code worked fine.
It's a surprisingly smooth process (though I don't have instructions for it on hand right now), and I can say from experience that themes downloaded from one account on a PS4 can be used seamlessly across all accounts on the system.
Anyway, cheers to Push Square for posting this, it's a nice theme that I would never have seen otherwise.
@Turismo4GT Ah, that's a shame about the pricing. Glad you can still get in on the sale price digitally, then, and with living in (as you say) such a beautiful country at that - still getting the best of both worlds, in a way.
I'll probably get GoW in this sale too, by the way (and physical, since I also like the feel of boxed games but don't have the pleasure of living on a tropical island). Totally agree with you that it's a fantastic price for a game that looks outstanding. Have a good time in its snowy Nordic pines!
@Turismo4GT I get the impression that a lot of these price points are matching equivalent Black Friday physical game sales, so you may be able to have your disc and eat it too, as it were.
Speaking as someone who's just finished figuring out all of the non-hidden-chapter fates in the Switch version of Obra Dinn (so no trophies to worry about one way or the other), the idea of this trophy brought a smile to my face. That's a super goofy joke in the context of the way a lot of the crew died, and the idea of having to go back through to get it doesn't strike me as being nearly as bad as this piece makes it sound. Anyone who's played the game through knows that the amount of step-retracing it's asking is a drop in the bucket compared to what you've already done.
Commenter Fath respectfully disagreed with Captain Robert Witterel.
@Bliquid Blame Kojima personally for the spoiler in this case, since he led the way just posting it right up on twitter. Or perhaps consider forgiving him for it, since he's a mad genius and the game's his semi-literal baby and all.
Man digs up companie's private data, posts it publicly on the internet, and probably profits from it through ads. Internet: "Our hero and champion!"
Company digs up private information on man who's been stealing their data, but instead of doxing him and selling ad space on it, sends a pair of licensed investigators to talk to him face-to-face. Internet: "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
This article’s headline picture explains it all. 70’s are “yellow” scores on Metacritic, which has an umbrella effect on the industry. People reflexively see green as good, yellow as a warning.
This doesn’t add up. SSD’s are expensive, and swapping one in for pure bulk storage doesn’t yield that much of a generational leap to loading times (as evidenced by the millions of people already using them with their PS4’s). Plus, “specializing” the bulk storage drive would mean you could kiss upgrading or expanding your PS5’s capacity goodbye, in a generation where 8k textures promise to swell game install sizes even more grotesquely.
One way or another, calling this storage architecture just a “specialized SSD” has to be an oversimplification for marketing’s sake (not that there’s anything wrong with that, for a first impression like this).
The simplest way to square this circle that I can see is to introduce a two-tiered storage solution, where the most recent game is copied to a small, static, superfast SSD that’s designed to hold just one or two games. Long “loading” times the first time you play it, then it’s fundamentally cached so long as you stick to it.
@get2sammyb I mean, my example is clearly made up, of course. But it’s something that would leave you baffled and scratching your head, right? “I though this was a huge open-world game; what gives with it being so small? Is that a typo? Is this some kind of spin-off ‘experience’? Or maybe it’s delivered through some kind of crazy streaming tech, and it’s nothing to worry about? Ugh, I wish the reviewer hadn’t just left that dangling there; now I don’t know what to think anymore.” That sort of thing.
No more replies from me right now, gotta get to work.
@get2sammyb That’s the obligation of the reviewer to explain here. The math just doesn’t add up otherwise, for the praise of the game’s narrative and mechanical depth. It’s like if, say, a glowing review of the latest Assassin’s Creed game concluded out of the blue “If that sounds like your cup of wine, give this 1.5 GB window into Ancient Greece a try.”
Warning flags aren’t always the end of the world, but just raising one and walking away like that is hard to draw a fair conclusion from, as an interested reader.
Soooo you’re just going to slip in at the very end there that for as fully-fleshed out as this game sounds - and it does sound rather great - it’s over and done with in five hours?
I’m not saying that’s necessarily a negative for me, personally, with how little time I can find for big undertakings, but it seems like it would color the rest of the review. How many bird hats can you really find, buddies befriend, extra combat mechanics introduce, recipes cook, and refineries conquer in that sort of timeframe?
You know, I never realized before thinking about playing this that Iron Man’s flight.. just doesn’t work. Not because of physics, but because human eyes are just naturally pointed completely orthogonally to the direction of travel.
Maybe this is all addressed in the materials I don’t have time to go through, but are we expected to play this with our head craned uncomfortably upward, or are we just supposed to suspend our body-sense to role-play as someone who has eyes in the top of his head (as I guess Tony Stark probably would in “real life” with an in-helmet screen)? Curious to see how well or poorly that’d feel to play.
I’d really like a subscription to online services without any free games at all, because I buy more games than I can play already, and don’t really like more being tossed onto my backlog indiscriminately. I also don’t much care for being held hostage to pay Sony every month in perpetuity lest my collection get snatched from my hands.
Wow. Whichever player EA is blaming this on must be absolutely monstrous to singlehandedly tank the game’s sales like they did. It’s almost impressive, really. Almost.
Speaking as someome who actually works in technology validation testing, it’s an enormously underrespected field, in the sense that developers really don’t want to deal with it, and tend to be more than happy to believe someone who comes along and says “Just leave it to me.”
What this usually means in practice is that a fundamental aspect of design - determining and applying what “working correctly” actually means for the product - is farmed out from people who don’t really want to deal with it to people who don’t really care about it, who then get the job done by throwing it at whatever down-on-their-luck contractors they can pull off the street to work for peanuts.
So if you squint a little, it sounds like they’re rolling it out kind of like a pack-in demo from back in the day (Dragon Quest VIII being released with a demo for FFXII back on PS2 comes to mind), but while trying to also provide a standalone version, which they then have to charge a nominal fee for to not render the whole exercise moot.
That kiiiind of makes some sort of backwards sense?
The last (re)lease of any Borderlands game at all, let alone an award-winner or top seller, was back in 2015. Does “Game of the Year” truly mean nothing anymore?
Huh. I thought everyone here was pretty cool with publishers generally funneling all the really cool goodies into “press kits” designed to influence their customers instead of delight them. Guess when there’s a bandwagon of hate going around, people’re just going to jump on it.
@rjejr Or if they're too pressed for time for a feature-length film, there's always that episode of Star Trek where Kirk fights the Gorn. Still more faithful to the MH source material than this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ-ATwRq5KY (ugh... how to embed)
It's all ok, though. Anyone peeved about video game adaptations today should seriously just watch that Detective Pikachu trailer that released today. It's just... impossible to be mad after seeing it.
@Porco Presumably, they’ve fixed it by properly sanitizing messages as they pass through Sony’s servers, as all messages necessarily do. Lets them quickly and comprehensively solve the problem for all users now, while rolling in a client-side patch later for double-layered protection.
The instructions in the tweet aren’t the fix itself, they’re there to combat the FUD factor that might compel people to wall off their systems indefinitely from online engagement (and to help anyone still affected from before the fix was in).
@doctommaso You're right in the sense that my first post's argument was self-contained, and my second post doesn't really support it at all. I guess it just bugged me that it was being taken as gospel in this thread that these characters are stated in print as being underage, without any evidence to back that claim up.
To my knowledge, Xseed has been censoring the character ages in this series from the beginning, specifically to placate claims that they're underage. Raking them over the coals for indecency that isn't even there because they've been censoring it the whole time is just... absurdly meta.
@Jaz007 @KingdomHeartsFan Characters being "clearly stated in the instructions" as being 15 - which I'm taking a serious leap of faith in taking your word for, by the way - is a definite problem, yes. It's also not at all what's being censored here.
If the problem Sony had was with character bios, then Xseed would have just removed the ages from the in-game bios. That's not even a theoretical, it's something they already did back in the game's original release on the 3DS.
The biographical ages - if they even show up in the game or manual, and you're not just pulling this from "oh, but on the game's Wikia page, they quote the Japanese bios as being..." - aren't what's being censored, though. The imagery is. If you're going to defend Sony on this one, you have to defend what they're actually censoring, not what they're letting pass.
If you saw anyone with proportions matching the characters in question in real life, you wouldn’t be calling the cops, you’d be calling a hospital. Anime is distilled stylization - it’s not a depiction of human beings as much as it is a presentation of exaggerated human traits that the mind assembles into a mental representation of a person.
When anime presents the exaggerated traits of “sexiness” and “youthfulness,” it’s intended to be assembled into a mental image of a smoking-hot barely-legal bombshell, which is socially acceptable, last I checked. If your brain’s interpreting it instead as a mopheaded toddler with huge bazongas, that’s on you for not assembling it right. You’re buying a bed from Ikea and trying to build a bookshelf out of it.
Wish Sony could’ve released a firmware update to stop my Vita from eating $50-$100 memory cards after some months or years, sigh. I really want to still love the thing, but it’s hard to invest time and energy into it after the second or third time all your games start throwing random corruption errors. The trust is gone.
I’d even be so desperate as to consider replacing the unit itself, if Sony hadn’t gone and downgraded the display in mid-cycle. No way I’m likely getting ahold of another OLED model now.
@Toast-rider @crimsontadpoles It’s actually pretty painless to make accounts for different regions on PS4. They can live right alongside your main account, and things like themes downloaded by one can be used by all seamlessly and without restriction.
@get2sammyb Fair edit on the language, my apologies and thanks for leaving my meaning inferable.
This one single screenshot may well be the only thing I ever play of this game, though. Certainly, next to none of the people you decry as an embarassment to gamers are in the same privileged position as you of having had the opportunity to play the game themselves yet, at least.
I’m sure the game is amazing, but this screenshot just plain isn’t.
@get2sammyb I haven’t really been following anything about this game.
The first screenshot looks cool, and piques my curiosity.
The second screenshot looks dull, and bores me.
The images have dramatically, obviously different artistic merit, and it’s totally fine to say so. Ridiculing people who see that and just want to muse about it as an embarassment, or nitpickers, or pixel-counters, or drama queens who don’t understand that the code’s exactly the same, guy, geez!... comes across as p***ing on their leg and telling them it’s raining.
“Well, honey, you see, when two really butch men hate each other very much, they put on earrings and touch their naughty bits together, and out comes a fusion.”
'Least you guys're getting the games. Square Enix has dropped the ball so hard on DQXI in Nintendoland that even though it was literally one of the first games to be announced for their console (back in 2015, before it was even called the "Switch"), and the game's been released on other platforms for over 6 months now (in Japan), we still have never seen so much as a single screenshot of the Switch version. To add insult to injury, SE seems to have canned the NA release of the 3DS version entirely in favor of chasing this vaporware as well.
Er... you have to be local for this because they’re looking for actual software testers for this, as in employees. At least, that’s what I assume by this being listed at https://bendstudio.com/careers/ and requesting a resume in addition to that list of games.
This isn’t one of those “you’re a beta tester, really!” demo-in-disguises that everyone does these days, then.
@KirbyTheVampire You must have one helluva pup if it makes you question life and the universe itself or anything like that. I will give them plenty of metaphysical credit, though - there seems to be a peculiar human inclination to believe that we as humans have some sort of unique monopoly on having a meaningful soul or emotions or what have you. I can't imagine anyone could still hold onto that fallacy but through willfully lying to themselves if they've had a cat or dog for any length of time.
As a messenger for teaching people that there are creatures besides themselves that feel things just as deeply and are worth caring about, flesh-and-blood cats and dogs are great. Viewed in that light, though, the idea that "some machine running on a computer program is just a hollow automaton; obviously only a living creature can have a soul" starts to sound awfully familiar. Decades from now, if Sony keeps refining this technology, I wonder if the Aibo mark twenty-seven might have our own assumptions about what is and isn't worth caring about as a living being looking quaint.
I mean, I get EA's corporate logic. They're a big company, and "need" a big, steady income to subsist on. Surprise hits are great, but lightning in a bottle is by its nature impossible to reliably and repeatedly manufacture, and it's expensive and wasteful to spin up all new games, mechanics, and assets for one-shot income. Much more consistent and efficient to capture an audience and keep them paying out repeatedly for games-as-a-service by incrementing in-game numbers and selling upgrades instead of new experiences.
It's reflective of the early human societal evolution from hunter-gatherers to farmers, but this time it's the players who're the milk cows. It's an aggressive stance to the market as a whole, as monopolizing a player's time for months or years prevents them from playing other companies' games while they're being milked. Hopefully it never goes so far as to completely clearcut the industry's creative woodlands, but it's tough to see any path to undo the shift while capitalism is still the law of the land. With few exceptions, humanity's never really looked back once it started farming its food instead of praying to the god of the hunt.
Yes, loot boxes are gambling. Yes, trading cards and sticker packs are gambling. No, gambling is not always a bad thing. Yes, gambling can be circumstancially dangerous. Yes, loot boxes probably qualify as such.
Gambling is basically the sugar of (generalized) gaming. It’s a fundamental component of games that can add good flavor naturally and in moderation, but is dangerously and temptingly easy to artificially concentrate to harmful and addictive levels. Saying “trading cards are fine for kids, so loot boxes must be ok too” is like saying boxed apple juice is fine for kids, so installing free and unrestricted soda fountains in schools must be ok too.
A lot of people would say our society still has problems with sugar, but there are at least two approaches that obviously don’t work, and the same lessons could be applied to gambling: banning it outright, and pretending it doesn’t exist or isn’t dangerous. With sugar, we’ve at least been able to get to a point in society where these two extremes are obvious fallacies. We’re a long way from that point yet on gambling when it comes to loot boxes, but in the meantime, at least we should be able to see that just as dumping in spoonfuls of pure sugar can cheapen and ruin a fine dish, so too can injecting artificial gambling ruin an otherwise good game.
Call me a hipster, but I just can’t muster much hype for a sale page showcasing posters of NBA and FIFA meatheads as its background.
(Not that being unemployed and on the verge of defaulting on my mortgage doesn’t contribute to my lack of excitement too, I’m sure, but that's beside the point.)
From this site’s first article on this tease: “[...] let's not discount the possibility that this may have nothing to do with PlayStation. It could be that The Zodiac Age is coming to PC or another platform, so we wouldn't get too hyped just yet. [...] What do you think this news could be? Now that the article's over, feel free to speculate like crazy in the comments section below.”
Now, from this article: “Square Enix has revealed the news that ‘will make fans of Final Fantasy XII happy’, and no, it's not a Switch version. [...] Please don't port beg in the comments section below.“
It’s all in good fun and all, but you guys really brought any port begging on yourself this time. Not much right to complain ‘bout it!
Anyway, looking forward to checking out this theme, and getting back up to feature parity with the original game is always nice, even if it should be the bare minimum for a remake to start from.
@Splints Think back to the last time you beat a AAA game and watched the credits all the way through. How many people do you figure were in there? Hundreds? Thousands?
Now multiply that number by a $40k-80k salary per each year you figure the game was in development. It’s by no means a perfect estimate, but it shows how labor costs must get utterly ridiculous when you have AAA-levels of staff working on a game.
"We’re celebrating Black Friday early and for an entire week this year in the U.S., starting on November 19 through Cyber Monday on November 27, at participating retailers while supplies last."
Pretty vague, but just that it's coming from Sony instead of an individual retailer should go a long way towards answering your question. In other words - probably. Whether or not a given store actually has any in stock through Black Friday, though, may be another question...
Comments 304
Re: Final Fantasy VII Remake's Butterfinger Promotion Sounds Like a Ballache
Picked up a couple of Baby Ruth's yesterday for the theme, but whenever I tried to upload the picture of my receipt, it said "An unspecified error has occurred." Guess I'll try again today =/
Re: Replace Your Buster Sword with a Butterfinger for Free Final Fantasy VII Remake DLC
As far as I can tell, the Butterfinger website is absurdly devoid of any detail on what these prizes actually are/do. I'm no fan of this promotion - this game is sliding from bad to worse on its DLC usage shockingly quickly - but it'd be nice to get an updated article when anyone can figure out just what it is Butterfinger is asking people to buy its stuff for.
Re: Final Fantasy VII Remake's DLC Summons Detailed in New Gameplay
@Grindagger That's actually an interesting question - I'm not sure if I'd be more or less ok with that, honestly.
But reading over my last post, more importantly, I want to back down a bit, since I was getting pretty doom-and-gloom, and that's not the way I want to call it a night over here. It's not the end of the world either way, and I'm not going to say I've never enjoyed a piece of DLC handed to me in a game myself.
I appreciate you giving my opinions some thought, and I can respect your own that there at least shouldn't be any harm in tossing a few pieces of fluff on top of the game so long as everything from the original game is still properly integrated. Most importantly, if you're looking forward to having fun with these little guys, then by all means, enjoy them.
Anyway, yeah, time for bed for me. Wish me luck on my dreams not being haunted by that nightmare chocobo
Re: Final Fantasy VII Remake's DLC Summons Detailed in New Gameplay
@Grindagger Opinions on these buggers' aesthetics are subjective, of course
When I said DLC tends to be anti-immersive, I had in mind its method of acquisition, or lack thereof - an immersive, non-DLC implementation of these summon materia would have Cloud coming across them naturally in the course of the game, perhaps finding them tucked in some hidden corner, or winning the as prizes in a minigame, or even used as plot devices amongst main characters.
As DLC, though, since they have to be implemented in a way that doesn't impact the base game for them to be missing, and since developers don't want to put roadblocks in the way of people getting the items they've paid for, they'll probably just be shoved unceremoniously into the player's hands via some marginally-relevant menu, mailbox, or NPC at the earliest opportunity, with some terse note of "Thanks for your support of this commercial video game!" attached.
From a player's perspective, content in a game is a product of gameplay. With DLC, though, content becomes a product of paying money, and hitting "buy" on a real-world storefront supplants gameplay. It's anti-immersive.
Re: Final Fantasy VII Remake's DLC Summons Detailed in New Gameplay
@Grindagger IMHO, people are annoyed because DLC encourages and excuses bad game design - content anti-immersively airdropped into the game as a random mishmash of pointless eye-catching tat, rather than as elements carefully crafted and organically introduced to be part of a cohesive greater whole.
Also, two out of the three of these... things look viscerally awful, but that's beside the point.
Re: Final Fantasy VII Remake's DLC Summons Detailed in New Gameplay
That chocobo chick is an unholy abomination, and Carbuncle looks like a moldy corgi. The cactuar... is a cactuar, at least.
Re: Sony's PS5 Promise: The 'Biggest and Best' Games for the PlayStation Community
"And we're going to use that clout to cement our excessive censorship policies as an industry standard, y'know, for all our loyal players!"
Don't mind me here, just feeling a bit salty this morning I guess.
Re: Free God of War DLC Can Be Yours This Christmas
This news is much appreciated as someone who picked up the game on sale over the holidays, and the direct link to the store in the article was a nice convenience. Thanks, PS!
Re: Grab This Stunning Ghost of Tsushima PS4 Dynamic Theme for Free
@leucocyte If you're entirely sure you're not mistyping anything, you could try making a PSN account in another region, and using the code for that one - I can confirm that as of just a minute ago, the US code worked fine.
It's a surprisingly smooth process (though I don't have instructions for it on hand right now), and I can say from experience that themes downloaded from one account on a PS4 can be used seamlessly across all accounts on the system.
Anyway, cheers to Push Square for posting this, it's a nice theme that I would never have seen otherwise.
Re: PS Store's Black Friday Bonanza Kicks Off Tomorrow, PS Plus Subs Reduced
@Turismo4GT Ah, that's a shame about the pricing. Glad you can still get in on the sale price digitally, then, and with living in (as you say) such a beautiful country at that - still getting the best of both worlds, in a way.
I'll probably get GoW in this sale too, by the way (and physical, since I also like the feel of boxed games but don't have the pleasure of living on a tropical island). Totally agree with you that it's a fantastic price for a game that looks outstanding. Have a good time in its snowy Nordic pines!
Re: PS Store's Black Friday Bonanza Kicks Off Tomorrow, PS Plus Subs Reduced
@Turismo4GT I get the impression that a lot of these price points are matching equivalent Black Friday physical game sales, so you may be able to have your disc and eat it too, as it were.
Re: Soapbox: Return of the Obra Dinn Is Outstanding, Save for One Blasted Trophy
Speaking as someone who's just finished figuring out all of the non-hidden-chapter fates in the Switch version of Obra Dinn (so no trophies to worry about one way or the other), the idea of this trophy brought a smile to my face. That's a super goofy joke in the context of the way a lot of the crew died, and the idea of having to go back through to get it doesn't strike me as being nearly as bad as this piece makes it sound. Anyone who's played the game through knows that the amount of step-retracing it's asking is a drop in the bucket compared to what you've already done.
Commenter Fath
respectfully disagreed
with Captain Robert Witterel.
...Er, I mean, with Author Stephen Tailby.
Re: Conan O'Brien Will Give You an Otter Hat in Death Stranding, Obviously
@Bliquid Blame Kojima personally for the spoiler in this case, since he led the way just posting it right up on twitter. Or perhaps consider forgiving him for it, since he's a mad genius and the game's his semi-literal baby and all.
Re: Borderlands 3 Boycotted by Fans Following Take-Two Investigation into Leaks
Man digs up companie's private data, posts it publicly on the internet, and probably profits from it through ads.
Internet: "Our hero and champion!"
Company digs up private information on man who's been stealing their data, but instead of doxing him and selling ad space on it, sends a pair of licensed investigators to talk to him face-to-face.
Internet: "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
Re: Soapbox: 7/10 Is a Bad Review Score? The World's Gone Mad
This article’s headline picture explains it all. 70’s are “yellow” scores on Metacritic, which has an umbrella effect on the industry. People reflexively see green as good, yellow as a warning.
Some things are just that simple.
Re: Mark Cerny Says the PS5's Specialised Solid-State Drive Is the 'Key' to Next-Gen
This doesn’t add up. SSD’s are expensive, and swapping one in for pure bulk storage doesn’t yield that much of a generational leap to loading times (as evidenced by the millions of people already using them with their PS4’s). Plus, “specializing” the bulk storage drive would mean you could kiss upgrading or expanding your PS5’s capacity goodbye, in a generation where 8k textures promise to swell game install sizes even more grotesquely.
One way or another, calling this storage architecture just a “specialized SSD” has to be an oversimplification for marketing’s sake (not that there’s anything wrong with that, for a first impression like this).
The simplest way to square this circle that I can see is to introduce a two-tiered storage solution, where the most recent game is copied to a small, static, superfast SSD that’s designed to hold just one or two games. Long “loading” times the first time you play it, then it’s fundamentally cached so long as you stick to it.
We’ll see.
Re: Falcon Age - PSVR Classic Combines Meaningful Storytelling with Adorable Birds
@get2sammyb I mean, my example is clearly made up, of course. But it’s something that would leave you baffled and scratching your head, right? “I though this was a huge open-world game; what gives with it being so small? Is that a typo? Is this some kind of spin-off ‘experience’? Or maybe it’s delivered through some kind of crazy streaming tech, and it’s nothing to worry about? Ugh, I wish the reviewer hadn’t just left that dangling there; now I don’t know what to think anymore.” That sort of thing.
No more replies from me right now, gotta get to work.
Re: Falcon Age - PSVR Classic Combines Meaningful Storytelling with Adorable Birds
@get2sammyb That’s the obligation of the reviewer to explain here. The math just doesn’t add up otherwise, for the praise of the game’s narrative and mechanical depth. It’s like if, say, a glowing review of the latest Assassin’s Creed game concluded out of the blue “If that sounds like your cup of wine, give this 1.5 GB window into Ancient Greece a try.”
Warning flags aren’t always the end of the world, but just raising one and walking away like that is hard to draw a fair conclusion from, as an interested reader.
Re: Falcon Age - PSVR Classic Combines Meaningful Storytelling with Adorable Birds
Soooo you’re just going to slip in at the very end there that for as fully-fleshed out as this game sounds - and it does sound rather great - it’s over and done with in five hours?
I’m not saying that’s necessarily a negative for me, personally, with how little time I can find for big undertakings, but it seems like it would color the rest of the review. How many bird hats can you really find, buddies befriend, extra combat mechanics introduce, recipes cook, and refineries conquer in that sort of timeframe?
Re: Iron Man VR Looks Sick, Is a Full Game with a Deep Sandbox and Story
You know, I never realized before thinking about playing this that Iron Man’s flight.. just doesn’t work. Not because of physics, but because human eyes are just naturally pointed completely orthogonally to the direction of travel.
Maybe this is all addressed in the materials I don’t have time to go through, but are we expected to play this with our head craned uncomfortably upward, or are we just supposed to suspend our body-sense to role-play as someone who has eyes in the top of his head (as I guess Tony Stark probably would in “real life” with an in-helmet screen)? Curious to see how well or poorly that’d feel to play.
Re: Poll: Do You Feel Ripped Off by PS Plus' Recent Changes?
I’d really like a subscription to online services without any free games at all, because I buy more games than I can play already, and don’t really like more being tossed onto my backlog indiscriminately. I also don’t much care for being held hostage to pay Sony every month in perpetuity lest my collection get snatched from my hands.
I guess I’m just a weirdo.
Re: EA Blames Subpar Battlefield V Sales on Single Player
Wow. Whichever player EA is blaming this on must be absolutely monstrous to singlehandedly tank the game’s sales like they did. It’s almost impressive, really. Almost.
Re: Why Is Sekiro Published By Activision? FromSoftware Speaks Up
Speaking as someome who actually works in technology validation testing, it’s an enormously underrespected field, in the sense that developers really don’t want to deal with it, and tend to be more than happy to believe someone who comes along and says “Just leave it to me.”
What this usually means in practice is that a fundamental aspect of design - determining and applying what “working correctly” actually means for the product - is farmed out from people who don’t really want to deal with it to people who don’t really care about it, who then get the job done by throwing it at whatever down-on-their-luck contractors they can pull off the street to work for peanuts.
Good luck with that, FromSoftware.
Re: 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim Prologue Is Basically a Paid Demo Coming to Japan in March
So if you squint a little, it sounds like they’re rolling it out kind of like a pack-in demo from back in the day (Dragon Quest VIII being released with a demo for FFXII back on PS2 comes to mind), but while trying to also provide a standalone version, which they then have to charge a nominal fee for to not render the whole exercise moot.
That kiiiind of makes some sort of backwards sense?
Re: Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition for PS4 Spotted Again Via Ratings Listing
The last (re)lease of any Borderlands game at all, let alone an award-winner or top seller, was back in 2015. Does “Game of the Year” truly mean nothing anymore?
Re: Fallout 76 Influencers Got the Canvas Bag Absent from the Collector's Edition
Huh. I thought everyone here was pretty cool with publishers generally funneling all the really cool goodies into “press kits” designed to influence their customers instead of delight them. Guess when there’s a bandwagon of hate going around, people’re just going to jump on it.
Re: The Monster Hunter Movie Looks Exactly Like the Monster Hunter You Know and Love
@rjejr Or if they're too pressed for time for a feature-length film, there's always that episode of Star Trek where Kirk fights the Gorn. Still more faithful to the MH source material than this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ-ATwRq5KY (ugh... how to embed)
It's all ok, though. Anyone peeved about video game adaptations today should seriously just watch that Detective Pikachu trailer that released today. It's just... impossible to be mad after seeing it.
Re: Yes, 2B Can Lose Her Clothes in SoulCalibur VI, Just Like She Can in NieR: Automata
Clothes are lost at 15:25, for anyone who actually wants to see what this article’s going on about instead of a quarter-hour of endless crabwalking.
Re: Castlevania Requiem - A Compelling Collection of Two Classics
Just straight-up 2/3 the content of the Dracula X Chronicles, at 4/3 the price?
Eat a Schmoo, Konami.
Re: PS4 Message Console Bricking Issue Is Fixed, Says PlayStation Support
@Porco Presumably, they’ve fixed it by properly sanitizing messages as they pass through Sony’s servers, as all messages necessarily do. Lets them quickly and comprehensively solve the problem for all users now, while rolling in a client-side patch later for double-layered protection.
The instructions in the tweet aren’t the fix itself, they’re there to combat the FUD factor that might compel people to wall off their systems indefinitely from online engagement (and to help anyone still affected from before the fix was in).
Re: Sony Seemingly Censors Controversial Senran Kagura Mode
@doctommaso You're right in the sense that my first post's argument was self-contained, and my second post doesn't really support it at all. I guess it just bugged me that it was being taken as gospel in this thread that these characters are stated in print as being underage, without any evidence to back that claim up.
To my knowledge, Xseed has been censoring the character ages in this series from the beginning, specifically to placate claims that they're underage. Raking them over the coals for indecency that isn't even there because they've been censoring it the whole time is just... absurdly meta.
Re: Sony Seemingly Censors Controversial Senran Kagura Mode
@Jaz007 @KingdomHeartsFan Characters being "clearly stated in the instructions" as being 15 - which I'm taking a serious leap of faith in taking your word for, by the way - is a definite problem, yes. It's also not at all what's being censored here.
If the problem Sony had was with character bios, then Xseed would have just removed the ages from the in-game bios. That's not even a theoretical, it's something they already did back in the game's original release on the 3DS.
The biographical ages - if they even show up in the game or manual, and you're not just pulling this from "oh, but on the game's Wikia page, they quote the Japanese bios as being..." - aren't what's being censored, though. The imagery is. If you're going to defend Sony on this one, you have to defend what they're actually censoring, not what they're letting pass.
Re: Sony Seemingly Censors Controversial Senran Kagura Mode
If you saw anyone with proportions matching the characters in question in real life, you wouldn’t be calling the cops, you’d be calling a hospital. Anime is distilled stylization - it’s not a depiction of human beings as much as it is a presentation of exaggerated human traits that the mind assembles into a mental representation of a person.
When anime presents the exaggerated traits of “sexiness” and “youthfulness,” it’s intended to be assembled into a mental image of a smoking-hot barely-legal bombshell, which is socially acceptable, last I checked. If your brain’s interpreting it instead as a mopheaded toddler with huge bazongas, that’s on you for not assembling it right. You’re buying a bed from Ikea and trying to build a bookshelf out of it.
Re: TGS 2018: What the Honk Is Going on in World of Final Fantasy Maxima?
1:25 - Fishing minigame with chibi Noctis!
1:30 - "I HAVE TO PAY FOR BRINGING YOU INTO THIS WORLD"
Meta much, Square?
Re: There's a New PS Vita Firmware Update Out Now
Wish Sony could’ve released a firmware update to stop my Vita from eating $50-$100 memory cards after some months or years, sigh. I really want to still love the thing, but it’s hard to invest time and energy into it after the second or third time all your games start throwing random corruption errors. The trust is gone.
I’d even be so desperate as to consider replacing the unit itself, if Sony hadn’t gone and downgraded the display in mid-cycle. No way I’m likely getting ahold of another OLED model now.
It’s a real shame.
Re: There's a Free Marvel's Spider-Man PS4 Theme Up for Grabs Right Now
@Toast-rider @crimsontadpoles It’s actually pretty painless to make accounts for different regions on PS4. They can live right alongside your main account, and things like themes downloaded by one can be used by all seamlessly and without restriction.
It may not be quite ideal, but that’s life.
Re: Spider-Man PS4's Puddle Drama Is An Absolute Embarrassment
@get2sammyb Fair edit on the language, my apologies and thanks for leaving my meaning inferable.
This one single screenshot may well be the only thing I ever play of this game, though. Certainly, next to none of the people you decry as an embarassment to gamers are in the same privileged position as you of having had the opportunity to play the game themselves yet, at least.
I’m sure the game is amazing, but this screenshot just plain isn’t.
Re: Spider-Man PS4's Puddle Drama Is An Absolute Embarrassment
@get2sammyb I haven’t really been following anything about this game.
The first screenshot looks cool, and piques my curiosity.
The second screenshot looks dull, and bores me.
The images have dramatically, obviously different artistic merit, and it’s totally fine to say so. Ridiculing people who see that and just want to muse about it as an embarassment, or nitpickers, or pixel-counters, or drama queens who don’t understand that the code’s exactly the same, guy, geez!... comes across as p***ing on their leg and telling them it’s raining.
Language - get2sammyb
Re: New Dragon Ball FighterZ Trailer Confirms Vegito Blue
“Daddy, where do fusions come from?”
“Well, honey, you see, when two really butch men hate each other very much, they put on earrings and touch their naughty bits together, and out comes a fusion.”
“...”
Re: Talking Point: Is PS4's September Starting to Look Way Too Crowded?
@Flaming_Kaiser Fair enough - you do that!
Re: Talking Point: Is PS4's September Starting to Look Way Too Crowded?
'Least you guys're getting the games. Square Enix has dropped the ball so hard on DQXI in Nintendoland that even though it was literally one of the first games to be announced for their console (back in 2015, before it was even called the "Switch"), and the game's been released on other platforms for over 6 months now (in Japan), we still have never seen so much as a single screenshot of the Switch version. To add insult to injury, SE seems to have canned the NA release of the 3DS version entirely in favor of chasing this vaporware as well.
It's really quite ridiculous.
Re: Want to Play Days Gone? Sony Bend Searching for User Testers
Er... you have to be local for this because they’re looking for actual software testers for this, as in employees. At least, that’s what I assume by this being listed at https://bendstudio.com/careers/ and requesting a resume in addition to that list of games.
This isn’t one of those “you’re a beta tester, really!” demo-in-disguises that everyone does these days, then.
Re: Sony's Robot Dog Draws Crowds at CES 2018
@KirbyTheVampire You must have one helluva pup if it makes you question life and the universe itself or anything like that. I will give them plenty of metaphysical credit, though - there seems to be a peculiar human inclination to believe that we as humans have some sort of unique monopoly on having a meaningful soul or emotions or what have you. I can't imagine anyone could still hold onto that fallacy but through willfully lying to themselves if they've had a cat or dog for any length of time.
As a messenger for teaching people that there are creatures besides themselves that feel things just as deeply and are worth caring about, flesh-and-blood cats and dogs are great. Viewed in that light, though, the idea that "some machine running on a computer program is just a hollow automaton; obviously only a living creature can have a soul" starts to sound awfully familiar. Decades from now, if Sony keeps refining this technology, I wonder if the Aibo mark twenty-seven might have our own assumptions about what is and isn't worth caring about as a living being looking quaint.
Re: Rumour: A Way Out Won't Break Out of Prison Until 2019 on PS4
I suppose any game can be "one of the most anticipated games of [the year]" if you announce it's coming out far enough in the future. >_<
Re: After the Battlefront 2 Scandal, EA UFC 3's Beta Sounds Like a Disaster
I mean, I get EA's corporate logic. They're a big company, and "need" a big, steady income to subsist on. Surprise hits are great, but lightning in a bottle is by its nature impossible to reliably and repeatedly manufacture, and it's expensive and wasteful to spin up all new games, mechanics, and assets for one-shot income. Much more consistent and efficient to capture an audience and keep them paying out repeatedly for games-as-a-service by incrementing in-game numbers and selling upgrades instead of new experiences.
It's reflective of the early human societal evolution from hunter-gatherers to farmers, but this time it's the players who're the milk cows. It's an aggressive stance to the market as a whole, as monopolizing a player's time for months or years prevents them from playing other companies' games while they're being milked. Hopefully it never goes so far as to completely clearcut the industry's creative woodlands, but it's tough to see any path to undo the shift while capitalism is still the law of the land. With few exceptions, humanity's never really looked back once it started farming its food instead of praying to the god of the hunt.
Re: Belgium Reckons Loot Boxes Are Gambling, Wants Them Banned in Europe
Yes, loot boxes are gambling. Yes, trading cards and sticker packs are gambling. No, gambling is not always a bad thing. Yes, gambling can be circumstancially dangerous. Yes, loot boxes probably qualify as such.
Gambling is basically the sugar of (generalized) gaming. It’s a fundamental component of games that can add good flavor naturally and in moderation, but is dangerously and temptingly easy to artificially concentrate to harmful and addictive levels. Saying “trading cards are fine for kids, so loot boxes must be ok too” is like saying boxed apple juice is fine for kids, so installing free and unrestricted soda fountains in schools must be ok too.
A lot of people would say our society still has problems with sugar, but there are at least two approaches that obviously don’t work, and the same lessons could be applied to gambling: banning it outright, and pretending it doesn’t exist or isn’t dangerous. With sugar, we’ve at least been able to get to a point in society where these two extremes are obvious fallacies. We’re a long way from that point yet on gambling when it comes to loot boxes, but in the meantime, at least we should be able to see that just as dumping in spoonfuls of pure sugar can cheapen and ruin a fine dish, so too can injecting artificial gambling ruin an otherwise good game.
Re: US PS Store Rolls Out Tons of Black Friday PS4 Deals
Call me a hipster, but I just can’t muster much hype for a sale page showcasing posters of NBA and FIFA meatheads as its background.
(Not that being unemployed and on the verge of defaulting on my mortgage doesn’t contribute to my lack of excitement too, I’m sure, but that's beside the point.)
Re: That Final Fantasy XII News Square Was Teasing? The Sky Pirate's Den Returns in New PS4 Patch
From this site’s first article on this tease:
“[...] let's not discount the possibility that this may have nothing to do with PlayStation. It could be that The Zodiac Age is coming to PC or another platform, so we wouldn't get too hyped just yet. [...] What do you think this news could be? Now that the article's over, feel free to speculate like crazy in the comments section below.”
Now, from this article:
“Square Enix has revealed the news that ‘will make fans of Final Fantasy XII happy’, and no, it's not a Switch version. [...] Please don't port beg in the comments section below.“
It’s all in good fun and all, but you guys really brought any port begging on yourself this time. Not much right to complain ‘bout it!
Anyway, looking forward to checking out this theme, and getting back up to feature parity with the original game is always nice, even if it should be the bare minimum for a remake to start from.
Re: Analyst: Gamers Are Overreacting Over Star Wars, Publishers Should Increase Prices
@Splints Think back to the last time you beat a AAA game and watched the credits all the way through. How many people do you figure were in there? Hundreds? Thousands?
Now multiply that number by a $40k-80k salary per each year you figure the game was in development. It’s by no means a perfect estimate, but it shows how labor costs must get utterly ridiculous when you have AAA-levels of staff working on a game.
Re: Guide: The Best PS4 Black Friday 2017 Deals in the USA
@ztpayne7 The official Playstation blog has a post with what I assume is the deal in question: https://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/11/10/black-friday-2017-week-long-playstation-deals-revealed/
"We’re celebrating Black Friday early and for an entire week this year in the U.S., starting on November 19 through Cyber Monday on November 27, at participating retailers while supplies last."
Pretty vague, but just that it's coming from Sony instead of an individual retailer should go a long way towards answering your question. In other words - probably. Whether or not a given store actually has any in stock through Black Friday, though, may be another question...