Impossibilium

Any month that has three games I don’t already own is a good one to me. Even if none of them were on my wishlist, that’s what I like about PS+ — getting to try games I wouldn’t normally buy,

I’ll give Callisto a try, but I usually don’t jive with horror games, so I probably won’t stick with it. Weird west looks interesting — I really like immersive sims. I’ll definitely give Farming Sim a look — I always end up playing more hours on relaxing busywork type games than I intend to, looking at my playtime on Powerwash Simulator, Mudrunner/Snowrunner, House Flipper, and Animal Crossing, while leaving the big AAA games and old classics unplayed.

I’ve got the first game’s platinum trophy twice (original on PS4, Remastered on PS5), so I don’t mind collecting things or 100%ing districts. I just hope there aren’t trophies or abilities locked behind new game+ like Miles Morales did. If I’m gonna play the game twice, I want two platinums dammit! 😂

I’d really like to buy books like this, but I wish they sold digital versions as well. I know that having a physical copy to hold in your hands in part of the point of these projects, but I find it so prohibitive, in terms of price, shipping costs, storage space, and convenience. At least give people the option.

Haha. The two Japanese developers that I have to stop for a second to remember who did what games. Joining forces to confuse me even more. At least I’ll be right no matter which one I guess for this game.🤔

While I admit that the creative aspects of Roblox are good — it’s never bad to get people interested in making games — Roblox has turned into a platform that exploits children and drains their parent’s bank accounts.

Like what needs to be done to other game economies — ones that use loot boxes, excessive microtransactions, etc. — this needs to be monitored and regulated to make it safer for children to play.

I believe it was the morning the day this stuff was announced, I was thinking that maybe I should be learning how to use Unity instead of Godot to develop games, because of the larger amount of resources available for Unity. The reason I chose Godot was because there were no licensing fees involved at any point (even though I have no delusions of incurring the Unity fees, because you’d have to make $200,000 in sales for the fees to be incurred).

Now I’m feeling like I really made the right choice now. Even if I do decide to use another game engine, it definitely won’t be Unity.

@get2sammyb I think much like publishers that are still making games for the PS4, EA is looking at the install base.

Even though 5 is free-to-play, there have been so many DLC packs that people have for 4 that many of them wouldn’t want to start over from scratch, as well as a casual audience — which are the bulk of Sims players — that might not notice a new SKU, but will notice a new DLC pack for the one they’ve been playing for years.

They have also went through the release of Sims 4, where there were many, many complaints about missing features from the previous games, that they might want a more gradual transition to the new game, rather than immediately stop support the old game.

@Darude84 I was going to comment the exact same thing.

I track my game prices on Deku Deals, and whenever a new sale starts I get an email showing me everything I have on my wishlist that’s discounted. I get a little excited, until I scroll through the games and all I see is “Matches previous low”, or nothing (which means it was cheaper in the past) — and every “Lowest price ever” is for a newer game that isn’t cheap enough for me to buy yet.

It’s especially bad for publishers like SquareEnix, where most of their games haven’t gone lower than 50% off for many years now. And all the same games go on every second or third sale, so there’s no reason to buy anything that you aren’t going to play immediately, because it’ll be on sale again in a month or two.

When I worked in retail, I had a customer — who I assumed is the father/grandfather/uncle of a young child that was occasionally with him — that would buy a $50 Roblox card every time he was in the store. I’m pretty sure it was at least once a week, if not more.

If you can avoid it, keep your kids as far away from this game as possible. That man did not look wealthy at all, and I can’t imagine the debt he must have feeding that kid’s Roblox addiction.

@Fiendish-Beaver No offence was taken!

The worst part of using text to communicate is how hard it is to convey tone. I try to use emojis to get that across, but it’s still hard to indicate a lack of seriousness (especially when you’re autistic and tend to write in a more formal and blunt way) 😄

@Fiendish-Beaver I’m aware of all that. I wasn’t talking about story, I was talking about game mechanics — how it’s hard to go back to older games after you’ve played a more refined game that I think BG3 will be, based on reviews. Also an acknowledgment of my enormous backlog of classic games that I’ve never played — which I can play while I’m waiting for BG3 to go down in price. 🙂

This is so tempting. I want to play this immediately. But not only can I not afford it right now, I’ve got at least 4 games I want to play before I play this — specifically Balder’s Gate 1 and 2, and Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2. I know BG3 is gonna blow all of those games out of the water gameplay-wise, so I want to at least give those games a try before experiencing the (presumed) majesty of BG3.

I’m actually excited to finally play this game. It’s good that I waited, so I’ll get a much better experience than the mess it was at launch, with much lower expectations than the hype that was built up before release. I’ll still wait a bit longer, so that they’ll have time to patch the DLC and the 2.0 patch. 😉

And this is one of the reasons why I don’t buy games at launch anymore. In a couple years time, I’ll have a GOTY edition that’s a fully patched game, at at least half the price, with all kinds of extra content. (Especially good if the DLC is the kind that’s inserted into the main game, and not stuff that that takes place after the main story, so I can play it integrated in where it belongs.)

And yeah, despite SquareEnix waffling back and forth on whether this game was successful or not, it must have done well enough to support it with DLC.

@johncalmc Does this have the 2012 PS3 remake of Karateka included? I can’t find confirmation of this anywhere (the remaster is all that’s mentioned), so I’m guessing no. It seems strange not to include it.

I remember buying and playing it at release, and I didn’t like it very much, so it’s no big loss. But it still seems weird to leave it out in a comprehensive history of the game.

In its FAQ, the dev team says it's "quite far along in the production cycle" and is targeting April 2025

Yeah, in my experience with video game Kickstarters, I’d add at least 1 year to that date, but maybe as many as 5. Not a criticism, just managing people’s expectations when it comes to crowdfunded projects. (I backed Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and it was worth the wait for me. I hope this one turns out good for everyone.)

I’ll play this eventually. Just have to play Balder’s Gate 1 and 2, and Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 first. So seeya in 2030 I guess? 😆

@nessisonett I’m really hoping for this. I don’t use social media, but I did contribute to the dogpile in the comments section on the PSBlog post. So I hope the collective internet will help me with this.

I don’t condone harassment, but people will have to be loud about their displeasure about this price increase.

If I remember correctly, I think Microsoft went back on a similar price hike after the backlash. And Sony kept the PS3 and Vita stores open, after the backlash at the announcement of their closure. Here’s hoping it can be done again. 🤞

I’m pretty angry about this. It’s a $30 price hike in Canada, making it cost about $100. I’m on a tight budget, and this throws a monkey wrench into the works.

But I can’t see a way not to keep my subscription to Essential. I don’t play online very much, but my niece — who I console share with — does, and even though we split the cost of Plus, this is still gonna have an effect. I also like having cloud saves, access to Plus games, and extra discounts. And I can’t switch to a competitor’s console, since I have thousands of games on my PlayStation account.

They’ve got me over a barrel here, and it feels gross.

I was already thinking about how much I’d like to have PS+ Extra, but couldn’t afford it. Now I’m gonna have to see if I can afford to have Plus at all. I’ve had a Plus subscription since day one, and have never let it lapse.

Smart move Sony! Way to treat your loyal customers.

Other companies have increased prices and layed off employees, all in the name of “inflation”, when we all know it’s not, it’s actually “We didn’t make as much profit as we had during lockdown, and the top executives would’ve had to reduce their bonuses by millions of dollars to keep the shareholders happy.” So Sony felt they could get away with the same thing.

I don’t encourage harassment, but I hope the backlash to this announcement is as swift and loud as the PS Vita and PS3 store closures, and it gets reversed within a week.

@DellMibbler You must be new to paying attention to video games media, or you maybe only noticed it this time because it was a game you were looking forward to. But this has been an issue with game previews since day one, and it isn’t just a PushSquare problem — it is every game media website, TV show, and magazine for as long as video games have existed.

You never trust game previews. It is a very rare thing to read a negative preview. And it’s not always the game journalist’s fault. Besides giving developers the benefit of the doubt — which is fair to do, when being shown a game that isn’t finished — game journalists are only being shown what game publishers want them to see, or they are shown early prototypes that are going to look rough anyways. Sometimes they are giving impressions based on the same trailers that are available to everyone.

If anything shady is going on, it’s mostly the publisher that is misrepresenting what the game is going to be like when it’s released. There may also be the case that the site doesn’t want to give a negative preview because they want to guarantee getting a review copy before release, but most reputable sites have a marketing team that takes care of getting pre-release copies, leaving their journalists to not consider that in their coverage.

And once they get a game for review, the gloves are off — this review proves that, because they were also hyped for this game, but it didn’t turn out that good in the end. And it should have been expected to be good, given it being an important flagship title for PSVR2 and its success.

TLDR: Don’t trust previews, no matter who is giving it, and wait for reviews.

You actually don’t buy a new Madden every year. You’re just paying an annual subscription to get Early Access to a game that’s been in development since 1988. 😉

The perfect game for PS+. A game that I was waiting for a steep discount to buy, because of the bad reviews, but still interested in trying out. Now I don’t have to pay anything (other than the Plus subscription, of course).

Sounds promising, with at least a few improvements on the original.

But I’m waiting a few years before buying it. Like the article suggests, and others here have said, Atlus will probably release Persona 3 Reload Royal later and charge full price for it, with no upgrade path. When they port it to PlayStation 6, they’ll again charge full price for it, with no upgrade path.

They make good games, but they have really scummy business practices.

Wow. I thought they already went as far as they could, putting free-to-play monetization garbage in a full-priced $70 ($90 CDN) game. Leave it to 2K, they stuffed in another one. This’ll make EA jealous (at least until they put it in their sports games).☹️

This is fine. There’s already too many potentially good games slated to come out as it is. Not to mention all the games that have already released that I’m waiting for a sale on. I’ve got a huge backlog, so I’ve got enough to keep me entertained in the meantime.

Just found this out when I was looking to see if I already owned any of the new Premium PSP games. I got Tekken 2 and R4 for free, but Ridge Racer 2 was never released in NA, and I’ve never had interest in Mr. Driller so I wouldn’t have bought it before.

And now I get to play the game of “have I bought any of these games digitally in the past so I can get them for free without paying for premium?” I’ll check the PS Store in a minute to see if I’ve won! 😄

. . . Ah, nothing this time.😢 But I did find out that the Bandai Namco PS1 games have been released from the Premium paywall! I got R4 and Tekken 2 PS5 ports for free. Unfortunately not Ridge Racer 2 PSP, cuz that was never released in NA.😣

I voted for “Maybe when it’s on sale”, but that’s contingent on the Digital Foundry review of the port. If there’s no substantial improvements to the game, I’ll just play it on my PS3–which I just hooked back up to play something else recently. It would be nice and convenient to have it on PS5 and not to have to put in a disc, but if there’s no other reason to buy it, I won’t.

@thiagoauler I think you’re misunderstanding the backlash. Everybody wants the game to be released on current consoles. Nobody is saying that this shouldn’t be released.

The complaints are about the fact that R* did nothing to improve the game, just doing a straight port.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect an extremely rich developer like R* and publisher like Take Two to put some effort into improving the graphics, gameplay mechanics, and framerate into a $50 USD ($65 CDN) version of a 13-year-old game that already has enhancements on XBOX.

It’s good that the game is accessible to more people—now that it can be played on a PS4, PS5, and Switch—but for the people that have already played the game, it’s a real disappointment that there’s no reason to buy it, other than the convenience of not having to hook up your PS3 again.

I was about to comment that this article shouldn’t be on PushSquare because—after giving the PS Store a quick search—Papers, Please isn’t even on PlayStation. A quick read of the above comments told me that I had forgotten about the Vita… just like Sony did 😂

I know it’s actually close to 3 years since the PS5 launched, but it still feels like it just came out. The PS4 Pro came out after the same number of years, but at the time felt like the regular PS4 had run its course and the upgrade felt significant.

I think companies should just skip over the pandemic years, and add on 2 or 3 more years to whatever they’re planning. I could wait til 2026 for a PS5 Pro. Or at least my bank account needs to wait that long; I couldn’t afford a new system even if it did release soon 😣

This is almost as bad as the Nintendo way of thinking. They can charge whatever they want, knowing people will buy it anyway, just because the Rockstar logo is on the cover.

If the game had come out 5 years ago, I would be pretty excited. But games have evolved quite a bit in the last decade (yes, it has been nearly a decade since GTA V released!).

There is no way that a game that’s been developed over that long a period of time is going to meet the expectations that a decade of waiting could live up to. This is going to release with outdated game mechanics, outdated graphics, and outdated humour.

There is almost no way this could live up to the hype. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m predicting Cyberpunk 2077 levels of disappointment with this one.

@ShogunRok You’re welcome. The only reason I knew about them is because I have them both on a wishlist, waiting for either of them to go on sale, but really preferring to get the most up-to-date version. Late[st] is discounted more often than [cl-r] though, so I have to look closely at the last bit of the name to not confuse the two.

Ah, great. More low-effort trash porn games from Steam releasing on consoles—with the porn taken out, completely removing the only reason anyone would be suckered in to buying one of these. Add in a free-to-play microtransaction economy. And add in the lack of a platinum trophy, and we have a complete waste of time.

Correction: the last UNI game on PlayStation was Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[cl-r] in 2020. But I understand the confusion. You would think something called Late[st] would be, y’know, the latest game in the series. And of course, the lovely Japanese video game naming schemes, mixing random words and punctuation so you don’t know what you’re looking at. 🤪

Edit: Fixed. This comment makes no sense now. 😖

@ShogunRok You’re welcome. And you’re right, converting time zones really sucks 😖

Edit: Just to prove you more right, I just downloaded the beta and wondered why the servers weren’t up. Forgetting — of course — that it was 9pm Eastern Time, not my time zone 🤣

I think there might be a typo with the ET time on July 28th. If it’s correct, that would only give someone 1 minute to play 🤣

Edit: Fixed. This comment is now irrelevant 😖

This takes free-to-play mechanics to a new low.

They usually let you pay to skip playing the game, giving you rewards by paying real-world money instead of earning it through gameplay — after making the game an intolerable grind-fest if you don’t spend anything on it.

Now they’re rewarding people for not playing the game before it’s even released. What a nightmare. It reinforces my policy of nope-ing out as soon as I see “free-to-play” in a game’s description.

@Llamageddon Haha, I was thinking the same thing. This game is looking really good, but I hate giving Ubisoft executives more money, since the abuse allegations were never properly addressed.

@nessisonett Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t realize this was a remake.

I’ve never played anything in the series, but I’ve been interested enough to look up info about, so I’m aware of the various arcs and sub-series.

There’s still a chance I could be right about the SEO — the words may have been added to the English translation for this release — or, if the words were similar in the Japanese release… well, the internet existed in 2012, and it would have been people searching online stores for the physical copy.

But I was more focused on the usage of the words in the title to attract Trails fans; I only used the SEO bait games as a partially related example. I was thinking more about how companies use unrelated IP names to attract existing players.

@nessisonett @Czar_Khastik I’ve got a feeling that they put “Legends of” and “Trails” in the name of this game just to trick fans of the Trails saga into thinking this game is somehow related. People looking for an actual Trails game would have this appear in the search results. They can get away with it because they’re the same developer, and not another company trying to capitalize on the name.

Kinda like how some games use the name of an old IP on a completely unrelated project — like Bethesda did with Prey, or Bungie are doing with Marathon. Or how shovelware developers on the Nintendo eShop name their games — like Grand Call of Elder Theft Duty Auto Scrolls Simulator — just to throw as many popular keywords in the title to ensure getting into as many search results as possible, trying to sucker young or uniformed people into thinking they’re the real game.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner I agree about the headlines. I can usually figure them out after reading the article, but a lot of PushSquare headlines are way too long and convoluted.

They should really consider a new headline format. If they didn’t capitalize every word, or italicize or put quotation marks around game titles, they would be much more legible.

And (I hope he sees this as constructive criticism rather than an attack) I find Khayl’s headlines are usually worse than the other writers. Other writers sometimes use long headlines with more flowery language than is needed, but Khayl’s are just a little bit worse — in my case at least — because I think he might be a bit younger than the others, or just more “online” than others, and more prone to using lingo that me, an old person, doesn’t immediately understand. That’s more a “me” problem than anything else, but I think overall they need to simplify or reformat their headlines to reach a broader audience.

It may also be a cultural difference, this being a British-run site, versus sites with a more North American or international flavour. And I might be overreacting to it, based on taking a few marketing classes, and my experience in retail, where I had to put things in layman’s terms when speaking to customers that might not know more technical or video game-specific language.

And uh… to get more back on topic… I’ve never played one these games before, but I’m interested in trying one someday, to see if I like it — or at the very least try to figure out the reason for their unique use of SEMI;COLONS. 🤪

@Razrye888 Because it has cross-play.

If the game becomes a hit, it being on Game Pass means that there will be a big player base, because people on XBOX get the game “free” with their subscription. If it doesn’t take off, XBOX players will have no real reason to stick around, because they didn’t pay extra for it.

Those are big considerations for PlayStation players, who have to pay full-price for the game, so it is a completely relevant point to bring up in the review.

@nessisonett All fair points. I do admit to having a bit of naïveté. Comes with my autism 😉. You’re right that there would be people that miss Ultimate Team if was removed altogether.

But I believe they could keep a mode like Ultimate Team if you paid for the loot boxes with in-game currency. That would keep the thrill of getting a random pull without fleecing their audience.

But I also know that EA and 2K would probably not develop those modes if they couldn’t make more money from it. The modes were only invented to gather infinite revenue by bringing the physical card collecting model to video games, by getting people to overspend using psychological manipulation.

But I also don’t think losing Ultimate Team would cut into the sales of those games. The games would still be profitable, based on initial sales alone. Loot box mechanics are pure corporate greed, taking free-to-play mobile game monetization strategies and putting them into a full-price games.

The “marks” of scam artists don’t always realize that they’re marks. It’s not an excuse to keep the scam going because a lot of people have fallen for it. Victims of psychological manipulation deserve better than to let these monetization methods stay the way they are.

@nessisonett I don’t agree with your examples of banning alcohol and gambling. Those activities went underground after prohibitions were in place because people liked those activities, and they couldn’t be easily replaced with other ones.

Loot boxes could be taken out of video games and no one would miss them for one second. There may be some streamers that make their living giving people the second-hand dopamine rush of getting an epic loot drop (after spending hundreds of dollars, that is).

But if they took loot boxes out of games and replaced them with cosmetic DLC that you could buy separately — knowing what you’re buying at a fixed cost without randomness — very few people would notice or care, and a lot of people would be quite pleased to see them go. The few “whales” out there might grumble about losing the ability to show how big their e-peen is, but for the people that are neurodivergent or have addiction issues, it would be a welcome relief.

And there would be no way to set up illegal versions of loot box mechanics, at least not in official games like FIFA or NBA2K. You’d still have Counter-Strike gambling and NFT scams (which are another subject altogether), but banning loot boxes from the major games that still use them would effectively eradicate them for good.

“Protecting the children” is great and all, but this affects more people than parents that are dumb enough to link their credit card to their child’s account. The aforementioned mental health issues need to be considered as well.

I played the demo on my Steam Deck. Seemed like a run-of-the-mill first-person roguelike, with an amazing art style, that makes me nostalgic for the cartoons that I watched as a child. Still might be fun, especially if you’re into that type of game. The only one I’ve played is Ziggurat, and I enjoyed my time with that.

It just makes me think about games that have incredible art design, but not in a genre I like to play. Mostly thinking about Cuphead, but also We Happy Few (before it came out and was critically panned anyway). It’s too bad that indie devs sometimes don’t have the budget to make a good single-player game with narrative or level progression, instead of procedurally generated layouts shuffling rooms around to make it seem like a new content.

Well, I agree with the prison sentence at least. There was really no need to serve a prison sentence for this particular crime.

I don’t agree with the fines, though. $1.2 million seems a bit steep for a crime that he only profited $163,000. Maybe double the cost, at around $400,000? Enough to pay back the ill-gotten gains, plus a penalty to deter him and other potential criminals from committing this particular offence. Though, as an industry veteran, I would assume he would have the money to pay regardless.

Square spent so much time trying to cater to a “wider audience”, they forgot to appeal to their home audience.