Impossibilium

And here it is. The full, complete game being finished almost a year after its initial release.

With the way some games are launching in such a terrible state (Jedi Survivor and Redfall being two recent examples), I get unnecessarily angry at publishers thinking it’s acceptable to release a game before it’s done, turning early adopters into paying beta testers. Especially since there is one simple solution to the problem.

Label the games Early Access.

That’s all they have to do. Just be upfront and honest with people that the game isn’t ready, but we have to release it now to boost quarterly profits for the shareholders.

This Saints Row game is the perfect example of this. Just like an Early Access game like Hades, they sold the game to customers, listened to the feedback, then finished the game later. The difference between this and Hades though, is that they didn’t label it Early Access. The called it a full release and charged full release prices and got criticized harshly because people expected a finished product.

When all they had to do was be honest, and call it Early Access. Set the proper expectations and promise the 1.0 release will come at a later date. That fixes everything.

@Feena You’re right. Please forgive my ignorance. I saw that they were selling a Championship Edition upgrade and assumed it was the balance patch, but I just read the description again, and — thanks to you — I now realize that it’s just a bundle that contains all the previous content from the first four season passes, aimed at people that own the original but didn’t buy any other DLC along the way.

I have to say, though, that is a confusing way to title that bundle. And also a bit disheartening for the people that bought the season passes as they released, to see them now at a tiny fraction of the original cost.

I was aware that you could buy characters with in-game currency, but I just assumed it worked like a free-to-play game, and you’d have to grind for hours and hours to just get one character. But yes, it is good that they at least have the option.

In any case, I still think it’s exploiting the hardcore fanbase, wringing every cent (or every bit of time, when it comes to the free unlocks) they can from them — hundreds of dollars if you add it all up — while a casual person like me can just wait and buy it all for $20.

@get2sammyb @Wheatly My personal preference is in line with what Wheatly is saying. I’d very much prefer the complete game, with all DLC included, than have to buy it all piecemeal. But that might be because I’m only a casual fighting game fan, who only plays them with a friend locally every once in a while, not someone who plays competitively online, who would need to keep up with the latest updates and new characters.

I sorta disagree with Sammy. I don’t think current practices are better than the way it used to be. In my opinion, when you break down the numbers, modern ways vs. the old ways are almost equivalent.

In the arcade days, you were almost literally nickeled-and-dimed (quartered and dollared to be more accurate). You’d have to have a huge pocket of change to play as much as you would on console.

In the pre-internet console days, you’d buy a full-priced cartridge, and then buy another full-priced cartridge the next year, if you wanted the balance patches and extra characters.

Nowadays, you buy the full-priced game, you buy the first season pass — which costs almost as much as the game itself — and then another 1 to 4 more season passes every year. And in the case of Street Fighter V, you had to pay for the balance patches as well.

So, with all things considered, I think we’re paying as much for an updated fighting game now as what we did in the past.

But much like the way people compare loot boxes to collectible trading cards and blind-boxes, just because things were crappy in the past doesn’t excuse things being crappy now. It’s still exploitation of a core audience to achieve continuous profit over the lifetime of a game.

Yes, you may argue that the proliferation of DLC over time keeps the game alive, allowing developers to continue updating the game and retain an audience. An audience that will gladly keep paying to stay up-to-date with the latest meta.

But again, this take is coming from a casual fighting game player, and not someone who partakes of the fighting game community — as well as someone who remembers “the good ol’ days” of gaming where you bought a game and that was it, and who has a general disdain for live-service games and the like. So, from my perspective, the drip-feed of content over time looks more like a money-grab, forcing people to pay-up to keep-up.

Both perspectives are valid, and are part of a larger conversation about modern video game business practices. So I’ll leave it at that (before this one comment becomes a novel 😆).

@NEStalgia Nintendo is the console for kids. PlayStation is the console that makes kids. 😁

@ShogunRok

“And finally we've got Descenders, a rougelite that's all about cycling.”

It’s nice to know that the cyclists aren’t putting too much red makeup on their cheeks. 😂

But seriously… I already own Descenders, and enjoyed what I played of it. I keep meaning to go back to it.

I don’t have Grid Legends, but I’m always up to playing a racing game.

I played the beta for Chivalry 2. It was loud and chaotic, but not bad. I usually don’t gravitate toward multiplayer games — so I didn’t like it enough to buy it — but it’s good to have some games on Plus that you wouldn’t normally play, to try out genres that you might not know you like and never gave them a chance before.

@NathanKang @JonnyAces 100% agree with those sentiments. There are a lot of good games to play while we wait for Spider-Man 2 to come out. It’s always better to have a polished, complete game at launch, rather than having to wait for months after release for patches to fix it. We really need to stop paying to be beta testers.

@ztpayne7 Given all the difficultly options, it’s definitely something I’ll give a chance… when it’s $2 in a PlayStation Store sale. $30 for a 1 hour game? That would have to be a spectacular hour to justify that price.

I’m not usually the type to consider a game’s length when buying one, but in this case it’s pretty outrageous.

This is a pleasant surprise. I loved this game back in the day. But I don’t remember playing that much of it, probably distracted by bigger games. This is a chance to correct that!

@Anke 🎶 Doo-do-do-do-doop… Inspector Gadget! Doo-do-do-do-doop… Woohoo! 🎶

I loved that show when I was a kid. At least I did initially. But then TV stations broadcasted reruns constantly and I saw the same episodes repeated again and again and I got sick of it. They used to play them early in the morning, right when I was getting out of bed. There were no other cartoons on at that time of day, so it was all I had to watch. ☹️

The trailer had me in the first half. The mech designs and combat looked cool and interesting.

But as the trailer progressed, it all started to look the same, with dull, grey environments. Hopefully this gameplay footage is just based in one area, and there will be more variety in the full game.

Either way, we won’t have to wait long till we find out. That August 25 date is surprisingly soon.

I already have Descenders, but the other two have been on my wishlist — though only as a low priority, wait for deep sale kinda thing. So it’s another decent month fer me, getting games I sorta want, but never would’ve paid very much fer them.

@AndyKazama No, but that’s another one that’s on my wishlist, waiting for a good sale price.

@Deadlyblack @naruball @AndyKazama Yup, Metroidvania is one of my favourite genres too. I enjoy them so much that I can even tolerate some of the more mediocre titles. Already on my wishlist.

@DrGonzo Nope. Readers need to understand that a reviewers job is to give you an idea of what the game is and how they felt about. It’s up to you how you use this information. A 7 to them might be a 9 to you. They just try to compare the game to others in the genre. How much the negative qualities of the game bother you is a matter of perspective.

As soon as I read parrying, I was like nope, not for me. I suck at parrying in games, I can never get the timing right in the heat of battle.

I’m playing through Sifu at the moment, and I set it to the lowest difficulty, with all the difficulty modifiers on, and I’m still having trouble getting past bosses without losing a bunch of lives.

But then I read the last line of the review. Music by Austin Wintory made me put this on my wishlist immediately. Ya kinda buried the lede there. 😄

Even without the added hirings, Insomniac has to be one of the most efficient and well-managed development studios out there, in order to put out games that quickly without sacrificing quality.

At least, I hope that’s the case. The only other explanation would be required crunch, and that would be disheartening. Though I believe I’ve read reports saying that they didn’t crunch on some of their most recent games, and if that’s the case, that is some development wizardry on the go there.

@Uncharted2007 Exactly my strategy.

I’m not enough into fighting games to be competitive, so I don’t care about being up-to-date on every launch and DLC fighter drop, but I do enjoy them enough to play local versus with a friend. So I’d much rather save my money buy the complete edition with all of the characters included.

I just bought MK11 Ultimate for $16 Canadian. The launch release was $80; add on all the DLC and you might triple or quadruple that price.

For all the people say that it’s better than the old days — where you had to buy an entire new game for extra characters and balance patches (eg. Street Fighter II) — it adds up to roughly the same amount if they charge you for multiple season passes and said balance patches (eg. Street Fighter V).

Fighting games in recent years have found a way to charge people as much as they did in the quarter-munching arcade days,

@kyleforrester87 Going back to older games that you didn’t play close to release can be pretty rough, especially if it’s a beloved classic that inspired or influenced so many things that came after it.

The example that I always think of is the movie The Silence of the Lambs. I was only 10 when it came out, so I wasn’t able to watch it then. I never got around to watching it until 15-20 years after its release. By then I had seen so many movies and TV shows that were either inspired by it, copying it, or parodying it. So I watched it and thought “that was it?” It felt like watching a random episode of Law & Order, rather than a lauded thrill-ride.

Games have even more challenges to overcome in said situation. Not only the story elements may have dated, but graphics and mechanics as well. It’s not so bad to go back to the 8 or 16-bit eras, but PlayStation 1 and even a lot of PS2 games are almost impenetrable to experience without nostalgia goggles. Even then, our memories of games might not match the reality of what they actually are.

With all that said, I’m still hoping that FF VI is still good when I buy the pixel remasters. I have never gotten around to playing it in all these years, so I hope I can enjoy it for what it is, instead of what people have been gushing about for decades. 🤞

@naruball There’s a good chance that that particular remake was rebalanced to make the game more fair.

I didn’t play the FF IV remake, but I did play the PSP remakes of FF I and II without having any issues, so they absolutely rebalanced those games, given that they came from the NES and would’ve had even more brutal difficulty spikes.

These pixel remasters — despite having different graphics, music, new translations, and various other gameplay adjustments — stick very close to the original plot and structure of the original games. This would mean the grinding to make progress was left in, so they added the EXP and Gil boost options to compensate for that.

@Titntin I’m also glad they added the three-click.

But yeah, I’ll definitely try the analog stick first, to see how it compares to other golf games. Just knowing that I can fall back to it if I don’t end up liking the stick makes it more likely that I’ll eventually buy this game.

But, much like you, I’m not paying full price for it. $89.99 Canadian is way too much. I’m definitely waiting for a significant price drop.

It sucks though that there’s no demo on PlayStation.

@AK4tywill I agree. There is absolutely no need for a game showcase to be announced this early. Especially for a third-party developer.

If this were Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft it would be different. People would schedule their lives around big announcements from them.

With any other publisher though, I’m definitely forgetting about that between now and when it happens. I know they’ll reannounce it when it gets closer to the date, but that should be the time when they first announce it.

Good, I get to play some of this game now, now that it’s free to try. I’ve always liked the KOF series.

There was no way I was going to pay for it, since SNK is fully owned by Saudi Arabia (with all their human rights abuses, misogyny, and murdering journalists and stuff).

This doesn’t affect me very much, because I buy my PlayStation games on PlayStation . . . where they are already $79.99 to $89.99 Canadian (at launch anyways).

Which is one of the main reasons I wait for sales. I’m long past caring about playing the latest and greatest games when they release. I’ll enjoy them just as much when the price drops lower, with the added benefit of having the game patched up as much as it’s going to be.

And with the way games frequently go on sale on Steam, anyone who wants to pay less will have plenty of opportunities.

@KundaliniRising333 You hit the nail right on the head.

Growth as a measure of success is deeply flawed. When you reach the maximum amount of people that will pay for your service or buy your products, there is no way to increase that number. Expecting infinite growth is the pressure shareholders place on a company, but it does not reflect the reality of running a business. Making business decisions based on that metric is pretty dumb.

But hey, that’s capitalism for ya. 🤷‍♂️

@Matroska The argument for these boosts is not just about the length of time spent on the games, but also what you are doing in that time.

Older RPGs, like these ones, often require a lot of grind, trying to level up your characters to face later challenges but not advancing the story. If a 60-hour game has only 20-hours of actual story, with the rest spent doing repetitive battles just to get your EXP up to some arbitrary number, I don’t think that’s time well spent.

As for hours spent playing games versus watching trash TV shows, well that’s up to each individual person to decide what they want to do with their time. Everyone has different interests in different things.

Not everyone is a hardcore gamer. Even the people who played these games as kids don’t have the same amount of time as they did back then. Whether that’s due to the increased responsibility of being an adult, or the overwhelming amount of games being published these days that someone might also want to play.

I think these kind of options put into remasters of old RPGs is great. It gives people the choice of how much time they want to spend on a game. A wider array of demographics play games these days, from toddlers to retirees. Putting more difficulty options in games opens them up to more people playing them. If you don’t want to use the boosts, just pretend they aren’t there.

@kyleforrester87 Hahahaha, I love it. 🤣

If people want to complain about FFXVI’s battle system being action-based versus turn-based based on their preferences, I say have at it. But the people saying it’s not a traditional Final Fantasy game have not been looking at the history of the franchise.

They’ve pretty much reinvented the games with each sequel. Games III to VI might have had more incremental changes when it came to mechanics, rather than a complete overhaul. But other than the usual FF mainstays — Chocobos, Cid, spell names, etc. — their stories and settings usually have nothing to do with one another. The most consistent thing about Final Fantasy is how much they change each iteration. Even direct sequels to numbered entries — X-2, XII-2 and 3 — have different games styles. And that’s not to mention the spin-offs and their wildly different gameplay.

Some people just cannot see the difference between opinion and fact.

@Tharsman I agree with you. They are definitely separate products being developed by different studios.

But the conspiracy theory is mostly concerning the fact that it was noticeably missing from Hogwarts Legacy. It actually may have been left out because of the existence of the other game, being released by the same publisher.

But the more likely explanation is that they left it out due to time constraints. The game was already delayed multiple times, and every feature they include adds to development time.

Scalpers are scum of the earth. Not as bad as murderers, mind you . . . but pretty close. 😁

I think I might have developed some mild symptoms of thalassophobia in recent years. I was just playing the Shadow of the Colossus remake, and a couple of the colossus fights — the ones that involved them emerging out of the water — made me feel pretty uneasy.

The first time I noticed this uneasiness was when I watched Marvel’s Eternals (anyone who’s seen the movie will know what I’m referring to). It seems like a more specific version of the phobia, where I mostly just fear large, threatening creatures underwater.

Luckily, I was able to keep playing SotC without too much psychological damage. So I should be fine when I get around to playing Horizon. If it does end up bothering me, this new accessibility feature might help.

What I really need is a feature that removes bugs from games. (No, I don’t mean the glitches in games — though it would be nice not to have those in games either.) I’m strangely not too bad with spiders — I don’t like them, but they disturb me less than many insects and other bug-like critters.

It might be the main reason I haven’t played Hollow Knight yet. I think removing the bugs from that game might make it difficult to play though, being unable to see the player-character or NPCs. 😆

“The game's 'FLESH' system really does make this some of the most satisfying zombie-killing put to the medium. With each slash, bash, and swing, skin and bones are torn, snapped, amputated, and mutilated before your very eyes. Bones jut out of removed legs as you swipe at them with katanas, eyes pop out of sockets as you bash skulls with hammers, and skin will burn away in real time as you wield some deadly acidic knuckle dusters. On the odd occasion, we felt the game could have done with more zombies on-screen at once, but if that was the cost of having highly detailed gore, we think it was well worth the price.”

Sometimes I wonder if people unfamiliar with games would read a paragraph like that and think we were all psychos.😳 Not a criticism in any way, just a funny thought I had.😄

@danlk1ng And that’s the heart of the issue here. The claims that people make against trans people don’t make any sense.

How many cases of assault have been reported by women in bathrooms? What was stopping men from dressing as a woman before? If an effeminate-looking man grew out his hair, would he try to use a woman’s bathroom? If a masculine-looking woman wanted to use a women’s bathroom, would someone have to be at the door to inspect her genitals before she was allowed in? Other than using the toilet and fixing their makeup, what are women doing in the bathroom that’s so private that gender identity matters? What’s stopping a man from entering a woman’s bathroom regardless of his appearance? Will there have to be guards at the door of every bathroom? Would a person have to declare their gender identity before entering?

In other words, what was the risk before transgender people started to be vilified and what’s the risk now?

I think the answer to that is none.

Trans people are people, and “people” includes every person, good or bad. Bad people are going to to do bad things, regardless of their gender, and discriminating against trans people does nothing to fix that. It just makes the lives of trans people harder. Putting trans people in a separate category is pure bigotry.

To me, there are equal distinctions that need to be made on both sides.

Rowling is generally a good person — she wrote books that are loved by many, and she has used her wealth to do good things. But she is on the wrong side of this one particular issue, and she uses her fame and influence to promote her opinions on the matter.

There are also many good trans people and people that defend them. And there are trans people and allies that harass people — they are wrong and should be punished for their despicable acts.

The hate against Rowling is not justified, but the criticism of her opinion of trans people is. The discrimination against trans people as a whole is not justified, but the complaints about harassment are.

All of those things can be true — that’s just how things are. That doesn’t mean that nobody should try to change it.

@NEStalgia Anyone who buys a Switch is very likely to buy Mario Kart.

The game has universal appeal because it’s easy to play for new gamers, and has nostalgia power for gaming veterans. And every day a child that reaches the age that their parents decide they’re old enough to own a Switch has a birthday.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the most common pack-in game in Switch bundles. Pack-in games count toward the overall sales of a game.

As long as Switches keep selling, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe will keep selling.

(Super Mario Bros for the NES and Wii Sports for the Wii are other examples of this phenomenon.)

@Jireland92 Sorry, tagged you in the wrong part of my comment. Fixed it to just be the part that was directed at you, and the many others that share your sentiment. No malice intended, just wanted to put my opinions out there to counteract the views shared by my fellow commenters. ✌️

@viktorcode I thought that was what I said? I am in total agreement with you. Nobody, not even the worst people imaginable (which is not what Rowling is, to be clear) deserve harassment. It’s always a better decision to debate things calmly than to be abusive.

Rowling seems to be a genuinely good person for the most part. Her stance on trans issues just kinda taints her perspective. To be a staunch defender of women’s rights, but not include trans women, is just a weird bit of discrimination.

@OlderSpidey I have no issue with people being rich, especially if it is a reward for making art that people enjoy. I am only concerned about her using her fame to promote opinions that ignore the science and statistics regarding trans people.

@Enigk @johncalmc @Jireland92 Absolutely nobody — even the most vocal people calling for boycotts — ever expected this game not to sell well.

The people that are buying this game include (but are not limited to):

• people that like Harry Potter and know nothing about the controversy
• people that know about the controversy, but don’t care enough to have it affect them
• people that know about the controversy and agree with Rowling
• people (including trans people) that want to boycott the game but love Harry Potter too much not to want to play it

Add all of those together and you get the sales numbers reported in this article. While attempted boycotts never work, I think it’s still important to discuss the issues.

@naruball I fully accept the criticism of that particular statement. I’ve made an edit to my original post to reflect that.

That being said, a person can be right about a lot of things and still be wrong about one thing. (Myself included in this case.)

And you are completely correct, that Twitter (and this comment section 😏) is no place to have discussions as nuanced as these.

@tallythwack @MrMeeeseeeks Harassment — on both sides of the issue — is not acceptable, and today’s social media gives the worst people a metaphorical bullhorn. The idiots that send death threats to Rowling are deplorable, and do nothing to help their cause. But just like she does when she paints every trans woman as a bathroom-stalking predator, people should not paint every activist as a death-threat-sending extremist. Equating the amount of harassment she receives with the harassment trans people live with every day is a false equivalency.

@GrimReaper Don’t worry about J.K. She’s got enough money to hire people to take the harassment for her. She probably hasn’t heard a word of criticism, it all gets filtered out by her people before it reaches her.

Meanwhile, there’s a trans person somewhere, leaving their house, wondering who might want to murder them today, just for being who they are.

Rowling’s residuals from Hogwart’s Legacy alone could be spent making the world a better place. Instead she uses her status to pick on a vulnerable minority group. [EDIT: I wish I did not include the first part of this sentence. I was reacting to the original comment that suggested Rowling buy a yacht to get away from harassment. In such a reactionary statement, I have insinuated that she does not use her money to help people. This is incorrect, and I apologize.]

I really can’t understand people taking the side of a billionaire who can do whatever she wants, versus people that get persecuted just because their gender doesn’t match what they’ve got between their legs. Trans people aren’t hurting anyone, but Rowling’s remarks perpetuate the stigma of people that are already stigmatized.

I judge no-one for buying and enjoying the game. There are even trans people that bought it, just because of their love of the Harry Potter franchise. But actively celebrating transphobia is a bit much.

@GrimReaper Haha, fair enough. I never got around to playing Kingdom Come, but I did hear that it could be rough around the edges.

It’s too bad that it’s hard to convey sarcasm in text. But hey, at least my reply lead to a good punchline. 🤣

@GrimReaper Are you suggesting that they don’t already have quest, AI, and physics specialists? That hiring the person for this job takes away work from other positions at the studio?

I know it’s kinda your thing to find the negative in every article here, but this is a stretch, even for you. 🤪

@rjejr Yeah, like KaijuKaiser said, endgame content usually means extra stuff you can do after completing the main story, like repeatable missions designed for high-level characters.

As of right now, no DLC is announced for FFVXI yet. The Deluxe Edition doesn’t include a Season Pass like XV did at launch. Doesn’t mean they won’t make DLC, as the Yuffie content added to FFVII Remake proves, but I doubt it’ll be the amount of stuff they kept releasing for XV.

That being said, I’m probably gonna wait for a price drop anyway, so that’ll give me enough time to see if they put out any DLC or other updates.

Didn’t watch it.

I’m one of the few who were wondering what anybody saw in the first couple of trailers that was impressive.

It wasn’t until the first press previews came out that made me interested. If it wasn’t going to be turn-based combat, then going full-action combat is a better choice than the combat systems from XV and VII Remake that tried to be somewhere in-between.

The PAX panel was presented poorly, in my opinion, but what they showed looked good enough. I don’t need to know any more about it until reviews are published. And then it will still be a one or two year wait for it to be fully patched and at an affordable price. 🙂

If this were a delay for polish and bug fixes, it wouldn’t be this long. But if they were making major changes to the game, the delay would have to be even longer.

I think this delay could be for two reasons:

• Take out as much of the live service elements as they can without a complete overhaul
• Get the maximum amount of distance from the disastrous State of Play showcase as they can afford, so they can rewrite the marketing narrative

Even if those are the real reasons for the delay, they’re still gonna have a tough time reintroducing the game in February. Even that much of a delay won’t make people forget their first impressions of it.

Most importantly for me, this update has TATE mode. I can finally turn my TV sideways to get a better view of the tables.

Too bad the tables are so expensive. I already own a lot of tables in Pinball Arcade and Pinball FX3, but those games didn’t have a vertical orientation option, despite having it in their Switch versions. Now all I have is the three free tables in this one. I hope they have deep discounts on the rest at some point.

“XDefiant felt more like Hyperscape than Rainbow Six: Siege on the potential hit scale.”

Haha, that’s a pretty damning statement.

Ubisoft taking their original IPs — which were already becoming more and more similar to each other — and homogenizing them further into a generic arena shooter. With microtransactions that are likely even worse than the ones they put in their full-price games.

Sounds like a winner. 😉

This sounds original. Good stuff. I’ll stick this one on a wishlist.

Reading the preview before looking at the trailer, I thought this might be a bit more original, because I thought magic instead of guns meant this was going to have a fantasy setting. Then I saw people jumping off of spaceships and thought well, this is just Destiny with finger-guns instead of actual guns.

But hearing that this is single-player focused with Metroidvania elements has me much more interested. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

Never played an Utawarerumono game before, they didn’t seem appealing to me. But this looks like a traditional turn-based JRPG, so it’s piqued my interest.

Lately, the only thing I think when I hear a game is current-gen only is that the development team had a hard time optimizing it for last-gen, and that means it’ll be 30fps. I know this has only been a few isolated cases so far, but it makes me worried that it might become a trend. I’d much rather a game be optimized for performance than graphics and resolution. Especially important with a racing game.

@Pompey71 Look, I’m not a developer, and I wasn’t at the studio where this update was developed. But I can almost guarantee that “laziness” or “minimal effort” were factors in this — or any other — case. The “cash in” part is correct.

It’s much more likely that the team of people that worked on this upgrade were crunching overtime trying to get this in some kind of release-worthy state. It was upper management and the publisher that were responsible for setting the release date and not delaying it. Management underestimated how much work and people it would take to complete the project. The publisher was only interested in money — how much money in resources and salaries it would take to actually complete the work, and what date they needed to release it on to better benefit the quarterly profits.

I highly doubt that any developer would want to release a shoddy product. Only the number-crunchers, more concerned with appeasing shareholders than setting realistic deadlines, are responsible for games releasing in this kind of state.

I’m already a couple of levels into my Sifu playthrough, so I should get this the next time I boot it up.

But man oh man, are these collectables useless. I’m with @lacerz, these would be great if there was a Home-like space where you could display them. Even a one-room apartment space with a bunch of shelves to place the collectables and some hard-to-get trophies would be enough. Without that, I’d much rather a points reward — even if it’s just 1 point — than have another ugly balloon.

@Beerheadgamer82 Fully agree. Having to use a separate device is pretty dumb. I mean, my iPad is sitting right next to me at all times, so it’s not a big inconvenience, but it would be so much nicer to have that info on the same screen, being able to check Stars campaigns the same way you track trophies.

This will be such a niche product. So much so that I think Sony should go the Limited Run Games route and only manufacture the same amount that it gets in pre-orders. Otherwise, this thing will be gathering dust on the shelves of retailers and in their warehouse.

I’d be curious enough to try 13 again, despite my experience the first time around.

I didn’t like the battle system much, and the complaints about it having a 20-hour tutorial were a bit hyperbolic, but not entirely inaccurate. And then there’s the fact that I got to the second-last chapter of the game and couldn’t progress beyond a certain battle, all because I never upgraded one particular weapon that would have made the fight possible to beat.

In spite of that, it still had enough redeeming qualities to give it another go, now that I know what I’d be getting in to. And after that, checking out the sequels to see what they are like.