Medic_alert

Xbox fans are concerned because despite some of the defence of the brand in recent months this as much as just about anything highlights the Xbox strategy going forward.

I say Xbox strategy, I should probably say lack of Xbox strategy and the final push to become Microsoft game studios publishing.

@__Seraph I disagree with quite a chunk of your statement. Sony's games have held their price for much longer this gen - digital in particular maintains a £70 price point with reductions to £55 from time to time. You can buy games physically cheaper but that also applies to many Nintendo games - Mario Party Jamobree is currently £37 for instance.

Digitally they do see less price drops but there are some and many Nintendo first party games drop to £33 on a fairly frequent basis now.

£8 to get the update for BotW or TotK or you get it as part of NSO. Hardly a fortune and something Sony have tried to do in a similar way with their upgrade path.

To say the remake of Link's awakening remains a gameboy game is utterly disingenuous and shows to me that your comment isn't made in good faith at all. The game is rebuilt from the ground up, controls, graphics, sound, everything.

The price is too high for both.

That said I fully expect to get my money worth from both.

These subs are amazing when the games you want to play are rolling in month after month but if the things you want aren't on them you are left with an extra expense and still needing to pay top dollar to buy the game.

I've said for a long time that this sort of thing would have been a dream come true as a child. My year's worth of gaming money into a sub that gives me hundreds of things to play would have been so perfect, more time and generally much higher threshold for rubbish games.

As an adult, they only work for my sporadically and if I was struggling for cash then I'd be cutting back on them and just hitting the backlog.

Very unfortunate. But lean into it. The game is now in the news cycle where it might not otherwise have been and either through sympathy or another tactic, use this as a way to get some attention and sales.

I'd be tweeting Phil Spencer at this point trying to get some free press.

So many indie games get buried regardless of shadow drops though.

That's a big hit to the PSVR2 gamers... I know there aren't many of us but still.

Just confirms my decision not to renew in June I think.

Fun game, gets a bit stale, but a battle peggle always had a chance to be decent

@CutchuSlow that's why I used the word 'span'.

End of ps3 to end of PS4 would span 1 gen, end of ps4 to end of ps5 would span 2 generations.

2 games in the franchise and 6 releases all in the span of less than 2 generations.

I suppose if you count PC you could argue 8 releases. Blimey!

I thought it was really boring. I have tried 3 times to get into it and just can't break through how boring it is to play.

I have only just finished the first remaster of MW2....

Not sure i can be bothered with MW3 again to be honest.

Just not the same.

Lots of people noticed! It was the first thing my brother in law said to me about it!

It will be another one of those things that will vanish in pretty short order, hardly anyone will support it after the first year or so.

And it isn't going to have the applications that made Kinect a success away from gaming.

Got to agree that calling it a spiritual successor to Bloodborne seems way off at this point.

That's what we all thought when we saw that trailer but for many the wind has been truly taken from those sails because no Bloodborne title would be described as having 'matches'.

I'm still intrigued, but like most of that direct, most of what had me giddy with excitement has been let down in the detail.

Until pricing reared its ugly head i thought it was absolutely banging, pure 10/10.

I don't pay 70 for my games as it is. I definitely won't be paying 80.

My initial feeling on seeing Mario Kart for £75 was just to bin off the idea of getting a Switch 2 altogether.

I'm a bit more unsure now but I can't get my head round the idea of paying those prices several times a year.

I have already cut back on the PS games I buy and I buy virtually nothing on Xbox because of game pass.

I can afford it no issue, I just don't want to at that price.

@themightyant I hadn't seen that about the online pack.

That softens the blow somewhat I guess - especially as I'm unlikely to play both of them right through again.

Hmmmm, going to be interesting to see how this gets received in the next couple of months/years.

@themightyant seen anything on the price of those upgrade packs yet?

I'm intrigued as to where they pitch that. The £10 Sony upgrades have tempted me in but I'm not sure I'd go much beyond that.

The Switch sold a tonne to gamers who are more casual. It had a unique concept and was pretty cheap.

The console price is fine in my view but these games are no longer an impulse purchase and for me this will damage sales hugely.

There is just not enough here for the masses to pay a premium over.

I don't expect it to surpass 80m units without a price cut to games and the console.

Doom 2016 is in my view as near a perfect game as they come.

I found Eternal fiddly by comparison and while I still had a good time, by the time I reached the DLC I was done.

My worry with Dark Ages was that it would stray too far from the simplicity and fun of the first into too many systems and ideas that ultimately force your hand in combat and take away a lot of the fun.

I'm glad I have gamepass to give it a try without a purchase but I'm keeping my fingers firmly crossed that it sweeps all my fears away...

This games is so good it almost ruined every other game for me.

Dark, disgusting, intriguing, challenging and immensely cool.

One of the best games ever and deserves a graphics overhaul for the modern day.

Cool idea to extend battery life a bit. Our remote for the tv has it and hardly ever needs a charge.

The proof will be how efficient it is and so how long it extends battery life.

@Kidfunkadelic83 my recommendation if you don't mind digital is just get the android version.

It is such a pick up and play in any moment sort of game it is definitely worth having on your phone.

If you are looking at physical then I'd go Switch for the portability.

The collectors market for video games is totally absurd.

Literally a non-functioning piece of plastic with a physical value of pennies and people want it like some sort of collectors item.

I guess it saves them from ending up in a landfill somewhere and rotting in the ground.

When I saw it my first thought was she looks like she took a shotgun blast to the face.

This game is going to be so creepy.

@LikelySatan I've cleared out all of London bar Westminster and my gang skills are all full, just trying to pick up the last skill points to max out both characters.

This is my 4th time trying to play the game and it has finally clicked but I have also decided I won't 100% it now. Too boring.

Given I'm playing Assassin's creed syndicate now, I might get to Shadows in a decade...

I bought one, found the performance just slightly off and decided to buy a Steamdeck instead while selling the portal.

I'm just not sold on the streaming thing at all even if the portal is pretty good.

Get it on PSVR 2!

Hasn't it already been confirmed that they have changed 'that bit'? I thought i read recently that it wasn't going to play out the same way and Joel would be in more of the show?

Maybe I dreamed that....

It would be weird though, because it is the catalyst for the whole story.

Hmmmm, not sure here.

I found TLOU 2 to be too on the nose with its revenge themes and the 'eye for an eye leaves everyone blind' plot. It wasn't clever and in my view became too drawn out and I didn't buy the moment of minor redemption at the end.

If this follows the same sort of pattern, I feel it could end up metaphorically clubbing you over the nose with its message on a topic which is very individual to everyone.

I'm an atheist myself but I have a real human interest in religion and beliefs and why and how people follow them, so always open to a new take - the problem is i haven't heard any new ones in forever.

@Cry_Zero yeah I know but the next one is the mp one I think and I will probably never play it which is a shame because I love the world and lore.

One of the best games I have played on PS5 and now a little bit better! The Ashtray maze in particular is a massive highlight.

I'm still disappointed that the next game is a mp only title and I don't know if we should expect a load more from this universe given the poor profitability of them....

@gaston the way i see it, is you backing up my point. - it is too hard to make money on any given VR title and so a fragmented hardware market makes that more difficult exactly because it hasn't moved out of the niche space.

VR could really do with just one headset that works with everything right now.

Get the whole library of games in one spot and let that grow from there.

It is such good tech and is a transformative gaming experience when done well but there just isn't enough software out there and certainly not enough to support multiple hardware manufacturers.

Microsoft are all but done with physical media at this point. The writing was on the wall with Hi-Fi Rush, Grounded and Pentiment, but now Avowed has no physical and none of the ports have had a physical copy.

MS are almost exclusively digital now, with seemingly Activision and Bethesda holding on to physical media for now.

Another vote for buying this and probably day 1.

Loved the simple fun gameplay with the perfect aesthetic of the era. I don't have many platinums but i do have Robocop!

Nice surprise!

I had one from pretty early in the life cycle but never found the machine particularly compelling, albeit that it arrived at a time in my life when other things took more of my time.

I preferred the og Xbox personally.

Genuinely great game even for non-racing fans. Lots of fun and the rewind mechanic makes it all very forgiving.

I'm sure this will sell by the bucket load at full price and a tonne more on sale down the line and I'm almost certain Xbox are ready to give up on physical all together by next gen - they aren't doing proper physical releases on Xbox let alone anywhere else.

Xbox being an all digital, 3rd party publisher for PS is not what I foresaw at the start of this gen.

Best selection in months!

I will actually add and install these. Possibly even play them too!

If you are interested just hold fire.

It is great, but there isn't masses of software on it and it is obviously struggling.

My view is that there won't be a PSVR3 and that this one will be offloaded at bargain prices in a couple of years and the games cheaper too.

A good end of gen purchase.

This is an odd story where it is hard to see where the marketing ends and the true potential of the tech starts.

I did wonder if over time porting a game with AI might be a thing. Not in the way described above bit literally taking code for a game on one platform and re-writing it for another - this doesn't feel like a huge leap to me with enough data put into the system and would be amazing for making games accessible for use on future hardware.

I got my Pro day 1, I managed to get hold of a disc drive and I bought a few Pro enhanced games to put it through its paces.

I can honestly say that it is one of my least favourite pieces of gaming hardware I have ever owned.

The diminishing returns are just too great now to warrant the price tag.

@thefourfoldroot1 I mean go back to the series.

After playing a couple of the Yakuza games and enjoying them, I have had no desire to ever go back to them again.

This scoring 7s hasn't changed my mind.

I may try LAD one day seeing as that changed the formula up a bit.

Does it really matter any more? You'll still get 100 patches before it is complete anyway

@get2sammyb I don't think gamepass on PS would be the same as on Xbox.

I imagine it would be similar to other 3rd party sub services i.e. Just their games, because there is no way they could pay third parties to put their games on other platforms - way too complex.

There might be a tier that has the PC version of gamepass though as well as the specific PS version.

It feels like the last domino falling to me.

FromSoft who will tell everyone who will listen that the integrity of their games requires there be no accessibility options are now going to smash that integrity with a microtransaction model.

Is there anyone of note left now not doing this junk?

@MrGawain gotta agree with you here. Maybe just me growing out of games in general but I'm struggling to engage with anything right now.

All of it is more money for Sony without really having to do a thing so it's an entirely winning position for them.

As Xbox's hardware business shrinks and they make record profits selling games elsewhere it is hardly a surprise to see certain sections of the gaming community try and spin this as a negative for Sony.

However I think it is just people trying to cope with the changes and trying to make it seem like a Sony problem while everything is rosey in the Xbox garden.

@SrpskaArtilerija no there isn't. One gen difference in both cases, very little changes in either with maybe some minor new modes.

Other than the Wii U selling appallingly which I mentioned in my og comment it is just the same.