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I feel like I've been here before

Comments 110

Re: Hands On: PS Plus Cloud Streaming Is a Game Changer for PS Portal

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@Th3solution I think that's a pretty measured and reasoned response.

I picked Doom eternal as one of my favourite games knowing it would be the acid test of whether it can manage any game and in my view it cannot - but that's what I expected and I'm not sure how that will ever be overcome.

I generally use my portal with the PS5 playing Stardew or Balatro.

Re: Hands On: PS Plus Cloud Streaming Is a Game Changer for PS Portal

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Personally I'm not sure i can see a use case for me with this, even if it works perfectly.

I currently use it as a second screen while others have the main screen right now, I haven't tried it at all away from my home - i just can't imagine that would be an enjoyable experience.

The only thing I can think of is possibly when we go away and are staying somewhere we know has decent Internet.

**edit** just tried it out and the latency issue is just too big for games that require pace and accuracy. The game I played looked great otherwise but it was near impossible to control. Slower games than Doom eternal obviously might fare better

Re: Kadokawa Confirms Sony Acquisition Interest

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I'm not sure the Bloodborne remake/remaster is contingent on this. Doesn't Sony own the IP anyway and Bluepoint have shown themselves more than capable of doing a stellar job with the From games.

Bloodborne so needs a resolution boost, I love it dearly but in my head looks pristine in a nightmarish way but booting it up it looks far rougher than I remember.

Re: PS Portal Will Allow Cloud Streaming in New Beta Update

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@Luigia I'm glad people are getting use out of it. I maintain it is a bit of an odd device and would have preferred something with a way to play natively but I can see the direction the wind is blowing.

As the tech improves there will be a smaller and smaller percentage of people that care enough for it to matter until we are streaming everything.

Re: Vast Majority of Gamers Say Elden Ring DLC Should Never Have Been Nominated for Game of the Year

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@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare I use Geoff as the metaphorical dog to kick because it is his baby.

Ultimately I guess none of us really knows what the full process is but having a panel makes sense - it deflects some blame away from any one individual.

I think games journalism has long since failed to represent gamers. They often overlook things that matter and while getting wound up about things gamers rarely if ever care about.

They have certainly become way too forgiving in regards to the release state of AAA games and in my view should be far harsher in general.

Re: PS Portal Will Allow Cloud Streaming in New Beta Update

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@LogicStrikesAgain I don't know what to tell you, i've tried streaming in various forms and it is only ever ok at best. Not a patch on native and i wouldn't even consider bothering away from my home.

@Luigia yes I'm lan connected but there is often a noticeable little stutter with streaming and cloud gaming is always going to be subject to any variability in the connection where ever it comes from in the network.

@Takoweevil sorry boss, no idea what you are on about.

Re: PS Portal Will Allow Cloud Streaming in New Beta Update

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I bought a Portal because the wife felt we weren't spending enough time in the same room as a family, we have quite different interests.

It is fine and for the most part it does what it is supposed to, nothing spectacular, can certainly tell I'm streaming rather than playing natively but it still does what I need.

However, I have no interest in cloud based streaming. Even with 500mbps Internet the lag is too much and the break down of the image happens too often for me to enjoy it.

Maybe Portal will prove to be different but I doubt it.

Re: Do You Really Want Devs to Make Lower Budget, More Original Games for PS5?

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@rusty82 nope, that's a thing people say to hide behind saying things that are factually incorrect.

Some people are of the opinion that the earth is flat, they are wrong.

Your characterisation of 'gamers', simply by virtue of being so broad sweeping as to include all people who believe this is also wrong. You can call it what you want the statement is false.

I'm not at all saying a person doesn't know their own mind I'm saying opinion can be in opposition to objective fact and is therefore wrong.

Anyway, this is well off topic and I'm out.

Re: Do You Really Want Devs to Make Lower Budget, More Original Games for PS5?

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@rusty82 the idea that 5 is average is just not true.

There are loads of games that never get a review and the bigger, supposedly more polished games all get reviewed and rarely go below 7. A 6 for a AAA game is an absolute disaster. This skews the average significantly.

The major problem is that people only have so much time to game and if you have 10 games that score 8, 9 or 10 with the length of games now many people won't even finish those, so your average gamer will see a 7 and not give that game a second thought unless it has a hook for them personally.

Re: Do You Really Want Devs to Make Lower Budget, More Original Games for PS5?

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This is really difficult. In theory I want all the creative freedom for developers to try new things, make smaller interesting experiences that push the boundaries of creativity and potentially open up the next big IP.

But the truth is that 100 studios will close and maybe 1 of those games will break through. 99 will definitely shutter because hardly anyone actually buys them and when they do they complain about the lack of AAA features.

The boundaries of graphical fidelity keep getting pushed at great expense without any great gains while young gamers trend towards mobile, all in one devices.

So few games meet publisher expectations and that tells me that the profit margins are just not high enough and this applies to everyone bar Nintendo.

In short the industry just doesn't know which direction to pull in. The big publishers aren't supporting smaller projects and if they do they shutter the studio, when a big project bombs it costs the publishers hundreds of millions and the studio gets shuttered.

Things just cannot continue like this.

Re: PS5 Pro Image Quality Issues Reported for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

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@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare yeah but the ps5 launched with a load of crashing issues, the Xbox series consoles had features that didn't work out the box, the Switch had and still has Joy-con issues, Steamdeck launched in a pretty poor state with the OS not really fit for purpose and the list goes on.

The machines are more complex, the games are more complex and they can all be updated in people's homes. So the money men can insist on a release date and testing can be dialled back to save money while error reports are collected from early adopters.

It is all about rubbish and I'm not defending it, it just is the reality of the business these days.

If people need to avoid it, then hold off new stuff for 3 to 6 months when most of it should be fixed.

Re: PS5 Pro Image Quality Issues Reported for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

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Ah the joys of new tech...

It'd be lovely if everything worked straight out the box but that's very rarely the case.

PC players encounter this stuff all the time. One random update or new piece of hardware and stuff that had been working seamlessly for a decade is suddenly more broken than ever.

A bit frustrating but I'm sure it will be fixed in due course the same as DLSS got better and better with time.

Re: Review: PS5 Pro - An Impressive Yet Inconsistent Upgrade

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I bought the Pro kind of knowing that it wasn't going to blow my mind and well that turned out to be true.

The games look great, the compromises are less than ever and most titles are super fluid to play.

But in truth if you don't have them side by side you might not even be able to tell.

£700 is a lot to come to this conclusion and while I was always going to end up with one - I just can't help myself, I absolutely didn't need it.

So I personally rate it a 6 or 7 out of 10 depending how I feel on a given day. I like it best when I feel like there is no compromise being made with it, I think it is at its worst when something like Hogwarts Legacy is trying to shoehorn in new modes with even more flashy graphics but still leaving you with that 30fps choice on the table - because you still feel like you are losing out on something.

One element I love is the smaller form factor. It does look a bit like a warped cable box but the smaller, lighter unit is so much nicer than the og model....

Re: PS5 Pro Enhanced, PS Store Situation Devolves into Confusing Mess

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PlayStation handling of a digital library has always been a nightmare and this just adds another layer.

It is often hard to tell if you have even bought a game on the store, it is totally inconsistent, games that need discs don't always show it because you also have digital dlc, no way to tell the difference between different levels of ps plus for games etc.

So this comes with precisely zero surprise attached to it and just adds another fun layer.

Re: Resistance's Release on PS Plus Premium Proves There's Still a Fanbase for the FPS

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@Korgon Nintendo are very much their own thing though. They are able to release and re-release the same nes and snes games over and again and people (including me) bite every time.

It think the difference is they are low effort emulation jobs. Where as PS3 on PS5 is much harder and potentially doesn't move the needle as most notable games from that era have already had a re-release.

Re: No Xbox Games Are Off the Table for Release on PS5, Says Phil Spencer

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I don't think that is any clearer than it was before.

I'm of the belief that Phil isn't getting final say anymore and so it is very obviously him just saying 'these things haven't been decided and are basically out of my hands.'

You could further translate this as ' if the big wigs and the money men say it will be so, then it will be so.'

I expect them to start selling dormant IP soon.

Re: Hands On: Spider-Man 2 All in on Ray Tracing for PS5 Pro

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@SJBUK you are probably right. Although it all sounds a bit 'you don't know you are born' the experience definitely required a lot of patience and what we have now was totally unimaginable back then.

I used to dream of handhelds that could play full games and consoles that could pluck the best games from the arcade and replicate them perfectly.

Re: Hands On: Spider-Man 2 All in on Ray Tracing for PS5 Pro

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@SJBUK I had the Amstrad CPC 464 with the built in tape deck. Not as well loved as the speccy but I felt it was a better machine for games.

All those 5 1/4' discs were at school or on a friend's bbc electron.

Sometimes I wonder how I ever kept going with the hobby. The tapes were a nightmare!

Re: Hands On: Spider-Man 2 All in on Ray Tracing for PS5 Pro

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@Max_the_German you know, I have no idea. I may have at one point but that arcane knowledge has been lost to the past much like all the commands that I used to use to play in dos!

I only played the shareware version of DooM and that was on my mates 386. This was also the era of Championship Manager, monkey island and many other point and click adventures!

Re: Hands On: Spider-Man 2 All in on Ray Tracing for PS5 Pro

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@Raffles I thought I'd test this claim with pc part picker. Your build with seriously cheaping out on important parts like mobo, power supply and cpu cooler still hits £1000 and that's without an OS, a controller, a mouse and keyboard and it assumes you are going to play on your tv, not a monitor.

That's not an insignificant difference in my view.

Re: Dragon Age: The Veilguard Sales Keep Pace with Dragon's Dogma 2, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth in UK

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There is only so much room for games that require 50+ hours of people's time.

If a game doesn't catch the zeitgeist and simply reviews well it won't make huge numbers any more because the week after the next big game is out.

Next year will be worse. GTA VI - if it releases in 2025 will crush the chances of any other big game making decent sales as people put hundreds of hours into RockStar's latest game.