MrPeanutbutterz

@DeepEyes So they removed the sexist trash. Good.

@Troubbble It's a minor part of the game and its mechanics, and it was removed because it caters to horny dorks who don't have healthy relationships with women and only see them as sex objects.

Goodbye and good riddance to this sort of trash.

@Troubbble What's different and "silly" about this version?

Genuine question as I never played the original (outside of playing it at a friend's circa 2006 and being unable to read the text on his CRT).

@StonyKL Having played the original Crash Bandicoot again a while ago, they're really not old school difficult at all.

The audio needs work. Can barely hear when he normal punches enemies, yet some of his death yelps are piercing.

@Frmknst If you play it completely blind it's a hell of a lot longer than 8 hours.

And some of us play games to you know, have fun and are happy to replay existing content.

@UltimateOtaku91 How did you look at more than three articles and not realise it's satirical?

@RubyCarbuncle They're not talking about Switch 2 because it hasn't been announced yet, and it certainly hasn't been announced at a controversial price.

@nedbvai You reckon owning a business makes you a grown man? Lol.

C'mon, what did you mean by "alarm bells"? Is the grown man too chicken to say what he really means?

@nedbvai You reckon it was aimed at the under 7s who played checks notes the PS1 demo disc with the T-rex in the mid 1990s?

@SlipperyFish I quite liked the gadgets in Rivals, ditto the handling to the point where I was playing Hot Pursuit Remastered and it didn't hit the same.

HWU2 was about a tenner on PSN recently. Sorry I didn't pick it up as I do enjoy noodling about in HWU1 regularly and 2 would suit the same sort of casual half hour sessions.

I wasn't aware of that about the devs! Had high hopes for Solar Crown as I quite like the WRC games (once they came to PS5 and moved to 60FPS at least), but alas.

@LikelySatan Oops, yeah that one. Looks nuts for sure.

@nedbvai My wife bought the game for herself, and we're playing a separate save file each. Oh, and your childish response just further cements that yes, you are in fact still a child.

Tell me, what are these "alarm bells", exactly? What are you implying?

@nomither6 They're cheap plastic tat designed to appeal to insatiable consumerism, and bring almost nothing of their own to the table.

I say "almost" because the one thing they do bring is the destruction of memorable character designs - look at the silhouette of any number of famous characters, they're still easily to recognise. Now look at the silhouette of the equivalent Funko - generic stick body with a generic block head.

Oh, and the bug eyes on them are hideous as well.

Precisely as expected.

I've a friend who's a clown for this garbage and sure enough, he's playing this game as if it was some sort of lifesblood.

@nedbvai Yeah you're still emotionally a child though.

So I'll go enjoy the kid's game, and you enjoy being a kid.

@nedbvai Your original comment says you are yeah.

Next question.

The "Clank bits" are by some distance my least favourite bits of R&C games, so a whole game of him is about as appealing as a dental extraction.

@SlipperyFish Yeah honestly I approached the Criterion NFS games as extensions/offshoots of Burnout instead of NFS games. And I rather enjoyed NFS Rivals as well - in fact I still have it installed on my PS5 external hard drive despite originally playing it at PS4 launch. 2015... I played the ass out of that as I had recently moved, started a new job and wanted a proper "switch brain off for an hour at night" sort of game and really enjoyed it. Got bored of Heat and Payback in no time, but did finish Unbound.

Didn't realise Automodelista was rare! I think one of the boys has it in his attic...

HWU2 isn't a bad game per se, but it feels like change for the sake of change, to add a list of "new features" to the back of the box. Being able to jump adds nothing to the game, neither does being able to tweak stats. The open-ish map checkpoint races are no fun. HWU1 was a much purer experience while 2 has these superfluous bits that add nothing. Definitely still worth a buy these days with the dearth of racers and the fact it's frequently super cheap.

Gah yeah I had my eye on Solar Crown but have been burned far too many times with pre-orders, so I said I'd wait and here we are. Hope it gets fixed for sure.

@Shinnok789 Your post is about the difficulty the kiddos had with the game and mention age ratings three times... so what was your point that I missed, exactly?

@LiamOliver I've the same complaint about this too. And Horizon. And God of War.

Returnal >>> Balatro >>>>>>>>>>>> Hades. Everything else here bored me to tears (maybe I just really like Housemarque and played the ass out of Returnal because of that, not because it was a Rogue-like).

Utterly joyless, horrid games. Can't imagine a big screen adaptation would be any better.

@Shinnok789 You're aware that the age rating is entirely to do with how appropriate the themes and content are for children, and absolutely nothing to do with the difficulty, right?

@LikelySatan Ha, yeah it really is. The sequel wasn't quite as good, but still enjoyable.

Have indeed seen DeathRace. Bit of me thought "would it kill you guys to use anti-grav crafts" lol.

@SlipperyFish Lol, I'll happily attend a TED Talk about racing games.

Funnily enough, the first NFS game I played was a demo of the original on PS1, and then... nothing until Hot Pursuit in 2010. I only hopped in on that because Criterion were developers, and it's also the main reason I got MW 2012 at launch. But I can see why it's not liked by many.

I've had most of those games you listed - bar Automodelista. I remember looking at it in a store but was neck-deep in university exams at the time so never got around to it. PGR4 was one of the reasons I bought a 360 to go with my PS3 (used to play PGR3 heaps at a friend's, and their grand daddy MSR). The epochal FM4 came with my 360, so was happy with that.

Am a big fan of most of the Burnout games too. Burnout Revenge was the first game I bought digitally on my Series X.

Actually the last racer I went all in was Hot Wheels Unleashed. Enjoyed it so much I 100%'d it on PS4, PS5, and Series X 😂 HWU2 felt like a step in the wrong direction.

Redout 2 has really messy track design, and I enjoyed Pacer until the AI craft started using flashbangs that actually blind the player - you can tell the devs only ever tested this on a little monitor at a workstation, and not sitting in a dark room in front of a 65" OLED.

Racing games are indeed in poor health at the minute. Solar Crown looks like a swing and a miss. Probably gonna pick up Super Woden GP2 next. But might fire up DriveClub for the first time in a while now. Cheers!

@nedbvai Garbage take. That's like saying a Pixar movie is only for kids. And the irony of you saying that yourself and your friends are 23 and wouldn't play this - 23 years olds are very much still children.

9/10. A few niggles stop it being 10/10.

Astro just doesn't have the same nuance and control as Mario does in the Galaxy games. There's a distinct lack of enemies. It's a celebration of PlayStation, sure, but it also feels like a giant advert at times. And some of those adverts are for abandoned franchises - yes, I am a Wipeout fanboy and yes again, I am salty about how they've treated the franchise.

Most egregious is the regular levels are brain-dead easy to the point where they're (at times) unengaging. Even the challenge levels aren't particularly challenging.

But it is brimming with creativity, joy, wonderful visuals and audio. I sincerely hope Sony wake up to the fact that we need more games like this.

@SlipperyFish Yeah my main racers are usually GT, a rally sim, twitchy arcade racer like Wipeout or Burnout, and some form of Mario Kart. Though one of my all-time favourites is NFS Most Wanted 2012 - not necessarily an unpopular game, but one I seem to hold in higher regard than most.

I actually bought a Series X just for FH4 and 5, boy was that a letdown. Hands you hyper cars after an hour and you can drive them through stone country walls at 400km/h... yawn. The Series X did afford me the chance to revist Sonic And Sega All-stars Racing Transformed at 60FPS, so there was that at least.

@SlipperyFish Yeah I agree it's better than Forza Horizon in that regard at least (FH for my money is one of the most overrated franchises to exist in gaming).

@lacerz Yeah trophies are still present on my profile.

Wanted to like this game but the handling is eh.

Yeah had one hard crash as I was messing around with fluid in one of the levels.

@DennisReynolds I grew up dirt poor in the 1980s, and everyone had a 50Hz TV then (I live in a PAL region, hence 50, not 60Hz). In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a TV of any description that couldn't do 50Hz, let alone them not being common in the late 1990s.

@zhoont I'm expressing an opinion, Jesus.

@zhoont Seeing as the worst part of Fallout 4 is the base building and the worst part of Metro is the gameplay (the controls for Exodus are so bad they're borderline criminal), that's made sure I won't even visit the game's page for a look.

Looking forward to finally playing this at a locked 60FPS on my €1,200 PS6.

@Luna-Harmony Were you playing games in the early 90s? Adjusted for inflation this gen is miles away from being the most expensive ever, especially when you factor in the price of consoles like the 3DO and Neo Geo

@RubyCarbuncle Have you seen it first hand yourself? Must be cool to work for CNET.

@OldGamer999 It's called intelligence use of hardware. Raw resolution ain't quite the be all and end all like it used to be.

@OldGamer999 Considering that they have dedicated hardware for fancy AI upscaling...

@WiiWareWave Have you played through Rebirth in Performance Mode? The IQ and resolution are definitely hot garbage.

@nessisonett To play PS5 games? Does the existence of this thing make the PS5 null and void?

No, no it doesn't

@McBurn Doubtful the standard PS5 gets a price cut - it's gone up in price since launch, and slashing the price of it further while trying to sell the Pro console for almost 300 bucks more ain't gonna fly.

@Fallingshadow Would love to know what percentage of the user base is trying to install 1,000 games that we can "do without" this limit.

(Hint - it's effectively zero).

This seems like a mistake. Safe to assume that the 2TB is adding 100 quid or so to the price of this thing.

It's also safe to assume that the target market for the Pro is the enthusiast, many of whom will already own an SSD expansion.

@Flaming_Kaiser That has nothing to do with what I said.

@PuppetMaster It's literally got six times the install base to sell to in its launch week vs. what Rift Apart had.

And no, it's nothing like saying what you just said.

@PuppetMaster Eh, no, I'm not.

Tell me this - how does people being fans of the franchise since the PS2 games negate the fact that at Rift Apart's release in June 2021 was to an install base of about 9.5 million consoles vs. Astro Bot's release this week to an install base of circa 60 million consoles?

Astro Bot has a clear and distinct advantage here that (according to the limited scope of this article) wasn't capitalised on.