RBRTMNZ

1.5 years of 48 hour weeks is insane. People cannot do good work like that. Their staff will accomplish the same amount this way while being more miserable.

I decided that for 2025 I would only sub to PS Plus in the months when I wanted the free games. I subscribed just two months. The quality of the free games has dropped like crazy.

@Oram77 how would they know that when only the first hour has been previewed?

Yes because the developers making non-game pass games are treated so wonderfully. I’ve never heard about crunch at any studio besides those making games for game pass.

@Can-You-Believe-Sith Raises hand Me! I will be using YouTube and guides.

Have they mentioned the performance targets for the base PS5?

I won’t be sold until they confirm 60fps on the base PS5.

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare No you're being extremely clear about what you're saying. It's the implication of what you're saying that seems to be confusing you rather than me. You're even now calling what Microsoft is doing greed but also seemingly implying that it doesn't count as greed just because the gains are not immediate.

That there was a reason for the greed, perhaps even a smart reason, does not mean that this was not a greedy act.

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare it’s surprising to me that you don’t see that your comment is supporting what I said about greed rather than refuting it.

Microsoft is not satisfied with their healthy and profitable businesses so they’re willing to ruin thousands of lives to put all that money on the AI lotto ticket. That is greed. Ruining peoples lives to go from obscenely rich to even more obscenely rich is greed. When it’s never enough money and you’re willing to hurt other to get more that is the textbook definition of greed.

Beyond that the fact that the business they’re willing to destroy lives to increase their investment in is currently primarily known for making critical mistakes, ruining the environment, costing jobs, and helping Israel commit genocide makes this beyond greed. It’s evil. Microsoft is an evil greedy corporation.

These layoffs didn’t happen because of GP failing. They happened because of greed. Xbox is more profitable than its ever been and Microsoft is obscenely profitable. All these people beating their various hobby horses are just taking attention away from the actual problem…corporate greed.

PS Plus is fine but not good enough to justify continuous subscription so I just pick up a month whenever there is a free game I am interested in and will try to play a couple of games that are on extra during the month.

To each their own but I felt like this game pulled off exactly what it was going for. It is a charming and adorable cat adventure. Perhaps there is a cap on how good that type of game can score but considering that it is the best cat based adventure in gaming, I would give it a 8/10.

@PlatinumMikey I’m stacked for two year and tend to pay $9/month so I’m not concerned. Either way that’s a weird comment to make when the leading story in gaming news right now is another price increase for games and the beginning of charging more for physical media. I know Sony has not increased prices yet but they will for sure when Ghost drops.

@PlatinumMikey You know I am still allowed to own games right? I own hundreds. They just sit there never to be touched again because I have a constant stream of new nearly free games to play but I do own hundreds.

@PlatinumMikey Meh, I have access to hundreds of games so it really doesn't matter to me that they eventually leave the service after I have beaten them and if I ever do want to buy them again I can do so at a heavy discount by the time the leave subscription services. As for cost you're lying to yourself if you really think you're getting the better deal. Between GP and PS+ I have spent $64 this year and played 22 games with a total sale value of almost $400 this year and an MSRP of over $600. That is an 89% discount.

At the end of the day it is all a personal choice. I hope you're as happy with choosing ownership as I am with choosing value and access to hundreds of great games.

@PlatinumMikey They’re equally fun whether I own them or play them through a subscription so I prefer whatever is cheaper.

Game Pass really is the best deal in gaming.

I’ll never understand why developer keeping striving for bigger and more when gamers seem to universally want tight highly curated content.

For example Ghost of Tsushima had 62 Mongol camps. It would have been equally good if it only had 50 or even 40. Everything else is superfluous and just blows up development budgets.

This design ethos is the exact reason I am never able to fully love any RPGs. It kind of locks you into a single play style. I would prefer to have all options available and use my agency to decide which I am going to use in the moment rather than using my player agency to decide on a build that forces me to use the same tactics in every scenario.

@get2sammyb I didn't think you were being political. I thought you were just making a pithy joke based on the setup of the game. I understood the point you were making and my response was not intended to be a rebuke your joke. It's more that I just never miss an opportunity to talk ***** on cops for all the real world harm they do.

@Cornpop76 I have never once in my life seen the police intervene in an ongoing crime. Crimes do not tend to happen right in front of cops.

Cops are ill equipped for crime prevention or mitigation because they are not a part of the communities they work in. Their actual role is to investigate crimes that have already happened but they’re so bad at that in the city that I live in that they have illegally stopped reporting stats on their effectiveness. And that failure is despite my city’s police department being the fifth largest military on earth.

Cops are not good guys

2018 and Ragnarok are top 10 games all time for me and Valhalla is not too far behind. I am the core audience for any GoW game and even I would completely ignore a live service GoW. Even if it was free to play I still wouldn't give it a shot.

@Frmknst definitely Ori by far.

A PS5 handheld would cost at least $1000/£850.

@Rob3008 And way less than half the people playing on Xbox are subscribed to Game Pass. Counting PC it's probably less than 5% of the game's potential market. I feel like if anything GP probably helped with word of mouth.

@naruball I’m saying that the success of an expensive and completely inessential product like the PSP shows that Sony fanboys will happily eat up whatever tripe Sony throws their way just like Nintendo fanboys.

@naruball Dude the PSP is constantly sold out when there options that do the same thing for less than half the price and the steam deck that does the same thing and is a handheld gaming pc costs the same price.

@PuppetMaster The port of Luigi’s Mansion 2 sold 1.5 million copies and has been available for only a month. 1.5 for the only Sony developed game this year is a massive disappointment.

@PuppetMaster I'm not sure claiming it is a $60 AA game is the positive argument you think it is but beyond that your analysis is flawed. It was 100% marketed like a AAA blockbuster from the biggest gaming company. The numbers are disappointing.

This strikes me as disappointing for the only first party release of the year. Star Wars Outlaws sold a similar amount and that was considered a failure. Luigi's Mansion sold like 15 million.

@Secryt Name one single game that has been review bombed for failing to include diversity.

The reason you only see reporting on this specific type of review bombing is because all of the people doing review bombing are the bigots.

I don't understand the people defending this. They have just realized they can sell $50 DLC length games like Miles Morales instead of $20 DLC. This is absolutely a bad move for consumers. Screaming about it is weird too but defending a company is weird bootlicker behavior.

The volume of people complaining about too many soulslikes is way higher than the actual amount of soulslikes.

@ATaco the venn diagram of gamers who review bomb and gamers who complain about DEI is a circle.

@McTwist Their actions already discredited them. When you act like an incel people are going to call you an incel. Some people deserve to be shamed.

I have played DMC and Bayonetta. They're fine. The combat feels super repetitive to me. In every battle you're generally just throwing out as many different combos as possible, not in any intentional way based on situation, but instead to increase variety and run up the score. It rarely if ever matters what you choose to do at any given time. GoW on high difficulty requires me to be incredibly intentional and thoughtful about using my full tool kit and making sure to use the right moves in the right situations.

I would tell you to try GoW on high difficulty so that you can experience how perfectly designed the combat can be but some of the things you wrote make me feel like you have a skill issue. You can be in complete control of the action in GoW as long as you're smart about spacing and flexible in your approach. The things you wrote make it sound like you struggled with both at standard difficulty and like you're mad at the game for asking you to master these skills.

@clvr oh we are not a same page here. I would give the game a 10 and think it’s not just a masterpiece but also one of the very best games ever made. A few mid puzzles doesn’t at all detract from everything it does well. For me, it has the best melee combat in any game ever.

@R_L_Stine I played the game on give me god of war difficulty. Almost all enemies have more poise than you so it fundamentally changes the game. It becomes like a more dynamic version of souls combat. And I beat all 72 bosses. It was a ***** load of very challenging and fun gameplay. Gna alone took almost four hours. For me the puzzles were just busy work for me to get back to the part of the game I liked.

I loved the puzzle hints. GoW puzzles are generally uninteresting busy work so the tips helped me get back to the fun part of the game quicker.

8 - Its fun and has a lot of cool ideas but it never does anything compelling with them.

The chicken rocket and balloon power are really only used as high jumps. The time stopper and octopus are used to create mindlessly easy platforming sections. The lights you carry cast to such a wide area that the platforms being invisible becomes completely irrelevant. Other better platformers have used these same powers to create incredibly fun levels specifically built around the skills but in Astro they rarely lead to anything more than rote platforming.

I’m not surprised. Astro didn’t show up on the upcoming games section of opencritic until the week of its release and that list seems to be driven by user activity. Most AAA games show up on it a couple months before releasing.

@30fps60fps I played 90 hour of Tears of the Kingdom and never stopped seeing the choppiness so no it is not something I get use to.

There was a study earlier this year showing that some humans have less ability perceive high frame rates. If you’re not noticing you probably just don’t have as good of visual perception as other people.

@MS7000 Even worse the graphical improvements were only noticeable when they specifically highlighted them. It wasn't improvements you would even notice while playing the games.

@jrt87 I can never understand why people choose fidelity when it doesn't just play worse but it also looks worse due to the choppiness.

I see so many people online stupidly thinking they will be getting more than this trading in their launch units to buy a pro. They definitely won’t be getting a good trade in value now.

I really don’t think open world fits the genre. I don’t think ER is replicable. Even ER DLC which was basically ER 2 came and went rapidly.

I don’t get the love for Crimson Desert. Each round of hype has been increasingly perplexing. The combat looked awful and the preview I read said it felt frustrating not fun.

@get2sammyb I’ve got way too much I’m already playing to fit it in at the moment. It’s usually on sale super cheap so I’ll probably just buy it eventually.

It seems like big third party games only stay on Extra for a few months. Bummed about missing Midnight Suns.