Ralizah

Crazy how influential this little free downloadable game was, isn't it?

I play it every year without fail. Usually in October. And I'll continue that tradition as long as my PS4 is alive and kicking.

Still very weird to me that arguably the biggest third-party developer in the world chooses not to release games simultaneously on console and PC, like they're some little indie studio that's worried about porting costs.

@Zeldorf "Gravity Rush"

This one still hurts.

@Axelay71 Like... I'm a shameless Nintendo fan, but claiming Elden Ring and Red Dead Redemption 2 aren't any good is wild.

It's the lack of competition. Nintendo is wildly successful these days, but not in the exact same space (you obviously don't buy a Switch to play AAA multiplats on your 4KTV), and Microsoft is busying itself finding new ways to tank the brand every day. Same reason PS4 sold so well early on, basically.

@rjejr GTA is up there with Fortnite, Minecraft, Call of Duty, and Mario Kart in terms of its casual appeal, though. It's part of that elite 10% of top video games that sell to the mass market, whereas almost everything else sells to the core gamer crowd.

LOTS of casual gamers are gonna buy a PS5 to play this. So many. Rockstar is arguably the biggest developer in the world

@NEStalgia At least GTA has a sense of legacy to it. Lots of people grew up on the series, and it really revolutionized sandbox open world game design.

Whereas I look at what's popular in terms of music, celebrities, etc. and I suddenly feel like I'm surrounded by aliens.

@NEStalgia San Andreas was the best-selling game on the PS2. RDR2 sold 61+ million copies. The legacy of this developer did not begin with GTA V. Do you seriously think GTA VI isn't going to make mad bank and move tens of millions of PS5s? And probably even more PS6s when the time comes, lol.

I really need to get going on MH World before the player base moves over en masse.

They must have the full 4K textures bundled in for the download size to be that big. It really should just be optional.

Otherwise, sounds like the game should easily hit 60fps on my PC, so that's nice.

Why does it need a price cut if it's selling at nearly the same pace as the PS4?

Price cuts are something you hold in your pocket to stimulate sales when demand dips. It doesn't sound like demand has dipped.

And, really, all they need to do, realistically, is maintain interest in their ecosystem until GTA VI releases. That'll sell PS5s for the next decade, probably.

@NEStalgia I do think the old-school simplicity of the Switch ecosystem probably appeals to a lot of older Japanese console gaming fans, including myself. Meanwhile, Sony cultivated an audience that mostly seems to want AAA blockbusters (before unsuccessfully attempting to pivot to service games lmfao), and Xbox owners are largely averse to buying much of anything. Steam and Switch are both really friendly ecosystems to smaller games, comparatively, and I expect that to persist into the future.

Nice. I have heard from many people that OT2 is a substantial improvement over the first game. Pity the original seems to have scared so much of its audience away. I'll probably just start with the second one (never played the original on Switch, weirdly enough, despite owning pretty much all the other major HD-2D releases). Someday. No idea when, because my backlog is vast and endless.

Triangle Strategy is so good, dude! I replayed it immediately after beating it the first time, and I never do that. I bet it looks way nicer on the handheld PCs.

tbh I was skeptical of the Switch OLED model for a long time, but seeing was believing for me when I got one second-hand. OLED screens make a huge difference in a lot of games for me. Dark Souls Remastered was pretty much entirely transformed on the SWOLED vs the original panel, for example. Any game with a lot of shadow or a lot of vibrant colors is going to look way nicer on it. It's even more pronounced with the display set to 'vibrant,' since it makes colors pop, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.

Granted, my experience with the Vita helped to sell me as well. Games looked way more vibrant on the original model than on the revision.

I didn't think the size difference would matter that much, but it really did feel HUGE coming from the OG and Lite models.

I'm not as wowed by my OLED handhelds anymore now that I'm used to them. They've made my non-OLED handhelds much harder to go back to, though. I picked up my nephew's LCD Switch at one point and found myself thinking: "How did I ever play on this thing?"

There's a reason Valve almost immediately copied the thing for their hardware revision. Even down to more efficient power usage that dramatically boosts battery life.

@nessisonett Just wait until they add Pyramid Head to Fortnite as part of a promotional strategy for the game's release on PS5.

@nessisonett The more exploratory feel and nightmarish tone of the original is a big part of why it's my favorite game in the series.

Also they can ride off the coattails of the second game easier and make people do the ‘look Pyramid Head my favourite monster’.

It never fails to entertain me how much Konami turning Pyramid Head into a sort of unofficial series mascot has irritated SH2 fans.

@NEStalgia I don't disagree with that framing. What I am saying is that Switch exclusivity doesn't seem to hurt sales of these games. Triangle Strategy sold around 800,000 copies in two weeks on Switch, for example, which is not bad for a $60 pixel art strategy game.

Even with the multiplats, probably 70%+ of their console sales tend to be on Switch, as with Octopath 2.

That said, I think a move away from exclusivity is a good thing overall. Especially if it liberates modern Final Fantasy games from a platform where people aren't really buying them in large numbers.

I still need to play Live-A-Live. I actually bought it on Switch, but, as with many games in my backlog, I never actually started it. I'd probably buy it on Steam today, considering it probably runs better on my Steam Deck, but I'm sure it'll still look gorgeous on the SWOLED.

@nessisonett EH

Not really.

Different plot. Different universe. Wildly different gameplay.

It's a reimagining to the point where it doesn't feel even remotely similar to the original.

@NEStalgia I do feel obliged to mention that Octopath 1 sold better as a "Switch exclusive" with Nintendo marketing than the sequel did as a multiplat.

I know Live-A-Live didn't sell amazingly well, but otherwise I'd be curious to hear what major Switch exclusives have flopped. Wouldn't surprise me if some of their various remasters and collections did, but then, those don't seem to perform well on competing platforms, either.

@Ainu20 This strategy of randomly remaking fan favorite sequels does strike me as incredibly odd. It's only good in the sense that Konami appears to actually be interested in utilizing its IPs again.

They could have potentially made a remake series out of Silent Hill. Instead, we're just... getting Silent Hill 2.

In general, if a company isn't announcing the numbers, it's because those numbers aren't flattering to them.

Flooding the market with smaller releases and making major games exclusive to whoever is willing to throw money at them clearly wasn't working for them, given how drastically their business plans appear to be changing.

Hopefully that extends to the PC space as well, and major releases are no longer held captive on EGS.

@riceNpea Pretty much.

The thing with games --> movies is that you can sometimes view that from an interesting new angle, given the change in mediums, but Until Dawn is literally just emulating bad horror movies, so I'm not really sure what's to be gained there. The presentation was the only other interesting aspect of that, and you lose that completely with a straight live-action film adaptation.

@riceNpea Deleted my response when I realized I was essentially just restating what you already said. I agree entirely.

Questionable messaging from the company aside, I think it's probably best to regard the remake as its own beast and not freak out whenever it doesn't slavishly imitate the original in every way.

Either way, it's a shame Konami didn't commission them to remake the original Silent Hill first. There's way more potential for improvement in that, and being more straight-forward as a story, they'd have more freedom to inject their own personality into it without significant backlash from fans.

Almost seven years now since Naughty Dog released a new game that isn't TLOU-related, with no end in sight. Ugh.

I want something fun and less depressing/torture porn-y again.

The reality is that Braid is a dime-a-dozen in 2024. Go on Steam and the Nintendo eshop and you'll probably find yourself tripping over a few hundred artsy platformers in this vein. That's a world Jonathan Blow helped to inspire and create, granted, but all the same, it's also one within which he must compete.

The Witness was excellent. Supposedly he's been developing a game in a programming language he designed himself? I'd love to see it.

That said, I feel no need to revisit Braid, and apparently neither does anyone else.

The PSVR2 discount IS humongous. Mostly because nobody in their right mind would buy one at this point over a Quest 3 at MSRP, and Sony's just going to let it quietly die.

Maybe we'll see better discounts on the Slim once the Pro is out.

@NEStalgia Yup. I'm still not fully convinced the characters and script aren't mostly AI-generated, fed on a steady diet of training data from Marvel movies and other hero shooters.

Makes sense when you consider how Monster Hunter Rise sold on Switch. While it didn't do incredibly on other platforms (relative to World, which remains very popular on PC), it's absolutely one of the highest selling MH games on any single console platform to date.

There's a gigantic well of support for MH on Nintendo consoles, so of course investors are going to be licking their chops when they think about the 10 - 15 million extra sales a Switch version might sell.

We know Capcom convinced Nintendo to add more RAM into the Switch when it was in development, so I find it hard to believe Nintendo and Capcom aren't looking to target at least a minimum acceptable spec for running this on next-gen hybrid hardware.

@Yousef- A multi-language Japanese PS5 version is also available via Play-Asia

@get2sammyb True.

It's not that there's no room for new competitors in the genre.

There's just no room for Concord, because it's a game almost nobody wants to play. Not even for free.

Yup. Even if digital is dominant, enough people still buy physical games that it's short-sighted to abandon the physical release model entirely. Why alienate a large minority of your playerbase unnecessarily?

Imagine spending billions on development, acquisitions, agreements for day one releases on Game Pass, etc., then not even giving your marketing team the budget to inform people of your products and services. Imagine doing this when you're drastically behind compared to your much smaller competition.

As for the people already engaged with them? Close studios and change prices on your services multiple times in order to really aggravate them.

This in addition to their existing management issues that make their first-party output unreliable to begin with.

A person actively working to sabotage the Xbox brand probably wouldn't even need to do much different than what they're already doing.

Microsoft is a very, very successful company, so it boggles the mind how they seem incapable of running this division competently.

@Keyblade-Dan New PS5 and Switch owners.

DDS 1 & 2 are interesting. They combine Nocturne's Press-Turn combat with a more conventional JRPG structure (no monster collecting here) and a science-fiction story that explores several familiar MegaTen themes from a more Hinduist perspective, which radically transforms the feel of the games.

I'd love to see these and the Raidou Kuzunoha games rescued from the obscurity that comes from still being PS2 exclusives.

Anyway, the first game is full of guitar music inspired by classic rock, so it's definitely worth checking out.

@RubyCarbuncle If the game can be made to run on PS4 with minimal effort, then you're just losing potential sales for no reason by not also releasing it on PS4.

This isn't Uncharted. Nobody buys a PS5 to play cheap Neptunia spinoffs. And probably a portion of the fanbase is still on older hardware.

@RubyCarbuncle It's a Compile Heart game. Why wouldn't it release on PS4?

Played it for an hour or so last night. I'll probably play bits and pieces of it over time.

Such a fantastic game. Perfectly paced in a way that makes it very replayable, too, like Super Metroid.

@TheAmbienWalrus I mean, death itself is inevitable, so fearing it in the abstract seems... counterproductive. A keen awareness of death is a gift, since it reminds you that the clock is always ticking, and you have to appreciate the precious things in your life while they're still here, because they could easily disappear tomorrow, and then they're gone forever.

Regarding spiders... urgh. Look, I don't kill the things if I can avoid it (prefer to trap them and set them outside), but no amount of factoids or positivity will ever replace the raw, instinctual dread their creepy little faces inspire in me.

Might pick this up during the next Steam Sale. Looks surprisingly fun.

@vikramsingh To make it more confusing, there's also Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within, known in Japan Clock Tower: Ghost Head, which was a sort of spinoff on the PS1.

@Mustoe The PS1 game was actually the second Clock Tower game in Japan. Unfortunately, the original was never localized until now, although fan translations have been available for years.

@3Above Nintendo's ability to sell millions of copies of their games every year for near full price is definitely the envy of the industry, I imagine. Only Rockstar is capable of exceeding that. Minecraft, too, I guess, but that's only $27.

@NEStalgia The majority of Switch users are actually 20 - 30 years of age, with a substantial number of 30+ users as well. Not to say Switch isn't also popular with children, but the idea that it's kids driving sales is old hat and inaccurate.

https://www.shacknews.com/article/127542/nintendo-discloses-switch-age-demographic-data-for-first-time

Kids are primarily playing on tablets and phones.

@3Above You realize people are buying Switches and PS5s every day, right? Hardware numbers keep ticking up because new people keep buying in. And Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and GTA V are still pretty much THE games the mainstream public buys alongside those devices (and a variety of other Nintendo first-party software, to a lesser extent).

Although in the case of GTA V, I also recall people buying copies because it was a cheaper way to get some sort of currency for GTA Online.

For me:
Metaphor: ReFantazio
Astro-Bot
Monster Hunter Wilds
DOOM: The Dark Ages
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Plenty of good looking games on the way.

@themightyant Nintendo has fended off competition from Sony, Sega, and others throughout the years in the handheld space. Their best-selling handheld directly competed against Sony's strongest attempt at muscling in on Nintendo's territory.

In terms of the modern day, a Microsoft handheld is the set-up to a joke, the handheld PCs, while very cool, are incredibly niche compared to the main console lines, and Playstation doesn't have the resources or willpower to compete with Nintendo in that space (which I think is even more the case now than it was when the Vita was a thing).

Anything can happen, of course, but with consolidated hardware lines and most of the biggest IP in the gaming space in their clutches, there's no reason to think they'll struggle again any time soon.

I'd be more worried about the competition. Sony seems to thrive on name recognition alone and a lack of direct competition in the home console space, and Microsoft's gaming branch has turned generating bad PR into a sort of twisted art-form. Both are struggling with long development times and inflated budgets for most of their biggest games.

@themightyant Fine. Not within any sort of immediately foreseeable future. Far enough away that it's not even worth speculating about.

That said, I've always had the impression that Nintendo would sooner go under on their own terms than become a software developer for platforms held by others.

Now that their hardware lines are combined, it's pretty difficult to imagine any more really bad generations. Their handheld hardware has always sold well (to varying degrees, of course).

Yeah, I'm also not bothered to relearn the game again just to play this DLC. I want to do a more complete run at some point in the future anyway, so I'll buy the DLC for cheaps once I'm replaying the entire game.

@Yonisanu TTYD remake really amped up the lighting, which I'm guessing is the biggest reason it's 30fps. That, and to maintain consistency with handheld mode at a conservative power profile. You can increase clock speeds on a hacked Switch and run a LOT of games way more smoothly, but it's not ideal for battery life. Being a hybrid console, Nintendo is worried about efficient cooling and battery life, so it avoids the jet engine effect the PS4 often experienced with many of its more demanding games.

@Agramonte lol Amazon randomly canceled my long-standing preorder for that game a year or two ago. Dunno why.

That said, I buy mostly digital, and the vouchers mean I'll get it for $50 anyway, so no big.

@Yonisanu Eh. Not always. Maybe if it's PURELY a sprite-based game. But even the HD-2D stuff looks significantly better on PC/PS5/Xbox. Just look at footage of Octopath 2 on Switch vs any other platform. It still makes a difference.

My interest in Sony's first-party output largely died when they nuked Japan Studio. I still enjoy the Horizon series, but that's about it. And Astro-Bot, maybe, which looks delightful.

Sony played itself by allowing itself to be lured into an arms race against Microsoft and cultivating an audience that is primarily interested in playing photorealistic blockbusters that push the boundaries of console tech. Of course budgets exploded as a result.

It doesn't matter in terms of the attraction of the hardware or ecosystem itself. Of the top five highest-selling gaming platforms of all time, only one was the most powerful piece of gaming tech at the time (PS4).

It's a shame they haven't been contracted to do more Pokemon RPGs like the two they released on the GameCube.

Denpa Men have never done anything for me, unfortunately.