ThomasHL

Very happy for them to change the combat up to be more action oriented. Combat in DA2 and DA:I was on the of the worse aspects of both.

Origins had good combat, but not so good that I'd ever replay it for the combat. If anything it's a bit of a barrier for a replay because some of the micromanagement gets tedious.

@The_Moose if you remember that the game development has been effectively rebooted three times now, that fits with the development of the Mass Effect timeline.

Apart from anything else, Switch physical games are much smaller than PS5 physical games. That's genuinely why I'm much more cautious about buying a physical PS5 game over a Switch one.

Also Switch games rarely get good sales (and as a result keep their resell value better). It makes more sense to buy it physically and potentially sell it on. I don't see the PS5 ever seriously challenging the software chart, even when it's install base gets much higher.

I picked up OW2 and I've been loving it. It's the first competitive multiplayer game to grip me since Rocket League.

Ranked is a lot less fun than QuickPlay however, and the experience of a newcomer getting ranked is utterly miserable. We started off with something like 7 defeats in a row with no idea of the level of our opponents and if the matchmaking was adapting. And you have to play a lot of QuickPlay games to even unlock it.

If the core game hadn't gripped me so much, my friend and I would have noped out of rank before we got our first win - weeks before we could see our actual rank.

I tried the game recently but ended up dropping it very shortly, it didn't click with me.

I will say I expected very little of the different backgrounds and the Corpo intro provided less than little.

The lack of people in the demo was a major turn off. It felt very artificial, like a world map which a collection of very video-gamey challenges in discrete points. That's not what I come to games for.

Put this down in the 'demos might hurt sales' camp, because I was relatively curious about the game before.

Mines been horizontal for 2 years, no issues. On the other hand the vibration and resistive triggers in the controllers sometimes feel like somethings gone wrong.

@Jmerbaugh I was genuinely disappointed when I learned Persona Strikers wasn't a football game

@Sam_ATLUS For me Arise it did everything well and nothing brilliantly. Combat is pretty fun, world is pretty beautiful, story is pretty straightforward but with something to work with.

I'd say it's easy to have fun with, but also not worth prioritising if you've got something interesting in your backlog.

Thanks for allowing me to not only not vote 5, but to put none of them at the top. I've only played 3 games on the list this year, and none of them felt worthy of Game of the Year

@Party_Cannon I love how everyone who uses the word snowflake is using it because they're annoyed that someone is getting criticised by others. The guy posted something on twitter, its totally valid for people to respond to it. If he doesn't want to hear the response, don't post on Twitter.

The game dev was thin skinned and has taken mild criticism of his game badly (Days Gone wasn't getting slated, it was getting called middle of the road at a time when we were tired of zombie games), other people called this dumb. Nothing about this warrants a lot of attention

Cal's fashion sense has improved

I hope this DLC has a stronger narrative hook than the main game. Forbidden West was quite a step back from Zero Dawn in writing quality IMO

Even more absurd, there are only 55 million households in Japan. So nearly 1 in 2 houses have a Switch (well, a bit less as some houses definitely have 2)

~25 million Switches being sold in a country with 125 million people is bonkers. 1 in 6 people have a Switch (or slightly less than that but some people have 2)

Sounds neat, but are they going to get enough attention on activity cards? I never look at those

@np70604 the captain's name is part Quarian too. Suggesting the stranded aliens on earth have integrated into Alliance culture perhaps

Season 2 of The Witcher told the same story as the Guardians of the Galaxy game but much worse. If season 3 is the same level of writing, I'm not sticking around

I feel for Hemsworth, however well he does it's going to pretty much impossible to step out of Cavill's shadow here.

I thought the PS5 would be when I finally learned to appreciate 60 FPS, but it turns out I couldn't tell you the difference. I don't know which games run at 60 and which don't

Sony are getting very greedy, so I wouldn't trust them to release a free upgrade. The PS5 has almost been too successful - Sony were at their most generous end of PS3/start of PS4 when they had to regain ground against Microsoft.

It's a shame about the story. I'm actively looking for a 'Fire Emblem Three Houses' level story but with better combat.

Thats a pass from me. I'll stick a games difficulty up and see if it changes the gameplay in an interesting way, but if it doesn't or the games getting boring, that difficulty slider goes down.

I think these PC ports will turn out to be a mistake for Sony in the long run, but this one is pretty harmless.

It will be fine and after a few games totally normal. But 'Yakuza' is more emotive in the West than 'Like a Dragon' because we don't have some of the mythology (carp to dragon) that the phrase draws on.

It was honestly fine having a game called 'Yakuza' not be about Yakuza. It's still about the criminal underworld. Games are often not named particularly literally. Heavy Rain has rain, but it's not about rain. Legend of Zelda is about Link. Halo is mostly not set on Halo rings. 'Mass Effect' basically only appears in the codex of Mass Effect

The screenshots look pretty muddy - like there's an oldschool PS3 brown filter on. Is that representative of the rest of the demo?

EDIT: I don't know how I feel about those thick black outlines on the realistically textured boulders either. Does that represent a particular effect?

Because it seems to only apply to one layer of the background, not the foreground or the skybox.

People are calling this part of the feudal Japan fad, when the most interesting thing about this is it's not feudal Japan.

Feudal Japan ended 200 years before this, this is the end of early-modern Japan and the rise of modern Japan. That's a way more interesting setting and gives it a really different flavour than Ghosts of Tsushima

30 hours is my perfect length, so if it's on that side perfect

I like being able to compare the 3D audio.

Honestly, I love everything about this except the empty worlds - but the empty worlds could be a killer for me.

Without friendly NPCs and dynamic interactions, everything begins to feel like a videogame level instead of a world.

I like turn-based combat, I like action combat, but ATB combat has always been an awful comprise between the two. I'll take FFX (full-turn based) or FFVII Remake over ATB any day.

This still feels unique and exciting...I wish their colour design had been a bit more careful though. The muddy brown units on a brown battlefield are hard to make out

@ShogunRok Thank you, that's really useful to know.

@ShogunRok how does the structure of the game compare to something like Tales of Arise?

The plagiarism is pretty blatant. Some artist must have been taking shortcuts

This one is a miss for me. Nothing I'd be interested in downloading

Star Ocean fans, what's the main selling point of playing a Star Ocean game?

I heard the reason people use British accents in historical and fantasy films is so that American audiences don't have to hear an accent that sounds familiar and everyday them. It doesn't matter that it's inaccurate - it's the distance from their own accents which is important.

And British accents were an easy go to for English speaking actors, and now it's been going on for so long that we're all used to it and no-one questions why Julius Caesar has a British accent.

Party members is enough to get me interested again. I don't need to control them

@lolwhatno the blog goes into this. They do ban the cheaters eventually, but they want the cheaters to stay in the game for a while so they can gather data on the mechanism they're using to cheat. This way keeps the cheater in the game for a bit longer, but doesn't ruin other people's fun.

I also suspect this way actually makes players happier. If a cheater is banned immediately you're not aware of that, you only see the cheaters who get through. This way the players get to have a bit of revenge and satisfy themselves against the cheater. They get to see the work being done to stop cheaters.

I'm excited for this, but is it going to be super grindy? And will there be a lot of interaction with NPCS?

@Ashina I'm betting it's Revival

Kingdom Hearts 3 is where I exited from the series. Partly because they made no attempt to help fans who had only played KH1 and KH2, partly because after spending all those games looking for Kairi they shoved her into a corner as soon as they found her.

And partly because it was just missing something, it didn't have the thrills of the earlier games.

This looks fantastic, but please may it not be Dark Souls!

One to watch out for

I still don't think Gamepass is sustainable in its current form. Look how quickly Netflix went downhill as soon as it needed to turn a profit. And Netflix's potential market is much much bigger

You know, I'm really excited about this. The tone is so different from what games normally do, it feels fresh.

The opening story was surprisingly creative for an Assassin's Creed game, but I still found myself dropping out shortly after Alexandria because I wasn't enjoying the moment to moment gameplay much.

I find the combat very repetitive, and whilst it's nice that assassinations are still possible, you lack a lot of the assassination abilities earlier games had.

Kassandra being so charismatic, and having dialogue options so you can roleplay makes a big difference to me.

Odyssey was sunnier and more generically attractive, but I do agree that Origins world feels much more alive.

I was already eager to try this game out, now I'm really on board

One game I want to play counts as a good month for me. All Stars is a hit.