johncalmc

First, they should be doing FemShep. Everyone knows this.

Second, if John Cena is in this I'm going to be so sour. Mass Effect is perfect for a television show. Amazon already made a mess of Yakuza. Let's not ruin Mass Effect.

Weirdly I'm playing Death Stranding again right now. Nice to see it going everywhere. It's an excellent game. The 8 people still buying games on Xbox will enjoy it I'm sure.

This sucks for running a site that talks about PlayStation news etc. but on a personal level I get the strategy and I like it. The announcement and relatively quick release of Astro Bot was perfect. We didn't need to see it at four conferences, with a half dozen trailers spoiling everything. I'm into this.

Seems to me that given the pedigree of some of the people involved in the studio that giving them another go on a different game might have been a good option, but then I guess if you make the biggest flop in PlayStation history then heads are gonna roll. Predictably, those heads belong to devs, not the upper management that threw $200 million+ at this thing.

I will buy this and I will platinum this.

I'm looking forward to playing this one. I'm a big Life Is Strange fan and I generally think the Deck Nine games have been very good. I'm also wondering how they address the choice at the end of the first game since most people seem to fall into two camps on the ending of the first game and I think I'm actually in a third secret camp that nobody talks about. Anyway, I'll probably pick it up in a week or two and hopefully they've fixed some of those tech issues!

I might play this but I just find it hard to care about Dragon Age even though I've played them all.

I honestly thought this looked cool until I found out it was free to play pish.

I know I'm part of the problem because I'm gonna buy this, but this is so unnecessary. The original version is still fine today. The later version with the anime cut-scenes added in is still fine today. How many times do we need this game, unless they're gonna pull a Final Fantasy VII and it's actually not a remake but something weird, which unlike Final Fantasy VII might actually work with Steins;Gate.

I like it. It's a bit like a remix version of Yakuza pulling bits and pieces from different games, adding new twists to it. But it's also one of those where I'm like, for all the changes, the story would be better if they'd just told the story of either 0 or Yakuza 1, and just fleshed it out. It's both simplified and needlessly convoluted at the same time. Bizarre, but an interesting watch.

Also, shoutout to my boy Saejima who in the show is played by a dude who is about 5 foot 2 wearing a comical wig. Questionable.

I'm using it to have a picture of Kiryu as the background for my PS5. Beyond that not really.

@ShogunRok Weird for a PlayStation site to be reviewing Xbox game Metaphor: ReFantazio.

Anyway, I was always gonna get this given how much I love Persona but I'm glad it seems to have turned out really well.

Fortnite man hypes Fortnite.

Hey Abby looks great.

I managed to get one of the Dualsenses which was all I wanted. I would have rather had two but they wouldn't allow more than one sale. Absolute madness.

I thought this looked really cool but I had no idea it was free to play. I thought it was a proper game. And for that reason... I'm out.

I can practically taste the twitter salt that they're doing lady ghost of tsushima. There's gonna be so many tedious YouTube videos about it. I'm into it though, glad they're leaving Jin's story as is.

@nessisonett I know! I dunno whether I'm just tired or something but people seem to be really into this show but it seemed like a bunch of nothing and then Ghost which was a foregone conclusion. I mean I'm into Ghost but when you've been waiting for God knows how long at this point for Sony to actually announce a bunch of games this hasn't exactly wowed me.

I thought it was pretty bad. Obviously, Ghost is a win but it was obviously happening, and the rest of it should have been an email.

This is one of the most astonishing pieces of PlayStation news I've ever heard.

There has never, ever, in history, been a video game that aligns with my interests more completely than this.

There's light at the end of the tunnel guys. It's nearly over.

@Kidfunkadelic83 Definitely! I'll tell you what's super noticeable playing this version of the game - the load times. The load times for Broken Sword on PS1 were absolutely catastrophic, and any time you had to go from one screen to another and then another - like the last puzzle in Ireland, for example - it took an age. There's a bit in the hospital where it jumps between cutscene and dialogue repeatedly, and I suddenly got flashbacks to playing it on PS1 all those years ago and how it would have to do a load between each transition and it was so annoying.

I know it's not loading Horizon Forbidden West here, but it's cool for people who played it on PS1 to have it as intended here. Lovely stuff.

@The_Wailing_Doom in a vaccuum it's not so silly. But the reality is that people don't expect to pay 40 notes for a game like that, rightly or wrongly. It's the same in the mobile space whenever anyone tries to sell a "real" game at what console gamers would consider a fair price and nobody buys it. Fair prices are dictated by the market, and value is determined by what consumers are willing to pay. Nobody playing Fortnite or Overwatch or Apex for free is gonna abandon that ship for an untested, unproven game they gotta throw £40 at.

@get2sammyb Yeah as much as I'd like to see them get another go I do think they can't survive. There's certainly a stink on the game and the dev too. Whether the studio survives or not I think the game is over - there's no redemption story on the cards. It's not like Cyberpunk or No Man's Sky which people wanted to be good. Everyone hated Concord as soon as it was revealed. There doesn't seem to be an appetite for redemption here.

The thing with Concord is that the game apparently plays pretty well? The director stepping down makes sense - buck has to stop with someone for the poor decisions made. And whoever was in charge of the art direction might be in a precarious position. But I'd let the rest of the team have another go. There's something there in Concord, it just needed to not have absolutely dreadful character designs and that silly pricepoint.

@BecauseBecause I've played that game!

Because I keep buying them.

@Kidfunkadelic83 oh it might have been 96 then. Even worse. Nearly 30 years ago. Good lord 😂

@Angelus3K it was '98 on PlayStation which is the version I played. Always forget it came out two years earlier on PC!

@VenomUK so funny how everyone is asking the same thing. I hated the Director's Cut opening too 😂 it's the original, as it was back in '98. Paris in the fall etc. Same music. Same cutscene - only much prettier.

Yes they've improved the audio mix I think. On the original there were some parts where the music was either too loud or too quiet and that's not really the case now, at least not on my setup.

@BowTiesAreCool It's the original. They Director's Cut Nico opening is not here.

@MrSands Talking about the Director's Cut? Very different. The new content that was added in the Director's Cut version is not in this version which sounds like a bad thing but the Director's Cut stuff sucks, or at least I thought it did. Also the more comic book looks during the conversations are gone. This is true to the original game - it just looks much much better and has QOL improvements.

It's defo the best version of the game as far as I'm concerned.

They shoulda just announced the pro in this colour scheme and then maybe people wouldn't have been big babies about it.

@Jayslow The goat is substantially easier to deal with in the new version since when you move your cursor about it kinda snaps to points of interest if you get close to them (you can turn this off if you don't like it).

@themightyant Yes, all the recordings are the originals but then they've been remastered. So they definitely sound better than the originals but sometimes they do sound a little rough. The audio overhaul isn't as brilliant as the graphical overhaul. Also, there are additional lines of dialogue that were recorded but then cut from the original game that have been added back in. Not loads of them from what I can tell but they're there.

I know it's only a mini-review so it doesn't get too in depth about anything, so if anyone wants to ask any questions feel free to @ me and I will answer them unless I don't know the answer and then I'll just pretend I haven't seen the question.

@Dodoo I get that because any time spent on this is time that could have been spent on something else, but I don't know, I just can't imagine - unless they've really improved it - that this was a massive undertaking.

I know people will be having tantrums about this but I don't see what the problemo is. As it says in the article, it's perfectly playable as a PS4 port so if you've got it you can keep playing that version. It's not like Hermen Hulst is coming to your house and burning your copy.

Adding a PS5 that looks slightly nicer or whatever, maybe keeping it in line with Forbidden West, new trophy list and everything - I gotta be honest, I'm in. I know I'm part of the problem - and Sony's ideal customer - but I have absolutely no problem buying games I really like again and I really like Horizon.

I'm also totally into getting the platinum in a game I enjoyed a second time - I got the platinum on Elden Ring, Yakuza Like A Dragon, Gaiden, Infinite Wealth on PS5 and then went back and got it on PS4. I'll get this and do it again.

Maybe backwards compatibility is a priority because they're finally gonna start releasing PS5 games once PS6 comes out

It's interesting to me that somewhere, at some point in time, a conversation was had where somebody got told to come up with some merch for Concord because they thought the game would be popular. I would love to have been a fly on the wall at this time. Surely someone internally must have known. Someone must have played the thing and been like, "Errr guys?"

I wouldn't buy one regardless. The price isn't an issue. Sure, £700 looks bad. But everything goes up in price in time and I get loads out of a console so I wouldn't be bothered. It just doesn't have enough to make me care enough to faff on transferring my stuff over, selling my old PS5 etc.

I only care about 4, so I can play 1, 2, 3, and 4, get all the trophies, all that stuff. Not bothered about the others honestly.

It's a terrible price, not because £700 is inherently too much - I'll easily get £700 worth of use out of my primary console in a generation. It's a terrible price because we just bought £500 consoles a few years ago, they've barely released any first party games for it, they've got next to nothing announced, and the big talking points - ray tracing! 60 fps! - are things they sold the base PS5 on.

The benefit of the upgrade isn't worth the cost or the effort.

Step 1: sell a kidney.

The price is obviously what most people are going to choke on their tea over, but it's how little of an improvement it is that's my dealbreaker. I almost certainly wasn't going to bother anyway, but this seems like a big chunk of money for a slightly better machine than the one I bought a few years ago and they've released like six games for.

Yeah I already bought a PS5. Start showing me some games and we'll talk about a Pro.

Look, let's just cut to the chase. We all want the DualSense in the original PlayStation grey with the coloured face buttons don't we? That's all we want from this anniversary. Be honest.

Nobody is asking the only question that matters.

Can I dress my Astrobot up to look like Kiryu from Yakuza?

Fairgame$ is toast.