patronmacabre

The DualSense features in GT7 are amazing.
The most immersive thing for me is when you spin out.

This is a game that I will be excited to ***** on if I can get it for ten dollars.

Having beaten the game yesterday (I did most major things except beat Malenia), I gave the game a 9.

It's very good. It's nowhere near as good as Breath of the Wild in terms of open world design. I didn't like it nearly as much as Bloodborne. But it is still very good and probably my second favorite FromSoftware game after Bloodborne.

It took me 67 hours to beat the game. The game is amazing from hour 10 to hour 40. Past that point, the seams of the game really, really start to show and I started to get tired with how repetitive it is.

I have a lot of complaints with the game, but I think my biggest complaint could be described as "That secret/boss was the coolest secret/boss I've ever encountered and I really wish the game didn't repeat it two more times."

I feel like more reviewers should mention that the first 10 hours of Elden Ring are awful. It has the slowest start of any Souls game and it initially put me off of it.

It gets dramatically better past that 10 hour mark. I am at the 25 hour mark and the game deserves all the praise it is getting. It is one of the weirdest games I have ever played.

@suikoden

I was big into the Souls games from 2015 to 2017, but I recently played Demon's Souls and still adored it. Hell, I even really liked Dark Souls II. But Elden Ring is just... so boring.

I think it's the lack of any real forward momentum. I know the open world makes it more accessible because you can go wherever, but at some point I need to know when I need to just tough it out and beat this boss.

And like, I know visual design is more important than graphics. But FromSoftware isn't Atlus and they can't offset older tech with explosive colors. The game looks and runs like it was from 10 years ago.

I am still hoping I like it after a really rough start, but it's a struggle that I have never experienced before with their games.

I am about 5 hours in and... I really am not feeling it at all.
It's so empty and boring.
I am a huge fan of BotW. I am a huge fan of the Souls games. I wanted to love this so much and it's a real struggle so far.

I assume official closures will happen once the PS5 has backwards compatibility thanks to Spartacus.

I do hope the backwards compatibility isn't completely tied to the Spartacus service and you can buy old games individually.

These old stores are major security risks so they cannot stay up indefinitely, but video game companies need to try to preserve old games.

Bonkin'. Gyro controls are great.

Honestly, I never had high hopes for this one. It just seemed like poor man's Indiana Jones.

I have much, much higher expectations for the TLOU HBO series. It seems like they actually care about that one.

I absolutely guarantee they wanted to make things exclusive at first.

But then they probably realized the FTC was going to give them way more ***** about the acquisition than they anticipated.

They're committing to multiplatform so that the acquisition can still go through.

One of the things you have to do when you make a M&A is explain why your merger makes things better for the consumer. While exclusives have been approved in the past despite being bad for the consumer, no M&A has been of this scale before.

Keep in mind, this acquisition is still very, very bad for the industry, just like the acquisitions of Zynda, Bethesda, Bungie, and everything Tencent and Embracer acquired. Media consolidation seems inevitable, but it still sucks.

PlayStation Home, especially in PSV2.

But most importantly, the live service model should try to replicate what Fortnite does: encourage people to engage consistently, but make them feel like they're forced to. Make a game that is fun to play every now and again with your friends, but doesn't feel like a second job.

On the one hand, I hate this. People can only play so many live service games because they can only pay so much attention. Beyond that, I like my games to have stories in them.

Furthermore, most live service games fail. I expect the intention is that they throw 10 live service games on the board, expect Bungie's game to succeed, and hope that one other game succeeds.

My hope is that a lot of these are smaller titles, especially as Playstation expands into mobile.

On the more positive side, at least Sony is open about how it intends to make money. Giant big budget single player games do need a source of continuing revenue to prop them up. Never trust any company (corporations are not your friend), but you should be extra suspicious when you don't understand how a company turns a profit.

I have to imagine this is retribution for Xbox owning Crash and Spyro, right?

Anyway, this is garbage and the industry is garbage. It is nowhere near as bad as Microsoft's acquisitions, but it's still garbage.

Planet Coaster is a good game.
Tiny Tina's whatever could be fun.
Other game I will never download.

I continue to be confused by what people expect. I thought it was a pretty sweet month.

@Col_McCafferty Yeah, I always saw Phil Spencer as incredibly oleaginous and insincere. Like, I don't like Jim Ryan and I regularly forget that Doug Bowser exists, but they act like businessmen that are running businesses.

I think Phil Spencer is the kind of person that is charismatic to a certain demographic of people. Like the kind of people that want their grocery store cashier to smile at their job and pretend like it's the best job ever.

Sony probably can't really do much of anything.

If the Activision deal goes through (and I am more optimistic than others that it gets blocked), Playstation is going to diminish substantially. The counterargument put forth by Microsoft that it would still be in third place in the videogames industry after the merger is so demonstrably disingenuous, I don't know where to begin.

I do think that the Playstation brand is too strong to die. My guess is that either Google, Tencent, or Amazon will probably want to save the Playstation brand at whatever cost.

The acquisition is becoming much more politicized than expected. It's entirely within the realm of possibility that Democrats make the acquisition a political issue heading into the midterm elections where they're facing very poor prospects. Warren and Nadler have expresses skepticism at Microsoft and numerous more Democrats, including Biden, are presenting anti-trust as a political issue.

I think Phil Spencer is pre-empting this political backlash. But I genuinely think this acquisition is about to get a lot bigger than videogames.

Welp, looks like what I expected happened from Sony. I still think it's extremely unlikely that Sony ends up making a big purchase for itself.

That said, I do think there is a higher than expected chance that the Activision deal gets blocked IF (and this is a very conditional if) the merger gets overseen by the FTC. If the merger gets overseen by the DOJ (where there is probably a conflict of interest), then it's very likely the deal will go through with minimal alteration.

Even though I am definitely a Sony fanboy, the following statement isn't fanboyism as there is plenty of documentation on it: Microsoft, of all the big tech industries, currently has a privileged position in Washington when it comes to mergers & acquisitions. Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon get heavily scrutinized while Microsoft largely gets left alone. This is largely because Washington doesn't want to have a repeat of what happened in the 1990s with Microsoft.

If the FTC chooses to block the deal, it would come at the cost of Washington burning bridges with Microsoft.

Can we collectively all just say: ***** the video games industry.

I'm just glad I put money into a new PC.
Microsoft has infinite money. You can't beat infinite money.

As long as it needs to be.

As a lover of story-based video games, I also firmly don't believe that games are conducive to being reviewed as art. Art needs to be small enough that it can be consumed multiple times.

Disco Elysium and The Last of Us Part II both demand multiple playthroughs and are both 30 hours-ish long. People try to evaluate their artistic merit on a single playthrough, which is silly.

One thing I do applaud Sony for is that they seem to be one of the few publishers that celebrate their support studios.

I very recently got my new desktop with an RTX 3070.
DLSS is absolutely incredible. I really hope the PS5 and XSX can incorporate something similar.

Welp, I am foaming at the mouth.

Really enjoyed this game. It's definitely more fun with Co-op.
Be aware that it does not play like a typical twin stick shooter or Diablo. Its mechanics take some getting used to.

It is exceptional.
I'm only half-joking when I say that Arcane and the Radiohead game are my two favorite videogames of 2021.

I am definitely putting extremely strong odds on the outcome of "Sony settles this out of court in two months and then hires a ton of women in executive positions."

@B_Lindz Even more general than that, it's a tech industry thing.

Do we know what phase of the lawsuit they're in? Are they in discovery?

I definitely do have to wonder what their endgame is.
One explanation could be that they want to make a Gamepass competitor that just provides a endless deluge of mid-tier games.
But that also requires a lot of infrastructure and an enormous amount of money to burn.
Maybe they want to make a marketplace to rival Steam or Epic Games Store?

I was intending to get this for PC anyway, but I keep having to push back getting a new desktop.

Mid-tier computers are super affordable now, but high-end rigs are ludicrously overpriced. It's just frustrating thinking about having to shell out about 2,500 dollars for a computer that is... slightly better than my PS5?

At least I'll get to play games at 144 fps, so there's that at least.

I think this is great news overall.
Playstation studios make the most visually impressive games, and it will be interesting to see what can be done with RTX 3090s.
That said, PC gaming is in a difficult place right now. I've been looking to get a new desktop and it is really, really, really expensive. You could get an amazing PC for 1,000 bucks that wiped the floor with the original PS4 in 2014. In 2021, a 2,000 dollar PC is... marginally better than a PS5. And that's if you build it yourself (which I am too lazy to do).

I have no idea what people were expecting.
A new Let it Die sounds cool. I am cautiously hopeful for a new Star Ocean. And Death's Door is great. Little Devil Inside also looks great.

The first 35 hours are excellent.
The last 10-15 hours are miserable.
I gave it a 7 overall.

I know this is probably the wrong place to start a discussion about it, but considering I recently beat Tales of Arise, I am really, really struggling with the universal acclaim it received.

The first 35 hours of the game are really good. But did players and reviewers not play the last 10-15 hours of the game? It's miserable and the Xenogears comparisons are obvious. But almost no review came with the caveat "just stop playing the game once the second opening scene starts."

This is REALLY minor and is never going to happen, but I would kill for a 120 FPS patch on Project Diva Future Tone (and maybe some other rhythm games like DJ Maxx Respect).

So many names that start with the letter B...

@InsertUsername Beyond the original founders, 7 additional members of the original Metroid Prime development team joined Bluepoint as of 2019.

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/half-of-the-core-metroid-prime-3-team-is-still-at-retro-studios/

These are small-ish studios based in Austin. There is a sizable amount of overlap. Armature (Recore developer) also has a few former Metroid Prime members.

@Aiodensghost I meant a game in the vein of Metroid Prime, not the exact IP.

@AhmadSumadi I am one of the biggest Dark Cloud 2 fans in the world. There was a period when I was hoping for Dark Cloud 3 at every E3.

Between the restructuring of Japan Studio into Team Asobi and Level-5 moving away from publishing games in the west, it's pretty clear Dark Cloud 3 is never going to happen.

I think one thing that is apparent is that in this age of media consolidation, "2nd party" developers are becoming increasingly rare.

I am going to go out on a limb and say Arrowhead studios will probably be bought within the next few months.

I imagine they will get messages daily asking for a Bloodborne remake.

But ideally, I would like to see them make a Metroid Prime-like game, since Bluepoint has a lot of connections to Retro Studios.

At present, the video game industry isn't nearly as bad as the movie industry, but it will continue to consolidate.
I'm not optimistic. I expect something disgusting like Tencent buying Valve to happen in a year.

1. PS1, PS2, PSP, and PSTV support. It doesn't have to be complete backwards compatibility, but just let me play Persona 4 Golden and Xenogears on my PS5.

2. Store improvements that allow smaller games to be more visible. Maybe have a "most liked" or "most popular" feature for indie games.

3. Themes.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is a masterpiece and absolutely should not be missed.

I am going to annoy everyone I can about this game whenever it is on sale.

I am somewhere in the middle. Spider-Man and Miles Morales were high quality games that were fun to play, but I didn't think they were absolutely stellar.

Insomniac has an absurd production schedule but their employees seem to be happy.

It's also abundantly clear that the Marvel games makes a preposterous amount of money, and I don't think it's feasible for Sony to rely on time-consuming and expensive games like God of War and The Last of Us to make a profit.

The original Persona 5 was a tremendous disappointment for me, since Persona 4 is my favorite game.

Persona 5 Royal is amazing and absolutely worth all the accolades, though.

Usually Sony is good at showmanship, and that is where they faltered here.

Objectively speaking, they had a really good lineup, but they didn't present it as such. I honestly felt like their first-party studios didn't have enough time to put together proper trailers so they crammed everything into 6 minutes.

And it's weird that TLOU Multiplayer didn't get shown.

I didn't enjoy most of it at the time, but looking at it retrospectively, I really liked it. I think there was a lot of good stuff, but it seemed poorly edited and paced.

I liked Project Eve, Forespoken, KOTOR Remake, God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2, and Wolverine.

And I know it confused many people, but as a Radiohead fan, I loved that there was a weird Radiohead thing in there.

As long as I get to play as Thom Yorke in Fortnite, I will be pleased.

But seriously, this was the weirdest and best surprise of the third party portion of the presentation. Weird stuff needs to be cherished.