wildcat_kickz

Good thing we're getting all of Xbox's 1st party games. Cuz we're not getting PlayStation ones for a while...

The teams at Haven and Bungie must be sweating bullets.

@DennisReynolds I actually wonder who the true evangelist for these live service games was. Ryan was the figurehead, but Hulst was head of 1st party at the time. Under Hulst, the majority of what we've been expecting are GaaS and the ever-expanding Horizon universe; the game plan for both seems to have been to flood the market to the point of absurdity.

Obviously, this is all assumptions and conjecture, but the alternate reality where Shu was promoted to CEO instead of Hulst seems pretty alluring.

@K1LLEGAL Yeah, I totally understand. I also wish Xbox had done better and given more people a reason to choose their platform over Sony's, but they fumbled hard. I chose 360 over PS3 and was VERY happy with my choice, but when Xbox One and PS4 rolled around, I felt the choice was pretty clear and haven't looked back since.

@itsfoz In the interview, Shu mentions that it's usually not the original team that is making the remaster - it's either dedicated port studios (like Nixxes) or external teams, so it's not the opportunity cost that it may outwardly appear. Additionally, even if the remasters are developed internally, it's an opportunity for the rank-and-file developers to keep productive while the creative teams cook up what's next. It's a lot more work to make something from scratch (new story, script, mechanics, world design, etc.) that takes a lot of creative effort. While that kind of pre-production happens, there's a whole team of developers that wouldn't necessarily have anything to do. The remasters give those folks a chance to keep busy, productive, and employed, while also adding additional revenue to fund the bigger, new projects.

@K1LLEGAL There are plenty of people who just can't afford to have multiple consoles. Since the only real differentiating factor between the two (PS and XB) are their exclusives, people gradually just moved to PS, myself included. PS has consistently, on average, had higher quality exclusives at a much more regular clip. With Xbox console sales down year over year, I think it's better to have them move their titles over to other platforms, rather than just bury them all when Xbox inevitably folds. At this point, I just don't see Xbox rebounding to a point where they can realistically compete with PlayStation.

Edit: I think Xbox, as we know it, will eventually fold, but not Microsoft's gaming division. Whether they rebrand or not, I think Xbox's future is primarily as a third-party publisher, much like Sega is today. They may still manufacture consoles at a smaller scale, or maybe even allow third-parties to do it for them, but their days as a legitimate competitor to PlayStation are done.

If the MCC were to release on PS5, it would sell millions of copies, easy; and I would absolutely be one of them. I put a frightening amount of hours into Halo back in college and the idea of having 6 campaigns/5 multiplayer suites available on PlayStation? Sign me up!

@ATaco Aesthetically, I think the Switch 2 looks pretty nice. If the chassis was aluminum, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was an Apple product. We'll see how things shake out price/performance-wise, though.

@Oram77 Mirroring what the article/interview says, it'll only work if all the games are cross-buy with PS5/6. It's dead on arrival if they have to make exclusive software for a handheld.

SM2 is the only 40K game I've played, but it was definitely a good ol' romp. The campaign was pretty short and I didn't have much interest in the multiplayer, but that's totally fine. My only real complaint is the performance mode, which upscaled an internal resolution of 720p, which is just too low a resolution to upscale. No Machine Spirit can fix that. Everything looked smudgy, so I ended up playing the whole campaign in quality mode (which looked spectacular).

@zupertramp Everything is politically charged in the states nowadays.

@Batesy125s That's all you can ask for! Ultimately, calling a certain era the "golden age" is completely arbitrary. It's a fun topic for discussion, but nothing more.

@ChrisDeku @PuppetMaster @LogicStrikesAgain I'd be curious to know how much that dude's donated in the last year 🤔

Heartening to see, glad they're donating!

He can only be succeeded, never replaced. Wish him the best in his next chapter.

@JB_Whiting I found the 120hz mode made things a lot worse for me. Screen tearing has been pretty bad, regardless, but the 120hz introduced a ton of stuttering, which was mostly resolved when I put it back to 60hz. Hope they can get some good optimization patching in the near future.

Black Flag is right behind Origins as my favorite in the series, so I'm definitely down for this!

Don't really agree with the folks saying it's a "bad AC game." I understand the meaning, but to me, if it's a good game, then it's a good AC game.

@ThomasHL Well said. Learning a situation was engineered from the beginning robs the whole story of stakes. Batman, to me, is at his best when he's portrayed as being smart enough to think on his feet, overcoming adversity - not manufacturing it...

@Max_the_German That's certainly true, but I don't really fault Sony for trying to get another live service hit. As long as they aren't severely diverting resources from their single-player focused teams (which I don't think they are), I have no problem with them getting new teams to tinker with the idea.

Once we get a proper look at the game, I'll be able to tell if it's a game for me or not, but, for now, I'm just curious.

@SeanOhOgain comedy gold 😅

@Max_the_German I'm actually really curious about that game. Would love to see some gameplay.

Self-foreversleep Squad: Unalive the Justice League. RIP in peace.

@Northern_munkey Better to hijack the comments to talk bass than some other stuff...

I'll definitely check her out, thanks for the suggestion!

Probably already on your radar, but if not, check out Snarky Puppy/Michael League (bassist and band leader). Top tier musicians, playing modern big band fusion type stuff.

@Northern_munkey Haha, yeah if only we had $10K - $20K of extra cash lying around. Still, a far cry from acoustic instrument prices. I also played cello growing up and my "student" instrument was $5K! I even played a couple when I was shopping for it that cost $800K and $1.3 mil... If only I saved my allowance money...

@Northern_munkey Oh nice! I've messed around with a friend's Aria Pro 2 and loved how it played. My main is a Laguna Ocean TB75 5-string (active, thru-neck). It was a pretty short-lived series, but has served me very well for about 20 years. I'm fairly certain they're a variant of Cort guitars that were rebranded for GC, back in the day. I primarily use it for jazz and funky rock. My other bass is a modded up Squire P-Bass that had all it's electronics and hardware replaced over the years. It was my first bass that I use primarily for demoing rock/punk at home, though I'm actually in the market for a proper Fender P-Bass. I desperately want a solid passive axe to gig with. My amp isn't anything to write home about, but it's an Ampeg Portaflex PF-800. I rarely use pedals with my bass, but when I want to get weird, I have a Moog MF Drive.

@Northern_munkey Yeah, that's totally legitimate. The wonder of video games definitely diminishes when adult life interjects and you don't have the time to just veg out and play games until 4am, just to wake up the next morning and do it all again. As a kid, for me, that was the Gameboy Color and Dreamcast. The closest thing I've had to that in my adult life was during the pandemic. All I did for two months was drink, play games, and write/play music (we seem to be pretty simpatico in that regard - I'm also a bassist). Not the healthiest way to spend lockdown, but it sure was fun!

@saffeqwe Damn dude, you seem super angry. I'm not saying that these are examples of highbrow entertainment. I thought Uncharted was fun. Mortal Kombat was entertaining. I haven't seen Mario, but it was super well received. Fallout was great. TLoU was great. Castlevania was great. Edgerunners was great. The Sonic movies are fun. Gran Turismo was fun.

That's two hands right there.

@Oram77 I think we're out of the woods with bad movie adaptations being the rule, rather than the exception. I think this is largely due to the fact that the people making the movies are actually from generations where gaming was a big part of their life already, rather than just trying to capitalize on the zeitgeist. The Resident Evil series, to me, was still part of that old era.

We now have Uncharted, the Sonic movies, Gran Turismo, Borderlands (just kidding), Detective Pikachu, etc. While many aren't great, I think they get the tone better than they used to.

@Khayl @Batesy125s @Fiendish-Beaver @Northern_munkey I actually think the PS4 generation (approx. 2013 - 2020) was the golden age of gaming, at least so far. It saw what, in my opinion, are some of the absolute best games ever made, while also having access to many legacy titles. It had the beginnings of what would become the toxic online culture war, but it hadn't really metastasized into brain rot yet.

I love how this comment section turned into everyone divulging their age 😂. Queue the FOMO in three.... two.... one....

I'm 34.

Only Kojima can decide when to call it quits. I hope he sticks with it for a long time to come, but only if he wants to. He's given so much creativity to the games industry, that if he wanted to rest on his laurels, he'd have every right to; however, something tells me that if he "retired," he'd get restless and be back before you knew it.

Love the Wuxia aesthetic going on here, so I've definitely got my eye on this game, but won't be sold until we get a closer look at the flow of the game as a whole.

@Northern_munkey Picked it up about a week ago and I've been totally hooked; already in Cruel difficulty. The buildcrafting is just so next-level, but love that they've streamlined the currency from the first PoE.

Played this all weekend. Absolutely fantastic game - the true spiritual successor to Diablo II.

Don't like taking up valuable storage space, so I turned it off. If there's a clip I want to save, I'll use the video clip feature which saves the last 15 minutes and I can edit from there.

I'll believe it when I see it, but if true, I'll be getting the MCC day one for sure. Played Reach and Halo 4 like a fiend back in college.

Personally, disappointed because I'm actually really excited for Shadows, but am more than happy to wait another month to make sure they really nail it.

If this is true, then it is absolutely despicable and I hope the commissioner is fired and tried to the fullest extent of the law.

@Vega37 Some folks just don't get it. Gameplay-wise, yeah, Infinite isn't anything to write home about (though the grind rails are freaking fantastic), but those high concepts... chef's kiss.

The commentary on American Exceptionalism, while simultaneously showing some of the darkest aspects of humanity, is amazing. The fact that they took the Founding Fathers and turned them into religious prophets... soooo goood. And that is all without even mentioning the multiple reality or predestination angle.

@Northern_munkey I think politically slanted articles certainly have a place here, but I do understand and agree with the frustration of seeing politics infect everything on the website. For example, it would be really nice if Push Square could publish an article about Naughty Dog that didn't devolve into commentary on wokeness, Israel, etc.

@Northern_munkey Yeah, I totally get it. There are plenty of people who go full tilt in the comments and resort to ad hominem, which, in my opinion, automatically voids their arguments.

However, there are realities of being subject to the Chinese government, which cause legitimate problems and are fair to point out. You don't necessarily need to bring up a Western flaw to balance it and give the appearance of fairness, though I do understand when you say that there are plenty of people who refuse to even acknowledge the flaws in our own societies.

I do legitimately believe that the Chinese government is more malevolent than most counterparts, but that has nothing at all to do with the Chinese people. I spent the majority of my primary education at a predominantly Chinese school in a US Chinatown. I learned Mandarin, learned Chinese culture, music, history, etc. and loved it all.

If anything, I want more Chinese cultural exports, including video games. So many people have no idea how much wonder and inspiration comes from China and the Chinese people.

@Northern_munkey It definitely doesn't make it ok, but we live in the present, not 70 years ago or 70 years from now.

I didn't buy my PlayStation from Imperial Japan of 1942.

I'd rather do business with a country that committed atrocities 70 years ago than one that's committing atrocities today.

@Northern_munkey To be fair, those human rights abuses by Imperial Japan were during WW2. China is engaged in human rights violations today.

@themightyant I don't think anyone is "outraged" that Tencent has ties to the Chinese military. This article is talking about a US government blacklist with regards to security concerns for US citizens. Just about every large corporation has ties to a governmental military apparatus in one way or another.

@themightyant I'm American, so the Devil is on my team.

@themightyant My own personal concerns with Tencent are twofold: 1 has to do with user data, but I have the same concerns with Western companies. However, that concern is amplified when that data is being used and manipulated by a foreign adversary. It doesn't mean that what the US is doing is any better, but at least they're on "our" team.

My second concern is as I said: big companies gobbling up competition, which is a concern I definitely have with Western companies and I don't view that concern any differently between Western or Eastern companies.

@UltimateOtaku91 To answer your first question, it won't change anything really. The "blacklist" is an advisory. I think it's meant to discourage other companies from doing business with blacklisted companies, but there's no law prohibiting it.

@themightyant I get what you're saying, but this doesn't really have anything to do with outrage, per se. This has to do with security concerns for the US government. Ties to the military of a foreign adversary is a much different situation to ties with our own, regardless of how you feel about the military industrial complex.

@UltimateOtaku91 I think it's a little bit of both. Tencent is a mammoth corporation with a propensity for gobbling up any vulnerable gaming companies. However, I think the majority of the suspicion comes from it's inevitable ties to the CCP. While that is completely unavoidable for any Chinese company (if the CCP says "jump," any Chinese company is obligated to ask "how high?"), there are also reports that many of the higher execs at Tencent are very closely tied to the CCP.

It's the same security concerns that a lot of Western governments have with Chinese companies (i.e. Tik Tok). No matter how much a Chinese company can say the don't share user data, they are legally obligated to share that info with the Chinese government if it's demanded.

@Dimey Yeah entries over 5 minutes are super suss XD

If you like pulpy adventure movies (a la Indiana Jones, National Treasure, the Mummy (1999) etc.), you're gonna love these games! The first is good, but not great; however, a great introduction to the main characters. 2, 3, 4, and Lost Legacy are all amazing games, in my opinion. Fantastic platforming, script, story, and the shooting gets better with each entry.

What's so crazy about this is I don't even want the drive to play PS5 games. I haven't purchased a single PS5 game on disc. I just want the drive to play movies and the PS4 games I already own...