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I haven’t played it yet 😭 Eurogamer gave the game 4/5 review saying in terms of narrative it’s funny and out there, but the gameplay is quite ordinary. So similar-ish to your impressions by the look

Maf refused to create the thread for the weird Russian nun game I put about 4 hours or so into it the other day, cause the description sounded pretty weird. Anyway it's sort of a third person narrative adventure with a focus on puzzle solving and platforming. It's set in a surreal realisation of 19th century Russia. You're playing a nun at this like Orthodox covenant, everyone hates you for some reason. It blends together a few styles, mainly the TP narrative thing mentioned but also 2D platformers, which emphasizes splits in period of the narrative (the 2D bits are the main character's memories). The 3D sections is fairly standard block pushing type stuff, but also an interesting environmental manipulation gimmick involving prayers and shame, it's like the environment gets all DmC for a bit. There's a few strange things with the setting, a kind of steampunk thing going on and one section with unreasonably huge fish. It sort of straddles the line between feeling like this ironic sendup of... something but also using genre conventions from games and maybe some eastern european cinema to chat about guilt, religious conflict, sexual repression, v. standard stuff. It's alright, I expected it to be weirder tbh. Make sure to light up these Christ icons so you can get a high score and level up your Christian guilt skilltree (points are pointless)

Moving quicker through this than I hoped, but it's really enjoyable. Chapter 3, while it might not be everyone's cup of tea, was a wonderful case of meta-narrative. The protagonist's powers of channeling other people's emotions I find still a bit too vague as a concept, especially as the game treats it like some kind of situational mind-reading superpower. They are doing some interesting things with it, but just like LiS2 it feels like a feature born out of necessity. But it doesn't drag it down either, so I'm a bit ambivalent about it. Noteworthy also is that this isn't the kind of rollercoaster the first one was, it's more steady storytelling that isn't afraid of spending a lot of time on more mundane things to ground it. It might end up being less memorable as a result maybe, but after years of TV shows aiming for that big cliffhanger to force engagement I'm kind of glad this just goes into the other direction instead, where you almost can't sense the cut between chapters.

This is a great trailer, looks like it's getting into the meat of things. I guess this pretty looking elf is Sauron. That said, did not hear great things about season 1. Or at least the word of mouth on it didn't seem to really make waves Maybe they'll find their feet here, I dunno

I got Sonic Superstars and Star Ocean in a Amazon sale last week and GTA5 was only £15 regular price.

Well, I haven't actually used him yet but, as far as I can see, surely his dress sense alone would strike fear in the heart of the enemy I've never seen such pixel saturation.

Yeah, the way Gogo is hidden is a perfectly nice balance of obscure and decipherable. It gives you the info via the world map that there's something there, it puts you up against an enemy that does something unusual and always respawns. You have to get back into the curious mindset of pre-'spelling everything out' game design, but I think that part was really interestingly crafted. The character is complete shit though, unfortunately.

I think that Mario game is the very first game I ever played. Kind of odd how long it took them to add it into the service.

Alleyway is great. I love those Breakout kind of games. Think I still have mine on GB in box

Had a couple of major sessions on this over the last few days and I think I've come full circle on the game - getting that warm feeling of glee again from its impressive creativity, rather than that mid game frustration when things started to get a bit obscure and, let's face it, old school. But I'm not afraid to take advice from those who know better and I feel I've started to experience the game as it was intended back in the day (to the extent that such a thing is even remotely possible). So after grabbing Locke and getting all the locked up goodies in Narshe I decided to just go to the top of the map and explore all the yellow dot locations and their NPCs, working top to bottom, and acting on even the vaguest hint. There's no need for spoiler shielding as I'm sure I won't need to go into detail to divulge to those who've contributed to this forum playthru thread the sheer amount of adventuring I've experienced in order to get Cyan's ultimate move, Sabin's soul killing blitz, and find a completely new character called Gogo, via one of the most random mishaps I've ever experienced in a videogame. And no guides, just talking and exploring. I'm still a couple of characters short I think. I'm remembering the girl who did the drawings and that assassin dude. But, luckily, I docked the switch today for the first time in a few weeks, and my telly revealed a definite greyness to some of those erstwhile yellow dots. That's where I'll be going tomorrow.

There is a 1st party Sony game coming. The press keep misunderstanding a comment about them not having AAA games this year I'm a little surprised Sony didn't rush together some dlc or a spin off to fill the gap for this winter, but Insomniac are swamped. We could have had something God Of War I suppose, but the rogue like dlc tied off that story I suppose

New trailer for season 4 So they’re making a change to the loot system where you can more easily get the attributes you want on a weapon by finding attribute recipes. Not fully understanding but looks like they’re changing the rune system as well? This is actually really good. When I played through season 1 there was a point where I didn’t use any new gear for about 12 hours because all the perks on my shit made me unkillable. But the game got boring as obviously loot is the main driver and at a point the damage numbers on the new stuff surpassed mine by so much I said fuck it and swapped. If they’re changing it so you can carry weapon attributes/stats forward easier than great. I found that to be a big problem when I played it

There was some Playstation financial reporting today which is why there’s all this news. The hardware stuff I’m not really certain about. I saw one thing earlier that said hardware sales were down 29% y-o-y, I saw another that said PS5 is basically on pace with PS4, this is from Gamesindustry.biz article https://www.gamesindustry.biz/playstation-full-year-revenues-rise-to-275-billion-but-narrowly-misses-ps5-sales-target Hardware revenue was also up. But maybe that’s because PS5 isn’t being discounted as far as I know and they had that PS Portal that despite looking useless I think sold great I think overall PS5 is doing well, and with a PS5 Pro almost definitely on the way, they’ll be a boost there, too* So PC ports might come faster, but for non-multiplayer games I think they’ll still put the console version out first. It looks like it still works for them. But maybe reduce the wait time from a year to 6 months or something on PC? *According to that GIbiz article there are no 1st party PS games coming until next April…makes me think the PS5 Pro will also come out next year. I don’t think they can launch even a premium version of an existing console without a new game

Looks good, but I'm not paying £80 for a physical version to back it

Sony's PC releases sell really poorly, except for Helldivers. Maybe there's some exceptions but they aren't super impressive last I heard, a lot of that is down to how delayed they are I think. AAA games, Sony ones especially, it's like there's this hype bubble where all the sales momentum occurs. A release 18 months down the line, people have moved on. I wonder how Ghost of Tsushima will do. It's an OW game so you'd imagine pretty well, but I bet it will have this same issue. They need get releases faster on PC, especially as they're apparently not hitting hardware sales targets anymore, people ain't buying as many PS5s and I reckon it's not just cause of what exclusives it has so no point being all Square Enix about it. Sony games aren't the kinda things you double dip on, especially as near all of them are third person narrative heavy games which are tedious to replay. How will GoW Ragnarok do, pretty poorly I'm going to bet.

I won't be at all surprised to see earlier and earlier release dates for PC in regards to Sony first party games... whether they'll ever reach day and date releases is anyone's guess. I'd imagine they've noticed that extra dollar rolling in though.

Oh, yeah I’m not saying they won’t do more online focused GaaS stuff. Just in response to @Nag that it’s all going way of PC. I don’t think Playstation going anywhere. But more GaaS stuff. Sony already said for online games PC will be there day 1 with console like Helldivers so that’s expected. PC will get bigger for these companies but it’s not all going that way. I didn’t know Sony owned Helldivers I thought they just published it. But I googled it and you’re right

But Helldivers likely confirmed their push towards GAAS, when it might have been a bit of a wobbly stance just a few months ago due to Destiny underperforming and the multiplayer spin-off of Last of Us being canned. If Concorde reaches similar numbers, then that's their path forward. And it's reasonable to assume Sony covered the entire development cost of Helldivers considering it's their IP and it will likely never release on anything but PS and PC. 'Publishing' is just paying the bills and having control over marketing and deadlines.

The only company that might go away is Xbox. Playstation are having a great year. So they’ll be more Playstation. As long as there’s more PlayStation that’s where they’ll want people to spend first. Helldivers is unique being a multiplayer title, and as far as I’m aware is only Playstation published. When it comes to Playstation developed, I think it’s unlikely they’ll want to give Steam 30% of the first run of sales.

New 'J'RPG from a French indie studio, with music from Motoi Sakuraba, ALZARA Radiant Echoes. Looks cute I think, and I like how they cite Golden Sun as an influence and talk about elemental puzzles, which to this day no other JRPG has even attempted (I'l try not to think too much about Lost Odyssey being perceived as a classic already though). https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studiocamelia/seed-a-vibrant-tribute-to-jrpg-classics

New teen slasher horror game from Supermassive Games (Until Dawn, The Quarry) based on Dead by Daylight I know nothing about Dead by Daylight. But I really enjoy Supermassive’s stuff and this trailer looks like another fun one of those.

Yeah... PC.😂

You can tell this is one of those games where they put a lot of work and effort into making it look 'cheap'. Looks really interesting and the Steam reviews are glowing. If it ever hops on a console I'll check it out.

Combined with the recent news that Helldivers 2 sold a staggering 12 million units so far, I think it's easy to see where things are headed.

Here’s a really interesting quote about how PS values success right now https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2024/05/14/playstation-focus-ps5-games-sales-play-time/ Not to make everything about Xbox this week, because I think there are 2-3 really interesting bits in here. But if this is the trends the top business people are looking at and measuring then Gamepass makes more sense and why sales on 1st party games aren’t as important. Sony are thinking the same and calculating success in a similar way, but they’re popular enough to not have to put their games on a subscription service to achieve it Fortnite/Minecraft might end up being the most influential game of all time for the worst reasons