one-armed dwarf

Which, as far as competition and choice is concerned, would be a shite outcome. There's a lot of fanboy brain rot about this thing online, in the sense you get the impression some of them would actually like to see MS drop out of the market. Right now this feels like such a Quixotic endeavor by Phil and you'd wonder what the perception of the gaming division is internally. Yes, 'business weirdo' thing to think about but it's not great. On the other hand you could see why they want to buy themselves back into a more competitive position, but maybe this wasn't the way. or something, I dunno

CMA blocking Acti acquisition https://www.gov.uk/government/news/microsoft-activision-deal-prevented-to-protect-innovation-and-choice-in-cloud-gaming I'm stopping pretending like I understand what's going on here, or what is has to do with cloud gaming in particular. edit thinking on it, I sort of guess the angle is maybe if cloud gaming is predicted to be big, which is hard to see at this point but maybe it will be, then basically being the king of content and king of technology (Azure cloud) would put them in maybe too powerful a spot for competitors to emerge. Maybe CMA understand it as GamePass === Cloud gaming, or something like this

Apparently its coming to digital really soon so I'm looking forward to seeing the wine glass munching 🍷

It's a shit gun that randomly spooges bullets, gorilla hands and shotty or gtfo. Anyway sort of on topic, but not really, I went and ordered the Witcher novels off book depository cause it's shutting down, and I wanted to get something from them before that happens.

If you're talking about upcoming releases sure, they look pretty strong. In terms of next gen exclusive stuff that's out, I don't really see it, hence my surprise. Unless there's a huge cohort of Forspoken nutters out there who we've yet to hear from. 70 GBP for that undercooked disappointment, oof. Forget about your gamepass outlay lol I get that all that is subjective, but to HD's point about meritocracy in capitalism I think it's very thin pickings from both the hardware leaders. So I think it's more of a brand loyalty thing with a higher attachment of sentiment to playstation in particular that gives it that edge. Which is something I'm not really interested in cheer leading cause it's not stuff that's really tangible.

I'm surprised the ps5 is selling as well as it (allegedly) is. It's been the most boring start to a gen I can think of with hardly anything really flaunting the power of these systems. I assume the whole endgame with GP is to expand it beyond just xbox anyway, and turn it into a more scalable service across tons of other devices in the same way that netflix works on your TV, phone, PC, xbox, PS etc. I still think a big thing that's fucking its growth is how poor the software side of the xbox/gamepass on PC desktop client is. If it was more frictionless and less buggy it would help. High end PC gaming has stagnated since the we returned to a sort of post pandemic normal but there's a lot of PC owners not necessarily interested in the high end anyway and its a market open for capture with the GP library, if GP could improve enough to make an impression with them imo, they should integrate it with Steam, Epic games store, the other ones I forgot the name of. Steam definitely at least, EA access is on steam. I know valve would probably take a pretty big cut of that maybe, but it would probably still grow the userbase if they aren't prepared to just improve the experience they already have

Stuff like tlou2 made me think we will probably hit a point where if games look as convincing as this we might start agreeing with Jack Thompson.

It's a bit OT so I won't go too much into it, but while I think it gets an unfair rap for its story telling, when it comes to its setting I thought Cyberpunk was pretty toothless. The angle they could have went with the bodily augmentations and cyberpsychosis was a missed opportunity imo to really integrate that aspect into both story and gameplay. What Witcher 3 does really well I think is just let a setting tell its story, 2077 is a bit of a paper tiger in that respect. But the continent in Witcher tells and shows a story about occupation and ransacking a country, and the difficult deals people make to live with the aftermath of it, and that is also communicated really well by the consequences of the stories in some of the missions. It's just a very dark and fucked up world and feels properly filled out in a way 2077 doesn't really come close to. That said, it is the third game in a saga so CDPR had a lot of practice at figuring it out. I really should play Witcher 2 as well I think.

I don't want to relitigate DmC, but the kinda approach I don't really like is the 'oops, we fucked this one up and need to redo it over', or 'we ran out of runway, so lets start again with this rethought out thing' and throw away the old thing cause well it's way too cringe to bother with now. It's much more interesting to me to see weird spinoffs that branch off of something else within an existing universe, than reheat it with a new style. Even if arguments can be made that the style is fresh and interesting, it's cool for instance that something like REVII co-exists with something as crazy as RE6 and Code Veronica. Or GoW 2018 with the stuff that precedes that. I believe that was actually the idea with DmC at some point, something which Ninja Theory themselves wanted to do, but someone at capcom specifically asked them to make it a completely new continuity and cut off the old one. It sometimes feels like in gaming there's this thing where the medium gets embarrassed with itself and strains to be taken more seriously, so these kinds of facelifts become a bit more common than in other media. Tomb Raider always stood out to me as a particularly shit reboot that just made those games way less interesting. I'd even say I preferred Angel of Darkness tbh, though it was pretty shit tbf. FFVII Remake, despite its faults, is a pretty cool way to reboot an IP. If you know the plot of the game you know why, or you vehemently disagree because of that. But I think it's a cool way to go about it.

I might actually agree tbh, I find reboots like that a bit boring cause it feels like they are trying to replace the old game, cause old games are icky or something. That said, I think most reboots tend to try and be sequels. Stuff like Doom 2016, and God of War, so the complaint is really more applicable to remakes than reboots tbh I suppose I would like (another) reboot of Ninja Gaiden, cause it's a starved genre and that was always the most hardcore one of the bunch and Team Ninja clearly still have people of that kind of pedigree making very deep and challenging games. But I think the RPG systems in Nioh are a pretty dull distraction from its mechanics at times, at least for me personally. So something much more purist and pared down from them would be great. Maybe not even Ninja Gaiden, but something faithful to the design of that game

Dunno if bellow is still on this one, or what kind of madness possessed him to spend 45 hours pottering around in White Orchard, if I got that right. But I'm making another attempt at going through it after my Cyberpunk return earlier in the year, figured I'd try and draw a line under Geralt's adventure too. But starting again from the start, this time on 'Death March'. What I like about high difficulty levels in RPGs is they aren't really about skill at all, it's quite easy to execute what the game wants. But things like bestiary entries, enemy weakness, oils and potions, all of that becomes more important to study. It integrates the preparation aspect of being a witcher into the role playing fantasy in a more immersive way, cause if you ignore it then the enemies are tanky and kill you straight away. The game still feels pretty of its time in terms of gameplay with the boring batman combat but handles all elements outside of that pretty well. The questlines have more fun and interesting outcomes than Cyberpunk (which is no slouch in the writing department either, incredibly overlooked in that regard in fact), with some of the 'goody' options leading to more dour consequences than the 'mean, greedy bastard' ones. Which makes the world pretty convincing The ray tracing update looks fine, I dunno. Not got a lot to say about it really other than it makes some of the more dated blemishes more cohesive now. It's a decent looking game without those blemishes. Anyway I want to really focus on the 'green' skill tree for Geralt and make him a potion junkie, and spend a few points here and there in the red and blue trees. You can respec apparently so no worries

I sort of selfishly hope this is the last one and they don't do the Mori ones like this as well, so I can finally murder the OCD goblin in my brain which is compulsing me to buy all these fucking things just to have them even tho I ended up being kind of lukewarm on Berserk past Golden Age

I mean I assume they have metrics for this. If they see an uptick in subs coinciding with player activity around specific games, and growth in uptake for said games then that's probably a correlative trend they can point to. The developers on these titles and the people involved in maintaining the gamepass service itself can't pay the bills with passion, they got to keep the lights on somehow I don't mean to dump on the game anyway, I actually did intend to try it again but I have no rhythm and don't really like it when a game tells me when and where to push a button (eg, Sekiro)

The interesting thing about the controls is people make it out like the old game is hard to play cause of tank controls. But imo the new one is much more hard to get to grips with, cause of Leon's weird kind of movement. At the end of the day tho they operate by the same basic ethos, create space and take your shots. The diff in remake is you have to be constantly moving, and they adjust the aggression of the ganado to keep up with your more intricate and blended movement options. But in actuality, you're doing the same thing you were always doing, getting away and making yourself safe enough to shoot. The cool thing about the difficulty levels in this game IMO is that the AI is different on all of them. It sometimes feels like you're being chased by Nemesis on pro. It's really worth going into the difficulty levels if you want to feel how the more dangerous enemies change your approach and shift the focus from reactive gameplay (knife parry/block) to more proactive (running away and creating space, parry is a last resort)

What are your feelings on it then? I think it's probably the most I've been into a TPS since the actual RE4. The way professional handles combat and player mistakes took some getting used to, but I got into it big time when I figured it out. Definitely had my fill with it now though.

Well, I bought it on steam, hated it and forgot to refund. So don't blame me for nothing edit been disputed now

The demo seems pretty boring from what I've seen. You could probably lab some stuff with Ryu and Luke in training tho

Did another S+ run with the default handgun instead of Punisher and doing all the sidequests. Definitely done with this now, all Leon-ed out. There's lots of achievements I could unlock but frankly none of the other challenges interest me (beat the whole game without healing? ignore the merchant? yuck). Done unless they do that DLC, or PSVR2 version. This was a close one. I think the duck move is more pivotal to the combat than the parry can be, at times. Great game, 2023 off to a good start.

Sounds like we are getting a demo, what that entails I dunno (timed access multiplayer beta?)

Layoffs at Ready at Dawn, they made Lone Echo and its sequel. The latter of which was released to very little fanfare and wasn't' very well optimised, but was the last 'big' AAA PCVR release to occur and probably for VR in general until Horizon on PS5 Lone Echo 1 was cool but I never got good performance out of 2 and just never got into it. Lots of judder and reprojection. Unlikely but maybe Sony might have a AAA project that they are cooking up that some of these guys could land themselves in

I watched this, similar to this dude I took an interest in checking out AC coming at it from the Souls perspective, not really knowing much about it and played all the gen 3 and gen 4 games (but did not finish For Answer). I think there's a uniqueness to those older ones that gets a bit lost later on, where the clunkiness is sort of the point and fully integrated into the design fantasy of figuring out how to control these things and customise them to something that matches your preferences/mission objectives. Later on in AC4/For Answer, they turn into feeling like you're playing Vanquish, which was cool in its own way but not quite as interesting or special. Though it's much easier to show people a video of For Answer* and convince them to give the series a shot, than it is to show them a mission of Last Raven (which is my favorite one, and one that's not on this video. Takes place over the course of 24 hours and has branching storylines built for multi playthroughs, it's quite cool) I'm really excited for ACVI cause I think the popularity of Souls, even if it leads to mixed expectations WRT these new titles, has shown that there is an appetite for systemic games like this where you have to poke and prod to understand how to make them work, and embrace failure a little bit along the way. * like this one here, the scale is kind of crazy for a game of its generation. Also the beginning basically got re-used for Rhadan in Elden Ring when he shoots big arrows at you. I upgraded my CPU to a new Ryzen to run this level better ACV looks interesting but everyone hates it. Except this guy here, he thinks it's amazing but it's from the perspective of someone who got into the clan based gameplay of that game. Shame that there's no way to experience that now http://www.mechadamashii.com/reviews/reviews-armored-core-verdict-day-1010/ I'll probably try out the PS1 originals next.

Yeah, that is exactly why I like it so much. An effortless blend of comedy and really dark drama that somehow never feels jarring (except when it is supposed to) and constantly surprising

Optimistic that he could even get onto that salary bracket with a criminal record now.

Yeah, that's why I hid the Barry trailer when posting it in the trailer thread. It's unavoidable with the direction that show goes in tho Just don't read news articles on succession anyway, lol

The spoiler minefield for this show is near impossible to avoid at this stage I think, it's sort of hitting the peak of its zeitgeist right now and some news outlets just straight up put spoilers as headlines. Maybe the worst example I've seen in a long time