The Hot Topic Returns

[Nag]

I think a few highlights for me would be Gears of War: E-Day... returning to the Locust threat is an exciting prospect for me along with bringing back Marcus and Dom, Silent Hill 2 actually being a great game against what seemed like impossible odds... that makes me excited to see how Bloober Team handles their next game especially seeing it described as a mash up of Resident Evil and Dead Space and the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 announcement... I can't wait to get my hands on that.

 

Disappointments? I guess a few too many big triple A titles kind've let me down this year... Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Senua's Saga and Warhammer 40k being a few that spring to mind.

[mfnick]

The Best

 

Not To just do my GOTY here but I have to mention Astro Bot. It was a magical experience. Exactly what I imagine Nintendo fans feel when they get a great Mario. But this time it was for me. 

 

The TGA’s funnily enough I put up there. Astro Bot won and loads of game reveals that spoke specifically of me like Onimusha and Okami. Shame they’re years away but still. 
 

Concord - Found the whole thing entertaining. Fuck mediocre live service shit. Glad it failed. Obviously people lost their jobs & that sucks but that’s much bigger issue in businesses overall. I’m just celebrating the game losing here. 
 

Worst

 

Layoffs - again concord failing is funny. People losing their jobs isn’t. Unless it was the management who pushed this kind of bland shit in the first place. 

 

Xbox fully giving up on consoles - I really think this will be a net negative for us. 

No Switch 2 Reveal - I’m sick of hearing about it. Please just do it already even just to shut people up a bit. 

Old service games dominating the charts - Shows how unhealthy the games industry is unless you’re one of these companies whose game is already in the list. 

[Sly Reflex]

Probably the best is being talked into playing Balatro even though the people that did it know I hate card games. It's such a special game and deserving in all the accolades it's collected.

 

Middling is Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. It the definition of fine hampered with a covid development and also maybe a drawing a line under that style and humour of the Borderlands we've known for the last decade or more.

 

Worst was Destiny 2. Good points is it's very mechanically sound and it runs like a dream. To list all the bad points would take me forever and quite honestly I don't think anyone cares enough for me to get my stick out and beat this game. Cliff notes are it's a confusing mess where even the most celebrated stories are just meh. The worst stories are a huge waste of time. New skills feel gimmicky and superfluous. It in general feels so bloated yet so barren simultaneously. I have no idea what they are aiming for there anymore, but it's a real Frankenstein's monster now, although one I have very little sympathy for.

[one-armed dwarf]

There's nothing to really celebrate with Concord failing the way it does though, cause nobody who's actually accountable suffers any negative outcome, just the human capital who are the grist for the meat grinder. Which also makes the industry worse in myriad ways, more volatile for people currently in employment as the market gets saturated with high skilled technical artists, more brain drain as people leave such a shit industry that mistreats its workers and underpays, and Sony will continue to double down on the kinds of GAAS games that matter to them, probably, cause Helldivers 2 did so well for them (least until they fucked around with the a/c linking thing and regional restrictions based on that)

[HandsomeDead]

Concord wasn't even the bad kind of service game.  You paid upfront and updates would be free.  No battle pass, no loot boxes or any other kind of FOMO nonsense.  It was just an online multiplayer game.  A lot is being attributed to it that it wasn't.

 

Like, there's plenty to criticise about it without just making stuff up.

[one-armed dwarf]

Honestly the only thing I was fatigued by when looking at Concord was its Guardians of the Galaxy FMV cutscene. Marvel snark is so 2019. 

 

But when they showed actual gameplay, I thought it looked pretty interesting and am sort of sorry to have not played it cause the switch out incentive sounded like an interesting idea (also I would have been able to get a refund if I did play it anyway). 

[Metroid66]

6 hours ago, Maryokutai said:

Microsoft having absolutely no idea what they're doing anymore and pretty much leaving the field to Sony.

– Sony being almost as clueless and punishing Concord developers for shitty executive decisions.

 

Drawing on the unfortunate truths of @Maryokutai's post, my highlight has been leaving the console race altogether and moving to PC. 

 

Since I was never one to hold onto physical copies of games it seemed the best place to rediscover favourite titles from my near twenty years of gaming. It's been a revelation - picking up classic titles for next to nothing, and seeing them boosted, naturally, to a degree that you can only achieve on console via the rip-off 'remaster' route.

 

Grab a decent PC, download Psychonauts for about 90p on cdkeys, run it at pristine 4k, 60fps and widescreen, and realise what a load of shite your consoles are.

[shinymcshine]

@Metroid66 You're only a terrible PC conversion away from it all crashing down though (can't remember a recent PC video card frame rate disaster, but there was a huge faff around one of the Batman games a while back).

[one-armed dwarf]

[Maf]

39 minutes ago, Metroid66 said:

 

 

Grab a decent PC, download Psychonauts for about 90p on cdkeys, run it at pristine 4k, 60fps and widescreen, and realise what a load of shite your consoles are.

Firstly an Xbox can run Psychonauts at 4K60 and secondly if that’s all you wanted to do you should have saved a few £100’s and got a Steam Deck which is basically a console

 

PC gaming is great and has lots of benefits and advantages but if you want to play modern games at good cost, don’t want to mess around with settings, want to play games made on UE5 and like sitting on your sofa PlayStation/Xbox has your back 👍

[Nag]

PC converts are like the Vegans of gaming...🤣

[Sly Reflex]

56 minutes ago, Metroid66 said:

Grab a decent PC, download Psychonauts for about 90p on cdkeys, run it at pristine 4k, 60fps and widescreen, and realise what a load of shite your consoles are.

 

It doesn't matter how often you say stuff like this, some people are just to stubborn to realise they are in the wrong. Consoles have taken all this shit parts of PC gaming while claiming only a few of the good parts, and PC games have taken all the best parts of console gaming without diluting the experience too much.

 

When something does go wrong though, it goes wrong. You have to jump through some circles and usually get a work around. Like recently I wanted to play Just Cause 2 and I had to bugger about to get it to boot., Once I did it worked like a dream.

 

But aside from that all of the things people are usually scared of just happen automatically now. Everything installs and patches on it's own. Everything uploaded to the cloud so you can play across devices. You might have to dive into the settings, but lets be fair, you're doing that already to alter stick sensitivity and subtitles/sound stuff anyway. It's a nothing burger of an argument. If you're having to do a complete customisation of graphical settings it's rare, most games take a benchmark and set to approx what they should be on. Outside of turning on V Sync or whatever, it barely gets touched this end.

 

Also don't buy the "BuT I wAnT tO pLaY oN mY tV!!!" bullshit. You can do that. I can send my PC feed to either TV in the living room or bedroom and play with a wireless controller no issues for the majority of games. Outside of stuff that requires frame perfect timing you're good. I've even played Clone Hero on the TV with little to no problems, but I had trouble with faster moving stuff like pinball. I could see fighting games suffering as well. There are exceptions, but most things will be fine.

 

It's a mental barrier more than anything. It's scary for a lot of people. And expensive. But it's also superior, if you can overlook a few things that can be annoying as fuck.

 

Also fuck you @Nag for posting before I finished this. I knew it would come, but I didn't think you'd beat me to the punch

[Nag]

1 minute ago, Sly Reflex said:

Also fuck you @Nag for posting before I finished this. I knew it would come, but I didn't think you'd beat me to the punch

 

❤️

[Metroid66]

56 minutes ago, Maf said:

Firstly an Xbox can run Psychonauts at 4K60

Not in widescreen 

[one-armed dwarf]

You can also just plug a PC into a TV.

 

I've definitely gone the other way on control methods tho, controller build quality is shocking this generation and so it's been an easy switch to make, in combination with the obvious disadvantages of using a controller in an online game on PC.

 

I also think medium/'high'* settings are underrated tbh, I even use medium on 4090. Set the preset, turn down the RT, sometimes it's like who gives a fuck. I've done that with Marvel Rivals, currently doing it with Indy as well.

 

* it seems these days that 'high' means 'medium', with how you have all these weird new presets like 'ultra', 'epic', 'psycho/supreme/unobtanium (yes really, in Avatar)'

[Maf]

I think the first problem with PC is the first step

 

Go on then. Go buy your PC

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=Gaming+pc&crid=29I7DB2SKK6Y5&sprefix=gaming+pc%2Caps%2C95&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

 

Hope you like PC gaming on your TV and don’t need a monitor as well

 

You can do what I did and throw money at it and skip this part of the process. And still end up with the not best CPU and having to send it back because it was broken.
 

But it’s not recommended I just have fuck all else to do

[Metroid66]

PC just fits the way I want to collect and play games going forward.

 

It's really not that controversial.

[Maf]

And I’m not bagging on your choice or PC’s in general. I spent most of my gaming time on PC last year. But it’s the consoles are shite bit which is some bullshit. 
 

It’s not saying they’re perfect or even better, but if you want simple, reliable, easy and still good value for money. They’re definitely not shite 

 

EDIT: Err, PS5 Pro + disc drive not withstanding for vfm

[Maryokutai]

For me it's just the whole hardware aspect I find unappealing. Not necessarily the upgrading parts aspect but rather that on a fundamental level I don't want to spend any mental capacity on thinking about hardware, it's something that has become entirely uninteresting to me (handhelds excluded for obvious reasons). If I didn't have to switch a disc every once in a while my Series X might as well be invisible, to both eye and mind, and I kind of like that. 

 

I did build a PC back in the day for Half-Life 2, which was a pretty cool experience and the game itself was beyond anything I could play on console at that time. But it just wasn't for me – I think the last PC game I played was the first Witcher on my old MacBook.

[Metroid66]

8 hours ago, Maf said:

it’s the consoles are shite bit which is some bullshit. 

 

Ah, pure over enthusiastic hyperbole. No one's had more fun with playstation than me.

 

I should have made it clear (I thought I had by giving the Psychonauts example) that I was talking about console's performance around older titles. I still think they're pretty shite for that.