Next month we get:
The Last of Us Remastered (plus expansion)
MLB The Show 19
TLOU is obviously a complete classic and anyone who hasn't played it is in for a treat - clearly they're trying to build hype ahead of the sequel's release next February.
MLB is some sort of baseball game so I assume no-one in Europe whatsoever is going to give a shit about that one.
I should probably get around to finishing that Nightmare Mode playthrough of TLoU at some stage – having the thing on my hard drive instead of the disc version might help with that (but probably won't).
It's a more inspiring line-up than Games With Gold next month, that's for sure, which is giving us Tembo The Bad-Ass Elephant, Friday 13th, Bolt and Ninja Gaiden 3.
I had a MLB The Show on the Vita and it was actually quite good. I don't understand baseball particularly - you have to hit a ball and run in a circle, which sound like fun, doesn't it? I get confused when they layer on a bewildering quantity of incredibly deep statistics on top of this. The core gameplay is MLB The Show is one where you have to judge the speed and trajectory of a ball and time a button press. There is also the option to choose not to press the button, which is sometimes the correct choice. On the other side of the equation, when you're fielding, it's a fun little bluffing game where you pick what kind of pitch to throw. You have to balance throwing your best pitches against not becoming too predictable. I prefered this to batting, personally.
My MLBTS career on the Vita became a very odd psychological drama. You control one guy through his career, as a few sports games have done over the years. I first of all created a player and gave him superhuman abilities in all fields. I decided this would be cheating, and quit that career, starting a new character with weaker abilities, character flaws, a tragic backstory, that sort of thing. When I started this second career, it transpired that the game had kept my first player and inserted him into this second campaign as a computer player playing for another team somewhere in the league. This baseballing superhero soon started dominating the league in all the stats. So no matter how well I did, there was this alternative me, with the same name, who was doing better. This perfect version of myself who hit better, pitched faster, and won more games than me. I imagined he was better looking and more popular than me as well. I started to hate him. Hating this perfect version of myself was quite an odd experience. I felt a bit like Arnold Rimmer when he meets Ace Rimmer in Dimension Jump.
In conclusion, it's a deeper game than you might expect.
Did you ever beat yourself?
Bit personal.
Don't really know where else to put this but is anyone else now tempted by PS Now since Sony announced the price cut? £50 for a year of access to games along with the option to download rather than stream seems like a good deal to me. I've not tested PS Now since we upraded our broadband (previously the PS4 detected the broadband wasn't good enough) but if it's a goer now the service looks a lot more appealing than PS+ has for a long time. Looking at the list of games it's very slightly underwhelming but does look like there's enough to justify it and never buy a game again.
With the option of downloading its tempting. When I used my free trial it was all over the shop in terms of freezing or not even working (no fibre in our area).
It's basically Game Pass now, right? That's not so bad. Sadly, it's another expense and I have enough games to be getting on with right now. Maybe in the future though.
Making games like GoW available for only a week though… pfft. I'd barely get a third of the way through it in that time.
Making games like GoW available for only a week though… pfft. I'd barely get a third of the way through it in that time.
GoW (along with Infamous Second Son, Uncharted 4, GTAV and maybe something else) is there now until January 2020. I'm just waiting for a quiet week to kick off the free trial and see how much of it I can get through.
It is a bit half baked putting time limits on these games. I wonder if it's part of a model – my experience of PS+ was that when I stopped the sub I kept an eye on the games and bought a fair number of them in various sales.
To be fair even Xbox Game Pass (which remains a better example of this kind of model) has a revolving selection of games, so things do leave that service from time to time too. The key difference is that first party games seem to be permanent on Game Pass, and are now appearing day one, although admittedly the MS first-party line-up still palls in comparison to what Sony has.