Starting to regret getting the series S over the series X now. Been playing a lot of Sonic Frontiers and it's running at 30FPS one Xbox one, PS4, switch and series S. It's weird because most website say it was running at 60 on the series S but it's definitely isn't. Ah man, I honestly struggle with 30FPS now.
I've had my series s for a year now and my EA something or other has run out. I didn't even know that I had an EA sub with this thing. Or if I did, I forgot. I went to look at my subscriptions and I still have Game pass Ultimate, does that include Xbox Live? Is that a thing still? Was it ever? Help me out I can feel myself aging. I need a cheat sheet for what my options are and what they mean.
Game Pass Ultimate includes Game Pass, Xbox Live Gold (for online play) and whatever the EA sub is called these days. So you have everything you need.
Then I am confused about why I can’t play Archvale. I shall investigate.
Thanks!
Archvale left Game Pass a few days ago, at the end of last month.
Ah of course!
The younger child won't be happy. They were currently partway through an all-melee run and an all-magic run. I suspect we'll be buying that one the old fashioned way before long.
It’s worth keeping an eye on what’s about to leave - you get a 20% discount if you want to buy anything on Game Pass while it’s still on there. The mobile app is quite good for telling you what’s about to depart.
Good to know!
Some of you might have already seen this trailer for Ride 4 on PS5, featuring a first-person trip around what appears to be the North West 200 in Northern Ireland.
I don't know how many of you have been to the north coast of NI before, but that is alarmingly realistic. I'm pretty sure I spotted at least one junction near my father-in-law's house. Frankly, the biggest giveaway that it's fake is the lack of flegs and painted kerbs.
Oh god, don't talk about flegs. My partner is Northern Irish, she couldn't get away fast enough.
At first glance I don't think I'd even have considered that was game footage - that's really quite impressive.
Looking more carefully, the flat houses give it away a bit, but that wet road is exceptionally well done.
the flat houses give it away a bit
I can assure you, that's exactly what the houses look like in that part of the country, ill-advised pale yellow paint and all.
Speaking of insanely lifelike graphics, have you seen that 'bodycam footage' game that's doing the rounds?
Yeah, that seems in particularly bad taste.
I got a chrome book recently and just this evening decided to try the Xbox Gamepass cloud/streaming on it. Synced a spare Xbox controller to it and just played Age of Empires 2 in bed on it. That seemed to work fantastically.
Looking forward to the PlayStation showcase tonight. I think Spiderman 2 showing a gameplay trailer is a given. That should be really cool to see. The Last of Us multiplayer is likely too? It feels like it's been a while since they announced it. I loved the multiplayer for the first one, so this could be massive if Naughty Dog can successfully pull of a GAAS game unlike 343 with Halo. Something I'll massively pop for that's really unlikely is an announcement of a new Sunset Overdrive. My favorite insomniac game to date. That game was awesome. I'll say the biggest rumored one has to be MGS3 Remake. This could close the show for that "one more thing" in my opinion. I been hearing it's not actually a PS exclusive too, so that's great for us PC and Xbox guys If true.
I loved TLoU Factions when it first came out, but when they started selling the best guns as DLC it lost me. The monetisation model will be make or break.
Spider-Man 2 has to get a release date, right?
Maybe a tease of whatever Sucker Punch are working on. It's probably Ghost of Tsushima 2, but I'd love to see some more inFamous. Hell, just a remake the first two (and Festival of Blood) would be great.
Thought about this a bit more, and I think what I'd really like to see is something surprising. Everyone's going round in circles online about the remakes or sequels they want to see (including me, above), but it'd be cool if there was something new that nobody had any idea was coming.
I loved TLoU Factions when it first came out, but when they started selling the best guns as DLC it lost me. The monetisation model will be make or break.
Yeah, I put a lot of hours into it myself before the monetisations. I came back to it when they did the PS4 remaster and one of the new guns was one of or maybe the best gun in the game. It was also too easy to use. I stopped playing after that.
Spider-Man 2 has to get a release date, right?
Yeah, one of the voice actors might of leaked it. If the rumors are ture, it will be coming out at the start of September. Meaning it will be releasing within a week of Starfield. Crazy.
I think your right though. It's good to have remakes and stuff, but it has to have some new IPs too. I think they will have some new games to announce if I'm being honest. We'll have to wait and see i guess. Should be a fun show.
According to their financial report (yesterday?), they're increasing investment in new IP from 20% to 50% by 2025.
If the rumors are ture, [Spider-Man 2] will be coming out at the start of September. Meaning it will be releasing within a week of Starfield. Crazy.
How much of an overlap is there between Starfield and Spider-Man, though? They're both exclusive, and I can't imagine there are enough people with both consoles (or a PS5 and a gaming rig) for them to meaningfully eat each other's lunch.
That was a pretty decent showing, I thought - reasonable mix of big names and indies, decent variety of genres and art styles. Not sure anything that would convince me to get a PS5, though.
Except Dragon's Dogma 2, but that's going to be on PC and Xbox anyway.
I was only half-watching, but Helldivers 2, Talos Principle 2, and Sword of the Sea were all very surprising. As was Spider-Man 2 not getting a release date.
Other than that, nothing much stood out; Bungie have proved they're out of ideas by rebooting(?) Marathon. And until I read about it on Eurogamer just now, I thought FAIRGAME$ was a renamed Hyenas; they have a very similar aesthetic.
Assassin's Creed Mirage looks like Assassin's Creed, which is a Good Thing, though Baghdad puts me in mind of Constantinople from Revelations, which makes me less keen. Maybe (hopefully) it's just the architecture. And the trailer seemed to have a weirdly high amount of chromatic aberration going on. But it's still on the wishlist.
EDIT: Oh, turns out Marathon is also an extraction shooter, like FAIRGAME$ and HYENAS.
INNOVATION
Foamstars though. Gotta love the uniqueness behind thaoh wait.
And a new PS handheld? Potentially interested. A new PS handheld that's basically just a remote play device from a console I don't own and don't want? Nope. At least if I didn't own an Xbox, I could play games on my phone (using a bolt-on controller like the Kishi) with the right subscription. This is just tech for tech's sake and adds nothing to the value of the brand. Hard pass.
(Gonna say, I was nearly taken in by the new Android version of that PS mobile controller for that very reason until I realised it's a Remote Play device. Sigh.)
Foamstars though. Gotta love the uniqueness behind thaoh wait.
I'm honestly just surprised it's taken anyone this long to rip off Splatoon.
A new PS handheld that's basically just a remote play device from a console I don't own and don't want? Nope.
Yeah, same. Though I'd go further and say I can't even imagine who this is supposed to be for. A whole new device (price TBD) just to play the games you already own, streamed from a £480 box you've got to have bought already? Nah.
Don't forget it needs your console to be on, so it's using electricity all the time too. Progress!
It does seem like a truly baffling thing.
On the one hand, this is an objectively funny response to the Sony showcase.
On the other, Microsoft need to have a lot of exclusives in their lineup to avoid it looking really dumb in retrospect – and they've not got an excellent track record on that front over the last year or two.
It's been an odd generation so far. Sony came out of the gate swinging with an incredible eighteen months, but ever since then it's been a bit of a first-party desert. Same for Xbox (minus the actually good bit).
Maybe the scale of these next generation games is beginning to tell.
Maybe the scale of these next generation games is beginning to tell.
That definitely seems to be the case, plus of course most of the games that are coming out now were developed during Covid.
I was reading an article about Respawn and they were saying how proud they were that Jedi Survivor was developed in a "mere" three and a half years and to me that still sounds like an insanely long time for one game. Then I was also reading today about Ubisoft and how they plan to ramp up the number of people working on Assassin's Creed games… from their current level of two thousand people. That's completely insane in a different way.
I don't know what the solution is. Smaller, more experimental games is one way to go, for sure (it remains the reason I love Game Pass) but there will always be that appetite for big blockbusters. Asset reuse is another obvious one - there's a reason why the Yakuza studio are the only ones producing 60-hour blockbusters every single year without fail, and there's also the case of Tears of the Kingdom of course.
I remain relatively unfussed about Xbox exclusives - many of the games they produce aren't really to my taste anyway, and I have more than enough to play - but at some point all these acquisitions are going to have to pay off, and knowing MS it will all be in a single three-week window sometime in 2026.
I prefer smaller games to big ones. I don't have the time or the motivation to play something for ages. Right now, I've been playing Breath of the Wild for what seems like forever… I don't think I've finished a game in over a month. I'd rather enjoy lots of things than dedicate forever to one thing.
I thought the showcase was decent overall, if not a bit disappointing. Good amount of gameplay for Spiderman 2 and it's looking even better than the first one. Lot of cool new stuff like the new venom suit. Apart from that though what are Sony's other studios up to? We got a few CGI trailers with no release dates that really didn't tell us anything about the games. I couldn't tell you what kind of game they are. Some interesting looking third party titles but most of them are multiplatform anyways. Which isn't a knock on them games but we don't really know anymore about Playstation road map then we did before this showcase. Is Spiderman 2 the only game coming at the end of this year? Are them CGI trailers GAAS games really ready for 2024? I'm not sure I can believe that given game development theses days. It doesn't seem the Last of us multiplayer game is coming this year too. I still enjoyed the show. A lot of cool games coming, but this definitely seemed off for a Sony showcase. They usually deliver a home run.
I prefer smaller games to big ones. I don't have the time or the motivation to play something for ages. Right now, I've been playing Breath of the Wild for what seems like forever… I don't think I've finished a game in over a month. I'd rather enjoy lots of things than dedicate forever to one thing.
I'd wait a few years before you play TotK in that case. It's wonderful, but it's very much the same thing in the same world. I did the shield surfing quest yesterday and it's in the exact same place, runs the same route, and gives identical rewards.
If you're burned out on BotW you're burned out on TotK.
Daedalic have put out an apology words.jpg tweet apologising for the state of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum (currently sitting at a Metacritic 36), in which they call the game "The Lord of Ring: Gollum".
We're really sorry our game is bad, we're working on a patch to fix everything.
That seems… weird. Apologising for a game’s poor performance at launch is one thing (I’ve always read that at least partly as a dig at the marketing team for pushing it out the door before it was ready) but apologising for a game’s entire existence is a bit worrying. Someone somewhere must like it.
I've just realised this is Daedelic, who made some fun (if underwhelming) point and click games about fifteen years ago. The sort of thing that got bundled in the first ever Humble Indie bundles.
Looking at their wiki, this is their first attempt at a AA, shiny graphics game. Seems they bit off more than they can chew, which is a shame.
You can almost hear Starfield creaking from the weight on its shoulders.
It does look excellent, but I can't remember any game ever being this important for one console. Fable looked great too (almost unbelievably good, graphically…), but again, no date given.
I assume Halo is just sort of dead now?
Did I hear them say that not every player's version of a planet will be the same in Starfield? For some reason I can't fully grasp, that makes me a little less interested.
Starfield looks nice and it's free, so of course I'll play it. Will I like it? Eh.
Gimme South of Midnight, Fable, Monkey Island tall tales (on my birthday!), that climbing game and the blatant Bioshock rip-off please. Everything else, meh.
(Oh, and 'in-game engine' can fuck off as the new 'But it's not CGI!' thing. Don't say nothing will be all CGI and then show that Star Wars game third… such bullshit)
Scrubbed through the Ubisoft thing last night, and while there's not a ton to get particularly excited about, Star Wars Outlaws looks pretty darn okay. Curious to know just how "open world" it is, given how it's separated into distinct planets. Also, how big are each of those planets?
AC Mirage also on The List, obvs, but given that it's out a week before Spider-Man 2, I'll probably wait a bit for it.
Apologies for the almost-martonomics post, but I just got 3 years of Game Pass Ultimate for 74 quid.
It's lost its title as best gaming subscription (that's surely PS Plus at this point) but it's still insanely cheap. The gold conversion 'trick' must be working as intended after all this time.
Reminder of how you did it please? I have two lots of Game Pass coming up for renewal (me and my partner) so I think I'll pursue this again.
Once your Ultimate has expired, buy three years of Xbox Live Gold the cheapest you can. (This is the bit that cost me £74.) Activate it so that you have three years of Gold on your account (any more than this is lost in the conversion).
Buy one month of Ultimate OR use a free month promo, if you have one. As you're doing this, a pop-up will appear saying you're about to convert your remaining Gold into Ultimate, at a 1:1 ratio. That's it!
CDKeys have 6 months of Game Pass for £12 at the moment. It's a bit fiddly because a) they actually give you two codes for 3 months each, and b) you can only buy one 6-month code per checkout. So you have to checkout 6 times, and enter 12 codes.
Apologies for the almost-martonomics post, but I just got 3 years of Game Pass Ultimate for 74 quid.
It's lost its title as best gaming subscription (that's surely PS Plus at this point) but it's still insanely cheap. The gold conversion 'trick' must be working as intended after all this time.
Just got to the point where I had to do this, and the recent price hike has seen them also tinker with the conversion rate.
Picked up 3yrs of Gold for €100 and change from eneba (though I fucked up with the code redeem - if it offers you a free month for turning on recurring billing, don't do it because then the last code won't work due to it taking you over the three year stack limit. Sigh). Then paid €1 for a month of GPU and it converted to two years, not three. Huh. I mean, I'll still take two years of GPU for €101 but even so, that's a shame.
Picked a PS5 back up. I sold my launch one a couple years ago, after my RL friends all went Xbox.
It came with FF16, which is great so far. I'm not a FF mega-fan, but it's all very pretty and satisfying and well acted (except when it's not) - although I'm surprised how much of the RPG stuff they've jettisoned. It's more God of War than FF at this point.
Side note: I'd forgotten how fast the PS5 load times are. They're almost instant, the whole thing feels like magic.
I guess it's almost time for me to really say how I feel about FF16 then lol.
Continuing to work through the PS5 games I've missed. God, Horizon Forbidden West is so bad.
It's a beautiful pile of steaming, triple-A nonsense. The story is typical videogame bollocks. The animation is terrible. They're so bad at signposting things that you're frequently left without any direction. You have to press a special button to make climbable bits of wall glow yellow – that's how bad they are at steering the player.
The enemies all look identical. There are a thousand combat mechanics, and none of them are enjoyable. In fact, nothing feels good. It has a grapple gun and a glider, and somehow makes them both feel crap. It even gets the little things wrong, like the resistance on the adaptive triggers having nothing to do with what's happening on screen.
It's a shoddy, generic, offensively boring bag of stuff. It's Meh – The Videogame.
Wow. I mean.. it's not amazing, but I'm enjoying it a heck of a lot more than that!
Admittedly, I dropped it for a few months, because I just couldn't face it any more; but coming back to it on the other side of a Spider-Man 2 palette cleanse, I'm getting on with it okay.
I mean, sure, there's too much faff - too many machine types, too many weapon types, and far, far too many inconsequential side activities - but the story is fine (and gets a bit better as it goes), even if it doesn't match the original.
I think that's harsh. Its main crime is it contains too much stuff. As Ninchilla says, too many weapons, too many areas, too many quests. I think you need to try Avatar to get a proper sense of perspective for what a truly generic icon hunt videogame feels like. Horizon is way better than that.
It does quite a few things pretty well, and is probably in the top tier of games in the icon map hunt genre. 7/10.