All that for a new haircut? Doesn’t even look like that out of place of a style change to me.
I mean, look at what Castlevania Judgment did to its characters back then if you want terrible redesign. Most of them were unrecognizable. Simon, Maria and Death became Death Note cosplayers, others like Grant and Carmilla went full SoulCalibur knock-off.
Along with bad anime trope personality graft for half of them.
Sony sucks, using your money to try and buy exclusives is toxic garbage behavior, they deserve any criticism and troubles they come across.
I understand that exclusivity on games can be shit but if, I remember well lots of PlayStation games are already on PC (spider man, last of us and ghost of Tsushima) and steller blade will be soon too.
Not only that, Xbox and Nintendo have exclusives too. Not to forget about Epic Games and their exclusive deals.
Nintendo doesn’t “personally” do anything. They are a corporation.
And they do purchase both IP’s and studios. Just off the top of my head they bought Monolith from Bandai-Namco and Bayonetta has been exclusive ever since the second one.
Microsoft has been way worse than Sony. Zenimax alone was might have been bigger than Sony’s entire portfolio depending on how you measure. Activision-Blizzard was far, far bigger. And at least with Zenimax, it seems like most of their studios have gotten worse since acquisition, with a lot of them being shut down.
I don’t mean to overly defenf Sony, but just paying publishers for 1 year of exclusivity seems pretty mild in comparison. I’d prefer they didn’t buy studios like Bungie, but at the same time the acquisitions of Naughty Dog and Insomniac seem to have worked out pretty well.
Nintendo doesn’t “personally” do anything. They are a corporation.
lol. lmao, even.
Just off the top of my head they bought Monolith from Bandai-Namco and Bayonetta has been exclusive ever since the second one.
Monolithsoft was three separate offices- Nintendo bought two of them, which were both already working exclusively as a Nintendo second party, and the third was dissolved during the Bandai-Namco merger due to the fact that Namco was treating them like shit after Nakamura retired and the merger was the last straw. Monolithsoft is one, if not the only, exception to Nintendo staying out of buying companies, and Iwata has even commented on it only happening because Sigiuira basically asked them to, and it not being something they want or like to do.
As for Bayonettas since 2, Nintendo’s publishing it for PlatinumGames, who used to be a Nintendo second party. They started working with Sega in 2008 iirc because Nintendo literally pointed Sega their way (This is the same time period when Nintendo was giving Sega work to try to dig them out of their hole, e.g. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games). My understanding is that internally Nintendo still considers PlatinumGames a second party dev, despite Sega publishing several games for them.
You can decide if those are exceptional cases or something as bad as Sony, but I know where my vote lies.
Microsoft has been way worse than sony.
Probably, yeah.
I don’t mean to overly defend Sony
Then don’t? Going to completely uninvolved third parties and snapping them up to hoard their IPs, or simply outright paying them to not publish elsewhere (coughepiccough) should always be indefensible. Xbox is worse, but Sony is still real bad about this shit, and Epic is worse than all of them.
That’s been rumored for years. I remember back in the day seeing rumors about Halo coming to PlayStation.
Not entirely without merit. Minecraft has been released on pretty much everything with a CPU, although some of those may have been before Microsoft purchased Mojang. There were a lot of weird scenarios after the Zenimax and Activision-Blizzard where the now-Microsoft-owned studios had pre-existing contracts with Sony they needed to honor. It looks like some of the IP they recently purchased that had traditionally been multiplat might remain that way, like the “Age of ___” series, Doom, and Call of Duty.
I’ve seen rumors that Starfield might come to PS5, but nothing substantial. I don’t think there would have been any chance of that if it had sold well on Xbox and Windows.
I’ve also seen rumors of Halo, Gears of War, and Forza, but I will not start buying those unless there are more signs that Xbox is giving up on hardware entirely. If they could get deals done to get GamePass on Playstation and Switch that might start to look more realistic though.
Most of their games are still exclusive though. Avowed just released last weekend for Xbox and Windows and no hint of a PlayStation release for example.
The reverse is also true. Sony has published MLB games for the Xbox and Switch for example.
Just as a heads up, it’s more than rumors, it’s now an active part of their strategy going forward. Exclusive games that were released previously and are worth porting generally will, to find new revenue and audience basically. Same as new releases with no PlayStation / switch (2) platforms announced yet, it’s a matter of development resources to port those, a when and not an if. (Avowed just released exclusively and south of midnight coming next month both are yet to be announced for ps5 for instance, the focus was on a good release of already announced platforms)
Recent examples: Indiana Jones will release im spring on ps5, same as age of empires 2 and mythology and forza horizon 5. The rest is coming. they’ll just try to sync it with a calendar that makes sense Seo of thieves and grounded, pentiment and high fi rush already got ported as well, I’d expect starfield and age of empires 4 to get ported for their DLC releases at the end of the year.
Look out for a big support of switch 2 from Xbox as well
It’s so weird to me how many people seem to just hate Sony for doing milder versions of what Nintendo and Microsoft have been doing for much longer.
Sony didn’t buy Zenimax or Activision-Blizzard. Or heck, you could point to the gigantic graveyard of studios that EA and Microsoft have purchased and shut down over the years.
Sony doesn’t really do that, not in the way that we’ve seen Microsoft do it at least. And most PlayStation exclusives are on PC now or are planned for PC.
It did. It’s also on Switch and on Windows/Xbox as a Play Anywhere title on MS Store (buy once, get to play on both platforms). But from what I remember, FFIX was the one that needed the remaster treatment the least, as it plays fairly well on any emulator. FFVII and FFVIII, on the other hand, get more bearable with the built-in speed up button (which, yes, you can do on an emulator as well, but then the music gets sped up too and it gets annoying).
Well ff9 was the last one on ps1 so that makes sense.
I loved ff8 my only issue was magic was never used since I kept buffing my stats with it. Plus sci-fi time travel plot probably confused general audience and ff9 is safer. Which is sad cause the plot is what I loved about it most.
I’d like a more Mario sunshine/64 style game. The movement mechanics were sublime in sunshine. That itch hasn’t been scratched since, even by odyssey, which came closer than the galaxy games.
Makes sense, when Sunshine was made the only other 3D Mario was 64, so it used the same formula on a larger and more elaborate scale.
But then something unexpected happened, they made bonus levels that were capsule worlds that looked a lot like classic Mario games. And players wanted more of that so the Galaxys were basically that, fleshed out into full games.
Odyssey is a natural progression of Galaxy’s formula. But 3D World is not a natural progression of Sunshine, its New Super Mario Bros. in 3D.
It would be nice to get more 64/Sunshine-type games.
I want more Animal Crossing 🤞 I’m hoping with it’s success for New Horizons that we don’t have to wait 12 years again for the next one. A new Mario would be good too though, Odyssey was a lot of fun.
If you didn’t try it, “Bowser’s Fury” was a lot of fun. It’s annoyingly packaged with “3D World”, although if you haven’t played that it’s also a good 3D Mario.
I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.
Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.
Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.
And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.
And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.
But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.
Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.
When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.
But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.
And don’t forget to do your dailies!
If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.
It’s a useful place to find out if something totally sucks though. That’s how I use it. 60+? Probably good, at least for some audiences. Less than that? Only if you’re already hyped or a fan of whatever thing it’s related to.
Yeah I mean ratings are giving you an idea of whether there’s a chance you like that game. The higher the rating, the higher the chance. But there’s always a bit of chance involved.
I tend to buy highly rated games much more often, but if I really am hyped for a game with an OK rating, I still might give it a go. You never know if it will hit your specific niche.
It has an engine that permits recording and “rewinding” gameplay, with a lot of interesting quirks, like elements that don’t rewind. Puzzle platformer based on that.
It was a fascinating thing technically, and the creator did a lot with that capability. But IMHO it’s not otherwise exceptional, like graphically or such.
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