swthompson

Wouldn't shock me to see a different spinoff take the action-side mantle of RRG's portfolio in 2-3 years. The detective angle was cool but they could find something else to do in their fictional Tokyo. Not too worried.

The PC ports must be making Sega a lot of money if they're willing to go this far though. That may be the most interesting part of this.

The Razer Kishi on my iPhone doesn't seem to work with xCloud, which sucks. So I just go back to playing Genshin. I'm not going to mount my Xbox controller to my phone.

Digital Foundry did a pretty good video with another YouTube channel to cover all of the improvements they made to the OG Halo in MCC:

Halo Combat Evolved - Is Classic Mode Fixed In Master Chief Collection Season 7?

Was really impressed to see them take the time to do this. Halo 1 did always look weird in the anniversary edition but I could never put my finger on why. Now that you can see all of the improvements, it's pretty clear the original game was actually really great looking and holds up well when all of the graphical effects are present.

I generally agree with the OP. I've never felt an Insomniac game was really above average outside of maybe Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. Since then the series has just treaded water and done the same thing over and over, which sucks when the primary combat flow is so uninteresting. I absolutely hated everything about Spider-man, so I didn't get more than 3 hours into it.

There's a lot of good mentions in this thread but a lot of them I managed to dodge since them since the backlash came swiftly enough to temper my expectations. I was sad to hear that Mass Effect Andromeda was poor since I loved the series, so when I fired it up I just tinkered and wasn't shocked when it didn't click with me.

I'm going to upset some folks with this one, but it's Nier: Automata for me.

I really liked the first Nier for what it was, so a sequel by Platinum seemed like a slam dunk. Automata was tedious on every level. The gameplay was more active than the first Nier, to its detriment, but not active or interesting enough. More time wasting quests and running across a big, ugly map that isn't fun to traverse. Actually everything about Nier Automata is ugly, visually. Awful frustrating game design where it would lock you away from the quests while ramping up the level cap or difficulty with no warning (the start of the C play through as the worst offender). Random genre switches done poorly. Garbage checkpoint system. I found myself screaming at my television as I suffered through more and more waves of garbage, poorly communicated, bad game design.

But the story. Oh god the story is just so disappointing. The game gives you no reason or motivation to care about these characters. In fact, the way the story sets them up as disposable right off the bat just leads everything that follows to "oh sure, of course that's what would happen" because everything is so pedestrian. All off the plot twists were so basic and edge lord shit - "wow look how sad we can make these characters" but with nothing to say about its actual themes of purposelessness and existential crises. A lot of unearned moments, like leaving two characters together without ever indicating that they felt anything for each other (in fact one of them is literally programmed to kill the other, also unaddressed in the slightest, just assume she'll fall in love with the boy because that's what happens right, fuck I hate this game). So much wasted potential, caught up in how clever it is.

It's 20 hours of my life that I wasted since I really bought into since literally everyone in the industry but Jeff and a few outliers was saying was totally worth it, and it so, so, so wasn't. I played through every route in the game and by the end I just hated the game, and everything that it stood for, and resented the huge waste of time. What a disappointment after the first Nier.

What boggles my mind about E3 this year just purely as a game consumer is that I can't remember this many games worth actually covering since the mid-generation PS2 days. It's just bananas. Each event has so many games crammed into 90 minutes I barely remember what was announced at the start. I started just popping games on my Steam wishlist and then THAT started to balloon to the point I couldn't remember half of what I added that was marked as Coming Soon.

It reminds me a lot of reading through an issue of EGM in 2004 and seeing hundreds of games to play. And it feels especially like that in tone since the indie space has never been better at filling out the A and AA game spaces. 2022 especially just feels incredibly overwhelming, I can't even conceptualize all of the games I want to play on Gamepass alone!

My previous rule has been to only adopt new hardware when there's at least 5 games that I want to play that I can't get anywhere else, out already on shelves. By the end of the year we'll have the PS5 exclusive Final Fantasy 7 Remake DLC, but that's not a terribly compelling get. We'll see if E3 brings anything else, but honestly with the hardware situation I don't see too many devs going next-gen only.

On the flip side, compared to previous generations, I have never been more inundated with games to play on my existing hardware (I have a PC with a GTX 980, a One X, and a Switch). As the list of games I consider "must plays" for my own personal tastes are typically widely available multi-plats (Resident Evil, Yakuza) or indie titles, new hardware just doesn't seem all that important. I haven't seen much my current devices can't handle or feels notably downgraded. My GTX 980 definitely struggled with Resident Evil Village's poor PC port, but I'm playing it on Xbox now and have no complaints, looks and plays great.

Also, the last 18 months have been such heavy gaming periods in my life. I think this summer my interests may start to swing to other hobbies, and games will take a backseat anyway.

I still want a new gaming GPU at a reasonable price, but I've found a decent holding pattern until then. If games start leaving me behind I've got a nice backlog to play that my current GPU can handle (like the second half of the Yakuza series).

Any hype for the new consoles I had has totally vanished. At one point I might have snagged a PS5 but my dumb lizard brain has gotten over that shiny new oooh fancy appeal.

I think it's great that Sony's porting their back catalog and I love to see these games preserved on a platform like the PC, but I couldn't give less of a shit about Uncharted 4. It was gorgeous, but I enjoyed maybe 1 hour total of the entire playtime; the rest was not engaging or fun at all. If they're using these ports to bolster their brand awareness, I'm not sure U4 is the one to do it with.

The new Xbox Series controller does that to my left hand. Xbox One controller is fine. I think it's because the controller is just slightly smaller.