xbob42

Huh. Kind of wondering about Jeff's take on Fenyx Rising's combat. He pretty much just says it's light attack and heavy attack and stamina doesn't matter, but most video reviews I've seen have adored stuff like air juggling enemies and all the crazy abilities you have.

It was enough to prompt me to try the Stadia demo, which is both somehow better and worse than I expected. It's very playable and the image quality is pretty good, but not so much that it feels anywhere like a native game on your PC. Combat seems dope, though. First thing I did was start air juggling, seems like there's some good combo potential. Will depend on how deep it gets, though, I'm sure.

Gotta agree with this. The combat in Yakuza 0 was, at least to me, horrifically boring. It was like a bad brawler, super simple, super easy, but with pseudo-load screens like JRPG encounters instead of just being able to hit people, which just amped up how annoying I found them.

Here it actually goes the other way, where the combat, while still simple and easy, is a lot more wacky and fun, and despite being a turn-based JRPG, you can actually end battles so much faster than Yakuza 0 once you've got the right moves and power level. You can just stomp an entire group of enemies like nothing. It's great. And when it's challenging, it's really fun.

Kind of wish there was a hard mode out the gate though, as I find all Yakuza games to be annoyingly easy.

Also really hoping they stop re-using the same gags over and over. Comedy is something that rarely benefits from repetition, and seeing the same adults in diapers gag, naked guy hiding behind something gag, main-character-and-chicken-staring-at-each-other gag, etc, is really boring. Write new jokes! If you must have a "signature joke," stick with it but axe the rest for new content!

Other than that, been loving the hell out of this game.

Ah, yes, please tell me the context of the story only during cutscenes where the characters are talking rather than the gameplay. This is the best way to make sure I completely miss both what's on-screen and Alex's supplementary information!

I found Doom Eternal SO much better than Doom 2016. It has such awesome and complex (but not complicated) gameplay. I guess a large factor there is gonna be trying to play it on a gamepad, which I think is a terrible way to play any sort of FPS, but of course it's been the norm for a while, so anything that requires more complexity than ADS and chuck a grenade (Doom was just move-n-shoot for the most part, so its simplicity still sorta worked on a gamepad) is gonna feel "bad" because gamepads simply aren't up to the task.

Kinda weird watching a bunch of dudes who have been gaming on PC with SSDs for years getting excited about SSD-ish load times, but was fun nonetheless. The load times on PS5 haven't blown my mind because I've been waiting for consoles to catch up in that department for years, it's more like "goddamn, FINALLY" rather than "WOOHOO" but I guess the more interesting part for me personally will be now that games are designed around that we'll stop getting jarring load transitions that cut to black or split-second load screens where you can't even read the first word of a tip, in a game that has critical tips only in load screens.

So the one-two punch of proper load transitions like in Demon's Souls (Dark Souls on PC still seems to load faster, but it's more jarring because it just cuts instantly once the loading starts/finishes) and developers having to actually have a place where I can read important lore or tips is gonna be great.

I hope with any future tech we don't have to wait as long as we did for consoles to take advantage of SSDs. I get that it wasn't cheap for a while there, but by the time the PS4 and Xbox One launched, they absolutely were cheap enough that they should've been included by default. A shame that it took another 7 years, but I'm glad we're finally here nonetheless, and that the consoles, at least on the surface level, don't appear to have any glaring weaknesses like those awful CPUs last-gen.

I've always preferred soggy cereal. All the flavor, none of that crunchy bullshit. I've never understood why people like crunching on food. I find it both annoying and unpleasant. Gimme a soft taco, soggy cereal, third soft version of crunchy food, any day of the week. Do you guys just find it fun to crunch into shit? I do like the occasional food with a nice crisp, like some fresh lettuce in a sandwich or a crispy, sugary edge to a perfectly cooked fresh from the oven.

I guess we are destined to never understand each other.

Wow, that's a long time in development for a mediocre game they plan to delete in a few months. Almost smells like BS.

Damn. For a split-second I didn't realize this was under the "This day in Giant Bomb history" header and thought I was back in a world where we had Ryan and Patrick Quick Looks.

Where do people get the idea that assassins are ninjas? An assassination isn't necessarily stealthy, just a surprise attack. I'm glad AC has been branching out from pure stealth; mainly because I find stealth in most games to be intolerable. Either it's simplistic to the point of making no sense, or it becomes cumbersome, with very few games in-between. Not to mention that in every previous AC you could fight an entire army at once as they attacked you one at a time, so it wasn't very assassin-like there, either.

That said, some of the best new abilities have been assassin-related. That homing arrow is reaaaal dumb in a reaaaaal good way.

There's one surefire way to get a lot of people to like a generic Ubisoft open-world game: Call it a Sony exclusive.