apewins

As much as I hate it when people say "nobody asked for this" I feel like this is one of those sequels that nobody asked for. I liked the first game fine but it already got stale towards the end, so more of the same isn't much of a selling point for me. Also, I have no idea about what the story is this time around, but Senua's character already had a satisfying ending in the first one so this feels like an Ellen Ripley situation where audiences demand that she goes through the same hell over and over again. Senua is never going to be the mascot that's going to stand aside Master Chief at the forefront of Xbox.

They've obviously got talented people at Ninja Theory. Or at least they used to have, I don't know if they downsized or how did they go from DmC to making an interactive movie. I really wish that their next game is going to be something else.

Also, whatever Microsoft is saying right now about Ninja Theory's future doesn't mean shit. They're always fully committed to their next project, until one day they suddenly aren't.

I have been thinking about the same thing and I have no answers. My immediate reaction was that these games are Game Pass bait, hoping to get picked up on a subscription service and they get paid that way without any gamers directly paying for them. But then I said the same thing about Stubbs the Zombie Remake and it hasn't appeared on Game Pass. I believe it has been on Humble Bundle because I own it somehow, but I'm not sure how much money they get out of that.

You can probably put the recent Felix the Cat Collection in the same bucket. The term "collection" is a little misleading because it's really just 3 different versions of one game, and you should probably just play the best version and not touch the other ones. I haven't played the game, people seem to like it and based on the trailer it's doing pretty impressive stuff for the NES, but I'm also going to guess that this is a 2-hour game with save states and rewinding, and that we saw all the levels on the trailer. So we're looking at $25 for a NES game, I remember when Nintendo sold NES games on the Virtual Console for $5, and inflation is certainly a thing but it's not that prices have increased five-fold in 15 years, so it seems that there are just people out there that will pay basically any price for an old game.

Nice write-up as always. I played through this a few years ago on Switch, mostly because I wanted to play Super Metroid but this needed to be played before it, even though the story is mostly non-existent, save for the one little detail that gets carried into Super Metroid. I'm not ashamed to say that I started using a guide and save states pretty early in my playthrough, because as I said it was basically homework for Super Metroid.

I think it's a bad game on a bad system. That makes it difficult to rate because it's obviously the best the Game Boy could do, but I don't think I would have had fun with it even as a kid. It's easy to get lost because all the areas look the same, and the camera is too close to Samus to allow for much maneuvering. The combat is easy by design, especially as you can stunlock the Metroids and kill them in a matter of seconds. A lot of the design is probably such that it's intended for small kids to play who aren't very good at games, and as a seasoned gamer you can make short work of it if you just have the patience to look for the hidden entrances. But the game does have some ideas that get carried into the future entries. I don't hate it but it's clearly the worst mainline Metroid game.

I have to admit I find it a little upsetting that you're basically sitting on the entire Metroid franchise (assuming you have Switch Online) and you're just not playing them apparently until they come up on your wheel, which I suppose could take years. Metroid Prime is a phenomenal game that still plays very well, and the Prime series is basically a side story so you could just jump into it whenever without missing much of anything about the story.

Tango Gameworks has put out 4 games in 10 years (and, according to Wikipedia, one mobile game in addition to that). That is excellent output in these times where it seems that for most studios it takes 5-8 years to put out one game. Halo Infinite took 6 years to make. Naughty Dog is 4 years into development of something that has not even been announced (I'm not counting re-releases).

That's the most shocking this about Hi-Fi Rush is how Tango had put out a game in 2022 and then in the next year they already have another one. The Evil Within series may not have been a huge success but it has a following as basically the only active horror tripe-A series out there besides Resident Evil (not active any more obviously).

I can understand shutting down a studio that isn't performing. And if there was a studio that needed to be put down it would most likely have been 343 Industries that has had multiple chances of doing something interesting with Halo and has failed every time (I actually liked Halo 5 personally but I know most people didn't). Tango is one of the few studios at Microsoft that are actually performing, and the stated reason for the closure that they don't have enough middle managers to harass talented people who have proven that they can manage their work themselves is one of the most insane excuses they could have come up with. I don't buy it for a second, if the Activision deal hadn't happened and scared up the executives over how much money they are spending, this closure wouldn't have happened either.

@bigsocrates: They're small markets but not that small. Games and software obviously don't need to be translated so if something is needed regulation-wise it's probably just a few legal documents that any law firm could create for a few thousand Euros and they'd make that back in a few months at most. I believe that there's been an unspoken arrangement where these customers just create an account elsewhere and Soy doesn't ask any questions, and small markets are just used to it.

It's not that hard to believe that Sony would have gotten away with it and Steam would have happily sold their game in those markets. But they made the mistake of upsetting the gaming community, which led to that community picking up dirt on Sony, and this is what they found. This doesn't impact them and I don't believe that they are genuinely trying to fight for the little guy. They're mad at Sony for unrelated reasons and they're using what weapons they have available. I'm not saying they're wrong to do that, it's likely that a positive change will come out of this, but I absolutely believe that if Sony had done a few small things differently, nobody would be talking about this.

I was quite flabbergasted to learn that there are EU countries where PSN is not available. Is that even legal under EU laws? I suspect that at least these countries will be soon fixed by Sony as there's no logical reason to exclude them. It's probably just been a blind spot for Sony that hasn't been worth the trouble before, but now they have to address it. You can easily buy a PS5 and any game you want in every decent retailer in Estonia so it hasn't been a problem for those customers, as my understanding is that they can just create an account into some other country and there is nothing that Sony does to prevent that. But it's not a good system and especially if you are expected to spend money in that ecosystem you have to consider that there is a non-zero chance that your account could get banned because of that, even if right now it would be hard to see Sony's motivation for doing that.

Some of the other countries on that list are less surprising and likely quite commonly blacklisted by other big companies too. As for Sony stopping the sales in those countries, it's the right thing to do if they're not going to support those countries. Can't have it both ways.

Passionate people don't work for Microsoft. They can buy teams that sued to be passionate, but that is a company where people go to make money for as long they keep getting paid. I don't know if it's a big company versus a small company dynamic because clearly Sony keeps getting good output from their studios.

I'm not here to defend Spencer but let's be clear, the problem is Microsoft itself, and replacing Spencer likely wouldn't turn things around when it's Nadella and the shareholders that keep running things. I do think that Phil has a least tried to do the right things at times. Halo Infinite wasn't ready for the Xbox Series S/X launch despite being in production for a decade or so, that must have hurt them tremendously but he gave them more time to finish it. Redfall should have been cancelled a long time ago but he probably thought that they could still make it work. There are undoubtedly major problems with leadership at Microsoft, but you can also clearly see that some studios keep letting them down.

Buying studios is not the answer because nobody sells when they're at the top. Bethesda was sold to Microsoft because they were coming off of numerous underperforming games: Fallout 76, Rage 2, Doom Eternal, Wolfenstein Youngblood. None of these games hit for Bethesda, the signs were there that they were slowing down and that's why they sold out. How Microsoft though that Starfield was going to be a big hit when all of their other games kept failing is one of those things that is just hard to understand.

The same thing is happening with Activision. Call of Duty is selling for now, but at least I haven't seen much enthusiasm for the recent entries. There's going to be a point where people will say "I've bought every CoD game for the past 15 years, maybe it's time to move on", and new players aren't interested in it because it's not Fortnite. And don't get me started on the sad story that is modern-day Blizzard.

I don't have the answers. I'm glad that they did the backwards compatibility thing, and hopefully they'll go back to add more titles to it, so that regardless of their future output I can at least play Crimson Skies, Blinx the Time Sweeper, Red Dead Redemption, Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts and Fables 1-3 on it.

I've got nothing to add except that screw everybody who's been defending consolidation under Microsoft, usually with the argument that it's good for developers who get to take more risks, and good for gamers who get to see more new IP and revived IP. How many decades of salaries could Microsoft have paid for these two studios with the 70 billion that it paid for Activision? I'm seriously concerned that the Xbox is increasingly becoming the Call of Duty console, with an occasional Halo, Gears and Forza game in the mix.

Look out for the Phil Spencer apology tour coming soon where he's going to go around gaming media telling everybody how painful this has been for him.

Here in [small Eastern European country], I was browsing through game deals, not really expecting to find anything, when I suddenly saw Super Mario RPG, a game released less than 6 months ago, on sale for what would be the American equivalent of $26. At first I thought it was a mistake, then I though the store was maybe having a blowout sale, but a quick search reveals that it sells across several retailers for well below $40.

Switch games here regularly debut at around $60 which I imagine is around the global average, and Nintendo first-party games notoriously never go on a significant sale (you're lucky to get 33% off for games several years old). Super Mario RPG is currently cheaper than Mario Kart 8, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker and Xenoblade Chronicles: Definite Edition, just to name a few. The only other Nintendo first-party game I see at the same price is WarioWare: Move It, but I would argue that having Wario in the title rightfully decreases its value so it's not a good comparison point.

Are you seeing the same where you live? What do you think it means, if anything? Did this game flop for Nintendo who are now forced to clear out their stock? If so, what does that mean for the upcoming Paper Mario and Luigi's Mansion 2 remakes? Are people already saving for the Switch 2? Could we be seeing more unprecedented discounts in the near future? Suffice to say that I am questioning the reality that we live in right now.

Maybe if they get to Season 3 and people still say that it's good, I'll see if I can squeeze all of it into one month of Prime. I'm really not a fan of this modern trend where a season is 6-8 episodes when on network TV it used to be more like 24 episodes. And after every season nobody knows if it's getting renewed for another one so it's very hard to commit to a show these days if you don't want to have it cancelled on you. Nowadays even a positive reception doesn't guarantee a renewal.

From what I've heard from sources that I trust, the show starts out great and then loses steam after a few episodes, limping to a finale without having said anything interesting at any point. So I'm not in a hurry to get into it.