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I have been trying to catch up on the PS4 after getting a Pro for very very cheap with 18 PS4 only games.

Beyond the usual great things like Bloodborne, Until Dawn, Everybody's Golf, the fantastic Medievil remake, I just started Knack because I was fiending for a PS1 style level to level platformer or brawler like Pandemonium.

Knack is actually very fun, simple but not thoughtless, forgiving with it's checkpoints, and surprisingly easy to lose 3 hours to. Really glad I gave it a chance given I heard most acquaintances/games media folk say it was a pointless game to exist in a world with Little Big Planet.

I've also been playing Splatoon 2 as it's wonderful, and DRM (Death Ray Manta) for the 3000th time because Rob RetroRemakes makes my favourite type of throwback arcade games.

I mean in the introduce and pick-up-and-play regard. Introducing a Switch has always been easier than setting up any recent Xboxes or Playstations for people who want to get into games again/need one for a gift, in my experience anyway. The Xbox and Playstation are far more complex devices for people who aren't currently massively into the games and specific platform ecosystems, where the UI design is still not the best and a pain to comprehend for new eyes.

I think the last generation of other consoles are more baffling for the aforementioned set-up and variable models reasons. In terms of the amount of different machines you could get it's PS4, PS4 Slim, PS4 Pro + hard-drive variations, vs. the Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox Pro, Xbox One S All-Digital + hard-drive variations, compared to Switch & Switch Lite (albeit the newer consoles have two models a piece too, I do recognize that, but we'll see when that changes in the near future!)

I fully agree that the Switch Lite doesn't do enough to mention how more than a few games will be awkward on it/require an additional $90AUD set of Joy Cons, and it's always a problem with Nintendo. Remember when a lot of people thinking the Wii U was an add on to the Wii rather than a new console? But it's easy to explain that Switch Lite doesn't have removable controllers and is handheld only compared to the original Switch which is more versatile/the better but more expensive option.

Also, great post!

The Vita was a niche handheld system that unfortunately but understandably died on it's arse despite it being a lovely bit of hardware with a few nice games and a decent digital library. The Switch is a massively successful console which outlived it's competitor's prior generation of consoles, has a ton of games, and is doing very well against the competition's current consoles. It also takes a standard Micro SD rather than an infuriatingly expensive proprietary storage solution like the Vita.

The Switch is a console that is much less confusing than those offered by Microsoft or Sony, has the ability to play docked or handheld, and has hundreds of great ports of games you can grab physical or digital copies of, while being the lead console to have name value first party titles you can not play on other platforms. Sure, a good bunch of them were Wii U titles, but unless you were like me and owned a Wii U, they may as well have first come out on the Switch because they are first party titles from a console not that many ever cared for.

Of course there are flaws with the Switch and features of certain major games. If you're big into your tech and own multiple platforms the weaknesses are obvious, but it's by far the easiest console to get into and get others into, and it's digital library as well as it's generally fabulous four year old first party library mean there's a lot to play in a very convenient way.

As much as I like the Vita, the Switch is much more than the Vita ever was in most regards, making almost any comparison outlandish once you have a sense of perspective about it.

The direction of the English language voice acting is pretty poor across all of Final Fantasy X and it's easy to highlight it within that scene. The performance of the voice acting isn't great either, but at least it's consistent in it's okay-ness, whereas certain scenes are pretty poorly directed which directly lowers the quality of the voice actor's work.

People are right that it seems worse as people take it out of the scene's context but even with knowledge of what the scene is about it's not well done at all.

EDIT: sorry, didn't notice this was a thread brought back from the dead!

I just 100%ed Bowser's Fury a few minutes ago and it is a very good 3D platformer, but the flaws do speak to the benefits that 3D World has several years after it's initial release.

The free camera can be a pain at points which leads you to notice control flaws that seem almost non-existent in 3D World, the kaiju Bowser battles are a bit clumsy and happen too often, despite the Bowser kaiju battles happening fairly regularly waiting for him to fulfill some Star goals feels a bit dated, and the open world is fantastic but it's more impressive as a technical thing rather than anything more, and the way situational music kicks in isn't very smooth? It'd be like if you had all of Super Mario 64 but you didn't have to jump into paintings to access levels, which is very cool, but I'm sure it'll be used in much more interesting ways moving forward.

With that being said I back what the OP wrote in most regards as Bowser's Fury is a great 3D platformer with a lovely short-ish run time that reminds you of the great ideas found in the Mario series over the last few decades. Well worth playing.

As a bonus new experience packed with one of the best games of the 21st century there's not much else to say for how great the Switch 3D World package is.

Yep, played it last year on the Wii U again and it's still the perfect 3D Mario game, way ahead of any of the others including the brilliant Mario 64, it's maybe the best Mario game full stop, beating out a ton of NES and SNES classics in the process.

It is "too easy" for most of the game for anyone massively into 3D platformers (me included), but that means decent players of 3D platformers should be able to blast through it onto the harder worlds in a few hours at most. There are so many levels, but most are a few minutes each maximum.

What draws me back after 100%ing the game several times is how fun, rewarding, and varied it all is. The benefit to near 30 years of mostly-great platforming history and game design experience pouring into one level based game. You can criticize it for mostly iterating on the same ideas, but those iterations are way more interesting than anything in Odyssey or the Galaxy series, and especially stuff like Sunshine. It helps that the controls are a good mesh of 2D and 3D Mario. They work without much adjustment required unlike most 3D Mario games.

It's the A-Team thing, where people get killed left and right but it's minor/nothing characters so viewing eyes don't see them as important. It's perspective.

Similar reasons why when a close friend dies it's crushing to you, but if someone you don't know passes away you may not care in the slightest.

The Last Of Us series doesn't particularly do anything that well in terms of character or stories either, but it tries and appeals in very common media trained ways to a broad audience so people feel the characters more.

Ignoring the graphic decisions on display in the trailer this is another case of art from a specific time, by a specific person/team, not being able to be re-made in a way which carries the soul of the original piece?

I'd honestly rather have them put out a budget Sands Of Time trilogy in a box, no real upgrades bar save states and accessibility options, and say 'look, the first game is considered incredibly important by many in and out of the industry, there's no value in remaking it!'

I know the Crash Trilogy was a great looking game, but that had issues with a few design and gameplay issues which didn't exist in the original games, but sometimes you wish art would be kept as close to the original style with proper accessibility add-ons attached to help those who need it.

This is why I actually quite liked the Super Mario All Stars 2 set, despite the flaws (especially the awful limited release window, and lack of true accessibility options but that's still an issue in games, innit?). It showed the games largely as they were at the time, upscaled a bit. That's a form of archiving I fully get behind because it lets people truly experience what the art was. People can contextualize it with their own knowledge/research to see if it has value to them then without it being misrepresented.

What I'm saying is bring me more Rare Replay collections, I guess?

I've found Hitman 3 to be absolutely fantastic. I have played every Hitman game so I'm a long tenured fan, but Hitman 3, plus the original 2 seasons of this format, are all fantastic games.

I think the major criticism of 3 feeling more streamlined is because the first run of missions are largely more direct, some of them forcing you to go in a less free-form way to achieve anything, and while I understand the frustration of that for an individual who may not have time to re-play levels a lot, this is a game where the new levels are made to be re-played outside of the final train level, which I'll type something on shortly.

Once you complete levels and unlock new starting locations and learn the levels as is standard in a Hitman game, it's hugely open, not as much as the best of the first season's levels of course, but they are really rewarding on replays.

I am not so sure I am fond of the narrative story, however, it feels a little too much like closure in a game where that is very uninteresting. That is understandable but a little bit odd compared to the Brian DePalma Hitchcockian inspired ridiculousness-with-ties of Season 1 & 2, but at least the awareness and sense of humour in long standing conspiracies remains as it has for 20 something years in the series.

I think Absolution did the story thing better than this game by miles, and better than Season 1 & 2 by a decent bit. That's understandable as that's one of the greatest games on the Xbox 360/PS3 and got a bad wrap at the time. Absolution is worth a revisit to see how much of the new Season games are in there, but with a more direct Michal Mann/DePalma style plot if you get the style tied into it all. Was it streamlined and less about discovery than the previous games? Yes, but it is a far better game than most Hitman fans gave it credit for at the time (bar Alex on this site, which is interesting given he's much more of an informed film/media literacy person than the vast majority in video games writing).

In terms of gameplay Hitman Season 3 has some cool additions but without the ability to play in VR (no great loss to me) the only major additions are the phone, where it's cool to have a little bit of the Batman Arkham detective vision to encourage you to read about the evidence you pick up, and number pad locks on safes and doors which means studying levels/environments is extra worthwhile.

It plays almost as well as Hitman Season 2 but has a few issues with certain bugs and glitches at this point in time. I am playing on an Xbox One S so unsure if that's a factor. With that being said, outside of bugs like very slow responses to emetic poison at random intervals, the game looks/feels *perfect* on the older consoles.

The train level is fine but not great. It's a ludicrous and fitting finish to the story which I'm not a great fan of despite liking most of the source materials they cribbed from, and it feels like the Goldeneye 64 train mission in many ways. Was it an intentional nod to their next game? That'd be cool, but it fits something else that Season 3 does more than 1 or 2, it tries to vary up the styles between levels in much more distinct ways. Does this make levels feel more restrictive at first as mentioned prior? Yep, but it gives a flow if you do play it through in sequence.

From the dying embers of arcade racers time, Ridge Racer Type 4 is still something I revisit every year. The best Ridge Racer ever made, and while it may not live up to the standards many have for deep, lifestyle racing games now? It's great to run through the story mode once in a while.

Outrun 2, the arcade and Xbox original or SP edition on the Playstation 2, is one of the best games ever made without hyperbole.

Forza Horizon 3 and Mario Kart 8 are my favourite modern driving games. Mario Kart 8 has eaten up some hundreds of hours over the Wii U and Switch, offline and in various forms of multiplayer and is recognized as being pretty much the best kart racer so what else can I write here?

Forza Horizon 3 is one of those lifestyle racing games I mentioned earlier, but it's actually fun to drive around a compacted version of south Queensland and northern New South Wales compared to the despairing boredom of the setting and compression of the real life lands in something like Forza Horizon 4. Maybe I played too much Colin McRae Rally back in the day, and drove too many of those UK roads years ago, but I've also driven those Australian roads and can see where Horizon 3 meets it in a much more tonally correct and interesting way.

Plus the macho bullshit blokeyness (something which usually drives me very far away!) fits a lot of Australian car types and the try-hardness actually fits that culture for once (/not to mention bike culture and such, hence why Straya has exported so much more to motor vehicles in various forms of media that you may realize), whereas other games that do something similar in and out of the series seem inconceivably naff and, well, just try-hard and desperate like wanker boy racers inspired by The Fast And The Furious. Forza Horizon 3 works in tone, in gameplay, and in style, and not many games with some aspects of simulation ever truly manage that.