Squadaloo

@topcyclist: Splatoon got the benefit of the doubt for a couple reasons. First, it was made by Nintendo so it automatically gets cut more slack than typical for better or worse. Second, Splatoon had a wide variety of different weapons which made it more repeatable since you can completely change up your playstyle within a mode where Knockout City everybody has the same skillset and the only change from match to match is what super balls are in play.

With that being said, I think people complaining about Knockout City's price are being too picky. I've probably already put 7-8 hours into it and had a ton of fun pretty well all of that time which honestly for a price-to-time-spent ratio is better than a lot of games.

I've been playing this on PC and having a blast. I was in the same boat of kind of liking it until I really got the hang of the trick shots and that really elevated the game for me. Plus I keep finding new kinds of tricks to do, like I dodged into a ball being thrown at a teammate to knock it out of the way (which I knew from the tutorial but didn't think to do for balls not thrown at me), and you can dodge underneath the cars in the map with traffic.

I still worry about the legs on it as the base gameplay has a lot of depth but without constant new maps and modes I still see it getting old fast, but I still went ahead and bought it on Epic Games Store since they were giving out $10 coupons anyways and I wanted to support the devs pushing the game further.

I would love to see another Gravity Rush but given yesterday's news about Japan Studio, that's pretty well guaranteed not to happen.

It's not surprising as said games are usually also overlooked in the VR community too. I like VR but I kind of agreed with Jeff when he was talking about being disappointed that Pistol Whip basically was being treated as the second coming by the VR gaming community years after VR has launched. Even larger games like Asgard's Wrath kind of came and went within the community (well, partly because it was Oculus exclusive but still, it was a full game at least).

I think it'd require too much time for them to play too many games to have that category. Plus it'd be hard to have a discussion about games only one or two people on staff have played.

As an aside, I bought Shadow Point while it was on sale on Quest and I'm kind of surprised that game didn't get more love even from VR outlets. It's much better than the usual VR fare that gets all the buzz. It's easily my favorite Quest game yet.

Some personal issues stopped me from playing recently but as of a couple weeks after launch in Spellbreak I was starting to notice it was filling more and more spots with bots on PC which was not a good sign. I too am curious how it held up after that.

@goosemunch: People have been trying dummy accounts and apparently Facebook bans them and sometimes asks for a driver's license matching the name on the account to verify it's real if you want it unbanned.

I have a Rift and a Quest but knew this was bound to happen when they made Facebook mandatory for social features. I don't think I'll be continuing the Oculus route. It's not so much that I don't want to make a Facebook account: my family uses it extensively to communicate so I already have one. I just don't want to link a personal account to a gaming one. I can easily see Facebook dropping usernames in favor of real names since they're already going to force that for Facebook Horizon. I just feel that has the chance to go horribly wrong.

With that being said, it's frustrating because I think Oculus has been nailing the mix between price and quality for VR. Their stuff isn't top of the line but it's a fair ways better than "good enough." Given Vive has kind of screwed up repeatedly since getting away from Valve, Windows Mixed Reality being disappointing, and the Index being way more expensive there isn't good competition at that price point.

I honestly wonder if there's some kind of equation behind the scenes which feeds certain subsets of users certain games over and over on some kind of rotation. On the weekend before last, I got nothing but Fall Mountain in finals above 5 players (otherwise it was Royal Fumble). Then for an entire week, I got nothing but Hex-A-Gone and Jump Showdown in their places instead until tonight when it again became Fall Mountain over and over. Likewise, my first week of playing I literally never got Jinxed and then I got it 3 or 4 times in the course of two days. I got Egg Scramble constantly for a week and then I started getting Hoarders in its place instead. Tonight, I literally got See Saw followed by Whirlygig in the first two rounds for 3 straight matches.

While I agree at launch PS5 doesn't have a ton going on and I certainly doubt I'll be buying one immediately, it feels like Sony has shown at least a few more games with actual gameplay coming only to the new console. The Ratchet and Clank demo, while not for launch, at least seemed well into development and did a great job showcasing what the SSD will bring to the table. They also have the easier sell because they're just doing the same thing every new console launch does: bringing games that only work on the new console.

Microsoft's "Buy it or don't, we don't care as long as you play our games somewhere" approach is consumer friendly, but at the cost of making the XBox Series X seem less necessary. Their other major franchises have for the most part gotten more vague trailers that are either just pre-rendered announcements (Fable) or "this is slightly prettier than the last console" graphical showpieces (Forza). They needed a showpiece title at launch to really tip the scales, and they lost that with Halo's delay.

Really though, I don't expect either console to be very good during their first year, especially given COVID taking a wrecking ball to pretty well every game in development. I also certainly don't think Series X will be dead, I just think it's the tougher sell right now. That could always change when the prices are announced though.