It's absolutely worth $30-$35, but $50 seems a hair steep unless you've been dying to play it. It's a top-tier game with a sort-of open world, but it absolutely isn't another Ubi game. The open world part won't even show up for HOURS. I may pick it up on PC at some point, but oh boy do I have a huge backlog that I'm finally actively going through. Part of that backlog was Ghost of Tsushima, which runs at 60FPS on PS5 without the "PS5 upgrade". Absolutely fantastic, I hope it ends up part of these PC ports so more people can play it. The primary story didn't hook me; the side stories of other people did, as did the pure FUN of its savage/graceful combat.
Unfortunately, it seems Sony only does these ports when it's going to point out that a sequel is looming, but only for the console. Ghost may never get a sequel, the story is quite complete, so...it may never see a PC release

fakespyder wrote on Jan 12, 2022, 16:37:
Upper Echelon Gamers has a good video on this subject.
The stats may be a little old but - When 10% of traders are doing 85% of the trading on 97% of all NFTs - it becomes obvious that they're trying to generate a market that looks amazing, at a cursory glance, but is built on crap.

This is where we get the insane stories of ridiculously priced NFTs. They're hoping we are stupid enough to put our own money into it because... look at all the activity and huge prices paid!

How they'd get this to work on derivative items in a game, where the only thing unique is a serial number? I don't think they know yet. Maybe the pricing would be low but the transactions so great that they get enough from that.

/Sorry, thinking out loud a bit. I find this whole subject fascinating and sad at the same time

While that was the lowest-effort video I've ever seen (just listen to it, it's a video that's really just an audio file), it absolutely nails why NFTs are a scam, and why the idea of having items you could use across different games is a pipe dream. Thanks for the link, fakespyder, good 15 minute listen you found!

Xero: I enjoyed HZD's story, despite the acting being...I dunno. The main character is WAY too fucking cheery for living in the back-ass end of an already brutally devastated populace, and also having been marked as an outcast. If the primary storyline doesn't have you VERY interested in what in the hell happened by the time you're let out into the open world (mostly...there's a gate-city you'll need to get through at one point), you may never be hooked. I will likely pick up the sequel on day 1 if reviews are good. I'm not sure how it could possibly have a storyline to rival the original, but God of War managed it, so maybe HZD can pull a similar stunt.

Oh damn, that's the best reason for DLC to exist I've ever seen.

Oh man, glad to see that it isn't stumbling out the gate like HZD did. Both of these ported to PC games have sequels coming out this year, and I will likely play them on their native PS5 home, even if PC ports get announced prior to console launch (which won't happen).

Both HZD and God of War are well worth playing. I played them to death on the console, so my interest in the PC ports isn't strong enough to purchase them. I'd simply want to sample how it ran smoother/looked a bit better, and then be done. Same with Ghost of Tsushima, if they port that masterpiece to PC.

This has been the long way around of saying that if you dig story-based single player games, both HZD and GoW are stellar, and you should pick them up. As long as it's a good port, I'd also HIGHLY recommend Uncharted 4 when it comes along later this year. You'll miss some backstory on the characters from the first 3 games, but it gives you enough about them that you won't be confused.

Walt, I know you don't want to hear it, but that fort-knox level copy/editing protection is to try to head off cheating. It's probably also there to limit modding, as they want to sell expansions and whatnot, but it's mostly there to try to curb cheaters. Microsoft was cagey about bringing their Xbox games to PC, because they were worried about the fairness in multiplayer. I'm not sure if the Steam version of Halo Infinite has the same protections, because apparently HI has a lot of cheating issues currently. I'd be interested to see if that's the Windows Store version, or the Steam one, or both.

Anyway, as for demos, well, Extra Credits did a video on this years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QM6LoaqEnY

Basically, demos cost time and money to make, and rarely have any beneficial effect on sales. Refund policies on digital storefronts make demos irrelevant-ish...it doesn't help if a game has a slow-as-mud intro that makes you quit before it gets its hooks in. I'm looking at you, Divinity 2.

I don't see this as any different from Blind Boxes for toys, and those are legal. Literally, if you don't know precisely what you are buying, it's gambling. It's been around for forever, but now that it's in video games, NOW parents care?

As with many patents, it should be dismissed simply because "now it's being done on a computer" isn't really doing something particularly differently.

The Polygon review points out what I figured would happen; the game runs great, but it’s because they didn’t upgrade it much from the Switch. It looks like a high end mobile game, not a proper AAA PC release, and certainly not at $60. It looks like maybe a $30 game.

Great news for Ghost of Tsushima, Sucker Punch deserves it. That game is one of very few that I got all the trophies for, and it doesn't require you to hunt down all the collectibles to accomplish it. The story is done well, It's absolutely gorgeous at all times, and you flow through combat like the Arkham Knight series. The story is pretty serious, and the comedy can be extremely dry, but it fits with the tone of the game.

PSVR2 is looking fantastic! Honestly the only downside to it so far is it can't go wireless like the Quest2 can. If a *console* is going to have a headset with foveated rendering and eye tracking, I'm hoping pretty much everyone else is going to release one with the same options. While I'm not a fan of Meta/Facebook, the Quest 2 is a shocking piece of hardware for the money, whether or not you feed it with a PC. I'm betting they'll be the next company to officially announce having a headset with the same features, except it'll be standalone/airlink capable.

Hope you didn’t plan on playing any Microsoft games. Turn off telemetry, watch Forza Horizon games shit their pants.

People turning off telemetry is how we got Windows 8 without a start button/menu. Turned out that the people who didn’t have the knowledge to turn off usage reporting also didn’t use the start button. So Microsoft gathered that NO ONE used the start button, and designed around it.

ahhhh, pretty sure if they try to go after someone for hacking when all they did was "view source" on a website, they're gonna get trounced. The reporter did everything right, they're just mad that the reporter then reported on what they found, after making sure the issue was fixed.

Wow, most kickstarters just hang onto the money and fade away when they realize they can’t produce what they planned to.

Sharken wrote on Dec 29, 2021, 16:16:
Except you haven't been able to reliable purchase any current gen console for a year.

So it's a tie at best.

EHHH, I was handed the opportunity to purchase an Xbox Series X and a Playstation 5 directly from Microsoft and Sony. I skipped the Xbox, as my pc plays literally every game I'd want on it. Bought the PS5. Wasn't nearly as easy as walking into a store, but it was a smooth, easy-enough process. was as simple as going to direct .playstation .com and putting my name on the list. Waited a couple months and tada, had a time-limited link to be able to buy one.

You *DO* have to already have had a Playstation account since sometime in mid 2021, you can't make one now and use it, and you can only buy one per account AND household. They went pretty hard on avoiding scalper abuse.

That Viva La Dirt is so spot on, I recently got my desktop FINALLY set back up (bought a new house, basement needed a remodel, which I did myself, leaving the PC in storage as incentive). Fired up Control to check out the new expansion aaaaand oh shit I quit playing at the end boss of the first expansion. I get wrecked in like 10 seconds, I need to relearn how the game works and I'm absolutely in the worst place to try to figure that out.
I think I can just...go dink around elsewhere in the game to figure it out, but my first reaction was basically what that video has going on.

Grab it for free, but don't expect too much from it. Maybe you'll dig it, but I found it absolutely isn't what the trailers show you. The trailers show a wild run and gun where your weapons spew death everywhere, but that's clearly some late-game stuff. It just gives you a little peashooter, and upgrades are few and far between. It absolutely is NOT the shooter version of Dead Cells, where you felt powerful from the beginning.

My wife would LOVE the hot pink controller. It'll come to the US soon enough, I'm sure. I'd like to see some more...interesting color schemes for the controllers and console, like how Microsoft has done with their color-gradient ones (look at the Aqua Shift controller for an example).

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Dec 10, 2021, 01:15:
Wtf, the game looks gorgeous, even better than the first, but what the hell is even going on here?

The first game, I interpreted everything to be her metaphorical battles against her own mental illness, and/or just straight up hallucinating or having psychotic episodes from past trauma. It always seemed as though the story was hinting that very little of the combat and monsters etc. were actually anything real at all, if any. I always pictured her as just flailing around by herself in the woods.

Now the second game, is she supposed to be imagining her whole tribe alongside her as she fights her internal monsters? This game will be even more depressing if so.

I was under the impression that the monsters she fought in the first game were actually the tribe that killed her...betrothed/husband/(I forgot). She's batshit insane throughout, but she's clearly entering actual encampments and whatnot. The one non-human thing she fights may have been a tribe "pet" or war animal, twisted into the rotting monster you see in the game.

She may now have collected a bunch of crazies, but there's no "well, it *could* be a normal human but she's twisting it in her mind" going on with that giant. Not that it doesn't look cool; that video looks impossibly good (but so did the entire first game). I'm just not sure how the first and second game can reconcile what's going on when the second one goes absolutely supernatural AND has others along who see the same thing she does.

I played through Alan Wake immediately before the AWE expansion for Control came out (which I haven't played, due to sudden changes in my real life, but that day is coming soon), and found it to be quite meh. The combat is the same thing, with VERY little room for improvisation, beginning to end. I get that Alan is a writer, not an action hero, but his minimal arsenal/functions got boring very fast. I enjoyed the story but ended up playing through on easy mode because I didn't find the combat engaging.

Control is significantly better, although the combat feels a bit loose. Might be a side effect of being third person, dunno. I hope the new Alan Wake takes lessons learned from Control, and doesn't regress into a one trick pony like the original AW. From comments saying it's changing genre a bit, maybe they will!

EGS isn't a deal-killer for me, but it absolutely does dampen my interest. Unless the game is a holy-shit-must-have-now one, I'll wait for it to saunter over to Steam. Currently, AW2 doesn't sit in that category.

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Dec 7, 2021, 12:40:
Interesting. I played through ... the first two of these, I think? On PS2 or PS3, and I never got around to the third (or fourth?) game, so I may pick this up if the price isn't egregious.

Lucky you! I'd like to pretend the third one doesn't exist. Not that it isn't pretty, or that the gameplay is bad, but the story is a complete clusterfuck, where impossible stuff happens and they forget to ever explain it. If I recall correctly, the writer of the story left due to the process the company was using for it. Basically, they would come up with the levels and locations first and then tell the writer to find a way to make them fit together into a story.

I don't know if they developed the final game that way, but it doesn't FEEL like it. The story is very focused and coherent, like 1 and 2 are. You don't *need* to have played the previous games to understand what's happening in 4, but there are a handful of jokes that are throwbacks to the prior games. 2 and 4 are the standout games in the series, if you have a ps4/5 the first 3 games are in a remastered package that is routinely $10, if you're concerned about knowing all the backstory.

Simon Says wrote on Dec 6, 2021, 14:50:

From the reviews I read/watched, what I take away is:

-Lots of graphical bugs and issues, deep lack of polish especially highlighted by DigitalFoundry's review
-Slow performance on PC despite much beefier specs ( 6900XT/3090 SLOWER than XsX makes absolutely zero sense ), and crappy'ish graphics even compared to Halo 5. See computerbase.de testing.
-Strange crashing issues with "lower" end setups ( RX580/GTX1060 ), again computerbase

Some lauded the game for "this is what happens when you delay and let the developers do their job".

I disagree vehemently...

The game is half-baked. I'll try it in a year.

I listen to crashing/performance issues in games with a heavy amount of skepticism. I work at a computer store, and I get "my computer runs poorly, and I'm only running (insert low resource software name here)". Inevitably, we find that it works JUST FINE, and then they say "oh, I also have (insert system-destroying software here)". Ah yes, thanks for wasting our time and your money. Point is, people are ALWAYS running other shit. Is the game buggy? Oh, very likely. I mean, name a single game that released without a followup patch (or several) within the first week or two.

I'll be waiting a bit on this one anyway, as I'll wait for the co-op campaign, and probably a little after that so they can fix issues with it. I don't know about the single player performance, but the multiplayer runs butter smooth on my i5/1660 laptop.