A strictly anti-capitalist fever dream adventure RPG getting completely consumed and milked by greedy capitalists who added nothing of value to its creation is peak this timeline.

It’s no great secret that the Trump administration was peddling in vaccine misinformation.

The only surprise here is how much damage it caused in the Philippines in particular.

Support an amazing “single-A” game that suffers none of the issues of modern enshittification by purchasing a physical copy.

OR

Refuse to hand any money to the mega corporation that shut down the studio responsible for the gem that is Hi-Fi Rush.

sweats nervously

The endgame Sephiroth fight was definitely forced. It reeked of “well, he’s been the secret antagonist all game, so we can’t just disclude him from the finale” kind of thinking.

I liked the more persistent villain lurking in Cloud’s broken mind, but they shouldn’t have felt the need to try and put a pseudo capstone on that story thread.

That’s so fascinating, tbh. I mean, different strokes, so I can’t judge, but it’s the impressively deep strategy they’ve baked into Remake’s combat that I am particularly impressed by. That said, it makes sense though that if you dislike Tales combat, you’d dislike Remake’s combat. They’re not the same persay, but they’re cut from the same cloth imo.

Calling the new game’s combat “mind-numbing” compared to a random encounter turn-based system is both peak irony and peak rose-tinted glasses.

I can’t get over just how much better Remake is compared to the original, so you do you, I guess. I was incredibly pleasantly surprised to see the ways they’re engaging with telling a different story and taking the name “remake” very literally. I was seriously concerned they were just going to sell the original story again in three seperate parts as full-price titles.

It’s weird because you’re both right and wrong.

It’s not AAA by any stretch. It was sold at a fraction of the usual price point, it’s advertising was non-existant, and it makes no effort to do the usual AAA things: live-service, online multiplayer, “you can play it forever”, etc. are are not present.

But putting it side-by-side with Manor Lords and Balatro, the latter of which was a single-person dev, also doesn’t suit it. It has a real studio, a dev team with experience, and at least enough of a budget to license real music from popular (or at least, once popular) artists. I’d perhaps agree with your statement that it’s closer to AAA than to a “small dev” game, but it is true that it’s a “smaller game that [gives Microsoft] prestiege and awards”.

This is a great article highlighting the pig-headed double speak going on at Microsoft’s gaming divisions. On the one hand, they’re cutting studios and supposidly refocusing on their core offerings, while simultaneously describing the experiences they want to offer as exactly the studios they just cut. The absolute worst part is I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to take the IP, push it on a different dev team that they control and give it the Fable treatment: “this IP was so well received; make a sequel that checks all these boxes that our market research data tells us popular, profitable games have” while conviniently ignoring the passion and vision that the original devs poured into the original title.

It absolutely has to deal with a Steam account every single time I log in to confirm ownership of the title. And then again every time I make a purchase from my Steam wallet. And again every time I connect to a friend through my Steam friends list.

It’s literally adding another potential point of failure and removes none of the necessities of dealing with the other service. I only suggested the server load bit because I can’t for the life of me understand how you can think it’s “easier” to insist that these two systems interact in a new way when they’re already up and functioning, and the original reason account linking was disabled was to make the game more stable.

Insane take imo. How does purchase authentication or cross play suddenly become “easier” with this change? Either it works or it doesn’t; having PC players connected to a PSN account doesn’t alleviate server load.

Sure, and I’m not suggesting said bean counter was responsible for the decision. What I am suggesting is that the only thing that influenced the decision was bottom line finances. Someone ran the numbers, and when the suits discovered that they stand to lose more money than they’d gain, they reversed the decision. Never mistake this as Sony “listening” to anything more than their investors and their bottom line.

How much less bullshit PC players are willing to put up with compared to their console counterparts, apparently.

I suspect someone in accounting ran the numbers and decided they stand to lose more to reduced microtransaction sales than they would have gained via selling scraped data.

Though I agreed with you. It’s still a win, but we have to be careful not to conflate this with Sony “caring”.

As of today, I am still able to log in. The next point I’m concerned about is the 30th, so we’ll be waiting a while, but I’ll do my best to update.

So, at first install, I actually linked my account to a PSN account that I knew was banned due to a charge back on an unwanted purchase. At the time, I figured if I discovered that I can’t play because my account is banned from PSN, I’d just refund on Steam. I feel I’ll be very justifiably pissed if my account is now banned from playing retroactively, long after the refund window.

Nah dude. If they hit a billion dollars, you take all their wealth, reset them back to level one, put a star next to their name and tell them to do it again. They’ll appreciate the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes with a second run.

This makes so much more sense.

I watched the gameplay trailer and was so confused as to why Ubisoft thought it could get away with so blatantly ripping off Dead Cells.

Still confused why it’s in the “triple-i” showcase, though. I know the definition of “indie” has become more and more loose as of late, but I’d think the core concept of being self-published would have to be a pre-requisite.

Honestly people will ruin whatever after a few generations when they don’t see the negstives anymore.

Why am I still paying those IT security folk? We haven’t had any data leaks in years!

I tried the game two or three times sitting down with the “I want to play a space sim” mindset and could never get past the tutorial. Then the next time, it had clicked that it’s a survival crafter that just happens to have a space theme. When I sat down with that mindset and perspective on what I was in for, I suddenly throughly enjoyed the game.

The game just does a really bad job of showing you what it is trailers and other media. Sure, all the things it shows off are there, but they’re not the core of the game.

The rebinding options are amazing, though. Being able to choose between tap, double tap, press, long press and hold for every input is fantastic. Two seconds after discovering this, press ctrl was crouch while double tap was prone and hold shift was dash while double tap was dive, and it feels so good.

Idk about controller, but keyboard support is amazing.