BPM: Bullets Per Minute. A boomer shooter had an affair with he rhythm game genre and this was the outcome. Amazing game, assuming you don’t mind rhythm games, and an immaculate one if you actively like rhythm games.

Neon White is technically a shooter, but in most ways does not play or feel like one. It’s better described as a first person puzzle/platformer, but I would still recommend it, as it is an incredible game.

Both of the Doom ports run insanely well on the Switch. Seemingly impossibly well considering how dated the console is.

Warframe is good, free and playing surprisingly well on Switch.

Splatoon is just awesome.

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.

Hi-Fi Rush might genuinely be one of my favorite games of all time.

These guys did great, and I’ll be thinking twice about any Xbox product I consider purchasing in the future.

I just fucking want Elite to be good. I could shoot pirates and 'goids all day if getting a ship ready to do so wasn’t as enjoyable as running dental floss into my mouth and out my asshole.

As a “space games guy” is there anything out there that is as satisfying to simply fly around in as Elite Dangerous is without the absolute shit fuck of ass-backwards, tedious and boring mechanics?

I fucking love flying ships in that game with my HOTAS and VR headset, but I will be damned if I am going to roll around on a moon praying I trip over some precious metals just so I can play logistics hot potatoes trying to figure out how I am going to get my module to the relevant station, upgraded, and then placed into the ship I designed it for. Elite is such an incredible space cockpit sim, and they’ve gone to great lengths to prevent me from wanting to actually play it. I just want a good cockpit sim with HOTAS support that doesn’t make me want to scoop out my own eyeballs whenever I think about loading it up again.

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.

“Fuck them, I’ve got mine” pro-capitalist mindset in the wild.

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.

Cassette Beasts kicks the ever loving shit out of Pokemon across the board, modern or retro.

Retro games weren’t better than modern games as a “full-stop” statement. They tended to be bug-ridden messes, but there was still a heart and soul behind them that tends to be missing in the AAA industry. Continuing on the Pokemon example Red/Blue were an absolute mess. I mean, moves and items that were supposed to massively increase critical hit rate massively decreased them instead. Stat calculations were all over the place. Hell, the ghost-psychic interaction just straight didn’t function as intended. It was a mess, and yet for some reason, it’s touted as “better” than the modern Pokemon games.

Plus, not all big studio games are soulless cash grabs of releases, either. Hi-Fi Rush is my favorite game of 2023 by a huge margin, and was a Bethesda published game. Sure, the dev studio was “smaller” compared to Ubisoft or Activison, but I wouldn’t call the game indie - it was AAA in polish and scale. I’m currently really enjoying Unicorn Overlord, getting major Ogre Battle 64 vibes from it, and playing a lot of Monster Hunter Rise thanks to a Steam sale. These games slap, and have all the depth and passion of games of old without alI of the horrible jank we dealt with in the pre-internet “no such thing as a post-release patch” world.

It’s easy to see the yearly Call of Duty, Pokemon, generic EA sports, and obligatory Ubisoft open world games release and think “man, AAA gaming sucks”, but they’re honestly a very tiny portion of the conversation.

EDIT: I take everything back, Bethesda just closed the studio that made Hi-Fi Rush. AAA gaming is a cancer that needs to be surgically extracted.

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.

I feel like listening is a strong word.

I suspect someone ran the numbers and realized they’re likely to lose more money on reduced future sales and microtransactions than they would have gained through data scraping.

A win is a win, but don’t fool yourself into believing Stony listens to anyone but the almighty dollar.

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”.

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