Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

The day has come. My PS5 controller that only lasted nine months, that incurred drift in the left analog stick, has progressed to now making me do quarter-turns in the right analog stick. So I sprang for the PS5 DualSense Edge controller with the replaceable analog stick modules.

Well played, Sony. Getting me to drop $250 on controller stuffs. Very well played.

Good olde Skyrim.

My favorite thing to do with every new playthrough is make a b-line to Windhelm and Revyn Sadri. Utilize his Speech training. Get Speech to 50 asap. Pretty much breaks the game's progression when you have increased profits.

Once Speech is at 50, make my way over to Markarth. Ogmund the expert Speech trainer at the Silver-Blood Inn. Level Speech to 75. And then to the Bard's College in Solitude. Giraud Gemane, level Speech to 90.

Then there are the usual personal tenants. Don't level skills you aren't using because enemies scale. In my opinion this includes: Heavy Armor, Illusion, Alteration, Restoration, Two-Handed, Block, and Pickpocket. Light armor > heavy armor because of the burden on carry weight. Axes > Swords because of bleed. Alchemy and Enchanting are crucial, both for profit gains and min-maxing your gear.

42 hours (where'd the weekend go? lol.), 60% of the base game trophies unlocked. Almost a 14 year old game, the questing still feels good. Although the jank with npc reations hasn't aged as well. "The world is ending!" "Oh, everything is fine, nevermind."

Skyrim - 68 hours, popped the platinum trophy for the base game, finished Hearthfire, finished Dawnguard. I can see why Dawnguard wasn't received well. Just a whole bunch of walking forward and fighting. It's like Final Fantasy X or XIII got into my Elder Scrolls, lol.

Received my order for the Dualsense Edge yesterday. Dang, this boi is chunky. About 15% heavier than the standard PS5 controller. Using this controller every day, I'll be swole like Kali Muscle before you know it.

After a couple months of playing it I finally finished Indiana Jones & the Great Circle this week. Not quite a GOTY quality experience IMO, but still a really great time. I'm just not personally big on the stealth focus (the sooner I could obtain a region's "bad guy" disguise and largely ignore that element of the game, the better) and the combat (when it popped up) was super basic (the gunplay was really fun when the opportunity afforded itself though). All the puzzle elements were really fun & actually pretty difficult at times though, the story was pretty interesting with some cool reveals at the end, and it did a really good job immersing you into the role/world (I liked that the map was an actual unfolding paper map).

Also just started Forza Horizon 5 this morning. Played it for a couple hours so far & it's started off tons of fun.

Skyrim - 90 hours, 100% trophies (base game + dlc)

I probably could've shaved several hours off that completion time. I did a lot of dungeon delving just for the fun of it. It was my first time through the dlc, so my pathing wasn't optimal. Crafting with stahlrim required me to reset my Smithing skill. Thankfully, crafting a 100% Alteration-cost set allowed me to grind 18 levels in twenty minutes, making the Kill A Legendary Dragon trophy easier than I expected.

Word round the campfire is that Sony is looking to acquire HBO Max streaming service along with WB Games studios and properties. -SEScoops

Interesting power move if true.

ED & EDDA: GRAND PRIX RACING CHAMPIONS
First time I heard about this franchise.
I found it from play-asia then I quickly getting some information from YouTube.

This is gonna make me seem biased considering I also just commented in the Xbox thread today to not be kind at all, to say the least, but to my surprise, I'm honestly more interested in Ps5's library than PS3 or 4. Ps3 is not surprising since I had a 360 during its era and they had largely the same games, but Ps4 to my surprise, just doesn't have a ton of big, AAA games that interest me. Or if it does, its only via the over-reliance of PS5 era games still getting PS4 versions. Honestly most of that era is almost a blur to me, and even some of the ones that stand out...like I'm sure Control is cool, but that doesn't mean it interests me.

Ps5 by comparison, actually has a decent amount to it, even if the decline of AAA games + Switch domination (especially Switch 2's launch) hurts it. Even still, barring having a good showcase port like Cyberpunk, most Ps5 era games that actually take advantage of PS5 level hardware I would play on PS5 if given the option. And PS5 does have enough genuinely great AAA games (between the slop) and a decent selection of AA games that I would actually want to play. Like at the very least Returnal, Metaphor, the FFVII games, Helldivers 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Ratchet and Clank, Ghostwire Tokyo (did that Hi-fi Rush port happen yet btw?), Sonic X Shadow Generations, Astro Botm and a decent selection of AA/the more impressive looking pseudo-indie games (y'know, games like Stray or It Takes Two), and a handful of sequels to big PS4 games I want to play first (and quite a few notable Japanese series I've mostly not played yet like Onimusha or Yakuza).

I'm mostly saying that because after finding their initial presentations for PS5 to be surprisingly good, I remember 2022 having almost zero AAA games that interested me and so I just assumed I lost interest in Ps5 beyond being a future FFVII remake machine. But actually this gen is actually working out for them, despite themselves, since I actually have a decent amount of games I want to play on it.

I got again Earthlock: Festival of Magic PS4 last Monday after 6 years ago I sold the game due of my stupidity.

Something I noticed this version was still considered as Old version of Earthlock as the New version came with title Earthlock without any subtitle so the animation of the character movements in Old version was still lack compared with New version.
Anyway, I also have Switch version in physical and it was the New version so I have both Old and New version of Earthlock.

Oh, wow...!
Wobbly Life will get physical release on PS5. 😃

OMG...!!!
HELLO KITTY ON PS5 !!! 😃😃😃
Finally, it will have physical release on PS5 after Nintendo Switch version.
Definitely DAY ONE purchase.

@Anti-Matter I love Hello Kitty Island Adventure; I've been playing on Switch 2 addictively.

@FishyS
I knew Hello Kitty Island Adventure will have physical release on PS5 since the game was already available in digital on PS5 too.
Hello Kitty on PS5 machine is like a luxury of kids franchise.

Lies of P is one of our PS+ games of August.

I've always been curious about this Timothee Chalamet simulator.

@Magician If you like FromSoft, you'll love it. It leans heavily into all of From's games, but still carves out its own identity... a lot of fun.

Refreshingly linear and chapter-based also, quite challenging but fair

Think I'm giving up on Ghost of Tsushima after around 12 hours.

It's just..beyond sleep inducing so far. I'm playing on the difficulty level just below lethal - because that seems dumb as hell for a first playthrough - and combat is hilariously one note so far. You pop the stance that's good against whatever you're fighting, whack at shields or defenses until they break and just slash enemies till they drop dead. Very little strategy beyond a very shallow RPS style idea. Stances also change disappointingly little about how you fight and, afaik, there's only the regular sword in this one so that's gonna be very engaging for a 40 hour game.. The tools so far also seem kind of op? The Kunais feel like they're just get off me buttons because they stagger the hell out of stronger enemies and outright kill regular goons. The bombs are similar. The smoke bomb means you just get free instakills, too. I think there's one or two more tools I haven't unlocked yet but I may also just have forgotten about a fourth one I do have. I'm not sure tbh.
Horse riding feels bad to me. I tried avoiding that but traveling by foot feels WORSE than that so that's a no go.

Jin...is beyond bland. This guy doesn't really emote, he isn't really interesting so far, he doesn't give me a reason to care about his motivation, same for the general setup. He very much admires his uncle, I think that's about it as far as his characterization at the start/in chapter 1 goes here.

Other characters I met till now don't fare much better. I think I kind of like Ryozo/the strawhat leader because he displays a little bit of emotion. He doesn't really get anyone to play off of tho, because of how jin is in those missions/in general.
The thief lady /Yuna is awful, first thing she does is lie to you and then she's kind of a capital b about it to boot. I only met her brother once and that's right as he's freed so no opinion on him yet, don't wanna be too judgemental when they actually did a good job making me feel bad for him, he seemed to be in rough shape.
The old guy I don't care for at all.
Which leaves the merchant who helps with Yuna and her brother, he's fun but, again, I've only seen him in one mission.
Everyone else I've encountered so far seems like a one off character. They at least don't seem to join jin in his undertaking to take back that first enemy base, at least.

And then there's the missions in general. Feeling like I repeat myself here but jin drags those down, too. He's so...passive in most of them. If he doesn't have something that allows him to go off about his honor - after I've been killing dozens of mongols in stealth - he just doesn't seem like he cares at all. He's very "matter of fact" which doesn't need to be a bad thing in character writing but they just do so little with it with Jin and I legitimately don't know if the writing is just horrible or if the acting/direction for Jin is at fault here. Although the generic villagers aren't exactly great either. There's a short quest with a man fleeing from his home and you find out his wife and child got killed. And this guy basically just goes "oh" in the most apathetic way possible and the mission just...ends. Same for jin who doesn't seem to give a damn about "his people" whatsoever.

The world is hella pretty. I'll give the game that. The bad thing here is just that there's not a whole lot to do besides busywork that has yet to feel like it actually empowers me in any way. Sure, I get more health, more of those focus points and I got a new bow, some armor and...some other tool, I think. But with the combat being as shallow as it is it doesn't mean anything to me.

I genuinely feel like I'm just going through the motions with the game and I can't tell if it's legitimately a boring as hell game and story or if it just doesn't "click" whatsoever for me. I don't see at all how this isn't just another take on the ubisoft open world formula and I'm kidn of shocked how much the game has been talked up. I don't think that's a bad thing, there's nothing the game does glaringly wrong but it's all very milquetoast in execution. No real flaws but nothing that sets it apart.

I got kind of excited for Yotei. That's why I started Tsushima in the first place. And I'm starting to think I'll just skip that for now. SURELY it's going to end up on psplus at some point, like GoT. And if not it's gonna get discounted. I also went and checked out trailers from Tsushima, just to compare how they market both titles, and it looks pretty interesting in those. They show all the things I do, no real surprises there, but somehow the game is more interesting to just look at than to actually play it to me. Or maybe Suckerpunch are just that good at making it seem intriguing.

Just kind of wanted to ramble about this a little because it bums me out. On paper Ghost of Tsushima is my jam. But I guess I can't expect every game to be exactly to my tastes. I jsut didn't expect it to leave me cold THIS much.

Sucker Punch, going through the wringer this week. Feels bad for the folks at SP who don't share the opinion of the dev who got merc'd. But it's a bad look for the game, the studio, and Sony. Mildly shocked Sony didn't offer a statement expressing how that person's world view doesn't align with their business practices.

Or whichever corporate rhetoric you prefer to sling at customers to gloss over the issue.

Ghost of Yotei hype is skyrocketing! I have to move my display cases into my office (den is smaller in my new home) and that means seeing Jin’s mask daily. Can’t wait to add its counterpart!