ErraticGamer

Excited to see Nier on the list finally. I'd like Borderlands 3 to get in there eventually; snagged it for crazy cheap in the last sale and it'd be fun to have that portable.

This and Call of Juarez: Gunslinger are the two secretly great westerns in gaming. Must plays.

It's an absolutely fantastic experience on PC, so I really hope they can get it in the shape it deserves to be in. If they can, and even moreso if they manage to add gyro support to it, it'll probably be the best version of the game.

@PROPS I'll take that bet, because I own it. I actually rather like John Wick Hex. It's not perfect, but it's fun and different.

What a waste. This was a pretty decent game, clearly made by talented people who put a lot of thought and work into it, but this was the end it was always destined for. Sigh.

It's currently listing Indivisible as on sale for $7.50 (https://i.imgur.com/4YwoW93.png), which I was a bit excited about until I went to the actual eShop and saw that no, it's at its normal price of $30 (https://i.imgur.com/Pf67ENE.png).

So that's kind of a bummer.

They're cool, but like everybody else is saying, that price tag is unreal. Joy-Cons aren't even particularly good controllers, I'm not laying out $165 for something that looks cool but that I won't enjoy actually using and that has a high failure rate.

And "If you end up ordering both sets of controllers, you'll also receive an "extremely limited" Fish Head Shovel Knight Enamel Pin." ...? I'm sorry, if you spend three hundred and thirty dollars on joy-cons you get... a pin? That's... supposed to be a bonus?

If you've only got a Switch or only care about getting an extra controller for it, that certainly seems like a great price for what they're offering.

That said, though, even though it's double the price, the Ultimate Bluetooth controller is the same thing but works on Switch, PC, Android/iOS and Steam Deck, has Hall Effect sticks, and comes with a charging dock that can also be its own pairing station for Windows. All that is worth the extra $$ in my book.

I love this, but/and I'm also curious why it's being reported on without mentioning that Powerwash Simulator has been broken on Switch for two months. Saving your game hasn't worked for a ton of players since the Spongebob DLC came out, and they still don't even have a time estimate for a fix.

Killer Queen is an absolutely incredible game design, but to actually get the experience of it you need 8 people who know what they're doing and want to dedicate at least 30-60 minutes to playing the same game together, and that's rare enough to just almost never happen for a small indie title.

If you ever see the full two-cabinet setup at an arcade or convention, though, don't pass it up. It's worth playing, for sure. (They just had it at the Pittsburgh Gaming Expo this last weekend, so I actually just played a bunch of it, which I hadn't done for well over a year.)

I don't think I care about this for Switch but this seems like a slam dunk for VR, so when it hits the Quest I'll be paying attention.

Interview with the developer from last month - https://supercombo.gg/2021/12/22/fightnjokes-rolling-back-25-years-later/

Whole lotta folks who have never tried Stadia, GeForce Now, Shadow, PS Now, XCloud, or any of the other cloud services that work just great actually if you have a good connection. I actually picked up Guardians on Steam specifically to play it on GeForce Now, where I'm enjoying it maxed out at 60FPS and it plays like a dream.

That said, though, I also just downloaded the trial version on Switch, and yeah, this specific cloud game seems to be really badly handled. Lots of what feels like frame drops on the rendering side, in addition to the connection just not being stable at all (not being able to hardwire the Switch net connection unless you're on an OLED dock doesn't help).

Cloud gaming as a concept and as a technical possibility are fine. When it works, it works great. But this game on it still appears to be pretty crap. Which is a shame.

SNES ALADDIN? ***** yes. Well I'm in now.

It's not a problem to bring lesser known games to the service. That's great. I applaud that wholeheartedly.

It is a problem to charge for a service that ostensibly gives access to a backwards-compatible library but omits beloved classics you've also charged money for in the past on previous consoles within the same basic functionality, making it impossible for specifically your most loyal and happy-to-spend fans to have a comprehensive collection without resorting to piracy.

Everything that was available for NES or SNES on the Wii or Wii U Virtual Consoles should be on this service. It shouldn't even be a question. It's the entire point of the thing.

I mean, I'm not gonna buy it, but if somebody managed to make a cute superhero game for kids that is actually good at being a cute superhero game for kids and not garbage - cool! Well done. I hope the kids whose parents and grandparents were gonna buy it for them either way can have fun with it instead of having to suffer through a crappy game.

It's almost like critiquing a piece of art and numerically scoring the proficiency of consumer entertainment aren't necessarily compatible goals.

But they do both matter, so thanks for giving both a shot, here.

Hunh. For a minute I thought this was just a re-brand of Pac-Man: Mega Tunnel Battle, which came out on Stadia last October and is a 64-person Pac-Man battle royale (and it's actually quite good)... but nope, they indeed appear to have made a second, completely different Pac-Man battle royale for Switch.

<shrug> Okay. It'll probably also be fun.

It's a crime to review this game and not mention that exceptional soundtrack.

To the rest, though, fair enough. I had fun with it on PC at its original launch, but it doesn't surprise me to hear it doesn't hold up.

Every day, yup. Not because there's usually a lot of new stuff to do (though I have enjoyed all the holiday events when they happen), it's just sort of a relaxation exercise for me now. 15 minutes to get some bells, do some cleanup, maybe change the decor a bit.

Like other folks are saying, the Pro+ is absolutely the best 3rd party controller you can get. It's phenomenal. So yeah, this also ought to be pretty good.

Bullfrog Studios had an incredible roster of games. Populous remains, over 30 years later, an amazing, landmark game that changed the industry. Theme Park, Magic Carpet, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper - all legit hits with fans that they earned the loyalty of.

And then Molyneux did everything he could in the last 20 years to squander that loyalty.

Black and White was a fascinating idea that sort of worked, a little bit, and never lived up to its own hype. The Movies, Project Milo, and everything Fable after Fable 2 were massively overpromised underachievers that he promised the world from and simply shrugged off after delivering mediocrity (or in the case of Milo, delivering nothing).

And Curiosity and Godus were just literally scams. He told everyone what they were going to be and how they'd interconnect, made a ton of money off those claims, and then... didn't do it. Didn't do any of it. Waited years for RockPaperShotgun to track him down and finally say "hey were you ever planning to show any accountability for these apparent lies?" and the honest answer was basically "no, not really." Well, first he angrily swore up and down that they weren't lies, and then when they showed the extensive receipts, he sulked about it and claimed he was going to stop doing interviews. And then didn't.

He's an idea man, and I have no problem believing that at least some of the time he believes his own hype. And when he's paired with talented developers who share his passion and have a workable scope, magic can happen. But that doesn't make it okay for him to have driven multiple huge projects right off cliffs since the early Fable games, and people probably should not be putting him in charge of things anymore.

@RasandeRose Except you have no idea how much Stadia is actually growing, and neither do I. The April 2020 number you cited wasn't an official number from Google, it was one source (gamesindustry.biz) saying that the Stadia app on Android had passed 1 million lifetime installs that month.

That tells you almost nothing. [EDIT: Well, actually, that's not true. There are other pieces saying it hit 500,000 installs on Android in March, so it tells you that it grew 500,000 installs on the Android platform in a month. That's all it tells you.] The Android app isn't the primary way, or likely even the 2nd most popular way, to play on Stadia, and that number completely ignores anyone playing on a Chromecast Ultra (the primary hardware-based way to play) or in a Chrome browser (which is how almost anyone using the service for free is playing), or on iOS, which doesn't use an app and loads directly in Safari.

So no, I don't put a lot of stock in that telling me the future health of the platform. You're welcome to your skepticism, and I say again - let's check back in a year.

@RasandeRose I mean, time's gonna tell. I've seen more positive buzz about Stadia in the last 3 months than I'd seen in the whole year it had been live since then. Cyberpunk's launch was a pretty big end-of-year shot in the arm for them, and Ubisoft+ compatibility meant that for $15 a month anybody who wanted to play Watch_Dogs: Legion, AC: Valhalla, or Fenyx Rising could effectively do all three at no additional cost (or for $10 more if they wanted to play in 4K, but that's still $180 worth of game for under thirty bucks).

Google shuts down free services on a whim, yes, but they don't routinely shut down things they're charging for. They've got years of development and investment in this, it's not like 5 guys spent a month coding real fast and here's our new experiment. And again, the tech works and works well, which is more than can be said for any of their competitors right now.

But we'll see. Bookmark this post. Let's check back in a year.

I don't think there's anything at all wrong with paying for this if you think you'd enjoy Hitman 3 "on the go" (as on-the-go as requiring a solid internet connection can be). A 720 stream is just fine for handheld play, and Control looked pretty great on the handheld for its streaming version so this probably will be a pretty decent experience as well.

Stadia isn't going anywhere, though, and if you want to play this on a bigger screen and the cloud is the way you're gonna play it, I'd definitely consider that over playing this docked with a 720p stream. They're leagues ahead of their competitors in terms of the streaming tech, and their userbase and game library have been growing steadily for over a year with a content plan that goes out at least 3 more years. The folks saying "lol google's just gonna shut it down" were saying that this time last year and they'll be saying it this time next year, and it'll still be doing just fine.

@Wexter I think we're closer to agreeing than disagreeing, so I'm giving that a 'like' and I'm happy to call it a night if you are. Yes, what happened to Devotion was censorship, but the act of censorship happened when that game was pulled from sale. The community did incite that censorship but they did not perform it. I'm happy to own that I'm nitpicking, but I think it's an important nitpick. But I also think I've laid it out as clearly as I'm gonna, so. Cheers.

No, it's really not like book burning. Like I understand why you hate the comparison, but also it's just a bad comparison. A review bombed game is very much still available for purchase, it its unaltered form. It has not been censored. A burned book has been burned. It is not available for people to have the option of consuming.

It's really important how different those are.

@Wexter Review bombing is not censorship. It's disingenuous, and storefronts have an obligation to monitor for and prevent it, but it happens for a hundred different reasons and to categorize it as censorship is to misconstrue both the practice and the concept. It does not change content, and it does not prevent speech. Trying to impact purchasing decisions is a fight over marketing, not a freedom of expression issue.

Nintendo pulling the game from the eShop would be censorship, but there's no evidence (or in my opinion reason to think) that was ever going to happen. Far more risque looking content than anything on display here is happily living on the eShop.

The spectre of censorship being used as an ad ploy is exactly why the distinction matters. It confuses the actual issue, and diminishes what was once a widespread actual tangible threat to this entire medium.

@Wexter Yes, by the technical definition that's true, and by that technical definition there is constitutional censorship (Sony overriding their developers, as an example you provided) and unconstitutional censorship (Jack Thompson trying to get violent videogames banned). But in this specific instance, there is no authority trying to censor anything. The developers are claiming that some people complained about their art - which may be true but those people are certainly not "authorities" who have control over the content - and then saying "we won't be censored".

But nobody was trying to censor them. Your customers can't censor you, that's not how the concept works.

EDIT: I suppose the actual quote is "the game will not be censored", so they're basically saying "we will not censor ourselves." Which, again, I think it's pretty important to distinguish from the sense of the word that carries rightfully nefarious legal / free speech connotations.

<shrug> As a matter of principle, I never get in the way of somebody happily making their own argument look bad.

Also - and this is just my personal nitpick, not related to the rest of the thread, really - let's be very clear that none of this stuff is censorship in the Capital C sense. The market deciding what will and won't sell is not censorship. The government stepping in and telling you that you can't say or sell something is censorship. And that's not even on the table here. Which it's important to point out, because some of us still remember very clearly when it was, frequently.

I mean, blocking folks isn't censorship. Our words are here for whoever to read, choosing to block them out personally doesn't 'censor' them. They can block whoever they want. It's just not a very good way to defend a point.

Jeezus. Okay, I did load up the video. It starts with him saying "Anita Sarkeesian might have been involved with TLOU2" and then throws to footage borrowed from another Youtuber, referencing "off the record stories", which themselves reference a conversation she might have had. It also claims "a lot is going to be coming out in the coming weeks and months" (click like and subscribe!), but that was April, sooooooo.

Yeah, if this is what you're tossing out as 'evidence' of your 'facts', definitely block me. I appreciate you saving me the future eyerolls.

Now, you can dislike Neil Druckmann, and part of the reason you dislike him can certainly be that he has publicly said he likes Anita Sarkeesian and that she's influenced how he works. He has said that, and it's fair game to think less of him for that.

But she's not an "actual part of Naughty Dog." That's not true. And repeating it more confidently doesn't make it true.

@Averagewriter "I've already blocked NESisonett, and I'll probably block you, too."

...oh no? Okay. That's fine.

I am for sure not interested in watching that guy's Youtube video, so, you got me there [edit: I did end up watching the beginning, see comment below], but none of the articles you posted provide any evidence whatsoever that Anita Sarkeesian has any actual involvement in Naughty Dog as a studio or The Last of Us 2 as a videogame, outside of whatever role you think she plays in Neil Druckmann's head.

Like, literally zero. The Forbes piece mentions her zero times, the Polygon piece mentions her zero times, the Twitter link is to him presenting her with an industry award - being an award presenter is not, it turns out, an employment arrangement, and Neil Druckmann probably doesn't decide who wins - and the Bounding Into Comics piece mentions her only in referencing the mention of her that I already talked about as an influence, in a 2016 interview, and it basically just says "I saw her videos and they made me think about things."

I too watched videos 4 years ago that made me think about things, without employing the people who made them.

So I did look at "where [you've] gotten [your] info", and again: I have seen, and you have presented, absolutely zero evidence, at all, that Anita Sarkeesian was connected to the development of TLOU2 or employed by (or even officially connected to) Naughty Dog in any way.

It's just made up.

As for this actual statement, it's very clearly marketing, and 124 comments says it's working. My interest in the game remains at zero, but sure, announce that you aren't changing your game in the wake of hypothetical attacks. Good on ya.

I'm just here to see if @Averagewriter provides some evidence that Anita Sarkeesian is an "actual part of" Naughty Dog, as opposed to just someone Druckmann mentioned a couple times as a personal influence (among others), because I read that comment and was like "really? hunh, I had no idea", and went looking for evidence of it, and found crickets.

<popcorn.gif>

In the US here, so, waiting to see what happens when they launch

(And yes, you individually might be able to never connect your device to the internet again, and thereby preserve the things you've downloaded in perpetuity. But basically nobody actually does that, and if the day ever came when they shut it all down, it'd be too late.)

@GameOtaku You don't own any game you've bought digitally, that's exactly what I've been saying. You never have. Nor any movie, any song, any book, whatever. You own a license to play that game / read that book / watch that movie, and that license can be revoked. They probably won't, because - again - it would be ruinous to their business to have everybody think they're gonna lose their stuff. But your ability to download the file has no connection to your "ownership" of it in a world where they can remotely update your device to take it away or stop playing it. Cloud gaming is not a change to that arrangement. It just makes it more clear. If you were downloading games without having the level of trust to stream them, you were already operating off a false premise.

I actually think for games it's MORE likely for this to catch on, because if somebody wanted to decide between a Blu-Ray of Endgame or a streamed copy it was the difference of mabye $25 of media and under $100 of a physical player vs a monthly fee to Disney+. With games you're talking about potentially saving hundreds of dollars on hardware, never upgrading a video card again, never having a hard drive or a console crash on you, and being able to play Cyberpunk the minute it releases with no download delay. Assuming the tech works (and it does), it's a more attractive proposition, not less.

If you think game streaming isn't gonna hang around, you haven't been paying attention to the music industry, the television industry, the film industry, or much of anything else. The tech is good enough, and when given the option to just click a button and have a thing play with no effort or hassle in exchange for a small dip in control and quality, consumers have chosen that every single time it's ever been offered to them so far.

@GameOtaku You have access to the files unless they take them away or lock them from working, both of which have happened on digital platforms. Again, legally, it is EXACTLY the same as what's happening here. And the reasons to be confident or skeptical about it are also the same. So folks who have bought in to digital distribution for almost 20 years have no reason to fear this unless they think their connections aren't stable enough (or they like modding games, on PC, I suppose).

Or maybe it hasn't worked, for you. Some folks still don't buy things digitally, period. But if you do, this is the same arrangement, only with the addition of your internet connectivity for the playing of in addition to the downloading of the game.

"They can remove it at a moment's notice" - again, this is true for literally any digital media purchase you make, anywhere. Kindle books. Amazon Prime videos. Steam games. Nintendo games purchased through the eShop. Any of these can be, and in extreme cases have been, blocked or removed from purchasing customers.

We just generally trust them not to, because it would obviously be disastrous to their business to have the reputation of taking away paid content. And that arrangement has worked for almost 20 years now.

As for Stadia, since folks are talking about it separately at some length, I've had a Pro Stadia subscription all year and I've put over 90 hours into Assassin's Creed Odyssey and all the DLC's on it, as well as a bunch of Destiny 2 and other games on that platform.

It's been great. I had a better experience with it than I had with a similar amount of time with AC: Origins on my local PC. My hardware is getting a bit old, so Stadia looks better, runs smoother, takes up no hard drive space, and has much speedier load times. I have no complaints with it at all. And Google has pledged that if they someday shut it down (which there is no sign will happen anytime soon, they have been expanding, not stagnating) they'll let you get your games out, so from an ownership standpoint it is exactly the same as Steam or any other digital platform. If you aren't buying a disc or a cartridge (and sometimes even if you are), you're buying a license that can be taken away, not a permanent object. And I've been on Steam for... yeesh, 17 years now. Getting old. And it's fine.

This game struggled to run smoothly on the XBox One and the PS4. You needed the X or the Pro just to get decent performance out of its full-fat console versions. There is zero chance that a native Switch port was going to be possible without massively overhauling the engine and the assets, and Remedy clearly didn't feel like that was worth the expense and effort (and I can understand why).

The cloud version works well. If you have a different way to play Control, you should take it, because it's a gorgeous game that will look better when not streaming. If you don't, this is a way to play Control on the Switch that isn't bad.

That's all that needs to be said about it. The hysteria about cloud gaming is ridiculous. EVERY platform is doing this now. XCloud. PSNow. Stadia. GeForce Now. Luna. Facebook is doing it. It is inevitable (cue Thanos etc), but it's also not going to be the only way to play things. But if you want to play a big game without taking up a ton of storage space, or a game on a platform that can't handle it hardware wise, it's a great option to have.

There are a lot of people in here pretty shocked about the possible death of something that's already dead.

The number of people who care about - or even are aware of - the distinction between 'owning' a game and simply paying for access to it, has been declining for well over a decade, and keeps going down all the time, just as it does with literally every other form of media. Physical sales are down across the board, and anything delivered digitally - Kindle books, Prime videos, Steam games, iTunes music, whatever - is legally exactly the same as this is, you're paying for a license and they can take that license away. They probably won't, but they absolutely can.

That in some cases you have the ability to download a copy of those things and hack whatever system into still letting you use the thing 20 years from now if you want with non-cloud solutions is a meaningful distinction, but it is one fewer and fewer people will care about over time, because that's exactly the transition that's occurred in - again - every other form of media. The market picks convenience and options now over permanence and stability later.

And that's probably fine. The games that are great, somebody will make sure to preserve, legitimately or not. What an experience is worth to you today is the value proposition being offered, and obviously we can all take it or leave it as we wish, but pretending this is (a) new or (b) doomed are both really silly positions. This is the model more people very clearly prefer, when it reliably works, which these services are all getting to the level of.

(Should you decide to give the demo a try, I recommend spending the short time limit in Performance Mode, not Graphics Mode, as they're very similar aside from ray tracing and some other effects you'll barely notice, and the Performance Mode has a much smoother FPS.)

The opposition to this is bonkers to me. If it's not for you, it's not for you, but this is the only way Control was ever going to see a release on the Switch, and it works remarkably well, which you can verify for yourself for free with a small download if you want to. For folks who want to experience a really good game and don't have another way to do it, there's no downside to this.

Stadia works well. GeForce Now works well. Shadow works well. XCloud and PS Now... work. Sometimes well. Game streaming is no longer theoretical, it has multiple working commercial implementations. You also don't "own" your games on Steam, or your games on the eShop, or the downloaded games on your phone, if the license holders should decide for some reason to pull them. Everything is a license purchase, and has been for years. There are folks who can't take advantage of this because internet sucks in a lot of places, and there are other folks who have the means to play these games better locally. But for the people this works for, it works, and lets them play a good game. That's a good thing.