@BlublacMH I meant more distinguishable as a gameplay experience, not distinguishable because a portion of the gaming community loses its mind any time they see a black person in a game.

Ultimately it didn't review all that well, and failed to set itself apart in the genre most oversaturated with up-and-coming indie developers.

Not quite the Keijo game I still want to be made.

@PharoneTheGnome I think it depends on your priorities. The price seems nuts for a console, yes, but you'd be paying a lot more for comparable power on PC if you were just building one. Just an equivalent GPU would cost around $500+ on its own.

Then again, that would also make PC cheaper to upgrade, which is the benefit of a modular design.

I'll probably never own a PS5 myself, since Sony is porting their games to PC anyway, but if you're a console person or don't already have a rig set up, there's a ton of stuff to play.

Publishers aren't charities set up for the benefit of artists to realize their dreams. They're always going to look for stuff that will sell, first and foremost.

The best ones will find passionate teams whose work is excellent and also marketable.

The real issue with the trendchasing from big corporations is that games take so long to develop now that they often miss the boat entirely with such releases. Suicide Squad and Concord were great examples of this in 2024.

Anyway, if this developer wants their next game to sell better, they should look at finding a way to distinguish it from about 50,000 other similar games in that genre also being released by other indie devs. The indies that make it big now are ones creative enough to be distinguishable and/or create new genres.

Nice numbers for Silent Hill 2. Would be curious to see if Bloober is able to make an original entry that's decent now that they've had experience with remaking one of the classic entries.

Would've liked to have seen them remake the entire trilogy, but that would just seem weird after starting with SH2.

Wish Metaphor was higher, but honestly, it's selling so well overall it doesn't really matter in this instance.

PS5 is swimming in good games atm.

Aww, that's a shame. I really liked the look of this one.

@Milk_ tfw you discover your experience with the law offices of Wright and co. means nothing in real world courts.

@RetroGames Representing oneself in court is almost always a bad idea, lol. Let alone against an entity like Nintendo that likely has some of the best lawyers in the world on tap.

Hope it sells well. The more incentivized Sony is to put its games on other platforms, the less need there is to actually buy their consoles.

Were the comments mistranslated, or were they "localized?"

So did almost everyone else. The PS1 was a hot little number in the mid-to-late 90s. Quite the homewrecker.

@Yoshi3 Err, blaming fans for what, exactly?

And wait... Rian Johnson, the director? What's he got to do with any of this?

I think we're rapidly approaching the point where we won't be seeing Miyamoto's name appear in almost any game credit sequences.

The man is old, and has left behind an incredible legacy. Everyone sails off into the sunset at some point.

@Yoshi3 You realize Aonuma has helped direct or produce every 3D Zelda game, right? Including most of the ones you probably like?

About time. Was amazed it didn't launch on Switch alongside PC, considering how big the platform is for indies.

Heard it's excellent.

As usual, the best strategy with new releases is to just wait for the major patches to release.

LOL Xbox can't even come closer to 1000 units between two models per week now.

PS5 sales also collapsed, unsurprisingly, after the price hikes. I guess Sony figures they'll do better in Japan by milking their small established market than trying to expand it.

Good. Glad Layton's Mystery Journey seems to be a thing of the past now.

I've really missed this series. Azran Legacy was such a long time ago now.

@Anti-Matter Don't worry, Nintendo can't remove the muscular Mario pictures from your hard drive.

Day one. Happy to see this getting a sequel!

@the_beaver It's fantastic as a Gal*Gun spinoff and above average for a Castlevania-like (especially in coop). Go for it.

I love these games. I still have my complete PS1 copies. I still even wear Lucia's pendant sometimes.

These have been so neglected over the years.

FINALLY

Good.

There absolutely should be a happy medium in Zelda between freeform puzzle solving and some structure. I was fine with the Divine Beasts in BotW, since that whole game was meant to shake up the series and the 'dungeons' themselves were thematically and conceptually unique, but the Temples in TotK were just... disappointing. Why make them like Divine Beasts? The whole point of the Divine Beasts is that they were enormous machines. If you're gonna have dungeons, make them puzzle-filled gauntlets like previous Zelda dungeons.

@Yoshi3 TotK was an interesting experience, but yeah, I'm ready for future open world Zeldas to actually have meaty dungeons and setpieces to structure them a bit. Something like Elden Ring is honestly closer to where I wish that game had gone, but with actual puzzles.

@johnedwin Really hope so. It'll make Sony a lot looser in terms of console exclusivity for their smaller games, since they don't really seem to regard Nintendo as a threat to their market position.

One of my favorite NDS game covers. VERY striking composition. The Japanese cover just looks really weird in comparison.

Still a top three Contra game, by the way. Simply fantastic.

@TotalHenshin "The only thing I don’t like about the NA cover is the strange streams of light forming an X over Bill Rizer’s crotch. If someone could explain that, I’d be grateful."

Bill Rizer is clearly too much man to escape censorship on the cover.

@Ryan_Again

"The NA cover is over-the-top in a good way. Those look like tough dudes that bang chicks. The JP cover looks like sensitive Emo-boys."

I dunno, man. The North American box has them showing off their chests, and Lance is gripping that rather phallic rocket launcher pretty confidently. Definitely screams masculine, but I'm not so sure about how heterosexual it all is.

You play third-party games on Switch because you like the hybrid freedom and/or have no other options. If 60fps is important to you, you're probably not playing multiplats on a current gen platform that's significantly weaker than the competition's last gen platforms.

Sony has largely written the region off, I think. They probably had their analysts calculate how much they could jack up prices to maximize revenue. Otherwise, their sights are firmly set on wooing and cozying up to China.

@Anti-Matter No worries. PS5 may or may not outsell the PS4, but it has already outsold the Wii U many times over.

I've almost pulled the trigger on the Steam version of this a few times.

Absolutely criminal how many utterly wonderful looking Western indies I've been leaving neglected in my wishlist.

@Ulysses I can only imagine how stressful it is trying to consider every factor when launching a new console. Especially when your old one is as successful as Switch is. And, frankly, especially when you no longer have an alternative device to fall back on.

The good thing about the inevitable transition period is that the new software should hopefully all run on the new device, unlike that last batch of 3DS games that launched after the Switch dropped.

@Ulysses Well, I believe the Lite launched in 2019. That wasn't "later in the console's life" to any meaningful degree. I do think they'll probably launch one device at release, though. Nintendo traditionally releases revisions 2 - 3 after that to maintain momentum with its portable consoles.

Anyway, I don't disagree that they'll obviously want to transition people to new hardware. I just question whether they'll have a budget SKU that'll be cheap enough to hit the demographic they're aiming for, in that regard. Even with inflation, $400 isn't really 'cheap handheld range' for most people.

A lot of it really depends on how they approach the new hardware generation in terms of marketing and software compatibility. This is solidly Furukawa's Nintendo now, so I'm curious to see how it differs from their 'concept era' launches.

Nintendo's long-term play will likely be, as with Switch, to have multiple systems per family.

So $399.99 seems like the reasonable price for a next-gen hybrid Nintendo console. Possibly with a somewhat more expensive premium model as well.

I could see them opting against a Switch 2 Lite and selling the original Switch as their budget/small child SKU instead.

@johnedwin Base PS5 hasn't really come down in price. If anything, prices went up for the digital model and Dualsense controllers. Considering the Pro is likely to be a high-margin, low-volume sorta product, I wouldn't expect any deals on it.

I mean, it's not like Nintendo's own games haven't drawn from other sources as well.

Sony looked to Mario for inspiration and created one of the best platformers of the generation. I don't see the issue.

This is something a lot of young professionals raised on social media need to internalize, especially. Your words are out there forever, and you never know what bridges that your burned in the past will suddenly turn up in your path. Dunking on that annoying coworker or boss isn't going to be worth it when you encounter them down the road and you life is more complicated as a result.

More generally, the better you treat people in life, the more you maximize your odds of beneficial outcomes in all areas. Whether it's someone vouching for you on something unrelated, or someone whose life you improved doing things to help others, which might also go around to benefit you indirectly.

Even from a purely selfish, egoistic perspective, there's every reason to be a nice person most of the time. Sometimes you have to let people have it, of course, but you want to pick those battles carefully.

@Lizuka I liked Book of Shadows. It's not a classic like BC:RF's many versions, but it maintained much of the atmosphere of that game.

Shame how Blood Drive turned out.

@Summer235 It's really all about the use of sound. Excellent voice acting. Fantastic implementation of 3D audio. And the disparity between the gruesome stuff you're reading about and hearing vs what's actually on screen forces your brain to conjure up vastly more horrifying images than even the worst CGs.

It doesn't hurt that it's a super solid example of a traditional ghost story, either.

@anoyonmus I'm very skeptical about this upcoming Corpse Party game (I guess Corpse Party 2: Dead Patient was abandoned?), but always open to being surprised.

Corpse Party should be on this list. Still an incredible game, even if the series as a whole is... less so.

@SalvorHardin I found it weird too that TotK is a direct sequel where the entire world apparently suffers from a severe case of amnesia. Why even make a direct sequel if you're going to do that? Just make a reboot like Super Mario Galaxy 2, in that case.

Although I'd argue TotK is a much stronger (narrative) experience when you treat it like a soft reboot as opposed to a proper story sequel.

Nintendo should never have perpetuated the timeline nonsense to begin with in any official capacity. Throw some references in there for the really obsessed fans to speculate about, sure, but most normal people are going to recognize the majority of entries are unique experiences that are utilizing similar themes and characters in different ways.

I actually just started playing Aria of Sorrow for the first time today, so I'm curious to see what makes people love it so much. It's... alright so far. Definitely better than Circle of the Moon.

Nice to see Order of Ecclesia getting love, but Rondo is too low.

@anoyonmus Looks pretty darn solid!

Every new trailer makes the game look that much better. This could really just blow away almost every other 2D Zelda to date if they do the dungeons right.

Swordfighter form is nice, too. As cool as the echo system is, it's nice to know there's a little bit of traditional Zelda combat in there.

@Tasuki By that logic, people who own a PS5 wouldn't have any reason to complain if the recent collections of Castlevania games on Nintendo portables had skipped that system, right?

@Ulysses LOL

Glad to be of service.

It's so nice finally having these games on modern devices! Definitely some of the shiniest gems in the DS library. Particularly Order of Ecclesia, which is only under Rondo of Blood for me.

@Haruki_NLI Dual Strike and Days of Ruin. There were two DS-era games.

People keep calling this a visual novel, but it sounds more like an old-school adventure game. Which would make sense, because that's what the original FDC games were as well.

@Uncle_Franklin You realize this wasn't released instead of new games in those series, right? It's not like there's a "Star Fox development fund" piggy bank that Nintendo smashed open because they wanted to make this instead.

WHY WASN'T THIS A SEGMENT IN THE ENGLISH DIRECT?!

Not a huge fan of the original, but it is very cool that they'll finally be on consoles internationally in a form. This remake looks so much more dynamic and fun than the rather ancient, clunky original game.

@IceClimbers Oh wow! I guess I was wrong.

Already played this on PS4, but might just grab the Switch port to 'send a message,' so to speak.

Actually looks really good, from the footage. But yeah, like others 5 has made me hesitant to get too enthusiastic. We'll see how this turns out.

@Buizel SEGA loves Nintendo, but RGG Studio... not so much, considering how biased against Nintendo the director is.

@Elbow Maybe not $60, but enough that it'll price out most people who know you can get the game everywhere else for practically nothing on sale.

Calling it: Sega execs have been looking at Switch sales numbers and bugging the developer to port Yakuza for ages now, so they're gonna sent out some full-priced port to die on the market in order to justify continuing to ignore Nintendo next generation when they release hardware that'll likely be able to run all the Yakuza games.

I might buy this just for the Power Stone games. Had a lot of fun with those on Dreamcast.