Ketchup

I’m surprised this topic wasn’t a little more active. Been playing the original c&c via this and it’s pretty great. The new graphics are perfectly matched and the game is mostly as fun to play as ever. Amazing for a game that came out in what, 95? That always sounds odd to me as it feels like a much later game. Ive never played the original before only red alert and tried some mod the sequels. It’s very clearly a prototype for red alert, the cutscenes are there but are fairly basic in terms of plot and acting before they go into over drive with red alert. The game play itself is fairly simplistic over the course of the 13 or so missions on each side but that doesn’t mean it’s not great. Just red alert did everything better. One downside I do have though is the cheating AI and a couple of dodgy missions. One has some turrets across some water you can get to and only gives you a handful of guys that side to take them out. If they all die which they probably will then you can’t destroy the turrets yo complete the mission unless you cheese an air strike to slowly bring down the health of the turret so it doesn’t auto repair. The AI also seems to have unlimited funds, can build quicker and can build where ever it likes. This means the difficult on normal is all over the place. Some missions are fine whilst others are almost impossible as the game sends wave after wave of men at you before you’ve even had a chance to setup your base. Casual I found way too easy. I’ve done GDI and now I’m starting on NOD, keen to see where it goes and then move on to the extra missions and of course red alert. It’s cheap now too so go buy it as it really deserves all the sales. Two great timeless games and a 10/10 remaster.

Special reserve in Upminster was an odd place. It had that new office type smell, was a large shop that whilst filled almost felt like the hilights of each console. You then had the prices which were too high without the card but maybe only slightly cheaper than elsewhere with it. The collection of games and consoles was odd with it almost feeling like a pc focused store that happened to sell a lot of console games. I quite liked it but it always felt a bit bland as a store compared to GAME or the local indies. Upminster is also an odd place for it because it’s a bit of a posh high street but far away from Romford or most other retail areas.

It was already shown as a patent so that’s why the fake looks so close.

Tbh I don’t know the full details of how they came to that conclusion but I highly doubt that was the case. In my experience especially with producers or publishers it’s generally someone not directly part of the team wanting to put their mark on a product and either coming up with a stupid idea that doesn’t fit or seeing something or liking an idea and asking for it to be included with little thought put into it except to be able to go back to their higher ups and feedback how they improved the game with their added new feature. Theres even evidence of this with rockstar or even peter molyneux where someone high up has an idea they think will be great (cars running out of petrol in gta, trees growing in real time in fable) and whilst it may sound great ultimately as ideas they are terrible with even a few minutes thought.

They probably actually did think they could do it, it's just the goal posts moved. When this has a what, 2018 release date? Even a 2019 release date they'd have focused on those consoles. But as it slipped further and further they then had to take their limited resources (employees) and stretch them to Stadia, Xbox Series and PS5. Maybe even the new PC graphics cards too. Those consoles made sense at the time and clearly they were only still released now because they'd probably pumped in years of time and money into them. To go from 150 million console users to what, 2 million of the new consoles is not a smart move. Look at GTA 5, that released weeks before the new consoles but they didn't say anything about those consoles getting GTA 5 for like a year. Maybe CDPR should have just focused on the base consoles and totally ignored Xboxs Series and PS5. Despite both being in BC mode, they still have done some work to those versions to make sure they work better and will continue to do so.

From my experience within the games industry its because as soon as a project is greenlit its all hands on deck to get it made. It's so backwards, so much time is wasted on these huge scopes and things being made before being ripped out. Whole levels or systems that are nearly finished just removed. Thats years wasted that could be spent making the core game great. Games should be made with a tight modular focus. Got a racing game for example. Just make 1 track and 1 car and make it perfect. Then just add on extra tracks and cars as time permits. Currently in this scenerio you go in making 1000 cars and 100 tracks and start work on all of them at once and before long you have to cut it down to 100 cars and 10 tracks with all this work on the cutting room floor. It's the same with gameplay mechanics, i remember one game i work on having...lets say 'swings' to avoid me giving away what game it was. Someone up to decided there needed to be a swing mechanic in the game, now off you go and put it in. Even just the basic idea didn't make much sense and didn't sound fun and whilst most the dev team were against it just from the sound of it they had to put it in. Now if they could have just prototyped it for a week they could have either gone back and shown how its no fun or found a way to make it fun. Instead if got put in the game as is and isn't fun and had no love or attention put into it. It basically just ticked a box somewhere. And thats the main thing with game development, most games that are great, are great because the devs either had a prototype or had a small idea someone worked on in their spare time that showed something fun happening. Think of the original GTA, that was just the devs messing around at the start and landing on fun gameplay. They didn't set out to make GTA as it was and if they had it'd probably have been dull, the fun came from what they put in because it was fun to them. You certainly see this with japanese games vs the west. Take Shenmue 3, when it first was shown the graphics were terrible, or take Mario 3D World and the graphics were pretty average. Thats because those devs put in what was needed to get up and running and then later on added on top to make everything look much nicer. Mario 3D world in particular looks great as a finished game. Where as western devs tend to go the other way, putting their best stuff in first, which takes time and then having to rip out stuff because they ran out of time. Basically a lot of this boils down to poor product planning, mismanagement and most devs just having to react to making stuff on the fly rather than a concrete plan of action. The movie analogy is perfect for this, games should follow this with storyboards and showing how ideas work so when you go and make the product you are making only the best content, not the cut content. Films like Toy Story don't really have cut content because all that stuff was cut at the storyboard stage.

This is a tough question because whilst you could say snes to n64 was a huge leap you're then missing out on things like the Neo Geo, 3DO, PlayStation etc which were all increments between the snes and n64. As much as I love the Dreamcast which is a lot, theres often times where you can imagine an N64 game with a higher resolution and a few extra polygons looking very similar. Same with the Ps2 and ps1. Ridge Racer Type 4 at a higher resolution looks similar to Ridge Racer 5. Its got to be something like pong or an early Atari system to the Nes really because you went from black and white paddles and a ball to actual characters and worlds. I guess the most impressed In difference for me though was the Dreamcast. PlayStation games were nice but seeing sonic adventure for the first time blew my mind. The clarity, sharpness and detail was incredible so maybe ultimately I’d go with ps1 to Dreamcast. Although as I type this going from say Donkey Kong Country on the snes to ridge racer or is probably the much bigger leap? Maybe arcades are a better thing to look at? Going from sega model 2 to model 3 was a pretty big leap.

Set up my new sync box and rgb strip and it is great. Playing left 4 dead 2 and the light from your torch goes around the room. Go into a dark area and shoot and the whole room in real life lights up just like the game. When you get hit from behind by a zombie the light behind me goes red too. In cyber punk as you go under each street light the light in the room brightens and really makes you feel like you’re in a travelling car. Of course there’s lots of areas in this game that work great and especially certain scenes where when the game cuts to black so do the lights. Really impressed by this and for games it works fairly well, movies it depends. Too many quick cuts with light changes can be distracting but for the most part a lot of films especially Pixar films work great. It’s expensive, even at half the price it’s still a massive luxury (gimmick?) but I love it. Sadly the subscription to the sync my lights devs has now been cancelled, was a fun app whilst it lasted but now is no longer needed. Btw one sole Xbox game actually supports lights directly, Chariot and when you do certain actions certain lights will do things. Shame more games haven’t implemented this as the lights become a part of the game rather than just expanding the visuals outside the screen.

The DS though launched at £99 and I’m sure dropped further where as the 3ds launched at £230, went to £150 and never dropped below that.

If you don’t have down payments then you end up ordering based on pre orders which then get cancelled and you’re left with a load of stock you’ve paid out for and now have to sell. Seems easy with ps5 scarcity right now but there will be a point where you don’t want 1000 of these in a warehouse somewhere. Really Sony should either be like Apple with a single point of preorder/purchase or make it so you need to get a 2fa code or something to reduce the bots and scalpers.

Mine doesn’t buzz like that but it does sound like a small fan blowing air through a small hole.

There’s quite a few nice covers that I picked up. There’s one with a soft felt like later that is great, the matching Zelda Majoras mask designs that Nintendo sent both out for because they screwed up their dispatch, the boo ghosts that glow in the dark and are hugely expensive. I really liked them and I’m glad Nintendo released loads before realising people probably didn’t care that much.

If they copy the template of the first game then it’s a fairly generic action movie with some subtle super natural stuff in it. I think it’d be fairly easy to do without changing a thing or watering it down. Maybe a few extra minutes to explain each bad guy more but beyond that the first games story is pretty coherent.

There’s been an Xbox demo of this available for a few months now.

Quidco for the next day or so are offering 18.5% cash back on Philips hue orders so perfect time To get that sync box and gradient strip price down a bit.

Psvr looks amazing on this. I know using it on the pro gave the visuals a slight upgrade but not having used a pro I can’t compared but now it’s really sharp. The screen door effect is reduced a lot and it looks much more like looking at a tv screen that through low resolution goggles.

There was also a second price drop quickly after this and that came with Sega GT and JSRF on a disc. Microsoft had to drop the price quickly but did it too many times too quickly.

I have to wonder why they didn’t make this a cloudy with a chance of meatballs tie in game.

When did you order yours? I ordered at 3am and on Friday it seemed people after me were being told there order had been dispatched. Where as mine moved between order received, order confirmed, and in progress but never dispatched until Saturday night when it did update and I was sent a dpd email too. Those that said dispatch before mine in fact haven’t had their shipped yet because they ordered later. So I wouldn’t believe what the order page says as it just seems random and doesn’t follow any logic anyways as it bounces around between statuses. Either way currys are a mess and a simple tweet would save them tonnes of man hours in everyone asking with their ps5 order is.

This is a tough one as VR only adds so much to the experience. There is moments and things you can only do in VR. At the same time VR is really limited to crash bandicoot style gameplay and that detracts from what makes this work so well. Whilst the levels are fairly corridor like you actually don't notice this unless you really think about it they do benefit from feeling more open. I don't even think having VR only levels would be enough for me, i need two full seperate games please!

Perfect, so that and a sync box would basically recreate an ambilight system!

I love the idea of this but it’s just a shame it’s locked to Philips tvs. I use Philips hue and that works great On films (I use an app called sync my lights but that requires people to manually create their own light shows for a film) but it’ll only (as far as I’m still aware) show one colour, it can’t do gradients and certainly not gradients around matching the screen specifically unless they’ve released something else that can do that?

I love this game. I knew I’d like it after Astrobot vr but ugh, this is so great. Is this the first time someone other than Nintendo has pulled off making a Nintendo feeling game? I think it’s all the little touches, the animations of the bots, the secret areas just off screen, the nostalgia nods. Without those it’s a fairly competent platformer but those make it whole. Every section having a unique gimmick probably also adds to this. Ive loved almost every 3D mario game, with odyssey being...a disappointment? I’m not sure how to explain it, I completed it with all stars and it’s certainly not a bad game but it didn’t feel like a Mario game. I really can’t explain it but it’s not a game I care to ever visit again compared to 64, sunshine, galaxy and worlds etc. But Astrobot feels as good as those games and certainly much better than odyssey. The music whilst not as memorable as mario titles is still great, so happy and jolly with a catchy theme. I’d love to see them expand this in a future title. Ive already completed 3 of the 4 levels and it’s just been a constant delight every single second and I’ll be upset when it ends. I could easily play another 15 hours of this. Let’s hope an Astrobot 2 or vr 2 comes about and soon! This could be a game of the year contender for sure!

The ps5 controller is great. Now it’s probably a little over sold, the rumble and haptics are great but I think it’s like comparing playing a game before the N64 rumble pack and then playing Star Fox 64 with the rumble pack. It’s a new and positive experience and in Astrobot is absolutely perfect. But it’s a little more subtle than you may think. The triggers work great but seem to work best with more deliberate use than pushing them in as if they are a button. But yeah really great. The set up process for the ps5 was great too from asking if you want to install a game whilst setting up to already downloading the updates whilst also doing setup. The ps4 transfer was easy enough (and fairly quick for just a few games). In fact all the PlayStation menus are nice and simple and much more friendlier than even the PS4. Pretty happy at the mo but like the series x a lack of new games in the coming weeks will be the only downer.

It does a great job of making you feel like you’re really exploring. There’s a bit of caves which is actually quite linear but your first time through them really does feel like an underground labyrinth that you could get lost in. I think it needs another play through in a year or twos time as I’ll probably have forgotten a lot of it by then.