Flanders

Yeah I know the full-fat patch is next year but I only currently have a base PS4 and a One S and I have no faith that the game is going to run even half decently on those old machines. So Pro version does me nicely.

Demon’s Souls and a non-janked Cyberpunk push this right up there for console launches. I’m quite time poor right now so those will likely last me until the middle of next year when we can hopefully start to see some discounts on these ludicrous game prices.

Has everyone forgotten how crazy the PS2 adverts were? The David Lynch one and all the others in the same vein? Or the Mental Wealth one for the first PlayStation? It’s a proud legacy of marketing that has sweet fuck all to do with the main product but looks cool anyway. Rooftop parties, pfffft.

I got a puppy this week so have been in need of an easy watch to zone out and binge when he sleeps, so am now almost at the end of the first series of this on iPlayer. Its been an enjoyable watch but I have found it interesting that the flaws that eventually ended up really harming the show in later series were 100pc there from the very start, with very loose plotting the main outstanding factor. The main problem is with the human Cylons, which are never really defined in a coherent way from season to season or even episode to episode. This is compounded by a high level Lost-style lack of curiosity among all the characters that only exists to preserve mysteries - by this point there’s been multiple lengthy interactions with human Cylons and nobody has bothered asking them basic questions like ‘hey, how did you become organic and eerrrr why did you murder us all?’ Compare it to something like the Expanse, where characters always ask what the fuck is going on and why - it makes them much more relatable in my view. Of course, the Expanse is arguably a much more plot driven show than BSG, One other BSG observation - cast is way too big and a lot of heavy lifting is done by a few key players - Olmos is even better than I remembered, and Tigh, Starbuck, Boomer and Chief are all great. Tricia Helfer’s vamping hasn’t aged well - I could do with fewer Gaius-Head Six scenes and their inevitable conclusion of someone looking confused at Gaius acting like a weirdo to thin air. Luckily there has only been one religion-heavy episode so far (Leoben interrogation) but Christ it was guff, fucking guff - inexplicable that the writers chose to double down on that shit later on.

Watched two of these last night, absolutely loved it. ‘The Ties that Bind’ bit in the medical drama show was extraordinary.

Popped this on last night on a whim as I saw it on iPlayer. The mini-series is such a curiosity - it’s 100pc necessary to establish the plot and characters but its very janky in lots of ways and quite removed from what the show will actually turn out to be like. It’s quite sprawling and flabby, chock full of exposition and the budget is a real problem because it can’t depict the scale of what’s happening with the Cylon attack on the colonies. Something else that feels very dated is that the mini-series seems so pleased with how modern it thinks it is, which I think was not unusual with a lot of shows from the early to mid 00s. I feel like the writers are shouting ‘look we have loads of scenes where people FUCK nobody ever FUCKED in sci-before yeeeeeaaaahh!’ Very much looking forward to 33 though because it’s one of the best proper opening episodes of anything ever.

I know Covid is partially a factor, but haven’t consumer electronics marketing cycles massively shortened anyway in the seven years since the PS4 and XBONE came out? The Switch was around two months from price reveal to launch. Apple product hype cycles are even shorter than that. Attention spans are shorter now so companies have adjusted in kind.

Rather than an incentive I look it at as more of a trade off. £50 difference isn’t enough to make me consider not being able to buy and sell second hand any more, the digital edition has to have a serious price advantage to make it worthwhile. Sony get to be the only store for the digital system, that’s worth way more than £50 in the long term.

A bit naughty but then again Control was the first game that seemed like it suffered at launch from gamers giving it a miss ‘because it will be free on Game Pass in three months’, which I can’t imagine engendered much desire from the publisher to be consumer friendly when it came to the next-gen version.

Did you miss the staggeringly enormous profits all three console platforms just published for their Covid quarters? Animal Crossing sold 22 million copies in less than six months! At full price! These expensive toys will have massively reduced competition. Cinemas and live entertainment will still be more or less out. Ditto live sport. New TV will likely be starting to get more sparse as networks and streaming services finish up getting through their material that was mostly filmed pre-pandemic. Spending on trips abroad will be down. In the bleak Covid winter, the new consoles are going to be close to the only game in town for leisure spending, which more than offsets the recession. The PS5 is going to sell out as many units Sony can produce this winter. I would have said the Series X was a cert to do the same prior to this Halo news, but it still has a pretty good chance.

I wonder if the plan is still to keep it playable on the Xbox One - if so, there’s only so much they can do for it looks wise you’d think. Which means there must have been much more serious problems to necessitate this delay - I think the consensus was that although the graphics weren’t great and not the best showcase for a super powerful console, they were still acceptable for a cross-gen open world game with a high frame rate.

This game better have a Knights of the Old Republic-style ‘murder my obnoxious allies’ option because I definitely want to off that ‘gettin’ your CHERRY POPPED’ guy.

Every time I see the words ‘A-Day’ written down it vexes me and I don’t even know why, it just sounds so fucking stupid. Omg man remember A-Day.

Building a combined zip line and road network that allowed me to go anywhere on the map within 5 minutes is one of my most satisfying gaming achievements, ever. Also, I would be fascinated to know the budget on this because although it’s obviously very polished, it feels like a lot has been done with a little. There’s no real advanced AI in there, lots of reused assets and although there’s a lot of motion capture, the cast is really small. Plus of course the game was more or less put together in less than four years, which is short for a big title these days. It’s really an indie game in AAA clothing.

They can double down on the survival horror theme with a 20 minute Bugsnax demo.

I feel like there was not enough excitement about the reveal that you fight savage barbarians riding robo-mammoths in the sequel.

Zelda is also severely lacking in tear blast arrows, which are one of the most satisfying game noises. Nyyyyeeeeeerrrrrooooww

I’m fascinated to see how Guerrilla have approached the upcoming sequel on the PS5. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do expand more on the exploration side of things and make traversal less rigid - if only because they ended up working quite closely with KojiPro on Death Stranding, which uses the Decima engine for BOTW-style freeform world design to great effect. Also, the Frozen Wilds DLC for Horizon showed a pretty clear understanding of what did and didn’t work about the main game. It virtually did away with the uninspiring human combat altogether and doubled down on fighting the machines.

I’ve started playing this and while I can see it clearly does stick to a lot of the traditional open world tropes, I do think reviews kind of undersold how the Guiding Wind mechanic shakes up the formula. It basically means I’m always fully engaged with the world instead of being distracted by a mini-map or intrusive hud elements. That makes the world feel more immersive and worth exploring rather than just a vehicle to tick boxes.

For me Horizon was this generation’s spiritual successor to Mass Effect in the sense that it’s a pulp sci-fi story done right - I think the two games are similar in that they have plots full of cliches but give those cliches just enough of a twist to draw in the player. Like, in Horizon:

Although arguably it’s not western civilisation that is the main market for game streaming anyway.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Demon’s Souls was a January - February title even if it was ready to go for launch. Sony will probably view Spiderman plus Cyberpunk and all the other third party staples as more than enough to drive holiday sales. Then Demon’s Souls will be their first big 2021 title and have more room to breathe without being crowded out by the usual crazy rush. My takeaway from that PS5 showcase was that it was very much a target list of first year games rather than launch window.

I think Sony in many ways have benefitted this gen from the fact that most of their PS3 era IP was quite weak relative to the Microsoft big three. It made it a much easier decision to jettison the likes of Killzone and Infamous and allow their first parties to work on more interesting projects. By contrast Halo and Gears almost feel like millstones around Microsoft’s neck. I can understand them sticking with them because they really were best in class first party franchises in the 360 era - I’d argue Gears 1-3 is a stronger trilogy than the PS3 Uncharteds - but they have been drained dry at this point. There’s been six Gears games and Infinite is going to be the eighth (!) Halo. And yet the latest versions still look and play very similar to the originals - compare this to other long-running series like Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil, which have enormous variety and evolution from title to title. I also think the general design of Halo and Gears is dated at this point and neither series has particularly strong narrative or world building. Gears 5 really is a technical marvel - one of the best looking games out there and very smooth running - so the Coalition is clearly a very talented team, you just wonder what they could create if they weren’t shackled to a combat system that has limited scope for evolution and a Rob Liefeld aesthetic that past its sell by date long ago.

I find the cost argument a bit disingenuous as it’s framed as cheapo Game Pass vs all games being 60 quid on the PlayStation, as if there wasn’t a virtually permanent sale going on the PS storefront, let alone the continuing existence of a second hand physical market or the games you get with PS Plus, which have included plenty of big hitters at this point. Also, PS Now does exist - doesn’t have first party day one but Bloodborne’s on there and the third party selection on there has started to reach parity with Game Pass, more or less through the cunning strategy of snapping up loads of games that are also currently on or used to be on Game Pass. Bethesda seems to shuttle its games between both services, for example. I can see myself swapping between the two services with short term subs depending on what’s on each one at any given time.

Sad to say it but even the ‘open-World’ aspect of that video looked more like Gears 5 than anything revolutionary for the Halo series. I continue to be baffled by how Microsoft advertises its biggest series. That trailer basically just had the most bog standard of skirmishes - you could take a five minute slice from so many levels from CE to Reach that would look more exciting than this.