dumpster

Quoting myself here as a lot can change in a year. This game is outstanding. First, I still prefer tracks. The open world thing makes it too hard to learn the circuits. In traditional racing you know those courses in detail , but in this it's too big. I'd prefer options to make the HUD map bigger , have satnav display to follow and an audio cue for the turn signs. But yes what a game. Over 10 years old and still best in class. The 60fps remaster on a standard PS4 is silky smooth and the gameplay is perfect.... And then, two more things. Number one. The "Road Rules". I missed them entirely and they create a reason to drive around the map. I'd previously been bored driving to the start points but beating these records and getting unlocks is great fun. And second.... How? Just how did I never even try the DLC? It's a revelation. Burnout Bikes is by a mile the best motorbiking game I've ever played. The handling is perfect. Twitch controls, ridiculous speed and the feeling of always being on the verge of a crash if you don't concentrate and practice. The game shows its age a bit (I dislike bring told you can't start a race because it's the wrong time of day, because you can go into a slow system of menus and change it, where the game should just offer to do it for you right there) and some parts of the map are a bit too busy (it's easy to ride through an amazing section of road then wonder where the hell it was if you wanted to do that again). But my god, a bit of practice and this has become an all time favourite for me. Further proof (in my mind at least) that the best games on the PS4 can be the remasters of games from previous generations. 12 years ago they pushed the console to its limits and today you play the same great game on a console that handles it with ease.

You can download this on Xbox and play it in the UK. This link takes you to the right page on the US store. You can buy it the name it download to your console, and it goes straight through to your UK console, with no barriers to play at all. http://Pso.law3x.com

I have debated this recently with friends playing Forza on Gamepass, who played Hydro Thunder Hurricane with me for 1 race before saying "is that it?" Because the race ended. But the game is supposed to be three minutes of noisy fast racing, you simply select another track and play as many times as you like. I couldn't get into Forza because as an arcadey racer is just has too much going on. I don't want to drive around to find races. I don't want to take part in a race that has different route choices, because, you know, it's a race! Why would you have different route choices in a race? Meanwhile, when you play the original Ridge Racer, you have 1 main car, and one track. The turning circle of the car, the braking, the drift mechanism, the maximum speed are all tuned to the track and the two go together. When you finally unlock the black car it is exactly the right handling to allow an expert player to complete the race after lots of practice. If you make a game with 50 cars and 50 tracks you can't tune it in that same way. Most Forza style games involve buying new vehicles or upgrades and you win the race because your car goes faster than everyone else, where in Ridge Racer it's your skill and practice being rewarded. Burnout Paradise is a brilliant game (I only discovered the motorbikes recently and it's given the game a new lease of life) but the open world and lack of satnav means that I've never learned any of the courses, and whilst the city is meticulously crafted and impressive in its scale, I've driven through some brilliant short cuts, done stunts, ended up driving high up in a railway bridge, all great gaming moments but I have no idea where any of them are on that massive map and can't find them again. So, whilst BP is an amazing game, the big selling point of the amazing big city and network of events actually detracts from the fun, especially if you are in a 9 minute long race and happen to take a wrong turn at a junction.

For me, "is it still playable today" comes down to the genres that they don't make any more. For arcade reaction gameplay you can change direction faster on a D pad than a thumbstick. Also if you have a gun that fires an unbroken stream of bullets then one rotation on a thumbstick clears the screen where with a d-pad you need to move the line of diagonal bullets into the enemy. So I'm going with Contra, Gunstar Heroes etc. The run and gun gameplay of a 2D side scroller doesn't translate into 3D. It becomes a different game entirely and this means the SNES era (and the very early PS1 Rapid Reload) remain the highlights of that genre. I played Burnout Paradise yesterday and really enjoyed it. I still prefer Burnout 2, but what hit me was the remaster of Paradise has all the DLC and runs at a full 60fps. There's loads of content, it looks great, sounds great and plays great. So when I look at that Unreal Engine 5 demo, I can't get my head around why it's not 60fps. Sure , they are modelling each individual grain of sand and the lighting looks realiatic, but racing games benefit so much from 60fps, so again, arcade racers peaked in the previous generations. If I buy a PS5, it better have backward compatibility, because retro is starting to be about more than nostalgia, it's about playing the best examples of genres that no longer exist.

When I was at Game, we cleared out Saturn stuff and started getting deliveries of 4 specific Saturn titles which we sold for £2.99. Burning Rangers and Panzer Dragoon Saga were the two I bought but in hindsight I should have rung the warehouse and got them to send me every copy they had. Then when I got a PC for the first time, I was so excited by the prospects of eBay that I sold Panzer Dragoon for a good profit. I paid 2.99, and sold it for £45. Hindsight again teaches me that I would have got a lot more even then if I owned a digital camera, was able to put photos on the listing, or even had any sort of previous feedback profile, but being new and naive I didn't realise how much my auction looked liked an obvious scam when it was legit. Someone got a bargain. Working in games retail meant we had plentiful supplies of everything, because nothing is rare until it becomes rare. We had shelves full of Castlevanias, Samba de Amigos etc. We could ring the warehouse and get extras if we knew we could sell them. There was also situations like when the NeoGeo Pocket was pulled from the UK and all the stores had to return everything they had. Could have bought it all instead. Or the day we randomly got a delivery of MultiMegas, many years after they were discontinued and they were priced to clear at £50. I even remember my boss at the time kicking a CD32 across the floor so it could be written off as faulty, and my area manager smashing up a 3DO because it was a store asset and she legally had to see it be broken and binned for some reason.

The announcement is an official rebranding of the character Tails. From June 1st he will be known as Miles Prower in all territories.

I was remembering when I had a spectrum 128K toastrack model and upgraded to the +3. Then I upgraded that to the Amiga. The +3 was surely not much more than £140 at Comet, and whilst I was only a teenager it seems silly to have sold the toastrack model to afford it. But when I got rid of the +3 and got an Amiga I said goodbye to the Speccy forever and didn't pay much attention to package I offered. I think I sold it for £300 because it came with so many games. After all, I'd been a spectrum user since 1985 and I had a lot of good stuff. Anyway, I sold that massive bundle for £300 and thought I'd done really well. But so much of that collection is now rare and valuable. I just saw Deus Ex Machina for £100+ on eBay, and I reckon that I probably sold at least a grands worth of stuff by today's prices. I've also traded in so many titles over the years that became valuable later. So what Uber rare valuable collectible did you trade in for a fiver?

Persona 4 Golden. I've never played much RPG stuff apart from Final Fantasy 7, which I never really liked because of the random battles all the time. Persona seems (eventually) to restrict the battles to the world inside the TV, with the story going on outside. I liked the sound of that, felt less random so I bought it. I've restarted it a couple of times but honestly I have no idea what it is. The opening is an intro that just goes on and on. And on. And then when you get into the main loop of the game I have no idea what to do. Do I go to the shopping street? Do I go to the lake? Wander around the school? Or do I just go home and go to bed? It doesn't make any sense to me, yet I'm sure I'd be complaining that it isn't interactive enough if it told you where to go. I cannot see what the appeal is. Is it even a game? The guy with the long nose in the intro makes no sense to me, and I think he is there to help beginners by explaining what's going on!

Imagine this in your VR headset... The PS4 movie encoder couldn't keep up

When the whole web gets a white sparking enemy on every line and you smart bomb it....

Cheers! I think it's a combination of moving the stick in the right direction whilst moving the controller in the opposite way. I think I have another question, about the restart options. As I remember from TxK, if you complete a level with, say, 6 lives remaining, you'll be able to start from that level with 6 lives. So it's useful to go back as you get better at the game because if you can build up, getting back to where you were before but with more lives available. Now, I might be missing something but Tempest 4000 seems the same, but i have massively varying restart points. I can restart level 61 with 8 lives remaining, level 62 with one life remaining , or level 63 with 7 lives remaining. Now I'm pretty sure that I did badly on level 61 before, but I went back to it and did better. But I certainly never started level 62 with one life and somehow earned 6 extra lives before hitting the next level. It's very strange and I'm not sure how it works.

Never had an issue with Ultrawings, but I found that it doesn't take long before the game becomes uncontrollably hard. There's a level where you start in the air, heading downwards and you have to fly through about 10 rings. I think I managed one, once. I find it more manageable without move controllers but even so it still seems that the difficulty is out of place. The whole game feels like a bright, colourful fun , chilled out take on flight, and the first few levels are great. Then you hit a brick wall and there's no way to head in a different direction to play elsewhere.

Sorry I misread the prev posts. Yes the menus are awful, but if I remember rightly you have to do stuff in game too, like selecting items to pick up and drop. The gameplay is fine, but selecting things from lists got really confusing.

I agree with @df0.. as someone who had never played Skyrim previously the PSVR controls are a fucking nightmare with move controllers. It felt weird to because there was obviously many easier ways they could have done the menus, but as @df0 said, the menus are a complete nightmare and the game itself is really unintuitive . I played with a pad instead and enjoyed it. In response to weird feelings, yes I still get that. I never feel ill, it only took a couple of sessions to get my sea legs, but I get a total disconnect from the room sometimes. Like, you take the headset off and you're not facing the direction you thought. The weirdest one is when I'm playing with the TV still on and the sound coming from it. I have a big screen TV and the main room is great for movies. But when I take the headset off the room feels big and the TV seems small. It makes me think that I sit too far away from the TV , especially if I play a 2D game in cinema mode. In Resi3 I noticed loads of detail I hadn't seen on the TV, like how the fire spreads and the big head is visible from the stairs before the first boss fight. I'm fine playing games on the TV but after a VR session it feels like trying to play on a portable from 3 meters away. And since the move controller question comes up on every page, yes they are good but it depends on the game. They are useless for Astrobot and Wipeout but essential for Superhot. But if you prefer games that don't have you standing up or dancing about (like suoerhot, beat sabre, batman etc) you probably won't find them as essential.

I don't remember playing bad arcade machines. MAME show us that they did exist and there were plenty of them but the ones I saw in arcades at the time we're pretty much all great. I even used to love an old arcade called Shebang on Morecambe promenade which had loads of old Victorian era games. A road painted on a rolling cylinder with a toy car on a stick on top of it, that sort of thing.