apewins

I'll welcome this with open arms, hope they will run at 4K and look good on it (maybe the PS5 Pro's AI upscaling can do some work there), but I wouldn't get my hopes up on the library. Most of the good games on that platform come from 3rd parties, who may not reach an agreement on price with Sony, and regardless they may do the math that they can earn more by releasing their own ports, remakes and collections. That's the thing that has plagued basically all previous attempts to bring retro games back on sale.

Big thumbs up for Ape Escape from my side too.

Thanks for the write-up. I've only played the first game, so I didn't read most of your post (curse you for spoiling the Tom reveal in Shenmue 3 at the beginning of your post). If you want to hear about a series newcomer, I am him, because I played it, I think in the year 2021. Since then I've played it three times, and watched the Giant Bomb Endurance Run a couple of times, which I believe is the single best feature on this site. Despite vividly remembering the hype around this game when it first came out, I didn't actually know much of anything about this game. When I picked it up, I didn't think I'd even finish it. I had no idea what to expect, but I most certainly wasn't expecting... pretty much all of it.

I wouldn't say that it's so bad it's good. I can certainly see why some people think that it's bad. But there's nothing else like it out there in gaming that takes such big swings and misses so majestically. It is absolutely bizarre to think that hundreds of people worked on this game for many years and it didn't occur to them what very bad decisions they were making. And I just absolutely love it. We were in lockdown when I played it, and just the act of taking it one or a few in-game days at a time after my actual work, without being in any hurry to get to the end, is one magical gaming memory of mine. So much I am scared to go to the sequels, which I also have.

Unfortunately, especially my second playthrough unmasked a lot of problems with the game. It suggests that there are alternative paths, but there aren't. At one point you are asked to join a gang, but it makes no difference how you respond. The Hong Kong ticket sequence feels like it's missing a conclusion, why not go back to the agency and make them give you a new ticket? Same with Charlie, we know where he lives so why not go back to him with more questions? It's infuriating how Ryo can only follow one lead at a time which naturally leads to a lot of downtime, and the arcade cabinets are not that exciting.

And then there's the case of the final act. I remember how it was a big deal in the hype that you could get a job in this game. Turns out that it's not a thing that you can do, but that it's a story thing that you have to do to complete the game (I guess games media were pretty gullible back then). Money has no meaning in this game, as I believe that it's literally impossible to run out of money in this game even if you try. But I don't mind the forklifting, but otherwise this whole act is just Ryo looking for clues in the harbor, which don't exist. The game wants you to ask around, but that doesn't lead to anything. The story only progresses when the game decides to do so. And it is so bizarre that there is literally a door that says "Mad Angels" on it, those guys that Ryo is looking for, and he doesn't appear to have anything to say or do about it up until the game lets you interact with it. And it does that at the expense of mostly removing Dobuita, arguably the most interesting "character", from the game. They're obviously doing it for disc size limitations, but I can't help but to feel that it's some sort of commentary about growing up.

Sorry that this post turned out so negative. As I said, I love this game, but it seems that I can't come up with many things that I love about it. Shenmue is absolutely one of those games that makes me say that they don't make them like they used to. I can't wait to play the sequels, except that I could play them right now if I wanted to so I guess that statement is incorrect, but the time doesn't feel right. I'm still saving it for a special moment.

@bigsocrates: It's the trinity of resolution - frame rate - fidelity. What I am saying is that with the power of the PS5 and Series X, there was never a chance of any game satisfying all three conditions to a level that I, and I would argue that most of the market, would find acceptable. You have to sacrifice one. If it were one game, you could blame poor optimization, but it's every game, and that means that the problem exist on a hardware level. And what I'm saying is that we were not far from a level where it could have been otherwise if they would have just waited a little bit longer.

I realize that delaying the consoles likely was not an option for market purposes. But that doesn't protect them from criticism. For me, the whole reason for these consoles to exist, was 4K gaming. So it's a case of "you had one job and you didn't do it" which is why I am so disappointed in this generation. Okay, I'll admit that the SSD is a good upgrade but they could have already done that on the previous generation (and in fact you could have modded an SSD into a PS4 fairly easily).

@bigsocrates: Yes and no. There is a certain minimum requirement that games need to meet from a fidelity perspective. You can't put out a game that looks like a PS2 game in this day and age regardless of how well it runs and charge full price for it. Every game that I've seen on this generation, if it's 4K60 then it almost certainly has major shortcomings in the graphical side. Certainly there are always developers who will push what it possible at the expense of frame rate and resolution, but that's their choice. But this generation, it seems that it's literally every game that has to make those tough compromises.

Also I think you may be overestimating how much a good gaming rig costs. Certainly more than a console but you don't need to have anywhere near the best of the best. As I said, 4K60 and above is old hat on PC by now. It's not impressive any more, for many gamers that is the minimum requirement. A 4080 GPU can run Far Cry 6 at 150 frames per second at 4K. At Ultra settings. So, with a few modest compromises, 4K60 is very achievable by even medium range systems. And that's before we get into artificial frame generation and upscaling.

I'm calling this the worst generation ever and it's not even close. Both consoles launched underpowered to their stated purpose of 4K gaming, where you already at launch had games that ask you if you want high resolutions or high fame rates, you can't have both, which is absolutely not what you want to see your new fancy $500 box ask you of. I think that even if they had just waited one more year the tech may have been there to work much better, because on the PC we have had 4K gaming at high frame rates for a while in a way that it's not even impressive any more. The launch shortages themselves I don't really care about, consoles always have a rough launch so in a way they may have done us a favor by not stocking them.

The software lineup is just really weak on both consoles. It's especially frustrating on the Xbox where they have had 10 years to turns things around and in some ways it feels that they are more lost than ever. Microsoft tells everybody to buy Game Pass and rent their games, then they tell us that they had to shut down everyone's favorite developer because nobody bought their game.

The development times and budgets are out of line in a way that every gamer feels it. The PS3 era was not that long ago, and they had 3 Uncharted games and The Last of Us on it. We're now halfway through this generation and Naughty Dog hasn't even announced a game for it (port and remakes don't count for me). It's really sad to think that we live in a era where a developer puts out one game per generation, maybe two if were lucky (the second likely being a cross-gen title so you'd rather play in on the next gen console). And it's not like these games are worth the wait. They spend 7 years making a game that in the end is just like every other game on the market.

The positives this generation are backwards compatibility (especially on Xbox) and Quick Resume which is really one killer app that the PC doesn't have. Which is weird because you'd think it wouldn't be so hard for Steam to get a snapshot of the RAM onto a hard drive that it could then load whenever. But I really like that I can get into a game quick without having to see 5 logos and legal disclaimers before I'm even in the main menu.

For me personally it's retro games (I count the Xbox 360 on Backwards Compatibility in that pile) and indies that are arguable better than ever that keeping my interest in gaming alive when the big guys are repeatedly failing at even basic things. And of course Nintendo is somehow still trucking along fine, but I have a feeling that the Switch 2 might run into the same issues that everybody else is having, it's just that for better and for worse, Nintendo always feels like it's one generation behind.

As much as I hate it when people say "nobody asked for this" I feel like this is one of those sequels that nobody asked for. I liked the first game fine but it already got stale towards the end, so more of the same isn't much of a selling point for me. Also, I have no idea about what the story is this time around, but Senua's character already had a satisfying ending in the first one so this feels like an Ellen Ripley situation where audiences demand that she goes through the same hell over and over again. Senua is never going to be the mascot that's going to stand aside Master Chief at the forefront of Xbox.

They've obviously got talented people at Ninja Theory. Or at least they used to have, I don't know if they downsized or how did they go from DmC to making an interactive movie. I really wish that their next game is going to be something else.

Also, whatever Microsoft is saying right now about Ninja Theory's future doesn't mean shit. They're always fully committed to their next project, until one day they suddenly aren't.

I have been thinking about the same thing and I have no answers. My immediate reaction was that these games are Game Pass bait, hoping to get picked up on a subscription service and they get paid that way without any gamers directly paying for them. But then I said the same thing about Stubbs the Zombie Remake and it hasn't appeared on Game Pass. I believe it has been on Humble Bundle because I own it somehow, but I'm not sure how much money they get out of that.

You can probably put the recent Felix the Cat Collection in the same bucket. The term "collection" is a little misleading because it's really just 3 different versions of one game, and you should probably just play the best version and not touch the other ones. I haven't played the game, people seem to like it and based on the trailer it's doing pretty impressive stuff for the NES, but I'm also going to guess that this is a 2-hour game with save states and rewinding, and that we saw all the levels on the trailer. So we're looking at $25 for a NES game, I remember when Nintendo sold NES games on the Virtual Console for $5, and inflation is certainly a thing but it's not that prices have increased five-fold in 15 years, so it seems that there are just people out there that will pay basically any price for an old game.

Nice write-up as always. I played through this a few years ago on Switch, mostly because I wanted to play Super Metroid but this needed to be played before it, even though the story is mostly non-existent, save for the one little detail that gets carried into Super Metroid. I'm not ashamed to say that I started using a guide and save states pretty early in my playthrough, because as I said it was basically homework for Super Metroid.

I think it's a bad game on a bad system. That makes it difficult to rate because it's obviously the best the Game Boy could do, but I don't think I would have had fun with it even as a kid. It's easy to get lost because all the areas look the same, and the camera is too close to Samus to allow for much maneuvering. The combat is easy by design, especially as you can stunlock the Metroids and kill them in a matter of seconds. A lot of the design is probably such that it's intended for small kids to play who aren't very good at games, and as a seasoned gamer you can make short work of it if you just have the patience to look for the hidden entrances. But the game does have some ideas that get carried into the future entries. I don't hate it but it's clearly the worst mainline Metroid game.

I have to admit I find it a little upsetting that you're basically sitting on the entire Metroid franchise (assuming you have Switch Online) and you're just not playing them apparently until they come up on your wheel, which I suppose could take years. Metroid Prime is a phenomenal game that still plays very well, and the Prime series is basically a side story so you could just jump into it whenever without missing much of anything about the story.

Tango Gameworks has put out 4 games in 10 years (and, according to Wikipedia, one mobile game in addition to that). That is excellent output in these times where it seems that for most studios it takes 5-8 years to put out one game. Halo Infinite took 6 years to make. Naughty Dog is 4 years into development of something that has not even been announced (I'm not counting re-releases).

That's the most shocking this about Hi-Fi Rush is how Tango had put out a game in 2022 and then in the next year they already have another one. The Evil Within series may not have been a huge success but it has a following as basically the only active horror tripe-A series out there besides Resident Evil (not active any more obviously).

I can understand shutting down a studio that isn't performing. And if there was a studio that needed to be put down it would most likely have been 343 Industries that has had multiple chances of doing something interesting with Halo and has failed every time (I actually liked Halo 5 personally but I know most people didn't). Tango is one of the few studios at Microsoft that are actually performing, and the stated reason for the closure that they don't have enough middle managers to harass talented people who have proven that they can manage their work themselves is one of the most insane excuses they could have come up with. I don't buy it for a second, if the Activision deal hadn't happened and scared up the executives over how much money they are spending, this closure wouldn't have happened either.

@bigsocrates: They're small markets but not that small. Games and software obviously don't need to be translated so if something is needed regulation-wise it's probably just a few legal documents that any law firm could create for a few thousand Euros and they'd make that back in a few months at most. I believe that there's been an unspoken arrangement where these customers just create an account elsewhere and Soy doesn't ask any questions, and small markets are just used to it.

It's not that hard to believe that Sony would have gotten away with it and Steam would have happily sold their game in those markets. But they made the mistake of upsetting the gaming community, which led to that community picking up dirt on Sony, and this is what they found. This doesn't impact them and I don't believe that they are genuinely trying to fight for the little guy. They're mad at Sony for unrelated reasons and they're using what weapons they have available. I'm not saying they're wrong to do that, it's likely that a positive change will come out of this, but I absolutely believe that if Sony had done a few small things differently, nobody would be talking about this.