The original Metroid on NES was so freaking good back in the day. I’m in my late 40s at this point and I still hear songs or themes that make me go “that reminds me of Metroid”. The music was iconic.
And it’s gotta be said, the original reveal that the hero of the game was a (gasp) girl! I am sure it had an effect on my young impressionable mind. And the good kind of effect, the kind that makes you realize girls can be bad ass too. So awesome!
I remember being so insanely jazzed and proud that I got into the closed beta for SWTOR like VERY early. Wasn’t so fun when the game launched and I was already burnt out on it. lol
To be fair, they didn’t address a lot of the main criticisms from beta so the game predictably sunk into “Free to play” hell not too long after. Shame, it had a lot of potential.
Point is, I specifically did not sign up for this beta for the same reason as you. I think this one is worth waiting for.
The DLC’s add a ton to the game. New storylines, new sectors (more space), new ships and buildings, new mechanics (in some), etc.
Do I think you need them all at the start? Probably not? I don’t know how much things cost at this point since I’ve gotten all the DLC’s when they came out since I got the game so it’s hard for me to say whether it’s “worth it” price wise. But just from a content and fun standpoint? They add a LOT to the game and are worth having for sure.
IMHO, the Split ships are the ones I prefer flying generally, so I would recommend that DLC if nothing else. But every faction has one or two ships that are best in class, it’s balanced nicely that way. I just know that if I had to start the game from scratch without Split ships, I would be sad. :-D
This game scratches an itch for me that very few games do. Starting from nothing but a single scout ship and building and empire with fleets of capital ships and miners and traders… and not just owning stations, but building them module by module. There are so many different ways to play this game, from pirate lord to corporate shill to business mogul. You can follow one of the many story lines or strike out on your own from day one. sigh I really enjoy this game.
And I thought they were done updating it two updates and one DLC ago. Yet here we are with more improvements. How lucky are we?!!
I don’t know if you noticed this but some really big companies with high stock valuations are only existing because investors poured tons of capital into them to subsidize the service.
Exactly, they PAID MONEY to make it work. No they don’t make the money back and depend on outside capital, but they are still paying their employees (not enough) and suppliers, etc.
IMHO, Xbox is a better console than PS this gen. I was a PS guy all the way but I got both XSX and PS5 when they came out and I barely touch my PS5 compared to the Xbox.
To be fair, most of the reasons I prefer the Xbox are just user experience things. The biggest one is that I think the PS5 controller is horrible. The ergonomics are all weird for me (yeah I realize that everyone’s hands are different) and the fancy trigger buttons are real cool in the one or two games that make use of them but they’re squishy and vague feeling in the other 99% of games. The Xbox controller has better ergonomics, and better feel in the hand with its materials and button feel. Yes, ergonomics and feel preference will vary from person to person but it’s worth mentioning since I never had an issue with PS controllers until the PS5.
The other reasons I prefer the Xbox are things like how much better it is for things on your TV that aren’t gaming (streaming shows, watching movies, etc.), I think Gamepass is WAY better than the Sony version, it has more exclusives I am interested in, etc.
Anyhow, you do you, but you might look into the Xbox a little before blindly just going with the PS5 on the strength of the older consoles. I was surprised by how much I didn’t want to use the PS5. And a little bummed if I’m honest. It was a lot of effort to get one at launch and a lot of money and it mostly just gathers dust.
And to answer your specific question, if you do decide to go with a PS5, just get whatever is available when you are ready to get one. When it comes to tech, there’s always something better coming so you can wait forever because they will never say “okay, all done!”.
It doesn’t matter what business we’re talking about. If you can’t afford to pay the costs associated with running it, it’s not a viable business. It’s pretty fucking simple math.
And no, we’re not talking about “to big to fail” business (that SHOULD be allowed to fail, IMHO) we’re talking about AI, that thing they keep trying to shove down our throats and that we keep saying we don’t want or need.
I don’t know what to tell you, I played it on Xbox just fine. Played the whole game through from start to finish and had fun. I believe the issue was with last gen consoles specifically.
And again, I think a lot of the criticism was reasonable. But my point is that the game itself was and is fun, but suffers because of the bad reputation it got at launch thanks to some ill-advised (intentional understatement alert!) decisions by CDPR.
Yes, NMS was overhyped and completely failed to meet expectations. But it was also complete garbage on release. 7/10? Not even close. It’s one of the only games I ever bought on physical disk that I returned because it was so bad when it wasn’t unplayable. That wasn’t a problem with expectations, that was a terrible fucking game.
I get it. I said I didn’t think the expectations were unreasonable.
I think you’re pretty much proving my point, though, that the game is unfairly maligned due to unmet expectations. The game they released, while buggy, was fun. You’re pissed off about a lot of things that aren’t how fun the game is to play.
This. I already don’t own my music (Tidal, Spotify) or my movies (Netflix, etc) and I already have been using Gamepass for years just fine.
But movie streaming is a HOT MESS right now. I looked up the X-Men movie franchise the other day for some reason. No joke, it’s split across 3 or 4 different streaming services! And next month, it could change. There are streaming services like Peacock or Paramount that have absolutely NOTHING worth watching except one or two shows (e.g. Parks and Rec or Picard) and I really want to watch it but there’s no way I’m throwing down money for a streaming service just to watch one fucking show. All it does is piss me off.
If the same garbage happens with gaming where everyone thinks making their own is the way to go, instead of just using a few big ones, it will not succeed. Ubisoft making their own is a bad idea. It’s bad for us for the reasons above and it’s bad for them because we won’t use it.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the poster child for this. That game was easily 7/10 even when it came out as a buggy mess. Now that it’s had a few years of polish, it’s much better than 7/10.
But the public perception was bad mostly because of unmet expectations. I don’t know if I’d call them “unreasonable” a they were set by the devs themselves, but either way, the game was and is much better than a lot of people think.
I switched to Linux as my daily driver back last summer and have been able to play every game I’ve tried with literally no issues. Admittedly, I had issues at first but then I switched to Pop!_OS, which has built-in support for Nvidia hybrid graphics. That solved the few gaming issues I had.
With how easy it was and how many games work with no issues, I’m genuinely surprised to hear people say they are having issues with it. I’m not even close to a linux expert. I’m not a programmer. I don’t want my OS to be a hobby, I want it to just work. And so far it has.
Oh yeah, I hated the God of War reboot. It was so cool for like 15 minutes. Then I got to the actual combat and I couldn’t stand it. It was nothing like the original, it was hard AF, it used button combinations I’ve never seen before (I think it’s based on Souls games?), etc. It was so disappointing.
The problem isn’t the mechanics, the problem is getting repair parts. Tesla is the only one who makes Tesla parts and they’ve decided that those parts are going toward new Teslas, not repairs. (My Tesla was in the shop for 11 MONTHS thanks to this fun state of affairs.)
While EV’s that share a platform with ICE cars are generally worse than ground-up EV’s, the nice thing is there are plenty of repair parts available.
Took 11 months to get my Tesla repaired because they were waiting for suspension parts from Tesla. There are only three Tesla certified repair shops in my whole city (of 2 million people) but that wasn’t the issue. The issue was Tesla.
If the EV’s they’re talking about in the article are Teslas, then I can understand why they would want to get rid of them.
And to be clear, I love my Tesla, but nobody should be buying one until they get their supply chain shit together. I already passed on buying a Tesla when I had to replace my second car recently. (Went with a PHEV because I need to road trip regularly and non-Tesla charging is still pretty terrible in that area.)
Jedi Fallen Order. I’ve tried a couple times because I really WANT to like the game. But I just can’t stand the fucking souls style of everything comes back when you save. And the boss fights are just too punishing (for me). It’s so frustrating to get stuck on a boss or lost in a zone and come to the realization that I WAS having fun and then the game got in the way of that.
Elden Ring. I had a lot of fun with the game restarting and playing through the first zone on like 6 different characters to try different styles and see what I like. But at some point in the second zone I realized I was just stressed out all the time. It wasn’t fun, it was stressful. I can appreciate the game and I don’t regret spending the money on it, but I realized it just wasn’t for me.
I think I’m done with souls games. They’re just not for me. I really wanted to play Jedi Survivor but I suspect the new cool stuff will just make me more frustrated with the souls aspects, Oh well.
Yeah, the biggest issue I had with D2 when it first came out was how disconnected it felt. It never felt like a full world, it felt like you warped into a map and killed some things with no larger goal, just some “kill x things” or “pickup x drops” mini quests. Then you warped back to base and then picked a new zone to warp to for no particular reason.
D1 at least had a story that propelled you forward, including tons of lore (admittedly poorly implemented lore, but it was there!) and secrets and easter eggs. The story and voice acting was one of the big criticisms at the start so it’s one of the things they worked hard on fixing over the life of the game. So it was REALLY off-putting when D2 went back to no story and lore. (And as I said, they decided to fix it by just putting in the story from D1.)
Thinking on it now, Avengers had that same disconnected feel as D2 once you got thru the campaign. I quite enjoyed the campaign but the game stopped being fun after that. Coincidentally right when it started being like D2.
Yes. When Destiny 1 came out, it was famously… an acquired taste. It took many updates to get it to a point where it lived up to its potential. And by the time Destiny 2 was near, Destiny 1 had grown into one of the best games I’d ever played. Then Destiny 2 came out and it was like they completely threw out everything they learned fixing and growing Destiny 1. It was a HUGE step back in almost every respect. A massive waste of money.
And then just to rub it in, they went F2P pretty quickly because that’s what you do when you charge for a live service game and nobody wants to pay for it because it’s crap.
I went back to it a few years later to see how it was because it had seemed to find a following eventually. They completely reworked the beginning off the game to make it almost exactly the same as the beginning of Destiny 1. That’s how they fixed it. They changed it back to what worked in the first place. Pathetic. Insulting. Infuriating.
Destiny 2 killed one of the best games I’d ever played. Then replaced it with a poor imitation whose main advantage was that it was optimized for predatory MTX. Fuck Bungie.
Yeah I knew someone was going to respond to my rhetorical “I have no idea” and explain it like I actually care. It’s like saying I have no idea why people buy Microsoft or use Twitter despite them being despicable. Obviously there are lot of things about them that a lot of people like. Obviously not everyone knows about all the despicable things these companies have done and continue to do. Obviously not everyone would care enough to stop using them even if they did know.
But it still frustrates me. I wish the world was a place where companies like VW couldn’t possibly exist because their own employees would never let them do the things they did, much less their customers or the regulators who are supposed to protect us despite ourselves. But, alas, we do not. And I have no idea why. (<— Rhetorical! Nobody has to try to explain why.)
So weird… I wonder why they have this whole thing that I had no idea about. I’ve been using Netflix since they were a DVD rental service and I’ve been gaming since the days of Wing Commander and King’s Quest. You’d think I’d be the target demographic yet it’s news to me that it even exists.
EDIT: Oooooh, it’s mobile only. I get it now. It’s really obvious in the app but I never watch Netflix on my phone. And yeah, it’s basically the Amazon app store all over again.
I’ve been a fan of thatgamecompany since playing the free Flash version of Flow online and reading Jenova Chen’s thesis on how to implement the flow state into gaming.
http://jenovachen.com/flowingames/Flow_in_games_final.pdf
It’s pretty awesome and he’s a very unique individual. Can’t wait to see what they come up with next.