A PS4 Thread: Because You Had to Play "Knack"

So did anybody buy this thing or not?

There's a ps4 now?

i know, right?

lotta years in the console cycle to have to deal w/the terrible touchpad

it's not bad tho

co-worker came in today and told me she got the PS4 with BF4 and AC4 and spent this weekend playing it. i felt ashamed of myself

kinda weird if PS4 doesn't play the brand-new GTA right??

at least they got one thing right, then

"hi i have a brand-new 'next-gen' CD player that won't play Rihanna's last record"

"hi whats a CD"

"hi i have a brand-new 'next-gen' CD player that won't play Rihanna's last record"

Also it doesn't play cd's

*yet

"hi my 'next-gen' iPod plays only mp5s"

just "bought" Resogun and Contrast for free via PS+ but have no PS4 to play them on. eeeeeeeeeeeh.

the price of digital PS4 games are pretty lol, can't imagine there will be many takers in the UK for Madden at £59.99 in the coming weeks

zappi that reminds me of when I "bought" Persona 4 only to release that I needed a PSP to play it. :(

knack is somehow like the least appealing game ever to me

http://www.nowgamer.com/features/2176331/ps4_how_to_buy_us_digital_psn_games.html

any euros have any experience of this?

would much rather buy FIFA for $50 than £55 (COME ON) but don't want it to not work or have Sony vengefully cancel my Playstation

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2014/08/12/upcoming-ps4-system-update-to-v2-00-to-add-share-play-youtube-and-more-to-come/

Interesting - basically Share Play is the old network tunneling / Hamachi / LAN simulation to allow local multiplayer-only over the internet.

Actually, even better - only one person has to actually own the game. They're probably using the Gaikai/PSNow tech.

didn't this thing sell like 7 million units? And none to ILXors apparently?

waiting for Bloodborne

^^^ this

we're old and have backlogs
honestly, waiting for a few franchises to push me over, like Batman and MKX

witcher 3 and ac:paris might push me in early b4 bludbourne

There are a couple of ilxors - myself included - think it's that neither PS4 or XboxOne has reached critical mass enough (nor has enough exclusives), so the only chatter seems to be on 'The upcoming console generation' thread.

I bought one. It's currently languishing in the guest bedroom until a game comes out for it that I want to play.

WE GOT A BOURGIE HERE PEOPLE

but uh how do you like it?

I like the interface more than the PS3 interface and things are definitely pretty on it, it's just that there are very few games out for it that I want to play

might try to squeeze in some Injustice time before my MIL shows up and takes over that room

DJP I suggest getting Towerfall and 4 controllers if you want to have friends over to use your PS4.

I wish this thread title had playstation or sony in it.

http://lovephoenix.typepad.jp/photos/rock/the_knackget_the_knack.jpg

i added some of you dudes on psn. i'm josephcotten. invites welcome.

I decided to take the plunge on one of these things; the lack of backwards compatability REALLY blows since I have a ton of old games that I still want to play, but between the good games that are out for it now, all the PS4 games I've already banked using PS+, and the fact that my old PS3 was getting too loud to use as a blu-ray player any more I said fuck it.

I can't quite dive into it full-on just yet since I'm going to swap out the stock HD for a 2 TB drive tonight and I didn't want to install everything twice (Destiny took HOURS to install last night ffs), but the little bit of tooling around that I've done with it so far has been really impressive. the new Dualshocks in particular are just a treat to use, although I had to get 2 just because the charge drains so fast (still better than the Wii U Gamepad, though). the Gold headset is p slick too - it's obviously the least of all the sets of headphones I own, but it's comfortable enough for me to wear it down until the battery dies, sounds good enough that I can turn off my speakers during gametime, and includes a built-in mic for chat & voice commands (which would be a lot cooler if I hadn't seen how much slicker the Xbone's voice stuff is).

anyway feel free to add my PSN ID (trdn89) if you need folks with whom to play.

added you. no mic btw

why no mic?

waiting for kojima/del toro penned silent hill. 2016!

why no mic?

i try to avoid headphones whenever possible to avoid further damage to my stupid ears

the charge on the pads drains so quickly you need more than one pad? how quickly are we talking here, like minutes?

I think I typically get a few hours, but the cable provided is like 30cm, so you can't charge-while-you-play unless you're parked in front of the TV. Also, what typically happens to me is that I've charged it, played for a couple of hours, watched some Netflix. Next day I go to play and after 5mins it says it's dead.

Yeah, the battery life on the DS4 is terrible. If you've got an outlet near where you play, though, you can plug a microUSB cable into any USB charger and play and charge at the same time.

the better part of twenty years they've been making these controllers and they keep finding ways to make them more expensive and worse

The charge on mine is fine and this is probably the best controller I've used so ymmv

waiting for kojima/del toro penned silent hill. 2016!

Shoot. I was hoping for this next year. Have they confirmed it'll be a PS4 exclusive? Would hope, like most of the other games in the series, it'd come out on the 360/xbone, too.

Speaking of SH, this SH book looks pretty good. Can anyone confirm?

the DS4 is way better than 3 in every way except for battery life which is bad enough to cancel out all the improvements

might as well just never unplug it

so apparently this is the first gaming console i have ever owned

welcome to the cool person club

is this what it's like

mother 3 timing works fine on some emulators but iirc the most popular one at the time (visualboyadvance i think?) botched it so it got that reputation

i couldn't get the timing right despite having a pretty well-tuned retroarch/retropie setup. i was using the VBA core through a BT controller though...

though my latest experiments with jackd to eliminate audio latency on the device have been looking pretty good. rhythm tengoku's test/calibration screen shows pretty good latency

Not 100% on this but the general rule for previous formats on ps4 is that ps3 games stream while ps2 and ps1 games are actual downloads which play locally. There may be exceptions though.

Batman seems to be the perfect bridge between Ratchet and Clank and Bloodborne (assuming I play the latter next). It's not particularly challenging, at least most of the time, since Batman is pretty OP, but it is a lot of fun, and the game design is dark, detailed and spooky. My fave aspect so far (I assume I'm still pretty early in the game) is how equally OP any goon with a gun is vs. the run of the mill goons. You enter a room with like 10 goons and you think, ok, no problem, I'll just beat them all up. But then you enter a room with 10 goons and one goon with a gun, and you have to stop and think, hmm, what's the best way to take out the goon with a gun before I beat up the rest? Also, Batman is always so grim and serious and dramatic that he is (ironically) innately silly, which is fun, too. Spider-man has fun swinging around, but Batman is all business. At least in the front: his cape kind of turns him into a human mullet.

I like the idea of an openworld Castlevania game, but the idea of Bloodborne leaves me cold. I gave Dark Souls 3 a try and the whole thing seemed gnomic and unfriendly. Hyper-difficult action combat is well and good, but it lacks Witcher-style storytelling and exploration, which is primarily what I'm there for as opposed to just walking along and killing baddies

Yeah, I like games with storytelling, too. Which the Soulsborne games definitely have, but it's so elliptical and obscure by design that it just adds to the oppressive atmosphere; "gnomic" is otm, but beyond that these games are just so lonely. Which is def. not for all tastes, especially since beating them, while satisfying, does not provide any sort of real ... well, satisfaction. I haven't played any of The Witcher yet, but that one seems like a hybrid of D&D style RPG and storytelling.

Witcher isn't that D&D, its narrative isn't structurally different from the RPG template that's been set in place for the last decade. Divinity is much closer, however.

is divinity worth a play?

i was bored by it when i played single player, and absolutely adored it when playing 4-play co-op campaign. holy shit, that was maybe one of my top 3 or 5 gaming moments of ALL TIME. unfortunately the co-op campaign ended after about 25 hours due to IRL conflicts

do you need PSN to do that?

PS Plus (not PSN), and it is required for online multiplayer.

oh actually - i should clarify - we all played on mac/steam. i haven't actually played the ps4 version. but it's supposed to be pretty good!

A few xposts, but dl, I think I really do recommend playing those Souls games with some sort of guide or walkthrough. God of War, Ratchet and Clank, Last of Us and now Arkham Asylum have all been relatively straightforward without a guide, with a few rare "what am I missing?" exceptions. Dark Souls, on the other hand, offered a seemingly insurmountable challenge every few minutes even *with* hints, and there is so much awesome stuff I would have missed without them.

Yeah I'll definitely give DSIII another shot one day. I think it's the unrelenting grimness + difficulty level + (so far) linear gameplay and lack of tangible story that puts me off. It's a really well made game, but I feel a bit like a machine carrying out thankless tasks sometimes. Never was into bondage. Yes, all games boil down to this, but the illusion of a good game is that it tricks you into believing you're doing more than this.

i always thought the secret of the souls series is that they're basically puzzle games

execution-heavy puzzle games suck ass though so i don't think that's the right way to think about it. if something's actually a good puzzle the satisfaction should come from figuring it out and stating the solution, executing it is unnecessary busywork

souls games are just action games

i always play them like they're puzzle games and i always enjoy them! Sekiro and Bloodborne were much less puzzly an more action oriented.

The "puzzle" in Souls is how best to beat each enemy, even the basic ones. Which can get frustrating. (Like, Batman right now, most baddies take nearly no thought or effort, which is a nice balance to the grim design.) The real puzzles in the Souls games are fewer and far between, but there is lots to discover and explore on the journey, and as you get used to the lonely bleakness (even Batman is super chatty by comparison) there is an odd beauty to it all.

Or avoid each enemy, more often. Or discover new terrain. Or understand how room x or door x or ladder x or enemy x or item x help provide an easy answer to move forward.
you can absolutely brute force your way through any DS game but there's almost always multiple elegant solutions to each issue if you want to think laterally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1Ek7AsO-og

Still enjoying Batman, but it lacks (for better or worse) much on the way of boss fights. The same was true for the last few games I played, iirc, which def. cuts down on the challenge. Which, tbh, is non existent in this game so far, which is admittedly fine.

One of the fights in New Game + might change your mind on that.

given the ongoing Souls talk, has anyone tried out Mortal Shell as yet?

spelunky 2 comes out today mother fuckers

I've never played anything in NG+ yet. So far when I'm done, I'm done, give or take the DLC. NG+ modes are generally just the same game but the baddies take 7 hits instead of 4 or whatever, right?

I don't remember that much content to Asylum after the story conclusion. (Very different for City and Knight, lots of post-game content). Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
If you like the story/lore, I'd do all the Riddler trophies, there's a lot to uncover.
If you like the combat, I would do the combat challenges that (iirc) you have to access through the main menu, outside the main game. The score-chasing is often some of my favorite parts.

I should prob try mortal shell

thinking of NG+ing Witcher 3 as I've pretty much exhausted everything except the Gwent, horse racing challenges plus a couple of ?s in the middle of Butt fuck, Ard Skellig. Still, not sure if I'm quite ready to relive the story I've been playing for nearly a whole year yet

I know I've accumulated a lot of Riddler challenges, but so far I'm not sure what to do with them. It still looks like I have I guess inadvertently solved a bunch of them though.

Oh, wait, they're just collectibles, like the question marks, teeth, interview reels, etc? Yeah, I've just been, well, collecting them as I see them but not really looking for them. They kind of seem to be all over the place.

They are yeah, they unlock the Gotham City Stories text pieces in the menu.

spelunky 2 comes out today mother fuckers

i was there at midnight to download, only to realize that it came out 2 hours later (midnight PST i guess).

will be playing tonight though motherfuckers!

i got up to try and play early this morning and it doesn't come out until 8am PACIFIC TIME. what is that.

that's a logical thing to do, that's what it is. it's spelunky 2 day

This looks harder than 1, which I am terrible at

i only played the original on keyboard + no mouse, so i am expecting to do a lot better with a gamepad this time around

xp polyphonic: I'm terrible at the original too, never made it near the end. I'll still probably get this sooner or later

Our PS4 Pro fan has been making more noise than the washing machine recently. Dismantled it yesterday, cleaned out all the fans and heat sinks, put some new thermal paste on the cpu etc, took ages.

Switched it back on expecting either “well that made no difference” or “now it’s not working at all”, because those are the most common outcomes I get from projects like this. But it’s worked perfectly! It’s running almost silently now and nothing’s making the fan spin up! I’m amazed!

OK, finished Arkham Asylum. It's a good game, but I stand by my original assessment that the boss battles are just not that challenging. And most of the other fights are little more than button mashing (like, button, singular). It's still fun and well designed, and if it's a little too easy on "normal" mode, well, you *are* playing as Batman. Can def. see this as the template for the Spider-man game. Batman: Archetypical Asylum?

Play Arkham Asylum on Hard for a while before moving on imo

I'm not moving

hehe "in my opinion" i mean

:)

Maybe I will! Which would be a good bridge to Bloodborne ...

Or you can just barrel on to City

I was tempted to do that as well, but I'm worried I would burn out on it, since the combat seems repetitive. Then again, I am in the zone, so if I move on I could just as easily not return. So maybe I will give it a shot on a more difficult setting, then try a bit of city and see what I think.

still working through Control. It's such a fun, unsettling game. I love being able to rip furniture and rubble and throw it: it feels so satisfying. The difficulty level is pitched just right, so that nothing feels particularly easy, but I always seem to be able to get past the challenging parts after a few goes. Plus it's a really imaginative game with absolutely its own vibe. I do find it creepy AF though.

My only gripe is the long loading times, especially when I'm on a tricky part where I die a lot. I also don't like how a lot of structures and furniture don't seem to have any weight behind them. you can brush past a chair and it will just fall over as though it's made of paper. I guess this makes sense in the context of being able to throw stuff around.

I also found that there are parts in the game where I get stuck and have to look up a guide online. in one part, I killed off loads of enemies only to find my way blocked by a red wall of Hiss. It's really not obvious that you have to shoot some red cubes around and near the wall (same colour as the wall itself) in order to progress. Felt like this was completely unnecessary and that the wall could have just revealed itself after killing the bad guys.

ha, i remember getting stuck once or twice on that too, i think it happens a couple of times. there's not much indication what to do and the infected red cube blocks just kinda blend in with everything else

i do like how a lot of things just aren't really explained at all. stuff like Board Countermeasures, materials etc will just appear in your menus and you've just got to work out what they are. the red blocks were super annoying though because as you say, they aren't even very visible.

BTW Control released an assist mode to help with its difficulty, allowing you to be immortal, among other settings.

Ok, Batman question. Arkham Asylum does not have much in the way of post-game content, and even if it did, it apparently doesn't allow you to change the difficulty level, so I would be stuck on normal, anyway. With no more enemies I am thinking of moving on to Arkham City, but do I start that game on normal or hard, with the knowledge that whatever I pick I guess I'm stuck with? I'd hate to find myself in a situation where normal is too easy, and hard is too difficult. Or normal on City is harder than normal on Asylum.