whatchu playing now

I suspect that's a hallmark of good design, though there's a chicken/egg element to it: do games get easier because you get used to the controls/combat/whatever, or are the games designed/paced to ensure you get used to the controls/combat/whatever by a certain point? I'd be curious, with something like, say, Dark Souls ... obviously it never clicks with some people, for many reasons, for those that start out struggling but eventually "git gud," I wonder if a lot of people "git gud" around the same point in the game? Are infamous "skill check" bosses and stages inserted based on game testing, where/when the designers think the player should finally have a good feel for things? I know a lot of people complained about the first boss of "Armored Core" being among the toughest, which iirc turned a lot of people off until they tweaked the difficulty.

Finished Alan Wake's special episode 1, started he second, which has a really awesome rotating building maze set piece.

Picked up a Series S on a good Black Friday deal and it comes bundled with three months of Game Pass Ultimate for free - I like metroidvanias, rouglites and platformers so if there's any recommendations for Game Pass stuff that fits the bill I'd love to hear about it!

similarly just got the fat PS5 on a BF clearance deal, the price was too good to pass up -_-
what's the cheapest way to play games? should I just get PS Extra for a month and play the backlog on that?
can you still get cheap PS credit or are those days long gone?

you could play thru a lot of good games on PS Plus before you needed to buy anything else. the down side i guess is that some of those games are only on there for a limited time

oh do they rotate out often? does the first party stuff stay permanently?

i don't know which are first party developers tbh. most stuff is there for a good long time, i see Returnal for example has been on there for over a year now. but some of the triple A stuff seems to last for a few months at most

ok thx. guess I'll just do that first.
now trying to login to the PS website for the first time in a couple of years, still a pain to navigate

lol when you manage to get logged on you can always just browse thru the library yourself and see if you think it's worth it

my sub has lapsed at the moment cos i'm skint but tbh i was mainly in it for playing all the old Atelier games on the Classics list

it's also good for new but short indies like Lake which i'd've felt kinda robbed by if i'd actually paid full price

Did you (xposting) get one with a drive, or a digital model? The cheapest way is to find used discs. In fact, the cheapest method is to find used PS4 games that have a free upgrade to PS5. Like, Cyberpunk (I paid $10) or Miles Morales (less than $20). A few good ones have modest fees for upgrading, like Ghost of Tsushima or Control. Even digital, I think there are always some good sales. Like, the complete Witcher 3 is $15 right now, that includes the PS5 version.

I never had PS Plus or whatever, and they recently raised their prices, but if I had had it from the start there were a lot of good games cycling in and out of there. Of course, you have to keep paying to play them, so that I assume adds up.

yes got a fatty with the hard drive. that PS4 upgrade tip is good, will definitely look into that.

oops meant disc drive, they all come with a hard drive

still thinking of going xbox for this gen since i like forza horizon and dont like any of sony's first party offerings. xbox + switch used to not cover all jrpgs but i think it finally does now

finally managed to log in to the PS website, my old password didn't work but sending out a password reset email was a bit too hard for them apparently
apparently I last played my PS4 in Dec 2020, but bought some cheap JPRGs after that in sales and never booted them up. Crystar anybody?!?!

even the cheap tier of PS+ gives you some generic crap to play every month but i'm basically still in for multiplayer access. sometimes you get lucky and they put good old stuff in, probably even better if you haven't played anything new in 3 years

Yeah it me

the sales are very frequent, recommend using dekudeals to keep track though the PS store wishlist system is actually not bad - Sony sends you notifications when something is on sale

still enjoying control with all the assist mode features on but i wish it was more trippy puzzles and a lot less going into a room and blasting away at 30 bad guys who all look exactly the same and like every bad guy you've blasted in every other room

saw that cocoon is on sale (a little bit - down from $25 to $20) so i'll probably pick that up

Good reminder for Cocoon, the reviews have been excellent!

A few good ones have modest fees for upgrading, like ... Control.

Do you mean the Ultimate Edition? Because I got the regular version on PS4 not long after it came out, and when Ultimate and PS5 were announced, I distinctly remembered an outcry that the regular version couldn't be upgraded to a PS5.

yeah - especially annoying if you owned the Ultimate Edition with all the expansions on PS4, it felt kind of silly that they didn't just give you the PS5 version as everyone else was doing those early days for the PS5. extra weird: it was given out on PS+ fairly soon after it came out too

to me, far more annoying that the save file didn't transfer from PS4 to PS5 and I didn't feel like starting all over again (still might someday, I guess)

doesn't matter to new players now, which is good because the game is still well worthwhile

more backlog idiocy: i bought FF VII remake on PS4 disc over a year ago, never opened it, but it came with a free PS5 digital upgrade to Intergrade. You still needed to pay for the special Yuffie DLC "Intermission" that came with the PS5 edition, but with the current sale you can just buy the full PS5 package for $16, or about half what I then paid for the PS4 disc. I am a fool and I never learn.

i try to never buy games that im not planning to play immediately, except for nintendo stuff

Huh, yeah, maybe not Control, then. But there are a handful of free upgrade games out there. The Spider-man game upgrade path is pretty circuitous, iirc. You can buy Miles Morales for PS4, upgrade for free to PS5, which unlocks the ability to pay extra to buy Spider-man PS5/Remastered. Something like that. Unless they changed it.

OK, so you know how I mentioned that Game Stop showed A Plague Tale: Requiem on sale new and even cheaper used, but supposedly unavailable within 100 miles? I called the local store, so I know for a fact that it *is* available closer than 100 miles, within 15, but it's not showing up as available to purchase online and pick-up in store, which means I can't take advantage of the promotion that knocks another $5 off. Bullshit, right? Well, here's another one. I see that Walmart is going to sell RE4 Remake for $30, $10 off the current sales. The catch? You have to sign up for Walmart+ (whatever that is). That low + price kicks in at 11am my time, so fine, I sign up for a 30-day trial. And within minutes ... the game (which had been selling at full price, $60) suddenly shows up as out of stock? WTF, two hours before the sale? So sketchy.

NM, sale went live right on schedule, I am now a proud owner of RE4 Remake.

OK, *now* I finished Alan Wake Remastered. Game itself is solid, DLC is fine and kind of pointless, though the second one was a lot of fun.

Just started Sea Of Stars. It's very much a love letter to Chrono Trigger and while it's too early to tell if this will be worth my while, I'm enjoying it so far. Seem to be a lot of these sorts of 16 bit jrpg tributes out now but this one is pretty sweet and even has some of the music by the same composer as CT

Finished RE4 remake dlc, and after not drinking for awhile I had some Thxgiving cocktails and bought Resident Evil Village at some point.

Also my partner & I finished Cocoon, so great.

Can't wait for that one to go on sale. Just started Wolfenstein New Colossus, seems pretty audacious already.

got the PS5 set up and borrowed FFXVI from a friend to try it out
friend said "it's not good" but I've played all the others so might as well
also bought Cyberpunk PS4 really cheap 2nd hand as it comes with free upgrade (thanks Josh for the hot tip!)

took a lot of faffing around but remote play PS5 on a deck feels like voodoo
plays flawlessly so far, fuck a portal

https://i.imgur.com/lJNQiuJ.jpg

Cool! Also remembered that Skyrim has a free upgrade to PS5, and you can get the PS4 version cheap. And Fallout 4 is apparently getting a free upgrade to PS5 (eventually) if you want to get a cheap version now. Found a big (though I don't think complete) list here:

https://www.psu.com/news/all-ps4-games-that-have-ps5-upgrades-guide/

Some other games just run better (usually better frame rate) on PS5 without a formal upgrade, like Last of Us 2, though that one is getting an official upgrade in a couple of months.

i've really gotta get one of those SSDs to continue the hoarding

Mine wasn't that expensive and was pretty simple to install, iirc. I've got the console storage, the SSD and an external drive full of PS4 stuff. For a while there I just preloaded all sorts of games big and small, whether I was about to play them or not, but it doesn't take long for stuff like Cyberpunk to just suck up all the space, lol.

yeah, the PS5 games can be nuts. i think Mortal Kombat 1 was like ~120GB

I played Lil Gator Game. It's not a long game. I loved A Short Hike and this is more of that.

dipped back into Cyberpunk 2077, moved to Easy mode because I hate the combat in it and enjoying it a lot more. Having said that, boy is the game still a hot mess in terms of glitches. Walking around doing nothing is okay, but feels like as soon as the game has some actual business to perform it just gets itself into all kind of graphical and collision chaos.

And having played Watchdog 2 recently too, just seeing the terrible car glitches in that one, you really start to be impressed with GTA and how much it can do with ease and without too much incident.

xpost despite all the updates and upgrades and tweaks they've released?

I can only imagine what it was like before.

I’ve tried to play Cyberpunk like four times now. Basically every time there’s a big patch and everyone says “Wow, it’s like a whole new game!”

I will say the bugginess has gotten better each time, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t like it as a game. I really want to, I think it mostly looks great, I wanna sink into the world. But it just does not grab me.

FWIW, I’ve tried to play The Witcher 3 about as many times and bounced off of it totally. I just don’t think I’m into their shit. Can’t put my finger on why exactly.

witcher 3 is definitely a vibes game, the gameplay is mediocre and it's just a nice fully-realized fantasy world to spend time in. there werent a lot of impressive fantasy instances of the modern open world game when it came out, just skyrim really, dunno if theres more now besides zelda

Ok I'm really not enjoying RE Village so far. It's so on rails - I'm 1.5+ hrs in and it doesn't quite feel like the game has started yet? It seems like every few minutes there's a scripted sequence where you get abducted to somewhere else. And the escalating amount of hand mutilation that your character keeps experiencing is maybe supposed to be, like, a running joke (like the noir detective who keeps getting beat up)?

From the clips I've seen, doesn't the lead person lose their hand entirely in the previous one and just, like, glue it back on or something? I haven't played this one yet (but found it cheap!). I've heard it's both a return to camp (following its predecessor, maybe the only one people consider truly scary), and also has at least one scary setpiece or something. Anyway, I had kind of been looking forward to it for classic Gothic monster vibes.

Ok I'm starting to enjoy RE Village a bit more. The bits where you're dealing with the normal enemies in the castle are genuinely tense. Still, for the encounters with evil supernatural family I don't always know if I'm supposed to be running for my life, shooting them, or if it's a scripted sequence where I won't actually die but will instead be shoved through another floor or whatever.

xposts fwiw, I think the Control ultimate edition is on sale for $10 right now. That's pretty cheap for one of my favorite PS5 experiences.

Ok he got his hand fully cut off for a sequence, later drizzled on some first aid juice and stuck it back on, this is definitely a trope. Apparently may have to do with him having become a mold person in one of the previous games? Makes sense, these games take place in very damp climates.

i think i'm near the end of control. i love the vibes and environments but the gameplay is not for me. the grabbing/throwing power rules but seizing/floaty jumps/ground pounds aren't as satisfying and the bad guys and combat feel very repetitive after a while.

cocoon is great though. i love games that don't explain anything to you.

And I fr love that the entire game is "figure out this mechanic that we're not going to explain."

I finally grabbed Control for that price, it's never looked appealing to me but I'll give it a shot on some rainy day.

I didn't know much about Wolfenstein 2 except that a lot of people said the courtroom sequence was a real challenge. Yeah, it was pretty tough, but it was also kind of nuts, and ramped up the game's already almost shocking audacity. It's remarkable that it can successfully balance some real extreme tonal shifts, from serious drama to b-movie ridiculousness. It really helps to have good writing and acting, that elevates every game.

That said, I thought I was a little further along than I was, but I suspect there's a huge hunk of this game to go, which might file it in the "too long" category. Still, I'm having a lot of fun playing it.