PS3 is probably the last gen to support a lot of local coop games

I’m so happy that the franchise is alive and well. We’re even getting both the Western and Japanese takes on the series at the same time.

Back when I was a kid they had all of the VHS movies at the counter of my local video rental and I rented a new one each week. Eventually got a copy of Destroy All Monsters and watched that obsessively too.

He’s a weirdo on mastodon too tbh. Very keen on blocking, no real interactions aside from self promotion.

Is it not a timed exclusive on PS5? I don’t think I can buy it on my Series S at the moment

VR always seemed like a gimmick to me. I ended up with a wii instead of a PS3 or 360 as a teenager and it made me bitter and resolved to avoid anything like motion controls or gimmicks in future purchases.

Not that the wii was a bad console but I ended up playing the virtual console and gamecube backwards compatibility more than anything else.

Are we in a golden age for Sonic games? I started gaming the generation after the mega drive / genesis so missed the original run. When I was growing up I remember a lot of cringe releases like Shadow The Hedgehog where they seemed to be going for a Jak & Daxter 2 type angle and missing the mark. I did eventually go back and play the first two original games as an adult.

The past few years there seems to have been a run of solid releases for both 2D and 3D games that are getting good reviews and seemingly respectable sales. I think I’m going to pick up Frontiers or this one on the Series S after I’ve finished Metaphor: ReFantazio as a pallet cleanser to see what I’ve been missing.

Yeah during lockdown I spent a lot of time visiting my sister’s village when she was living on the other side of the world in Australia

I’ve been playing Metaphor. Huge Atlus fanboy so I’m biased but I’ve loved this game. Think I’m nearly done, got all companions and over half of them are maxed out. They’ve done a bunch of reveals (which were very telegraphed especially if you’ve played some of the SMT games). Got one final dungeon to do from what I can tell but at the start of the cycle.

Combat is much better than Persona due to using press-turn. I’ve found the S-Links are much more streamlined than in P5 as well, with the stat requirements to progress some of them being reasonable with regards to where you are in the game. I think the time passing mechanic is the best it’s been since P3 tbh.

If I had to nitpick: The soundtrack is fine but not as good as most other Atlus games. Also enemy variety could be better especially if you are doing all the side dungeons.

Overall I think this game is excellent though.

I’m playing on Series S and it gets really rough in the later levels like the snowy mountain city

Why wouldn’t they want to enrich their lives with my high IQ takes arriving directly into their hands with a notification sound??

It’s a typical Japanese developer mentality of “if it ain’t broke” (even if it is broke). You see the same thing from other high profile devs like From Soft. I think the country also still relies heavily on fax machines.

Personally I’ve been enjoying the game despite the performance woes but I can see how it would ruin someone else’s fun. You have to wonder about why it is so hard to implement anti-aliasing in their engine…

I think one issue is that UE5 has all of its out-of-the-box toolset geared towards making a fortnite type game since that is Epic’s main focus at the moment.

They better have cross operating system multiplayer working this time! Friends and I went straight back to Civ5 when we found that we couldn’t even host LAN between linux and macOS

Couch co-op was great during gen 5/6 but after that I stopped playing multiplayer.

This studio have struggled with technology making every subsequent game to Until Dawn because Sony loaned them some talent to get that one over the line

DF is reporting some serious frame rate issues. Similar to the Links Awakening rerelease.

It’s a case of voting with your wallet for most people. There are degrees of DRM that people are willing to put up with; where some people would rather go for DRM-free games on GOG, others are happy with one launcher like Steam and some others will accept each game launching its own launcher from within a meta launcher/store front.

To be honest it’s a matter of personal preference and I try to be in the 2nd group but I don’t mind what other people do. Again, personally, I dislike the idea of being apathetically brow beaten into signing up for dozens of services for the convenience of companies which provide no utility to me. Sometimes these launchers actively harm the experience by disabling steam launch options or bricking the game completely if you don’t live in the right country.

Steam runtime includes a lot of common static libraries that most games expect to be there. This means that older games will still work even though the wider OS might not have 32bit libs present.

Extremely bare bones playthrough would be just doing Yakuza 0 and then 7. Those would give you an overview of the two main gameplay styles the series has to offer.

If you want to play more then you probably want to finish the brawler games first before moving on to 8 since it has spoilers for the whole series.

The Judgement games are also good so you might want to try the first of those to see if you like it. Story is completely isolated from the Yakuza games though so I’d investigate this at your leisure.

I agree with this. Communist like systems where there is central control of resources encourages corruption as people vie to get closer to the central control of the resources. Capitalism is just more honest about the fact that many people - not all of them - are fundamentally self-interested and entices them into cooperation with others by offering the carrot of individual rewards. Those are probably the same people that would try to exploit the system if it were more centrally controlled.