crispy4000

There’s still more. Ghostwrite Tokyo is supposedly awful about it. Castillo Protocol. Wo Long. Chernobylite. Probably a bunch of UE4 indie games where it isn’t getting the same attention. (Supposedly Bramble is another) Its too big of a problem to hand-wave, at least for the end of last gen/early this gen. Sucks that it’s pretty much a permanent problem for those games that aren’t fixed.

Jedi Survivor Wild Hearts Elden Ring Stray Dead Space Remake FF7 Remake Etc. More I’m forgetting. I don’t think any game with egregious shader comp stutter on PC is preferable there.

It wasn’t always this way. It used to be that being a PC gamer implied you liked particular kinds of games, not all the games or any games because they’re all here. And there was a period of stagnation where PC game felt d00med. (Here’s a thread from 2005 on the subject) There’s still some remnants of that in some of what becomes popular on Steam today. But I remember when JPRGs and character action games were something novel on PC, going back to the old Eidos FF7 port. By the PS4/XBO gen the question shifted to if the PC port would make it to Xbox. Oh, and just to mention it, PC does have the stutter struggle problem today. Maybe things will get better with newer titles, but there are quite a number of games where consoles are still the optimal place to play them. Unless you’d trade resolution for dealing with judder.

That's inevitable with modern console transitions now. Ever since we've had games go open world without too much compromise, the whole bigger better thing has become a moot point. And almost no one is designing their games around physics and such that only a next-gen console could do. (... meanwhile you have Nintendo pushing the bar forward confidently on super outdated hardware) All said, playing FF7 Rebirth has me thinking they couldn't get close Remake's fidelity if they were still on PS4. They clearly needed a new console to make that game. Otherwise, the visual continuity would have dropped of a cliff. I wouldn't want to see what a PS4 version would need to look like.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: **½ Basing this off impressions from a demo of it I played a while back, though I have the full game now. I can't imagine much would have changed, since the demo is the opening act. There's a lot more style than substance here seemingly. Really beautiful use of UE's lighting, but a pretty bog standard adventure game with multiple text options. Get the right information, use it to deduce and act. Something about the use of animals throws me off. I can't take the tone of it seriously when it’s got a King Charles Spaniel in a turtleneck.

Time Spent: 20 minutes Rating: **½ Bullet bloom, the video game. The effect actually gets more intense the more there is on screen. As for the game itself, its a roguelike where your currency is the game timer, where you have 18 minutes otherwise to finish. Most curses work like Returnal, but affect the clock. The controls are meh, the music is annoying, enemies are bullet sponges. It's not obviously a bad game or anything, but it's clear that I won't enjoy it.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: ***½ If Contra and Metal Slug had a love child. I'm definitely more in the Metal Slug camp, so it's welcome to see some of its influences make it in, notably the vehicles and muffled voice effects. The devs get it. Each of the five levels is technically checkpointed, so it avoids the pitfalls of the classic Contra games too. It's highly recommended if you enjoy these sorts of games, but if you don't, you could probably just play Metal Slug and not miss out on much. Side note, I feel like there's some Turrican influence in here too at parts.

Time Spent: ~30 min Rating: *** I'm normally not a big fan of rhythm games, and this hasn't converted me. Still, it does some smart things. There's a synchronization procedure that accounts for the input delay on both your controller and your TV/Stereo. The gameplay uses the same rhythm based system most of the time, but there are moments that let you play bits of the games it parodies. Each level also transitions between games it riffs on. I'd imagine this one would be fun enough to see through.

Take-Two reportedly shuts down Roll7 and Intercept Games, Private Division suffers layoffs WWW.GAMESINDUSTRY.BIZ More details have emerged about the ongoing layoffs at Take-Two Interactive, with reports suggesting the publisher has …

Prime is giving away The Forgotten City this month. Also, Fallout 3 Definitive, Tomb Raider GOTY and Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars.

Time Spent: ~45 min Rating: **** Yup, this is everything I hoped it would be. It's frenetic, doesn't feel unfair, and lets you retry rooms until you've completed them. Looks super stylish with lots of bloom, warping and pixel shading effects. I wasn't expecting story bits in between missions, but they're welcome diversions from the action. Play it, it's awesome, one of the easiest recommendations so far.

Time Spent: ~10 min Rating: *½ Beat 'em up sidescroller. Enemies give you pickups when killed that either serve as your health bar (Sonic rings style) or can be redeemed towards special moves, which feels like bad design to me. Movement is a bit janky in its looseness, which equally applies to an automatic double jump if you hold jump. The pixel art isn't awful, but is still far too zoomed in for this type of game. Music is trash. It's trying to be a better game, which reminds me, I should play Katana Zero next.

Time Spent: 1 hour Rating: ** I've tried to get into this one two or three times now. It's probably just not for me. Choose your own adventure style game with a few more RPG systems. It gives me flashbacks to how much I disliked Banner Saga's choice system, at least on the surface. Maybe there's a good game here, but I generally don't like being punished for making choices out of arbitrary selections. Add to that a text centric presentation, and it's really not my cup of tea. Well reviewed though, so more power to you if you can get into it.

I might give Oxenfree 2 and Poinpy a shot one day. See Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon and TMNT are up there too.

Time Spent: 45 minutes Rating: ***½ Good combat mechanics and an interesting setting where all the NPCs and your character can run out of juice, and presumably die. There is a stamina meter, but you can upgrade it to not go down when you run, which seems like a smart upgrade considering the game timer. The only downside so far is that the visuals are a bit lackluster. I dislike pixelated dithered effects in games today, they're totally unnessicary, especially when it's using bloom and such anyways. Jack Move is a better looking game with a similar aesthetic. Anyone who enjoyed this would do well to check that game out too.

Time Spent: 40 minutes Rating: ***½ Back to this thread after some time away wrapping up FF7 Rebirth. ScourgeBringer feels like you're a pissed off wasp dashing through the air stinging the shit out of everything. Enemies don't hurt you on contact, only when attacking you directly, so you can go ham most of the time. I just question the balance. Your gun's ammo is really sparse, and the persistent upgrades are nice but you'll be doing lots of runs. And as cool as it is that heavy metal kicks in when you're wrecking stuff, the visual presentation is a bit too sparse for my taste. Still, it’s a thrill.

What’s that Steampunk FPS again? I’d like to see more of that.

First month I accidentally didn’t pause Humble Choice. Oh well.

One of the must play JRPGs of the past decade or two. In Remake, you get to revisit many of the same places in FF7 creatively reimagined. But with Rebirth they had almost a blank canvas since the PS1 game's overworld is very sparse. FF7 Rebirth realizes it as something closer to a Xenoblade game, with more unique traversal abilities and less high level monsters roaming around to destroy you. That ends up working out quite well, it makes the game feel nice and breezy. There are Ubisoft like towers and map markers, but the only interactions actions that truly felt like busywork to me were the combat challenges and some of the mini-games. Whether you enjoy the mini-games or not depends on your taste, but they'll seldom be a wall to your progress if you're not a completionist. Pacing is one of the game's strong suits. I can't think of another open world game that throws you new mechanics (and mini-games) so frequently. But that also doesn't leave much time for any one particular thing to be fleshed out outside of the card game, Queen's Blood. The game's excellent combat system makes up for that fact. Having more characters to play with than Remake makes a big difference, as does a greatly simplified weapon leveling system. The amount of side quests is also perfect. And the linear bits impressively feel like nothing was scaled back or undercooked. As far as respecting the legacy while also giving fans something new, it walks a tight line but mostly succeeds. The things that made the ending of Remake controversial will remain controversial here, even though their impact on the through-line as we know it is debatable. I could see some of the other twists and additions getting on the nerves of some purists. But ultimately, they're all in character, and maybe even better considered than the original in terms of consistency. It does soften the impact of certain scenes and spoils a bit of what's next, especially with THAT scene, so playing through the original first is still recommended. Rebirth can't help spoiling the things fans of FF7 would already know, sometimes needlessly. What could make the game even better? An honest to goodness jump button akin to Xenoblade X. The climbing is pretty janky here, and I just want the freedom to bounce around without the game blocking me from climbing something. 9.5/10 2024 Games Final Fantasy XVI - 8.5/10 Tinykin - 8/10 Evan's Remains - 7.5/10 Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII: Reunion - 7/10 Castle of Illusion Remake - 7.5/10 FF7R Episode Intermission - 8.5/10 Telsagrad 2 - 7.5/10 Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth - 9.5/10

You’ll be fine. Once you beat it, go back and watch the big moment in question in the original.

Rolled credits, fantastic game. It's been a long time since I played og FF7. The feelings of loss and hopelessness in Rebirth definitely don't hit quite as hard. Rebirth realizes that it can't live up to the first time the story is told, so takes things in a different direction to flesh out these events, but in doing so spoils where og FF7 goes later. It's realistic to what most of us know about these characters, and doesn’t feel cheap as a result. So long as you can understand most of the split universe stuff as sort of a side note. (for now?) There are some interesting wrinkles left, particularly: I'd still recommend playing and finish the OG before you get to the final chapters of this game. The og hits harder, Rebirth instead softens it by fleshing out the context, both with new additions and references to future events. Oh, and Intergrade DLC is recommended as well. There's a few sequences with Yuffie in Rebirth that won't land at all if you haven't played it. Whereas you can still enjoy Rebirth fine enough if you've only played remake (though og FF7's impact will be dampened).

None of that was known when the 360 launched. Microsoft got in front, it would have paid off regardless. I don’t think another 360 gen would come easy, but they could do it if they leveraged their assets in a meaningful way in a launch year. Come out swinging, instead of deflated. It sets the narrative. It could also be argued that their new multiplatform push would make people hesitant to buy their machine regardless. So they’re sort of keeping themselves in this position. Games Pass and Series S were both great illustrations that the value play doesn’t drive hardware sales. They focused on the wrong things. And their one big software bet, Halo Infinite, generated a bunch of question marks with a delay instead of earnest hype.

Couple counterpoints to this: The 360 went first and it ended up working out fine for Microsoft. The games industry fought the idea of generational shifts hard this time with an extended cross-gen period. I don’t expect that to change going forward. Instead we’d see an Xbox Next use graphical options designed for PC builds. And it’s indies who are having a harder time justifying Xbox ports. Not the EA, Ubisofts and such. Things are still far from Wii U bad.

Let’s go with Mario Wonder then. Was what I wanted for the holidays and didn’t get. Digital works!

Awesome! I’ll have to think on it a bit. 180 from this thread… I want a new fun game to play in front of my young daughter. Debating between Kirby and the Forogtten Land and Mario Wonder. @stepee any thoughts? Either that or I go with PoP Lost Crown.