ShreddieMercury

Very strange to me that there was supposedly so much pinned to the success of a game that, before release, didn't seem to impress all that much.  To me this just looked like another generic co-op looter shooter.  Is it disappointing coming from Arkane given their past output?  Definitely.  Was it expected to review extremely well and represent the dawn of a new Xbox golden age?  It was?  What the fuck?

The disconnect between how this game has been received and what it actually is and was advertised to be, doesn't make sense to me.  It certainly seems like it wasn't ready, but neither was Jedi Survivor, or a number of 2023 games.  But in those games the rays were traced I guess?

Just a reminder that games criticism is broken beyond repair and now just exists as hollow marketing.  Most critics don't have the analytical or creative faculties to properly assess video games across all of their dimensions.  And the modern gaming audience likewise doesn't have the ability to read or think about games beyond the score they're given (7, 8, or 9). 

This game has always looked very bad and very disappointing to me, but I also can't take any scores seriously for anything coming out given the state of reviewing games in 2023.

"Fandom" of any sort requires strict obedience, and I've found that movie/comics/video game nerds are more than happy to oblige.  The lack of independent thought is striking.  Console wars stuff though seems like it was really perpetuated early on by younger people who could only own one system.  But then it's just... stuck around.  And it's pathetic.

I've been considering getting a PS5 since they're so easy to find now.  I sold my PS4 Pro a while back and am wanting to upgrade (and I really want to play Returnal).  Really basic questions but I'm unsure about the following:

- Can I just sign into my existing Playstation ID? 

- Can I download any and all PS4 games that I bought digitally?  And is there still some confusion regarding versions of games with enhancements or not and which to download? 

- If I sign up for PS+, are some games downloadable or is streaming the only option?  Is it just PS1/2/3 games that require streaming, or is it all of them?

- I don't like Horizon or GoW, but is there anything else I missed from this extremely slim generation that I should look into that's PS5 only?

- Is HDR a bit borked like I've read or is that more of a game-by-game issue?  I've read about lots of supposed HDR issues, but wasn't sure if that was a system level thing or not.  I've been pretty spoiled with Xbox/Dolby Vision/Auto-HDR stuff up until now and haven't needed to configure anything specifically.

Thank you!

Wow, big talk coming from a graphics whore (as you know).

Remedy rank:

Max Payne 2 > Alan Wake + American Nightmare > Control > Max Payne > Quantum Break.

Of all modern games to single out as "soulless", an immaculately crafted remake of one of the best and most transcendent video games ever is baffling.  It's also fucking stupid.  In the landscape of modern "AAA" games, this is one of the few that I would say has any soul at all.

I have three Dreamcasts and a bunch of peripherals and games.  It's my favorite video game console and I consider JSR my most seminal videogame experience.

I would kill for updates to any and all Sega games from that era.  But the spirit of those games - the concentrated creative and artistic explosion and lack of regard for broad commercial appeal - is long dead.  Sega went out on a creative high that likely will never be matched in the industry, and today they are the same company in name only.

These being "super games" can only mean that they will be either mobile or service based experiences, if they exist at all.  I can't think of anything less true to the spirit of Jet Set Radio than for it to be launched as a conformist, blatantly commercial product filled with the industry's worst tendencies.

Did anybody start NG+?  I'm debating whether to do that, or to just play it again fresh.  I'm always sort of opposed to NG+ since I find the fun in a lot of these games to be the gradual progression of upgrading and buying new items.  I started a fresh save but am having second thoughts about how to play through it again.

Beat Hardcore mode finally after 22.5 hours.  This is easily my favorite game from this "gen", or whatever you can call it at this point.   Just phenomenal in every respect and I don't have any real criticism to offer.  It took an all-time great game, made sensible and fun changes, and somehow made it even more replayable and dynamic.

These REmakes are one of my sole bright spots in modern gaming, and from my perspective RE4 is maybe the pinnacle.  The original RE4 was an unrepentant video game, made in the era just before the industry was dominated by western developers that sadly (to me) steered hard into a cinematic style that minimized the excess, breathless variety, and focus on gameplay that categorized the sixth generation.

I'm having an amazing time playing this, and it's so fun to discover how much is different or reinterpreted.  People here are really blitzing through it; I just got to chapter 7 after about nine or so hours, though a lot of that was spent dying in the past couple of chapters on Hardcore, which really ramped up around the:

The difficulty feels well tuned so far, but that fight was brutal.  It really did help the systems click for me though, and once I was fully in the zone with parrying, crowd control, and position management, the gameplay kicked into high gear.  This is different enough from the original that it feels distinctly its own thing, but I do feel that it retains that game's best aspects and refines them in clever ways. 

RE4 is lightning in a bottle and, like a handful of the most monumental games, it may never be replicated.  But the respect for its legacy is evident here, and I'm so thankful that we get to experience it again with fresh eyes.

Playing on XSX, the game looks fantastic and I didn't touch anything in the display options.  It defaulted to the non-RT performance mode and I haven't had a single noticeable hitch.  I also don't think I would have noticed any sort of deadzone issue unless I read about it.  That's the kind of thing I always assume just differs between games, and it only take a short time to get used to how aiming in feels in different games.  I increased the acceleration slightly but haven't thought about it since.

I appreciate DF's work but looking at games with that sort of microscope, especially ones that already look and perform exceptionally well to my eye, seems like such a joyless exercise.  It's like watching a movie and only focusing on the continuity errors.

2 hours ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

Finally get to dive into this game and experience it for myself. Goddamn it's been difficult avoiding shit on the internet. Especially since it leaked like, a week early and there were full playthroughs on Youtube three days before the game officially launched. While it was easy to avoid those, the youtubers I watch were not only launching into game footage sporadically, but they were doing late game footage on top of that. Really annoying.

 

And before anyone says "it's a remake you already know what's going to happen," I played the first chapter last night and it's already pretty different from the original. The settings and general events are the same, but even in that first chapter they already expanded the village and threw in a new enemy in a spot that didn't have one, and that surprised me. I don't know about anyone else, but I would've been bummed if I saw that in a video somewhere.

Agreed, I hadn't assumed that this game would be too spoilable, but even a short way into the game there are all sorts of fantastic left turns.  We'll see how the rest of the game is, but this is maybe the quintessential example so far of how to remake a classic game.  Where I found the Dead Space remake pretty safe and dull, this is quite the opposite.

5 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

Shoot I didn’t even think about this is there NG+ in this? That’s my only quibble with the 2 remake…

Yes there is, I believe the developers confirmed it.

Everything about this game rules.  The knife durability is awesome because it forces you to be strategic about positioning and how to fight groups of enemies, which are so far more frequent and more aggressive.  It just adds another strategic layer on what is already a very dynamic gameplay system.  Playing through the first Village square section multiple times because I kept dying, I was pretty amazed at how different it was each time.  I saw all sorts of things I didn't notice in the demo.  The game really pushes you in these fights and it makes for such awesome, variable encounters.  This in no way invalidates the original game, which has a brilliant and unique control scheme and will always remain an all-time great.  This remake is surprisingly different and feels like playing an all new game in many respects.  It's the best recent RE game, and one of the best overall of the past several years, and I'm only a few chapters in.

Also the typewriter save music remix...

Played this for a couple hours this morning on Xbox since you can swap timezones to New Zealand easily.  It is staggeringly good.  Anybody with any sort of affinity for the original game is going to be blown away I think.  Playing on Hardcore (which is recommended if you've beaten the first game), I was absolutely stunned by the village section and what comes shortly after.  Very excited to hear everyone's impressions, but so far this is even more of a dagger-to-the-heart nostalgia bomb than RE2, with some of, if not the best feeling gameplay in the series.

Never done the trick of switching your time zone to NZ but I'm excited enough for this that it's worth a try.  Anybody know how consistently that works, or if they've announced time-zone specific unlocks for this?

5 hours ago, Paperclyp said:

What platform are ya’ll getting this on? My pc’s performance with it is just inconsistent enough that it gives me pause. 

Xbox Series X for me.

19 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

Interesting, but for me the second is just as inconsistent as the first. There was never any fear of death at all for me in RE4, that's for sure. Oh no! A game over screen! I don't think I was ever nearly as immersed in it as you, it was a cheesy action game for me from day 1. There's also the issue with macabre itself being defined as being basically "horror (mainly from death and injury)" which is, in this context, just saying horror with an extra definitional layer.

 

I dunno, it's definitely all quite subjective, not helped at all by horror movies often being quite intentionally campy, meaning even the tone is up for grabs. What I will say is that if I was asking for a good horror game and had never played RE4, and was subsequently recommended RE4. I'd probably beat it and love it, but I would never, ever ask that person for horror recommendations again.

 

In the end, it really doesn't matter, it's just a label, but I do think when labels expand too much they become much less useful for conversational shorthand, and we humans love categorizing things!

Well, you got me there because I didn't realize what the definition of "macabre" was.  But I still think that works; if something is overwhelmingly macabre, no matter the tone I would still at least consider it "horror" of some sort.  Shaun of the Dead isn't scary at all, but I would still call it a horror-comedy, rather than a comedy, for example.  But then you have the case of things that are scary that don't have what I would consider horror elements.  Watching Mulholland Drive for the first time is legitimately the most unnerved I've ever been watching a movie because the tone is so masterful, but it's definitely not horror.

For games, I had to put down Alien Isolation because it was so effectively terrifying and stressful.  Not that it really relates here, but just to recognize how intense I found that game.

I understand your point about categories, but not calling RE4 at the very least action-horror wouldn't make sense to me regardless of scares.

I bought this and pre-loaded it on Xbox.  Don't think I've ever done that.  Barring Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, which I have serious doubts about, this is the most exciting release of the year for me.

Playing RE4 on PS2 for the first time, I was so impressively immersed in the first village encounter that being killed by the chainsaw suddenly from behind startled me to the point that I had to put the game down for a few days.  So I would say, at least early on, that it's effective as a horror game.  As it wears on I think you get used to the tone and it gets to be pretty over the top so it definitely veers into camp, which is really fun.  I don't think horror is defined by whether somebody finds something scary, which is extremely inconsistent and subjective; to me it's about the macabre subject matter and deriving tension from a fear of death, so all RE games are horror.

For remakes, I hope they just do RE1 again in the new engine and call it a day.  That original mansion has always been the strongest setting, so seeing it recreated with the care and attention to detail of something like the RE2 remake would be amazing.

Yep.

I like the optimism of some posters in giving examples of how developers might utilize this tech to create interesting gameplay, but I'm much too cynical to think that all of the sudden we're going to see creative applications of lighting once the hardware is powerful enough.  Maybe if we get to the point that Nintendo cares about RTX then we'd see something genuinely interesting from a gameplay perspective, but my guess is that this will be mere window dressing for the same slate of games that we see endlessly in the AAA space.

To be clear, I have seen cool examples of this tech and I don't disagree that it can make a difference.  And plenty of people have money to burn on new consoles that offer only marginal differences, so have at it.  But comparing RTX to other similar graphical advances in prior console generations, I can't see this having anything but a minimal visual effect for the foreseeable future.

Ray-tracing is probably the least impressive graphical upgrade that I've seen in all my years of gaming.  Like lots of buzzy GFX terms through the ages, its impact on enhancing/innovating/improving gameplay is extremely minimal so far.  It can be impressive if somebody points it out and shows the difference between a RT and non-RT image, but once a game is in motion, I don't understand why we should give a shit.  In terms of actually affecting the image, to my eyes HDR makes more of a difference, but it also does not enhance the gameplay to any degree.  This gen is a bust.

On Xbox, make sure that you have Dolby Vision enabled.  I didn't realize that I had it turned off, and I had issues with HDR in games (particularly RE2).  For whatever reason it's superior on Xbox to HDR10 or whatever the other option is from my experience.  You can also calibrate HDR from within the Xbox settings.  On top of that, my TV has independent HDR settings and calibration as well.

Played through the demo last night and loved it.  Can't wait for the full game!