toxicitizen

Konami on suicide watch right now. Holy shit!

It absolutely is worse than Steam. But the main problem is that we already have Steam. It's a redundant layer of DRM/account and it's not particularly good. Same goes for other shit like Rockstar Social Club. It doesn't bring anything useful to the table that Steam doesn't already provide. It benefits no one but Ubisoft/Rockstar/whoever else runs it. It's not going to keep me from playing a game I'm interested in but I sure as hell wish I didn't have to deal with it.

Give it time. Their shitty store isn't doing well, and given their history it's incredibly likely that they're only doing this to push their new OS. I wouldn't be surprised to see that initiative die down within a couple years. Also, new South Park game is confirmed to be uplay. That's a bummer. Was really hoping it would be Steamworks like the first one.

Watch_Dogs 2 gameplay demo was great. Definitely looking forward to that.

Technically, that would be 1.0 + 1.0 = 2.0

Well, the EA guy wouldn't shut the fuck up about "Play". That's the only thing that comes to mind, I've only been paying half attention to both pressers, though.

The Dragon Quest Heroes port was.. okay. Far from perfect and a bit unoptimized but overall decent. As long as Berserk isn't a step back, I'll probably bite. Same for the Attack on Titan musou. edit: oh and https://twitter.com/BethesdaStudios/status/742194847101095936 Skyrim Special Edition free on Steam for anyone that owns the Legendary Edition (the game + all DLC). Pretty cool move on Bethesda's part, definitely didn't expect that from them. Especially considering the work they put in improving the visuals.

Oh also, not technically an E3 announcement but there's a Berserk musou coming PS3/PS4/PSV for Japan and PS4/PSV/Steam for the west.

Welp, there it is. Jason Schreier was right. Looks like an interesting game but I'm not sure why they didn't rename it. It's not like a Prey reboot is inherently more interesting than a new IP, which this looks to be in all but name.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel. Finished it a couple days ago. Man, and I thought Trails in the Sky SC was long. This one took me a little over 82 hours, and that was without going out of my way to look for hidden side-quests and stuff. Overall, it's about a 50/50 mix of being exactly like the Trails in the Sky games while also taking a completely different overall structure. It even takes some pretty obvious inspiration from Persona, of all things. Unfortunately, it's not without issues. I went in expecting something similar to TitS FC, where the pacing is very slow and very little happens for the first half of the game. And that's pretty much exactly how the game is. Halfway though and you're still finding out about main characters' backstories and it's great! Almost everyone gets their time to shine and ends up being much deeper than the archetype they're initially introduced as. That's probably the game's greatest strength. The problem is that while FC is a slow and laid back experience, I really wouldn't say that it had pacing issues. The same cannot be said for Trails of Cold Steel. So here's the deal. The game takes place at Thors Military Academy (just a fancy way of saying high school), and every chapter is structured the same way. First you get a free day, during which you have a few (generally) non-combat side-quests to complete as well as "bonding points" to spend. There's where the Persona inspiration comes in. You spend a bonding point by hanging out with a party member, which strengthens your "bond" and makes it more effective when you link up with them during combat. It's not the most original or exciting thing ever but it works and serves as a good way to provide character development that you can ignore or dig into as much as you like. Or, if you're like me, allows you to focus on the characters you like and ignore those you don't. Then you head to the old schoolhouse for a little bit of dungeon crawling and that ends your free day. After that, the story moves forward a bit and you go on a field study. Basically, you travel to a different town for a few days where you'll need to accomplish a set of tasks and then a bunch of exciting plot happens there. Here's the problem: the further you get into the game, the more interesting and exciting the plot events get. But then when it's over you go back to school and have to complete these menial tasks again for an hour or two before you can go on the next field study. Around the 50 hours mark, that shit got real old. When FC really got going, it kept at it until the end of the game. Here, you've got this stop and start pacing that really starts to hurt the game and kills all the momentum of the story. It got to a point where I just wanted to rush through the beginning of each chapter because the idea of running around for an hour doing errands for the student council followed by another hour of exploring the old schoolhouse started feeling like a waste of time when all I really wanted was to continue the damn story. It's a shame, really, because for the first 50 hours I was enjoying the game a lot more than I did FC on my first run. Even when little of consequence was happening, I was having a blast getting to know the characters (and running into characters from the Sky games, too), taking in all the world building and lore and hearing all these references to events from the past games and what impact they had on the overall world. It sucks but the game is simply way too long for its own good and structured in a way that harms the narrative. Luckily, I'm hearing that Cold Steel II changes the game structure quite a bit (and after that ending, how could it not??), so I'm really looking forward to the sequel regardless. And oh man, that ending! I got a pretty major reveal sort of retroactively spoiled when I thought "Wait, what if..." and then instantly remembered seeing artwork on youtube a while back when I was listening to the sequel's soundtrack that pretty much confirmed I was spot on. So that was a bummer but whatever, so I kept playing, waiting for the reveal and expecting the game to end on it. Then it happened and... all kinds of crazy shit started happening! The last couple hours of the game alone made it worth enduring the boring parts just to get to it. It's not a cliffhanger quite as painful as the one from FC but it's a cliffhanger alright. So, yeah. Really looking forward to continuing the story this fall. If the jump in quality is similar to the FC->SC one (and I've seen people calling CSI their least favorite of the entire series while also calling CSII one of the better ones), then holy shit Cold Steel II is going to be something else! And then there's also Trails in the Sky the 3rd coming in 2017! It's kinda crazy to think that about a year ago we were still waiting for TitS SC and it was looking very likely that it would be the second and last Kiseki game released in english. Whereas a year from now, we're only going to be missing two games out of seven. It looked pretty hopeless for a few years there but now is a really good time to be a Trails fan!

Sony has finally confirmed the existence of PS4 Neo but also said it won't be at E3. Man, first the NX and now this. This E3 is getting less and less exciting. I really hope there's going to at least be some big surprise game announcements.

You must hate books.

The Steam release of 999 is the perfect way to start! Although, I really hope it's the original DS version. They made an iOS port that stripped out all the puzzles and it sounds... not great. There's a particular scene that was made specifically to have its full impact on a dual-screen handheld, so I really hope they worked something out to get the full game working on PC. Well, it is a VN, mostly. It's very much like Danganronpa where it's like 70% VN/story and 30% gameplay. Only instead of these Phoenix Wright-like trials here it's escape the room puzzles. The main draw is obviously the story. The difference is that, unlike DR, Zero Escape is structured like your typical VN where you have branching paths and what not. Only, it uses that in a really clever, mind-bending kinda way. If you just pick a path, complete it and leave it at that, you very much haven't finished the game. You're meant to clear all the paths before you can see the bigger picture (at least, that's true in VLR. IIRC, 999 only requires you to get a couple specific endings before you can unlock the true one). Hard to say much more without spoiling but, for what it's worth, I wasn't really a VN guy until I played this series. Hell, I still have very little interest in playing "pure" VNs. Spike Chunsoft's approach where the reading is broken up by actual gameplay bits and the story is batshit insane is just much more enjoyable for me. To be fair, 999 was made for the original DS so yeah, the visuals are just basic low res sprites, which isn't that great. VLR made the jump to 3D models, so it's a lot better as far as presentation goes. Take a look at Zero Time Dilemma's screenshots to get an idea what to expect. I think VLR was on PS+ a while back, so if you've been subbed and redeeming all the games for a while, you might have the Vita version. Could be worth checking out if you wanna give it another shot. A lot of people would have you believe you absolutely need to play 999 first but I don't necessarily agree. You'll certainly get more out of it if you have, especially the last 20mins or so, but you can still play and enjoy the vast majority of the game just fine. Other than a few specific references and returning characters, it's kind of its own isolated story (and leads right into Zero Time Dilemma).

9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, aka Zero Escape Vol. 1, was just teased for a Steam release! Seems pretty definitive at this point, I'd expect an official announcement in the coming days. They teased Danganronpa's Steam release similarly and announced it just a few days later. It was likely to happen but I'm surprised to see it so soon considering how non-committal they were when asked about the possibility of 999 and VLR also coming to Steam. I figured they were going to wait and see how Zero Time Dilemma performed on Steam before making any decision.

Yeah, the one thing PC gamers can truly be thankful to MS for is their complete ineptitude at replicating Apple's success.

I can see why some people might find it useful to have one app that runs on multiple platforms, but the end goal for MS is clearly some kind of walled garden app store. That shit might make sense for phones and tablets but it has no business being on an open platform like PC, especially considering how closed the format is. If this were to really take off, there would be nothing stopping them from not supporting regular Win32 executables in future versions of Windows. I mean, they referred to them as "legacy apps" at one point. It's pretty obvious where they want this to go.

I know, I said 2000s, not 00s. Maybe it was ambiguous but I didn't mean that particular decade specifically. IIRC, Prey had a fairly long development cycle. It came out in 2006 but it had more in common with the late 90s 3D Realms/id kinda shooters than it did with the modern military stuff that was starting to take off around that time.

So, the article itself is about Fable Legends and the closure of Lionhead but there's some pretty goddamn interesting quotes in there. Sounds like the Win 10 store is a complete fucking disaster sales-wise. Music to my fucking ears. Going by the numbers on SteamSpy, 98% on Steam would put WinStore sales of RotTR at about 15K, which is abysmal. Hopefully it'll get to the point where they can't justify releasing exclusively on it anymore. Or that devs actively fight against it. I want Quantum Break on Steam, damn it! At this point, if a game is exclusive to the Win store it might as well not be on PC, as far as I'm concerned. More realistically, if it keeps going like this I expect MS to shut down their PC gaming endeavors entirely claiming that "the audience isn't there" or some other complete bullshit. But honestly, even that is better than that fucking UWP/UWA bullshit they're trying so hard to push. Really glad to see them falling flat on their face with that one. It's good to see that after GFWL people no longer trust them, deservedly so.

Wait, it wasn't cross-buy? So you actually bought it twice?!

That particular bit wasn't aimed at you specifically. Just an attitude I've been seeing a lot online lately. But, more importantly WHYYYYYYYYYYYY?

Oh, right. I was messing around in the settings yesterday and didn't think that it might break this. I think it hasn't been displaying properly for a little while, though. Oh and I want a new Splinter Cell!

Oh yeah, forgot about that. That too!

Well, first off I think the hype for Prey 2 is less about the original and more about what they showed a few years ago looking genuinely cool and unique. Then all that shit between Bethesda and Human Head went down and the game was taken away, so obviously now all the little boys and girls want it more than anything else simply because they can't have it. The original Prey wasn't particularly amazing but at the time it was a noteworthy PC game tech-wise. Think Half-Life 2, Doom 3, etc. It looked really good, had some impressive tech for the time and was admittedly a pretty novel concept (indians in space, and Prey 2 was going to be cowboys in space). But beyond that it was your typical early 2000s sci-fi shooter. I only played through it once and thought it was alright but it didn't leave a lasting impression or anything like that. The opening scene is still cool as hell, though. But yeah, if Arkane are indeed still working on whatever became of Prey 2, I honestly hope they're not going to call it Prey 2. When it changed hands, they most certainly rebooted it completely and it might as well just be its own new IP. It's not like the Prey name in and of itself is a major selling point, anyway. If anything, calling it Prey 2 would probably work against it if it ends up being a completely different thing. It's just asking to dig up a controversy from a few years back that mostly died down at this point.

Honestly, when Nintendo said they weren't announcing the NX my excitement kinda died down. Not because I was particularly hyped for it but rather because a new system reveal is always more interesting than just new games. Beyond that, don't really care enough to make predictions. Instead, here's what I'm most hoping to see: The Evil Within 2 announcement Resident Evil 7 announcement something Devil May Cry related (two of the main VA/mo-cap dudes have been known to be working on something together for a little while, DMC5 is the popular theory) finally some official details on PS4K release date for Dragon Quest VII 3DS And, uh, I guess that's about it? Can't really think of anything else. XSEED have already made their E3 announcements, which was one of the main things I was looking forward to. Most things relevant to my interests have either already been announced or are unlikely to be revealed at E3.

Well, it's Cowboy... Anyway, just watched the 20mins vid and I'm on board with it so far. Not sure what all the negativity is about other than "hurr durr ubisoft".