Thursday Next

It's a weird one. MS can do what they want with their money obviously, and Bethesda can do what they want with their... company? Neither of them owe it to anyone to make the games available on a competing platform, but I understand the consumer dissatisfaction. If I was a platform owner I wouldn't buy the likes of Bethesda, Squeenix or whatever, as Ethan pointed out above, you don't *gain* anything since the games were already on your platform, you pick up the enormous tab of developing the games that you used to just collect free money from, and you have the consumer sentiment hit that devalues your brand and the acquired brand. Better to pick up smaller indie studios who have IP that is cheaper to develop, fresher ideas, and people tend to perceive as a more positive story.

Came across a really annoying bug where a switch that was supposed to open a door that closes on a timer would "switch" but not actually *do* anything. Spent about an hour reposition stuff to see if I was supposed to put the the dome in different places before I gave up and googled the solution, then after seeing that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, googled the bug. Had to restart the level and finally finished the game. That's the real problem with puzzle games that don't give you the remotest clue of what you are supposed to be doing, there is no way to know if the thing is actually broken. Anyway, it's done now. Not doing the time trial trophies, so it has been deleted from the hard-drive.

Yeah, it's definitely soft-mandatory, and that 100% sucks.

I agree that WT punishment for dying in body form is daft. If only because it adds a pointless trip to the nexus after every boss. My biggest issue with it is that going to PBWT is easy, just use an ephemeral stone and die lots. Going to white is so much harder since you need to either beat a boss, of which there are a limited number, or beat an invader which requires you to be in body form, which means that if you get ganked, you've done the opposite of what you were trying to achieve. If using stones to regain body form gave you WWT then that would be ok. You could use a stone, go to nexus, die, go back, use stone etc. As it is, I played through the whole game in soul form with the cling ring. *shrug* It doesn't do a great job of explaining how things work, like you can use a key on a door in the 1:1 scale world, but you can also use that key in 1:2 scale world as well.

Is there a dark mode?

Same. Surprised me in a good way.

I think the worst offender for path to boss is 4-2, closely followed by 5-1. Most of the rest of the levels have a fair shortcut although it took me ages to find it in 5-2. I think the payoff tends to be that the corresponding boss is (relatively) easy. I guess the devs consider a failed backstab part of the learning experience?

I can't tell you how excited I am to use a bow in Horizon Forbidden West. Hearing the creak from the controller, feeling the tension in the string on the trigger, rumble increasing as you hold the draw.... "Immersive" gets overused a bit, but damn will it be true for some things.

Think that is fair enough. It's great for PS4 owners to get a recent, decent game. PS5 owners can still play it, and we get Macaque[sic] which looks great (to me).

I bounced off it on PS3. *glares at Flame Lurker* Platinumed it on PS5. You. Got. Dis.

Great that you got it sorted. I do find the PS4/PS5 version UX to be pretty awful. But at least it is there I guess?

I have not, and will not be hooking up my PSVR to my PS5 (for similar reasons to Mr Jack - fuck moving furniture and dealing with rat-king cable catastrofucks), so also cannot help with this...

I'm fine with some combos and stuff, I just really didn't enjoy BOTWs pacing, especially in terms of resource management, so wouldn't want to get into that again. A more pure action experience will be nice after the more cerebral Ace Attorney games.

Refrigerated avos should be fine, just make sure you take them out waaaay in advance of eating them otherwise they will just taste of cold. (Same goes for tomatoes, they need to come up to room temperature to have any flavour at all).

Might give it a go. I've nearly finished Phoenix Wright trilogy and could do with some fairly mindless button bashery.

What even is the game? I've seen the art style is BOTW like but no idea what the gameplay is like. Guess I should hit up YouTube. Edit: So it's Dynasty Warriors?

It sounds like we're going to get at least one more year of use out of our current PSVR setup, I'm quite happy to upgrade next year at some point. Especially if that means internal tracking (no cameras) and a cable plugged into the front of the PS5.

https://blog.playstation.com/2021/02/23/introducing-the-next-generation-of-vr-on-playstation/ PSVR 2 announced. Not wireless, but just the one cable (I hope that means no separate box) would definitely make it more viable for me as I would want to be able to plug and play, then unplug and put away without having to rewire my entire living room.

Agree. I think almost every game could benefit from being pared down a bit. There's so much filler because you have to have "a sprawling open world" and "over 120 hours of content" when a lot of games would be much better for being "only" 10 hours long and having a world that actually had interesting stuff in it and a quick way to get there.

That's more like it!

Needs more Techno Syndrome.

There's a thing a lot of games with health bars do where the first 80% of your health bar actually constitutes like... 60% of your HP. So when you think your health is very low, you actually have say 10% more health than you think you do. I wonder if this is something that Control does not do, so you really only get that low health warning when you are actually very low on health? I only suggest this because I found in Control that I also found it difficult to get myself out of the nearly dead zone. I think the other reason this doesn't really work is that health in Control is via pickups rather than hiding. Red screening is fine if you just need to hide for a few seconds and it clears, it encourages you to take a break till you can see clearly. When you have to actually be aggressive and get kills to get health drops, it stops being a handy reminder and becomes a huge hinderance.

Apparently Texas grid "independence" is a deliberate bird flip to the rest of the states. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-environment/2021/02/15/391519/why-does-texas-have-its-own-power-grid/

Ugh. So basically you are never playing that game again lol.