TheMightyEthan

One can dream.

xCloud is launching in beta on September 15, with over 100 streamable games, as part of Gamepass Ultimate. Even your saves will transfer back and forth between local and streaming sessions. We'll have to see how it performs, but I'm pretty sure they just put the nail in the coffin of me ever buying Xbox hardware again. Or probably a gaming PC for that matter. Oh, and unlike PS5, xCloud supports DS4. ?

That game is only exactly what it wants to be, but it bes it perfectly.

Yeah, my first thought was that he's probably ignoring the ones that are helping him.

I heard on the radio today that 60% of Americans say we're doing worse than the rest of the world at controlling coronavirus, and my reaction was "only 60%?"

I mean it sucks, but Sony owns the Spiderman license, so... I'm shocked to hear you liked Conviction better. I like Conviction, but it's a very different kind of game. As far as the PC version of Double Agent, PCGW says it's still full of game-breaking bugs...

What happened to the hug-the-cartels policy?

What didn't you like about next-gen Double Agent? I've replayed it a couple times over the years (although it's still probably been close to 10 years) and I've always loved it.

Maybe the graphics suck so they can hit 120 fps...

Was it? I played both, because I didn't get a 360 until later, but that's the only version I really remember.

So 343 says they've "heard the comments" and they have "work to do" on the graphics. But honestly, short of completely overhauling the entire materials system, which seems implausible at this stage, I don't know what they could do to make it look less like Mega Bloks Halo.

Oh definitely. Blacklist was okay, but the originals were definitely better. Though honestly I think my favorite was Double Agent (the PS360 version, I don't remember what the OGXbox/PS2 version was like, except that it was different).

5% of the population, 25% of the cases What do you mean we're doing bad?

Probably they'll go action-infiltration, like Mission Impossible.

I agree the textures are low resolution, but that's not what makes it look like plastic, it's the lighting system. Halo 1 had low resolution textures and it didn't look like everything was made of plastic. For me at least the plasticky look is more of a problem than the textures being low resolution.

Digital Foundry has an analysis of why the graphics look so flat: https://www.eurogamer.net/amp/digitalfoundry-2020-halo-infinite-gameplay-demo-analysis Boils down to a design decision to use real time dynamic lighting, combined with the type of materials they're using.

Yeah, I had a whole fucking network of those built throughout the mountains. They're great.

Okay, so I just watched it again on my 4k TV (wanted to see what it would look like if I was actually playing it), and I'm a little less sour on it than I was before. I still think everything looks too much like it's made of plasticine, but the gameplay looks more like Halo than 4 & 5, so I'm starting to get cautiously optimistic. I'm still not buying it, but I'm looking forward to playing it on PC gamepass.

I agree with you in general, but man Ghost of Tsushima's world is huge and awesome. Sure it's cut & pasted in a lot of places (eg identical farmhouses) but it's fairly well hidden, so it rarely feels cut & pasted.

Yeah, that's pretty ridiculous. Even Halo 3 looked better in a lot of ways:

Dragon Quest XI S and Final Fantasy VII Remake I've been jonesing for something new to play on my Switch, and after playing the Dragon Quest XI demo I thought that was really my jam, so I decided to get it. I had a $20 Gamestop credit (from trading in stuff, I was going to use it on Ghost of Tsushima but then I forgot my card when I went to pick it up...), so I went to order from there, and turns out they're doing a sale where if you buy a new game you get a used game 40% off. The 40% off knocked FF7R down to $32, which was low enough for me to bite. I will never ever ever get my backlog below 4 games...

This game looks cool.

Hmm. Well one benefit is that I was thinking of getting the Switch version (mostly for mobile play, but also the extra content), and under ordinary circumstances this would have made me hesitate but the fact it's just a port of the Switch version means I can still get that one without feeling torn. ?

Yep. The Halo 5 story was stupid, but they needed to resolve it. Either that or they needed to full-on reboot. This soft-reboot nonsense is the worst of both worlds. Also, that "gameplay" was obviously so scripted, everything so perfectly choreographed, that I don't even feel like it indicates what it would be like to actually play. It was more like a first-person cutscene. And the grappling hook is still stupid.

Yeah, I was not impressed with the graphics, other than when the elevator started to rise I was impressed with how much detail was maintained into the distance. But overall yeah it doesn't look any better than current gen PC games to me. And I'm only on a GTX 1080 so it's not even like I have a bleeding-edge card I'm comparing it to.