Julius

I saw that it was a tribute but...I just can't get behind brown shorts. I really can't. It just looks like a kit a little kid draws up because they're out of crayons in nursery to me. I respect your right to an opinion, and obviously it's subjective, but also: It probably would look cool if the Tintin brown trousers colour didn't make it look like Lukaku was running around like Donald Duck. True, but also, I don't think anyone else is doing a particularly good job of showing it off either!

Great win for the mighty mid-table Chelsea tonight....goodness do I hate so much of what Boehly's done since coming in. Nice to get a result against United at least. Anyways, flicking through the old Euros 2020(/21) posts in anticipation of this year's competition just being two months away (!). Given my early excitement and just how great the last Euros and recent World Cup both were (from a footballing POV because, well, the ethical side left much to be desired), expect this one to be painstakingly average Way more importantly: have you guys seen the kits for the nations taking part this year, which were worn in the most recent international friendlies? Those are some of the most disgusting tournament kits I've ever seen. Belgium's Away Kit needs to be tried at The Hague for crimes against my eyes. The only thing that makes all of it worse is that news a little while back that Nike's taking over as kit producer for Germany. Groß. (yes that's a stupid 'gross' joke, bite me)

I'm tearing up lmao. Waited, what, a decade for them to pick up the Barriss thread? And they just throw her in the thumbnail Super hype trailer, though I guess that's not a surprise. Tales of the Jedi was a bit of a mixed bag I found, hoping this is a little more consistent, but at least with Barriss confirmed it looks like it could stick to revealing some darker secrets like the Dooku episodes in TotJ. This and TPM anniversary screenings the same weekend, can't wait ETA:

So, this game had turned up in the Top 40 Most Played list for Xbox in Japan... ...leading some to believe that testing for the game is underway (and not hidden, for whatever reason?). If that is the case (and I can't think of any other reason it'd be turning up on a list like this), I can't help but chuckle at it turning up in the Top 40 - certainly speaks to how Xbox is doing over there

Ubisoft Forward returns live to LA on 10th June: Guess this is when we're waiting until for blowouts on Outlaws and that Japanese Assassin's Creed game.

Rated in South Korea: This news comes days after wishlist pages turned up on Xbox and PlayStation digital storefronts on April 1st. Soon™?

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is also hitting the service when it launches on April 23rd. Strong push for the service this month by the looks of things!

Booted this up yesterday after a combination of being in a bit of a gaming rut and some personal things have been going on meaning it's absolutely the best time to pull out an RGG game, and this was next up for me. Less than two hours in but some fast and loose thoughts: • RGG actually takes onboard feedback between games, and I LOVE it. After seeing Infinite Wealth had directions and the like attached to certain moves, turns out Judgment revamped the tailing missions: gone are the grating alarm that rings immediately after the target leaves your line of sight when the countdown begins and the set destinations for blending in, and in comes some music that's a bit more frantic and just holding down Triangle to start playing with your phone or inspecting the floor. One of my biggest complaints with the first game pretty much dealt with - the only aspect of which was the number of tailing missions, and I guess I'll see if and how that's been dealt with as the game goes on. • Judgment and Lost Judgment easily have two of the darkest openings of RGG games, and LJ takes my pick for top spot. If you're particularly squeamish the inciting incident will leave you feeling a bit faint. Respect them for it. • just out of the gates immediately setting the tone that is the balance of humour and tragedy. • they've brought it more into other games too but MY GOODNESS the production values are insane. Looks great, there's a part early on where you're seeing security cam footage with blurred faces in a news bulleting, it switches to POV handheld smartphone camera, etc., it's excellent. • the inciting incident is right up my alley, as I'm sure it would be for any RGG fan. It's delivered in such a dramatic way just...perfection. • Snake Style as the new fighting style is pretty great! It's about flowing in combat and then delivering rapid and deliberate strikes to incite fear into opponents. Very Karate Kid illegal moves sort of thing. • the skateboard, I can already tell, is going to be a SUPER welcome addition. • I'm very curious to see if the game delivers on its early promise to have an informative take on bullying. It seems like it might go that way based on the early parts of the game and the debrief of what I assume is going to be the main case, with some really interesting facts thrown out. Really hope it continues to go this way, the first game had a surprising focus on a certain illness and bundling a lot of informative detail into it's story about said illness, so would love to see the same for bullying. • there's something weird going on with the audio here where skipping a line of dialogue causes an overlap in some cases, when in other RGG games the dialogue would neatly cut off before the next line started. Could see that getting annoying. • totally forgot about the anime-style opening for the game I know it's only a few posts back in the thread but I'm going to post it again anyways because I loved it: After Judgment I know that these particular games place more emphasis on being soaps starting a detective vs actual detective stories, which suits RGG's sensibilities to a tee, and so I'm really in the mood for this now. Can't wait to beat up some school kids

Just had the same thing happen again and lost most of my progress on the Marksman medal. Think I've figured out what did it, though - I went to go hit Respawn as I selected a villain just rushing through the menus to get back into the fight, and accidentally hit Restart. Did some digging and it seems like not finishing a battle in particular is what causes the issue. Yeah, my Platinum run is being put on hold indefinitely, might come back to it at some point but I think I'm in the mood to play something else with the long weekend here, so that'll be when I'm burning to play the game again and it'll probably be a bit more natural than just grinding it out. It's mildly frustrating but, worse than the feeling of just having wasted a bit of time for the game to bug out again, it's the first time I've ever felt soured on spending time with Battlefront II, and that for me is the unforgivable part. The monkey's paw really curled on me with this one I was holding out on completing the original Battlefront campaigns as my last trophies for the Plat to see if I could get a nice screenshot for it (in hindsight, probably should've done this with the BFII campaign) but I think I'll play through those today before I call the curtain on my time with the collection and uninstall. Aspyr. Suck eggs. Seriously.

Makes complete sense to me, and I thought the TGAs trailer pretty heavily implied that would be the case, what between the title, showing one massive flat open area (a staple of all open worlds ), and especially with the different ways your mount would interact with the environment. It's the only way I really think you could go "bigger and better" than World from a more objective technical and marketing POV (but not necessarily from an actual quality POV, jury's out on that I guess), I don't think you could make those zones much bigger without it being a bit confused about what it wants to be. I do think it's the right move for Capcom after World purely because of how big that game got sales-wise, but if that wasn't the runaway surprise success that it was, then I would think this sort of move would be super risky. Still, though, sucks for those that aren't fans of open worlds in their games if it's not handled the right way (will always struggle to understand the "all open worlds are bad" tribe though). I do think that there's a way to do it right here in the same way that I think there is a way to make a great open world Pokémon game, but ultimately the quality level it reaches relies on Capcom, as there's some great potential hunts to evolve between biomes, new environmental hazards turning up and phases, like imagine chasing a critter into one biome vs another and them adapting to that biome in a way that is unique, would add tremendous replayability. I will say I think it's going to be easier for them to plug more MTXs and the like into an open world vs with zones, though. Curious about how an eventual DLC works if it's going to be open world, though, is it just going to be an alternative open world, a massive zone accessed through a menu, or haphazardly taped onto this one?

Wild that this still only has 'Summer 2024' as a release window given that it's just a few months out, I wonder what's up with that? Per a Famitsu interview with Masaru Oyamada, this is being developed by NetEase's Sakurai Studio: So I guess S-E's plan to focus on more in-house development hasn't quite come into effect just yet

It's official: Take-Two Interactive is set to acquire Gearbox Entertainment for $460 million (source). Embracer continues to embrace new levels of completely warranted comeuppance.

Won't be watching until I've come back to and completed the game, but Episode 1: Shaping the World of Inside Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has just been released on the PlayStation channel: Love stuff like this.

In fairness though, like @Hero-of-Time said, there are so many other games that could come to the service instead or alongside these that I can't help but agree with you both. Makes me think that it's a case that Lucasfilm Games are pretty happy for all of these to make it over, and they offer up much less resistance/are more encouraging of having their classics thrown out there than a number of other companies. Ahem, Capcom.

Man, we're getting a lot of Star Wars ports, hard to complain! But idk maybe bring KOTOR over so it's not a Switch console exclusive and the original LEGO Star Wars games and I'll be an even happier bunny

Demo dropping on Friday, with progress carrying over to the full release: Can't help but feel this demo and this game are coming at a strange time, as it feels like we've finally hit our first quiet(er) period for releases for the year and everyone is either chipping away at Dragon's Dogma or Rise of Ronin, or going back to releases from a month or so ago during the super busy start to the year. It'll be really interesting to see how well it does.

Figured out the issue I was having, turns out the trophy progress relates directly to in-game stats and mine had bugged out so that I was reading as, for example, 32 Regulator medals vs the 46 Regulator medals I had showing on trophy progression; once I caught up in-game to the number showing at a system level, it was all good. Still loving my time with it, especially being forced to use other classes in chasing the Plat (99% of my time growing up playing the game was spent as Infantry units), hopefully I'll round it off this week so that I can dive into a fresh experience over the long weekend

It's definitely possible; weren't their rumours before the internal delay that it would be making it out sometime between March and May? It's Star Wars, so it will sell well whenever it's released, but with The Acolyte releasing from June into July, a mid-to-late summer release would dovetail off of that really nicely, I think. Have a big blowout on the game during Not-E3 time. I'm still unsure how I feel about this game, it's Star Wars so I'll play it and was impressed by what we saw but I feel like we just don't know enough. I'm also very curious about what our next look at the game looks like, and obviously when we get it. Could definitely see us getting something for it on or around May 4th to drag it back into the public consciousness, but I'm honestly expecting a bit of a dip in performance and appearance compared to when we last saw it. Because Ubisoft

100% agree. In a case where it's a game collection, it seems especially disrespectful to fans and the original developers too, and that's without even having the conversation about the price they landed on for the game Anecdotally, I've just decided to put a hold on my grind in Battlefront II for now, because I've been keeping an eye on the trophy tracking/progression and it's just not keeping pace with my in-game stats anymore, whereas it worked perfectly before. Not sure if it was the latest update or something else, but might just start cracking away at the first game's campaigns and couple of trophies. sigh

I've just checked that link and it's down to £29.99 now... Yeah, that's too good to not bite. Sorry, best laid plans of delaying game purchases, but I doubt we'll get a better deal than that for a while Thanks for the heads-up on the offer H-o-T!

Tickets for TPM's 25th anniversary screenings are now up most places got mine, looking forward to it!

That's insane. From my limited understanding of both (based on podcasts and from what I've read on here, I've dabbled in World but not to the extent I'd feel confident commenting on it's MTX catalogue), was Rise a move in a worse direction after World, even? I ask because I remember World advertising free updates for new monsters, weapons, armour, etc. at times, with some paid-for cosmetics perhaps and of course Iceborne being a paid-for expansion, whereas with Sunbreak I remember seeing some more complaints about it as an expansion compared to Iceborne, as well as some saying the "events" were more a case of recycling things. Again, can't comment on that stuff and happy to be corrected, but that seemed to be the sentiment I've seen floated around. If so, yeah I think you're right, it does sound like it's going in the wrong direction and has been for a minute. Ah, thanks for this. So it sounds more akin to what the modern Assassin's Creed games have been doing with their microtransactions, I remember a bit of an uproar following Odyssey's release (I think it was the first to latch onto it? If they were in Origins it might've been post-launch because I don't remember it coming up in conversation for that game) about similar things. Definitely not a Battlefront II launch situation where the game became pay-to-win. Yeah, I think I stand by what I said before: single player (I mean I guess it impacts sharing your pawn maybe? But again, it's not a competitive or shared multiplayer game, so ), play how you want to play, it seems like a total waste of money to me but if you're rich and for whatever reason it's up your alley, whatever. I think the issue here is the lack of communication over it ahead of launch, and the same went for AC Odyssey, GT7, and of course BFII (compounded by every other problem with how MTXs were integrated into that game). Saying nothing about microtransactions in your game and then having people learn about them for the first time at launch, following a great slate of reviews, is stupidly bad PR and marketing management; we all know how the internet loves to pick on whatever the new hotness is, so why give them that in and make it seem like you're even sleazier by not fessing up to these MTXs existing? Why leave that opening for others to attack? Get ahead of it, you fools! It's not really a great addition to the game from where I'm standing, but if we learned about it 3 months ago in a public way - you know, like during the myriad of trailers, preview events or gameplay reveals? - I doubt you'd see anywhere near as much blowback as we've seen here. Stuff like this seriously makes me question what these marketing teams at publisher's actually do, because it's clearly not keep a finger on the pulse of marketing in the gaming space, that's for sure.

The game was rated yesterday in South Korea, getting a 19+ (or Mature) rating. Interesting. September/October time I guess?

Man, this is such a weird one to watch play out. I think it really emphasises the pressure on early game reception and review scores for a lot of devs now, and how publishers are happy to pull things like this on the sly on launch day (WHAT?!) to manipulate these things. Would be curious to hear Itsuno's and the team's thoughts on this, I mean imagine working on a game for YEARS - for a sequel/reinvention to what was ultimately more akin to a cult classic with a rabid fan base, so a clear passion project - then seeing those reviews flood in, the overwhelming elation carrying you away...and then the conversation doing a 180° soon after because your bosses are greedy bottom feeders. It is a single player game, and I'll always go to bat for playing how you want to play, I need to have a bit of a nose around to see if it's as in your face as something like the GT7 MTXs, but I just don't get the target demo with a move like this – rich people who want to charge through a £70 game just to say they've beaten it/got a particular cool thing? seriously, how big can that market be? Is it worth sinking your game's great press for? I can't imagine it is. The math ain't mathing. It just seems so misguided, and unless they cave under the backlash, I really can't imagine that this bodes well for Monster Hunter Wilds at all. It feels like Capcom is pulling a bit of a PlayStation, where both came back stronger than ever last gen but now seem to be pushing at the boundaries to see what they can get away with. SEGA/Atlus have also been doing the same as of late. Very frustrating to read about, but again, more than anything, I really just hope it isn't getting in the faces of people who just want to get on with playing the game.