Julius

It's about flexibility So obviously it should be in the fitness thread

Pre-launch trailer: Crazy to think this is just under 6 weeks away. Really hope it delivers the goods

Dropped this game somewhere in Chapter 3. No fault of the game really - I was just starting to enjoy it - but it's just come at a bad time for me personally, and I wasn't totally gelling with it the way I remember gelling with Remake on top of it, which makes me happy to leave it as is and come back to it when I'm ready. Going to move onto some other games for now

Of course! Going to take a quick nap (long day) and then fire it up for the first time very excited to play through the single player campaigns, and those trophy lists look very doable while also forcing a bit of variety on you. Love it. Unfortunately, seems like Aspyr might've misfired in a few spots here, and pretty substantially on the multiplayer front... ...yikes. Will of course be making up my own mind about it - and hang onto it regardless, because Aspyr seem to generally be okay at bringing things back up to par post-launch - but there's no way that they could've possibly lowballed the servers to the point of only having ~200 spots at launch for a Star Wars game people go out of their way to mod online support into. Insane. Also, the file sizes for these games are absolutely MONSTROUS for what they are. I'm not too shocked seeing as Aspyr seem to be really bad at cutting these down (I think when I installed KoToR a little while back it was 15 GB on Switch? Which is insane!), but damn, they need to get a better grip on this stuff.

Dragon Ball. Character design for Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest, and many more. Truly one of the greats. RIP.

Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender has been renewed for a second and third season: Shocked, I tell you, shocked! In all seriousness though, looking forward to seeing how they go forward with it. Casting Toph is going to be HUGE. Really hope they take some of the feedback onboard, some is a bit extreme and mean-spirited which I think should obviously be ignored, but there's clearly room for improvement, so I do hope they try.

Awesome for PC players, loved Ghost of Tsushima. So by the time this releases, PC will have had more first-party developed releases (Horizon and this) than the PS5 itself (Part II Remastered, which is almost certainly coming to PC at some point in the near future) for 2024. You've also then obviously got their first day-and-date console/PC release in Helldivers II which is still going strong. That's pretty bonkers to think about. Nixxes has been putting in the work and then some with these ports and their support work, damn.

And we wonder why people don't come to post on N-E anymore lmao Normal distribution expectations fall apart at the seams in individual cases where people know their own tastes and naturally gravitate towards films which fit their fancy - there's a built-in bias. The only way to counter that and get to a point resembling normal distribution is by either watching everything, watching things truly at random, or by people forcing themselves to watch things they wouldn't want to. All of these options sound awful to me. In any case, I'm glad I enjoy as many films as I do, as much as I do, and I truly feel sorry for anyone whose average film rating is a (weighted) 6.3 or where only 0.1% of the films they've watched is above a 9, as outlined in that link. Let's just be grateful that I at least have a bell curve for my ratings distribution.

Been picking away at a lot of films lately, including a good few from my list that I want to get through for the year (really not in a gaming mood atm, sorry Rebirth ). Anyways, I just wanted to shout out one in particular, which is Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-Ho, Parasite). I've had the BJH blu-ray box set sitting on my shelf for years and am now deeply regretting not getting to it sooner, because this film was abso-freaking-lutely incredible. It's an incredibly tense whodunit based in a small town where a pattern of murders have started to take place, with an MO to boot (my years of watching Criminal Minds, Midsomer Murders, Rosemary & Thyme and the like is finally starting to pay off) but it's balanced so well by the charm and craziness of it's cast. Honestly? It kind of feels like a more serious version of Judgment, the RGG (the creators of Yakuza) developed detective games, just a lot of greatly executed story beats with some chuckles thrown in here and there to mix things up. Unfortunately, it's not streaming on anything in the UK right now from what I can find (go figure), but if you ever see it floating about, I wholeheartedly recommend giving it a watch. It's fairly rare that I rate films a 10/10 (22/380 according to my Letterboxd profile; 5.7% seems fair if you ask me!), but, well, this was absolutely my cup of tea and then some, so I would certainly score it that way.

I got up to the start of Chapter 3 yesterday after around 9 hours yesterday. I'm very torn on this open world. For the most part it has been fairly barren with very little available to do, I'm mostly avoiding open world encounters and just focusing on completing the available quests and other activities before moving onto the next story beat. The activities available to do in the open world are fine, I guess? Not a big fan of the Ubisoft towers, much less activating them not clearing the mist coverage on the map but showing available activities. I touched on it before but the open world just doesn't feel like a well-designed open world, even if it's pretty easy on the eye at times (well, minus a lot of the textures looking like smudged Picasso paintings up close), and I feel like this is most apparent in how much Chocobos judder over the rough terrain, occasionally getting caught on a rock that's sort of out of place. This all ties into a lot of half-baked ideas being realised which seem fairly superfluous, like having "stealth" sections in certain quest lines, or even during the main story (such as early on in Kalm). Like in the first game, I think the gameplay shines most here during the bigger fight sequences, whether it be a boss battle or a mini-boss, or the linear and tighter setpieces. The music is amazing. So far I'm okay with just going through and making it a tick box exercise, but this is one of the weaker open worlds I've explored in a very long time. While there are rewards and activities aplenty, I feel like part of the purpose of this open world was to sell us on protecting this world and it's inhabitants just as much as it was a case of paying homage to how things were handled in the original, but it feels a bit too spread out at times and there's a lot of dead air between said activities. Some of the activities are pretty bizarre too, like pressing triangle a couple of times at life springs to register them, or the summon materia shrine things where you need to time your presses to synchronise feeling so basic. I see the purpose of these things being available as activities from a functional and rewards POV, but the act of completing them just feels so unrewarding. There's a lot of bloat and not very much of it feels good, I'm kind of itching to get back to the mini-games and story. I'll kick on with it today, but yeah, a valley of highs and lows already at this early point for me. I did really enjoy the first game (even if the ending got a bit wacko, I respected the divergence from the original) but looking back I can't help but wonder how much of that was down to it's linearity, and just how much of that linearity was actually down to the development of the game being a bit of a mess until it was brought in-house. Would Remake have potentially been as bloated as this if things went S-E's from the start, I wonder?

Summoning @drahkon (because Andrew Scott)

Absolutely insane if true. Like you say, it's a niche franchise, and 2 is a sequel to an already very niche game, so I imagine it has even fewer fans than the first does. That you say it's worse than the original makes it an even more confusing move. The only reason they're doing this is because of the film, I guarantee it, and even that being in the works is a bizarre move considering, again, the IP being so niche. That they're remastering 2 as opposed to the first game though...were there any glaring technical issues with 2 compared to the first game? The only other thing I can think of is that the first game was already remastered from Vita to PS4 and that's they're justification? But I think it's the film. More importantly, what a slap in the face to Japan Studio. Closed up shop because...? And then revive one of their niche IP with a film adaptation and a remaster. Please, for the love of all that is holy, don't make a Shadow of the Colossus TV show or film... This could totally fall into the launch window of the PS6 too, but I think they're waiting on the film more than anything else; work on a Bloodborne movie has been kicking around for years at this point and I think there were more solid rumours just a couple of months ago about who was working on it. Sony seems interested in pulling a reverse of game licensing like we had in the PS2 era and are basically looking for more synergy between their film and game arms, from the looks of things; yeah I'm groaning audibly about this and think it's a terrible idea too. I mean, we've had HBO's TLOU release not too far off from a remake of Part I and a remaster of Part II, Guerrilla have been working on a bunch of Horizon projects so one will surely be tied to the release of the show in some way, God of War is getting adapted too, the list goes on and on. These are weird times for PlayStation, that's for sure.

It ends, Part One and Part Two are roughly adapting the first and second halves of the first Dune novel, respectively. It's worth noting that the original novel did end a bit abruptly and that these two films are about as faithful as a 500+ page book condensed down into two 2½ hour films can be, so where some people might call it a cliffhanger, the first part of the story is very much told across the two films and I think it's simply a case of trying to stay faithful to the original intent. A "third part" would be adapting Dune Messiah, the second novel in the series which serves as a pretty direct response to the response for the first book (the author, Frank Herbert, wasn't happy that a lot of people seemed to *completely* miss the point, so he basically laid it out for them); I think they will adapt this in just one film, which is doable as it's noticeably shorter than it's predecessor, but essential for rounding off the story and the main character's arc. Denis Villeneuve, the director of the two films, has already expressed his intent to adapt Messiah too, though he's interested in having the actors age up a bit (there's a bit of a gap between the first two books), and he also has a couple of other projects on his lap for now, so I wouldn't be surprised if we're waiting until 2030 or later to see Messiah adapted. Bit scary to type that out But yeah, to sum up, the two films out now are well worth the watch and tell a complete story, and though the "third part" is seemingly in the works, it's likely a while off, so I'd definitely suggest getting around to watching Parts One and Two in the meantime! Hope that helps

Might as well start giving these Xbox events their own threads I reckon, seeing as they look like they're trying to get somewhat consistent with them. Plus, platform equality From the press release: I've actually been really curious about The First Berserker: Khazan since we first saw it at the TGAs a couple of months ago, so looking forward to getting a better idea of what's going on there.

Bah, sorry to hear that @Hero-of-Time how many hours in are you at this point where you're nearing the end, and what's been your general approach to the game with it being open world vs the linear nature of Remake? I'm curious because I'm only 5 hours in (haven't played since Friday, apparently I book time off and then my life gets infinitely busier ), but after seeing the trophy guides saying it'd potentially take a couple hundred of hours to Plat (only checked out of curiosity after XVI's), I bailed and stuck to my original plan of just doing the story and mini-games, which is what I did for most of Remake. The mini-games I love by the way, Queen's Blood rules! I LOVED the first chapter, which was definitely more on the linear side (also: heroic Sephi theme ftw) and took the hardest knee I've ever taken in a game in Kalm (just let Cloud stand around for a couple of minutes while the music started to choke me up), but I got to the open world and...eh? I'll get into more once I'm further in the game but I'm a bit confused by it's design at times, in that I immediately ran into multiple instances where the terrain climbs up and I struggle to see over it, and it just seems a bit empty? I'll reserve judgement until I'm further on in but the linear sections so far have been the highlight for me, whereas I beelined story beats once out in the open world to pick up a Chocobo. There's weird lighting issue adjusting to the dark coming from the outside too in a lot of cases, I've found. Oh well, I'll get back to it today, but I definitely didn't feel as compelled to return to it over the weekend, but maybe that's just down to where I left it off

Glad to hear you two enjoyed it! @bob It's funny because despite giving it the lowest score of us three, I also definitely want to see a second (and third) season of this. Just go all the way with it at this point! @BowserBasher I'll be shocked if it doesn't get a continuation personally, the numbers it's pulled in have been pretty crazy; per Gizmodo, it had a debut of 21.2 million views (the One Piece adaptation had something like 18 million?) and got to the Top 10 in 92 countries, which is bonkers. What's more, while they continue to have the original ATLA in a number of countries on Netflix, there's a positive trickle down effect where there are people like me who have decided to watch the original again (more than anything because, well, why only stop watching at the end of S1, right? I think I even saw the original started trending in some countries off the back of the live-action release!); people who haven't watched the original, or just haven't got back to it in a while, might skip the adaptation after seeing the mixed-to-positive reaction and just go to the original (I have a number of friends who did this one); and I imagine there are a bunch of newcomers watching it for the first time who have checked out the animated series after being introduced to the series by the live-action adaptation. There are too many reasons to not continue, so I'd be shocked if we don't get some type of confirmation in the next few weeks, especially with financial end-of-years coming up for a lot of places.

Dune: Part Two was freaking incredible.

The game's event was hosted today, and the previews and impressions coming out for it have been looking real strong. Definitely going to be keeping an eye out for this game's full release.

If it makes you feel any better, Balatro is my personal favourite game for you that you've played this year so far

A 20th anniversary program for Monster Hunter is scheduled for 12th March at 11:00 GMT. It will not feature any updates on Wilds.

Man, that sucks. I was just reading earlier about copies in Japan I think it was where they'd mixed up some of the Play and Data disc printing, so you'd actually need to download data with the one labelled 'Play Disc' and play with the one labelled 'Data Disc'? Really weird that this game seems to be having multiple issues crop up on disc across different regions. (thanks @Ike for sharing the source ) I'll need to check but I also think Persona 3 Reload had some issues in SEA a few weeks back with the physical English language release just straight up not being the physical English language release? Something's up with the disc printer in Asia, that's for sure. Glad to hear it's been sorted at least Just setting my out of office email and it's time to mosey

I finished this the other night, and have been thinking about it a fair bit. Overall, I think this adaptation of TLA is fine. If I were to score it /10, it's slap bang in the middle a 5/10. There are some excellent original moments and scenes which are good enough to be added to the original, but there are large swathes of the show which just feels like the people working on this missed the point. There are so many times where we're just told and not shown what characters are feeling, and so it feels like a simplified take on an already pretty simple (at surface level) animated children's show. The exposition is pretty terribly handled, the writing is just straight up bad most of the time, the quality of the music shifts from EPIC ORCHESTRAL COVER to super generic incidental epic stuff, and it only hits at times because of the original underlying musical score from the animated series. Zuko was the highlight for me, I think Dallas Liu nailed it; actually, I think most of the time, the Fire Nation side of things was infinitely more interesting and better delivered than what we saw going on with the Gaang. A lot of these main characters are child actors and I think they all did pretty well, there's room for improvements in places (one of the blessings, I guess, of not shooting it all at once is that they can go get more acting chops between now and a potential second season) but these characters improving going into the next season is ultimately reliant on better dialogue than what we ended up with in this first season. Think it's time for an animated ATLA re-watch now, feels weird just leaving the story off at the end of S1.

My copy has just arrived Can't believe today is the day! Got the install started but got a busy day ahead of me, and then I'll need to round off the end of INTERmission (had a weirdly busy few weeks and played way less lately, go figure ) before I get started on Rebirth. Thankfully I'm off tomorrow and next week, though, so I imagine I'll be putting a lot of time in over the next few days EDIT: the reversible cover is still *very* much off-centre, as it was with Remake. S-E, WHY?!?!

Agreed with much of the rest of your post, but my fingers are itching to type an answer to this one. Because boys and young men from ages 10-25 are statistically the most vulnerable audience when it comes to what this industry preys on: free time, escapism, and disposable income. This isn't to say that women or younger children or older folk can't have addictions, or any other myriad of problems, at all, but there have been a LOT of growing trends over the last decade which more and more papers have been published about and has research has been completed on, and it's so scarily obvious why this industry targets this particular demographic. It's late so I'm not going to go for the most relevant or up-to-date findings, just what I can find relatively quickly: Here's an old graph from 2020 showing just how many more women are attending university than men. Here's an article on men's mental health which suggests a bunch of reasons why male:female ratios of depression and suicide are probably inaccurate, and it's largely down to men being more likely to avoid reporting or trying to find a solution to the problem, and being more likely to look for some form of escape. Here's a piece on men being nearly twice as likely to form an addiction than women, and being more likely to abuse that addiction. Men are more likely to be competitive than women. Again, to be clear, I'm not highlighting these articles to say that one side has it worse than the other or what have you, but to highlight that men - and young, developing men, for obvious reasons - are a prime audience to aim your products at if you're a game publisher. More likely to have free, unstructured time (relatively fewer men in and graduating from university)? More likely to become addicted? More likely to be competitive (and thus spend said aforementioned free, unstructured time getting better at something)? More likely to look for an escape than to tackle a problem? It all forms this horrible cycle which makes a certain male demographic a hotbed of potential whales for these companies. This is before we even get into the systems at play (mechanically) in and around (microtransactions) gaming which rewards the players (sweet monkey lizard brain dopamine) in ways which makes certain games so difficult to move on from. There's also now an additional element these days of compulsion and FOMO as games are very regularly updated with new and exciting challenges on an increasingly regular basis. League of Legends, Call of Duty, Fortnite, FIFA, and so on and so forth, there's a reason that they're all as big as they are, and large swathes of the rest of the industry (AAA obviously in particular) is at best guilty of following suit by following their lead and going for the same demographic with the same tactics, or at worst, recognising the vulnerabilities of this demographic and launching at them full force. In most AAA cases, it's probably a bit of both. I simply don't think there's as much money to be made from targeting a female or older audience in particular, and so much of what a younger audience can access is determined by their parents or guardians. I think of it as being similar to how Nintendo marketed the Switch completely right: their ads include older teens and young adults, not children or older adults, because there's that "they're cool, I want to be like them" factor to it (obviously it's an ad and it's effect differs from person to person, but that's absolutely their strategy with their marketing). For the female demo? It's often either a case that girls are included in the ads or there's an air of "I can do that, too. And maybe even better" if they're not, which can persist because of the way in which young women have been raised over the last decade or two in a world with a huge increase in feminist movements, causes and efforts – you don't even really need to target a female audience in some ways (and I don't think you'll win a new-to-gaming female demo over for countless reasons, the first of which being your ad probably won't even get on their radar to begin with). Unless the game is targeted directly at a female demo (which often, unfortunately, falls into some sort of stereotyping), I don't think women care nearly as much about a game not being aimed at them as men might (this is anecdotal, obviously). I've gone on long enough, but basically, well, they're just preying on the statistically more vulnerable demographic. It's disgusting but, well, shareholders mean this kind of has to be the aim for most these days

Thanks for the thread @Dcubed, definitely think it's warranted at this point. To comment on probably the smallest aspect of this first (and the least to do with the layoffs), the Star Wars FPS by Respawn cancellation kind of sucks considering, well, it's Respawn and they haven't made a new console-based FPS in...forever, at this point? Despite clearly having the talent to do so. There were also some expecting/hoping for it to be a Republic Commando spiritual (or actual) successor, so yeah, bummer as a Star Wars fan. More importantly it reads like a lot more layoffs are going to be heading their way. As for the layoffs overall, I don't really have much to add in terms of the current conversation around current development cycles and goals being unsustainable and unnecessarily costly, but this is just the point we've got to. Gaming appears to have ended up in a similar place to where films were about a decade ago where, despite a healthy-ish indie scene by comparison, sequels/remakes/reboots completely rule the roost simply because it is the safest and most cost effective ROI for these big companies. I've got to hand it to Shawn Layden here, he was very transparent about where this was clearly all going and saw the writing on the wall; it's not hard to see why PlayStation no longer wanted him around. Obviously I wish the best for everyone being laid off, but, selfishly, following the industry and these rounds of layoffs these past few years makes me feel like I dodged a massive bullet by not following my evident passion for the medium and trying to find a way in, which is something I'd personally been toying with as an idea for a while – and I can't help but wonder how much this news being so front and centre might impact future waves of potential developers, and just how many others it might've put off already. It sounds like a horrible industry to be in, whether it be the crunch, the lack of job security, the constant acquisitions (furthering the lack of job security), the rampant power struggles and corporate schlock as well as some fairly heinous things being done and said in certain corners...you have thousands of some of the smartest and most talented creative minds in the world, in the most lucrative entertainment industry, being laid off year after year. Bloated budgets and investments from COVID are definitely partly to blame for all of this, but I also think it is clearly a cultural issue, too: loyalty and hard work are rarely rewarded, and, if anything, actually seem pretty foolish traits in terms of furthering a career in the space as things stand. Especially early on. And I touched on the indie scene before, but well, this is exactly why it's oversaturated. There is too much talent and not enough jobs going around with the stability needed to support it all. Someone needs to compare the 70s push of indie films to what we've seen in the games industry over the last decade, because while in film it seemingly came from wanting more creative freedom in order to break the mold and pattern of the big studios of the time, in gaming lately going independent genuinely seems like a move being made out of a search for some solid ground under people's feet, and for the more experienced folk around it seems the wiser move, even if it is an incredibly risky one. It honestly saddens me to see what the industry has morphed into even in just the short time I've been around actively following it. Games are better than ever, the industry is making more money than ever (obviously with a huge COVID bump it might be down relatively in some spots), and yet thousands of jobs are being lost because..? Oh, because it's not those same creative minds - or the minds of people who respect creativity - at the top anymore, like it might have been a decade ago. It's Business Grad Joe remorselessly maximising profits and reducing costs in the name of his shepherds, the shareholders.