Julius

Yeah, it’s a shame. They always seem to send them out with little chance to succeed (either little advertising compared to other games, or crowded out by other games), and use that as reasoning for not pushing the next game. July and August are still empty for the PS4 besides Kiwami 2 at the end of the latter, and though I’m sure that’ll change after E3, DQXI (due to its duration and genre) seems much better suited for that window. September is already packed, COD and RDR2 are scheduled for October, we’re still waiting for release dates for massive games like Smash and Battlefield V, and I’m sure E3 will throw us a throw big curveballs. So, if the problem is that the game won’t be ready at all until September, I don’t think that it can be delayed until later in the year without risking more sales; however, if it would be ready prior to the current release date, it would seem smart for S-E to move it forwards.

This looks awesome. September’s filling up very quickly.

Got to say Liverpool did a great job. They’ve been one of the teams I’ve enjoyed watching most this season, and were fully deserving of the win. This seems to be a running theme for Pep now: have the title race more or less done and dusted by mid-April (if he’s going to win it), but his players seem to lose conviction on the continental stage because of this. On the one hand, I think City would have more of a chance than Liverpool of winning the competition if they were to get through, because of the strength of their midfield. On the other hand, I think Liverpool - if they turned up on the day - could give any one of the Big Three a run for their money. Also, well done to Barça. Unless something goes dreadfully wrong in Rome next week, they’ll be through to the semi-finals for the first time since 2015!

I didn’t expect the game to be one-sided going in, but I think the battering of the Man City team bus by Liverpool fans prior to the game has shaken a lot of their players. An away goal is all it will take for City to be back in this tie. Always love watching Pep v. Klopp, they really bring the best (and worst) out of each other/‘s teams.

Got to admit, the Spider-Man release date (September 7th) makes me a little worried for how Dragon Quest XI will initially perform. I’m new to the series, but it seems like Square Enix has been trying to crack the West with the franchise for a while now, and it just hasn’t been working. This seems like the series’ biggest chance to do amazingly and finally conquer the West, but having Spider-Man come out only three days later just seems a little odd to me. And, if I recall, Yakuza Kiwami 2 is only a week or so prior to DQXI, so it’s going to be interesting to see how those games initially sell.

Spider-Man swings onto PS4 September 7th! This month’s GI includes a 14-page spread on the game’s early story, levelling, suit crafting, exploring the open world, side quests and upgrades. UPDATE 1: The game is now available for pre-order, which will come with a pack of three Spidey suits. The first revealed is the Punk suit, with the next to be revealed soon (Infinity War tie-in, I’d assume) and the other to be revealed in July. UPDATE 2: First look at the game’s box cover art, which looks great. The reveal of the Digital Deluxe Edition also revealed that the game will have post-launch DLC. The Collector’s Edition also seems pretty awesome. Don’t worry, though, because you’ll be able to pick up all of the pre-order bonus content without a pre-order, presumably on the PlayStation Store. UPDATE 3: Photo mode confirmed.

As much as I’ve loved hardware news and announcements before (haven’t owned an Xbox for a while, and not a massive Xbox fan, but the Scorpio announcement still excited me back in 2016), I’m not craving it at this E3. I’m craving software news, and a lot of it. I’ve loved the games we’ve had this generation, and the debates they’ve spurned, and the simply joy for gaming - and that alone - which excites both us consumers and the developers. We normally have a hard and fast roadmap of the next year of gaming or so going into E3, but going into this one, we only have a scattering of tentpole releases to look forward to in the second half of this year, and no next-to-nothing about next year, which both excites me and makes me a little bit anxious. We could be getting a Shenmue trilogy on the curren generation, news on FFVII Remake or The Last Of Us Part II, etc. ...or, we could just end up with the usual annual smattering of big, fast and loud third party AAA games we’ve large become accustomed to getting in the second half of the year.

Sorry, I think you might have misunderstood what I was trying to say: the PS4 just had its best-selling year for units sold, and every single year it’s been on sale it has had its best-selling year to this point, so if we were to graph annual/fiscal year sales for the PS4, up to this point, it would just be going up (according to the numbers that we have available on the matter). 2013 - 4.2m units sold 2014 - 14.41m units sold 2015 - 16.75m units sold 2016 - 18.41m units sold 2017 - 21.2m units sold The PS2 was announced in March 1999 - just one month prior to the end of FY99 - when the PS1 had already begun to decline (the deficit from FY98 to FY99 is great enough for it to be assumed that this announcement wasn’t the cause of said deficit). Similarly, the PS3 was announced in June 2005, with PS2 sales having been on the decline since the end of FY02. Similar story for the Wii, which showed a decline from the end of FY10 onwards. Sorry, my bad, that’s what I meant. As I edited into my post above, though, others who would presumably be aware of such details aren’t, and can’t at this point corroborate Semiaccurate’s claims. Sure, I see where you’re coming from, apart from with the length of a console generation. As I said above/elsewhere, console generation length can’t be assumed to be static, because of the diminishing returns that each new console will naturally offer compared to the previous model (Moore’s Law, etc.) in terms of upgraded raw processing power, visual fidelity, and so on. The fact that video game consoles have had a pretty static life cycle of typically 5-7 years to this point is astounding, but reflects the constant evolution of technology that we’ve seen on the hardware end. However, with that slowing down, the focus will inevitably turn to the software side of things, such as AI, which takes much longer to evolve, simply due to its complexity. We’re already 4.5 years into this generation, and there’s no sign that developers are slowing down in turns of how much they can get out of the current generation of systems. I don’t want to seem like I down want the next generation to come, because I really do. I cannot wait to see how advancing AI is integrated into video games, and to maybe (finally) have enough space for a larger quantity of games if they decide to upgrade the storage to make up for the seemingly smaller upgrades elsewhere. I’m just so incredibly satisfied and happy with what this generation has been so far, and may yet be, in terms of software, that I’m not craving hardware news as much as I have before.

I think the key difference, at least for now, would be that the PS4 is still on a staggering upward trajectory in terms of units sold per year, which it’s been on ever since launch. The PS4 was announced back in Feb 2013, when the PS3 had already shown signs of beginning to peter out, with FY 2012 sales having shown its first drop-off. Not only that, but the PS3 never passed 20 million units sold in a year, which PS4 managed last year, and I don’t think Sony would risk messing with that momentum, so I agree with @Goron_3 that it’d be wise for them to hold off announcing/teasing it until they have solid evidence that the PS4 has started to slow down. Agreed that backwards compatibility would be a great move, and it’s something I definitely want, even if it is only the Xbox route of having discs be a license key to access games. It’s frustrating how quiet they’ve been with regards to backwards compatibility as a whole this generation, simply because the PS3 has so many rare games available for relatively cheap which, for some reason, aren’t available on PS4. It’s probably the only place where Sony has been well and truly beat this generation. However, I don’t think Sony needs to do much of anything to take the wind out of Xbox One X’s sales. They’ve been king of the hill this generation, and I think an approach like that - especially in this day and age, where many studios can go under at any moment - could backfire just as massively as the PS3 did at launch. I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but, ideally, we shouldn’t be getting a PS5 until 2021 at the earliest, because console generations should only be getting longer due to the technology available. I mean, just look how much that first parties have managed to squeeze out of the PS4 (and especially the Pro) recently when compared to launch, with games like Horizon, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, etc., looking extraordinary, regardless of whether the Pro is showing them off in true 4K, and that should only continue until the end of the generation, as has been the case with almost every generation of consoles. Of course, this doesn’t account for extrinsic factors, such as sales and customer anticipation of the next big thing, but I really don’t think that we’re getting the PS5 this side of 2020, due to all of the above reasons and more. I’ll actually be gutted if, with a relatively empty second half of 2018 currently slated, the PS4’s presence at E3 is overshadowed by a PS5 tease. The thing is, I’m sure ResetEra is accurate, and I’m sure devkits have gone out (there were whispers about it a few months ago, if I recall correctly). But I think it’s just a case of Sony getting ahead of the curb and letting third parties know what their current plans are for the PS5, and to let them know that they’re working on their next console, and nothing more than that, because the next generation’s upgrades will likely be a lot more difficult to explain beyond the expected visual upgrade to true 4K for PlayStation. EDIT: also worth mentioning that Jason Schreier, who broke news of the Pro, is urging scepticism when reading this report. None of his development buddies can seem to corroborate it.

Unless there’s a pretty big miscommunication going on here (everyone and their grandmother seems to be running with it but the tweet seems a bit more ambiguous than many are letting on), the release date for the game might dropping tomorrow with the digital issue of this month’s Game Informer. If not, then seemingly by the end of the month. Either way: the hype is real. Seems very odd that we’d be hearing a Spidey release date tomorrow/by the end of the month, some two months out from E3. Unless... April - God of War May - Detroit Become Human June - Spider-Man ?

Firstly: obligatory mention of Ronaldo’s wonder strike vs. Juve. I think that was probably the most complete goal of his career (from his pace, to his build-up play when he received the ball, to squaring it to Lucas Vázquez, to, of course, his masterful technique in netting a sublime goal). As for this talk about Conte, I believe we talked about it here last summer before/around the start of the season a bit: he just hasn’t been backed up by the board in the transfer market (which was his very reason for leaving Juve in the first place), and we could see even then that we were setting up for a failure of a season, at least relative to 16/17. Forget quality for a moment: we didn’t even have the quantity of players needed to mount a challenge on all fronts; an injury here and there, selling key players to rival clubs/China, building tensions behind the scenes, arguably the most competitive season in PL history for a berth in the UCL, etc., were always considered strong reasons to worry about the size of our squad, and it’s shown. I can’t help but feel sorry for Conte. He won the Prem with what was fundamentally the same group of players that were considered down-and-out only a season prior - under the guidance of the Special One, no less - and I recall the conversations about what could happen if Chelsea ended up relegated. He instilled a belief and passion in the team that I don’t think we’d seen since Di Matteo led us to Champions League glory back in 2012. There was no reason for Abramovich to not back him going into this season, and if he is going to leave, I only hope it’s to a club that can finally offer him the finance and platform he’s been searching for since 2014. He’s one heck of a manager, and he’s still relatively young for one. If he leaves, then there’s only one man I honestly want to replace him: Massimiliano Allegri. I’ve been waiting for his arrival (I mean, I wanted Bonucci to come with him too, but there’s not much we can do about that now) since things seemed to be going downhill at the start of the 15/16 for José. He’s a tactically astute manager who said that he wanted to leave Italy as recently as yesterday, and he’d be a perfect fit for us, having already proven that he’s excellent at evolving teams from Conte’s plans (three successive Serie A titles and two visits to the final of the Champions League with Juve are testament of that). My only worry would be that, yet again, the board doesn’t back the manager and his plans, at which point it doesn’t matter who we bring in anyway.

Oh, and I forgot to mention: you can see what seems to be an alt. costume with a more classically Spider-Man look (i.e. without the white) at 0:24/0:25. I think this is the game I’m most excited for this year. The first video game that I completed was Activision’s Spider-Man for PS1 (and the second was its sequel) with my dad, and I’ve had a love for the character as far back as I can remember. I’m really hoping it lives up to the hype as the spiritual successor of Spider-Man 2.

Game Informer have put out an exclusive coverage trailer, as they will be posting exclusive online features about the game throughout the month of April in conjunction with their newest issue. It’s ever so short, but the snippets we got of gameplay (and web-swinging) look awesome.

^^^another excellent Don’t Skip by EZA, this time on a retro game. I also just wanted to mention that, as someone who wasn’t around/in a position to play a lot of the games talked about pre-PS1 in this thread, I’m really enjoying reading the discussions going on here, and I’ve added plenty of games I first of mentioned here to my ever-expanding list of games. I had no idea that the Panasonic Q was even a thing until I saw it in here a few weeks back (and might I mention that it looks excellent, @Happenstance), so, as someone who still considers themselves relatively new to the great library that is gaming, I really want to thank you guys for your incredibly insightful discussions and opinions.

PCGamesN have put together an excellent piece on the setting, megacorporations, classes and characters of the tabletop RPG - Cyberpunk 2020 - on which CDPR’s Cyberpunk 2077 is based. Definitely worth checking out for those interested in learning a bit more about what we’re probably in for.

The second half of this year is filling up in the best of ways. Heck yeah. Also, first gameplay video of the Western version (featuring our first listen to the English VO, which sounds pretty good judging from this):

My biggest problem with Kalos and Alola is that Game Freak’s desire to cram every single Pokémon into a generation of games seems almost entirely redundant now that we have Bank; I’d personally much prefer if the majority of Pokémon available within a region were those native to that region’s Dex, at least for the duration of the game’s main story.

First gameplay trailer. First impressions courtesy of Easy Allies’ Daniel Bloodworth; the game was at GDC last week. 15 minutes of gameplay footage courtesy of Nintendo World Report. This game looks and conceptually sounds very whimsical and charming, so I really look forward to learning more about it in the coming months.

Rumours are swirling that the game will be released this year, with a teaser/announcement expected to come prior to E3 by those who are asserting that this is true. It is also being suggested that Bandai is readying themselves for the reveal of new Pokémon toys in May. To be very clear: I don’t necessarily believe this to be true, nor do I necessarily believe any of the other rumours/purported leaks surrounding the games to be true. However, with Smash expected to come in either September or October by many (either to tie directly into the launch of Switch Online or to follow it up), and with other first party titles without release dates (such as Fire Emblem or Yoshi) not expected to carry the weight of Nintendo on its shoulders in what will surely be a stacked Christmas period, I am starting to think that it’s certainly possible that Pokémon Switch launches in late November of this year. Some might argue that Smash is big enough to carry Nintendo alone this Christmas, and whilst I agree, I do think that Pokémon for Switch caters primarily to a much more casual (and generally younger) audience, and that both games (with 4 - 10 weeks between them) could flourish in sales alongside each other. It would also be an excellent way for Nintendo to truly establish and consolidate a greater and more varied install base for the Switch going into 2019.

We have Ronan the Accuser. Coulson is back (this is set in the 90’s, so don’t anyone go getting hyped up for an Avengers-Coulson reunion ). And we have Jude Law as Mar-Vell. Oh, and Ben-flipping-Mendelsohn. This film has a stellar cast. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it sets up Avengers 4; considering that this is a key piece in setting up that film, and is the final film to be released before it (next March, if I recall correctly), and that we’re unlikely to see Carol Denvers in Infinity War (and that she’s nowhere to be seen in the MCU to date), I have to wonder: is she off trying to find help (like an Adam Warlock-shaped kind of help?).

Huh, that’s odd. Sky Sports Germany reported just this morning that Thomas Tuchel had, at the very least, spoken to Arsenal. Seems like there’s a lot of hearsay going around @Emerald Emblem, but I do think it’s worth mentioning that Kicker were the ones to originally report that he was heading to Arsenal, and it’s very rare for them to be so off-piste with a rumour as substantial as this. He did great with Dortmund, so I’d love to see him come to England and manage at some point because I just want to see what he could do with the right support (though, notably, he isn’t the great man-to-man manager; perhaps Jardim would be better suited for Arsenal), but it was included in the original report that Bayern were also in for him, with Uli Hoeneß even supposedly approaching him over the role before finding out that he already had a deal in place. I definitely think Bayern would be much more desperate to have him than Arsenal simply because Heynckes was only ever going to e back until the end of the season, whereas Arsenal could hold out a little longer with Wenger if they really had to, but I never saw Tuchel as the type of manager to go behind his former club. Honestly, I still want Joachim Löw to make return to club football and manage Bayern (really unlike given his age, I know). He’s already cemented himself as one of the greatest international managers ever, but his club record doesn’t really paint him in the best light, so I’d like to see him make the change after the World Cup (unless he retires, which would be a shame). And Bayern will definitely have an eye on Julian Nagelsmann in the coming years/decades (it’s ridiculous that this guy’s only 30) after his relative success with Hoffenheim.

Rarely ever watch SNL stuff, but this rant on James Cameron’s Avatar’s use of the Papyrus font is something I never knew that I so profoundly agreed with.

Honestly, I’m not too sure. We could see them come out at E3 next year with the PS5, but adversely, we could be a while off yet. I don’t want to bring up too many of the points that I made above with regards to the longer system life cycles at the risk of sounding like a broken record, but I do think that the PS4 Pro - and how it’s allowed games such as Horizon Zero Dawn and Shadow of the Colossus to be shown off, and how developers seem to only be getting more and more out of this generation’s tech (see my above comment for a bit more on this) - is evidence that we could see the base model PS4 slowly phased out, akin to how the New 3DS/2DS line slowly replaced the base model 3DS/2DS line. My opinion is that we won’t hear anything about the PS5 until 2020 — at the earliest. A few reasons for this, one being that we’ve still got games like Death Stranding, The Last Of Us Part II, Final Fantasy VII Remake, etc., planned for release on the console, which seem a pretty long way off. Some might argue that they could go cross-generation release, and they might, but I think that the planned releases for the PS4 imply that we’re in for the long haul with this console. Another reason is the sales figures of the console last year. Typically, consoles have had their best sales years in their second or third calendar year on sale, before declining after that peak; yet, the PS4 only seems to be on an upward trend, with last year - their fourth calendar year - bringing in their highest sales, in terms of volume, since the console was launched. I genuinely don’t think that PlayStation are in any rush to get to the PS5, so, while they might have begun to research the hardware side of their next console, I don’t think that they’re going push out the next system until the marketplace changes significantly enough to warrant it, whether that be from Xbox announcing their next console - which would force their hand a bit, as PlayStation owners would then begin looking ahead to the PS5 - or the PS4 suddenly declining rapidly in sales - which seems extremely unlikely. Another reason is that not everyone has a 4K TV yet, but, as they become more popular over the next year or two - with the Pro likely to drop quite noticeably in price over that same period - I think we’ll see a lot of owners of the base or Slim PS4 model make the move to the Pro, which would give Sony more of a reason to push developers to squeeze everything out of the console that they can.

Black Panther is the highest grossing comic book adaptation to date in the US, after crossing the $630 million line this weekend. I wonder how long that record will remain... Also worth noting that it’s the highest grossing comic book adaptation solo outing, as it just passed Iron Man 3 with $1.237 billion worldwide.

Thomas Tuchel (former Borussia Dortmund manager) has reportedly held meetings with Arsenal to replace Arsene Wenger at the end of this season. He’d be an excellent match for the style of play I’ve heard that many fans want Arsenal to pursue (more aggressive, counter-attacking football), and would likely be well suited to the Prem considering he coached in the Bundesliga. Makes me a little nervous for us next season.