Julius

Co-op trailer: That high-five in the opening shot is killing me

Yeah, agreed. Am I misremembering or did we not get the 2021 Wrap-Up in January of 2022? I remember Red Dead Redemption 2 making it onto mine that year despite binging it over the Christmas period (it did weirdly cut off at 60-something hours iirc rather than the full 70+ I put in, so maybe they cut it off on like December 29th? Idk). I think last year I didn't even look at mine (wasn't very well at the time), and not sure if I will this year either - maybe out of curiosity and just as a quick thing to share if it's remotely interesting, but honestly, I spreadsheet and make enough notes about what I'm playing that I could probably guess pretty accurately what my playtime is for a lot of games honestly I find it's often more just a reminder of how much I haven't played rather than it is a celebration of what I have. Which is funny to me, because I love Spotify Wrapped and it sucked ass this year and I'm pretty sure cut off one of my top artists (again), so

Yeah, I think what probably makes it potentially a good bit more icky to me is that From Software have arguably been the most generous developer to Geoff in terms of what they've given to the TGAs and SGF in terms of marketing material over the years; off the top of my head, you've got the 'Shadows Die Twice' announcements teaser for Sekiro at TGAs 2017, the first trailer with gameplay for Elden Ring during SGF 2021 (which was absolutely massive as the "We're back!" show-closer and is still arguably the best trailer we've ever seen at SGF), and the Armored Core VI announcement trailer at TGAs 2022.Hell, Geoff was visibly shaken/hyped/emotional when introducing the two latter trailers. Now, as far as I'm aware, the decision to include Shadow of the Erdtree wasn't based on Geoff's decision but on the votes submitted by gaming journalists – but when he clearly has such a strong relationship with the studio, it does call it into question just a a little bit. A similar thing happened last year when Dave the Diver was nominated for Best Indie - because the gaming press at large are, well look I'm just going to say it: they're pretty stupid at times - but Geoff didn't step in to correct them, and so you end up with a game which absolutely wasn't indie as a nominee. Like, you can vote for Mario Kart 9 as Best RPG by the same logic I guess and it wouldn't get removed? So stupid. Anyways, yeah, again, not a question of quality, but I do think it's just such a bad look when people are frustrated that people behind the scenes aren't getting their flowers, and it feels like the show is just compounding that by potentially giving From their flowers a second time for the same game. It feels especially wrong in a year with such excellent games all over. Now, if this were 2021, which I'd argue is the weakest year for games in the last 5 years? Then I'd potentially be willing to hear this out. But it feels like something which deserves to be on the list got axed in favour of Elden Ring, which, well

Shhh, what people don't know can't hurt them...until it's too late Seriously though, we're missing some absolute sitters despite some massive wins recently. I'll gladly take Top 3 so long as we manage to somewhat maintain this momentum as these younger lads seem to fall apart at times when in a slump. This is by far the most I've enjoyed watching us since the takeover though, which is great

They might even say it's 46.something % better And those with calculators will point out it's 46.875% better which, well, screw me and you for taking the time to check a calculator The real question is: why's no-one backing Donkey Kong 124?

Yikes, a lot has happened with this while I've been away. It's trailer time! Wanted to put these in order but, uh, the internet has done a very poor job of making it clear what the order of release was. But roughly... November 13th - Official Trailer: Spelunky: Sifu: Dungeons & Dragons: Warhammer 40,000: Armored Core: Concord: Mega Man: The Outer Worlds 2: Exodus: Pac-Man (?!) So, by my count, we're still waiting on trailers for five more episodes: Crossfire, Honor of Kings, New World: Aeternum, PlayStation, and Unreal Tournament. Looks great from the trailers, obviously I'm especially excited for the Armored Core episode – and they got Keanu for it?! What the hell?!?! Super hyped for it. Hopefully it's a sign that we're not too far from the next installment being announced (at TGAs next week, ahem).

Right – the Gold time before was 11 seconds flat, so whatever tweaks they've made mechanically since then has resulted in them lowering the Gold time to 10.7 seconds, which to me suggests that whatever changes they've made in terms of mechanics/handling/etc. has made getting a faster time more attainable (as a time of 11 seconds flat now only gives you Silver). That makes sense to me, anyways bah I'll give it a whirl later, see what you make me do?!

My First Gran Turismo, the game's demo which was announced as part of PlayStation's plans for their 30th anniversary celebrations a few months ago, is dropping this Friday: One of my favourite games this gen and I'm pretty sure my most played of current gen releases? Perfect time to hop in and test it out if you haven't yet Them lowering the needed times for Gold suggests the tweaking made the game easier since launch, so...no

Oh yeah, sure, there's D.I.C.E. - I was more responding to the idea that TGAs doesn't highlight devs enough (which obviously they don't) and so they could use some of those TGA funds to advertise, stream/co-stream and further push a dev-focused awards show. I think the real problem is lack of visibility for these awards rather than a lack of actual audience interest I guess is what I'm saying. Or they could just partner up with D.I.C.E. to do that very same thing I suppose

Haven't commented on the TGA GOTY nominees given my short break, so I'll do so now: I've played three of these nominated games and all were brilliant and are in the running for my personal GOTY, those three games of course being Astro Bot, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Shadow of the Erdtree being here is weird, though, just because it's DLC. I'm glad to have it considered for people's personal GOTY, such as my own, but having it potentially recognised as GOTY in a year as great as 2024 has been for games just feels odd, and that's as someone who absolutely loved their time with it – it's a saturated, 20-30 hour deep dive into everything made Elden Ring freaking brilliant back in 2022. Elden Ring arguably defined gaming in 2022, and felt like a leap forward in a lot of ways. Has Shadow of the Erdtree defined gaming in 2024 in that same way? I wouldn't say so. Balatro makes sense to me, it's the biggest indie game of the year and there's been a lot of noise from it since it launched, especially with the consistent stream of updates. Seems very deserved. Metaphor also seems to deserve it's spot here, which is awesome. I won't get to it this year, but to have a turn-based RPG front and centre and just nominated like this feels like a big moment that not enough people have been talking about. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried about JRPG community infighting, mind you (be it splitting votes for awards or some NieR/Genshin/etc. level of toxicity online elsewhere). Black Myth: Wukong being here really surprises me. Negative press ahead of launch, yes it was massive (similar vibes to Lies of P last year I'd say) but it sounds and seems to me to be more style than substance, especially given its performance struggles on some platforms and straight up not making it to some. Another one I've been wanting for ages but just wrong time and place I guess, and with DLC seemingly landing next year, I'll gladly hold out a bit longer. As someone who probably watches and listens to as much gaming news and reactions as I do actually play games (much to my own chagrin), if not more, I think Shadow of the Erdtree shouldn't be on this list - again, not for a lack of quality, but I think a DLC on an award-presented list just feels gross, and will feel worse if/when From have a trailer drop here for something else - and nor should Black Myth: Wukong. Based on feeling out the year and their reception, I think there are a few games which could take those 2 slots in their stead, be it for quality or helping to define the year in gaming, and those games would be: Helldivers 2, UFO 50, Animal Well, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Silent Hill 2. @Dcubed even as someone who hasn't played 1000xResist myself, I'm shocked it didn't get any nominations either, there has been so much damn buzz around it! Given how much noise there was around Minishoot Adventures' earlier this year, another game I've really wanted to check out, it's another one I'm shocked to not see turn up anywhere here. Quite frankly, that indie category needs more nominations (I'd make it 10) if a game can be nominated for GOTY, Best Indie, and Best Indie Debut like Balatro was – not salty at all about it getting on those lists, but 'Best Indie' is logically spoken for in a practical sense if it's on a GOTY nominee shortlist when other games on Best Indie/Best Indie Debut nominee shortlists aren't? And also because obviously if it makes a GOTY nominee shortlist it has to be on those other two lists. 1000xResist, Tactical Breach Wizards, Kill Knight, Shogun Showdown, Arco, Minishoot Adventures'...there are your other 5 indie games which should be on the 10-game nominee list imo. Re: a potential winner? I would like Astro Bot to win it – 30th anniversary of PlayStation, would feel like a much-needed statement on the closure of Japan Studio and PlayStation drifting from their Japanese routes and oh by the way LEAVING ASTRO BOT OFF OF OFFICIAL PRESENTATION SLIDES ABOUT RELEASES THIS YEAR WHEN EVEN CONCORD WAS INCLUDED LIKE IT WAS NOTHING....ahem. It's also just brilliant and a love letter to fun in a way which feels very Nintendo-like, hell despite being a PlayStation game with as many callbacks as it does to long forgotten PlayStation titles, it's clearly a love letter to Mario (Galaxy, specifically) too. You can tell how much Asobi respect that team, and it's so obviously in a way which feels separate from the rest of PlayStation if you ever listen to Doucet talk about the game. I'd gladly take Rebirth because for all of its flaws - and it has MANY of them - no other game has made me feel the things I felt playing that game this year. I mean I was straight up choked up and dewey-eyed, if not just outright crying at one point. Metaphor would be a statement of intent for JRPGs too, but I think it not winning sets Atlus up with Persona 6 to win everything in 20-...26? 29? 45? 87? - whenever that comes out. Balatro would be the good kind of shock win, it has been a game which has done a really good job of staying on top of the conversation when so many get swept away and it would be a bit of a statement win. I don't think it has great odds, but it'd be neat to see! Black Myth: Wukong I don't think has a realistic chance. I'm a bit scared it'll end up being Shadow of the Erdtree to be honest. For the third and final time - absolutely freaking adore it, and based on quality alone it is GOTY worthy, but it simply shouldn't be in the conversation for me. But this is games media we're talking about...I could see it winning here. Re: the existence of the TGAs, as someone who has consistently tuned in to watch it live? It's not a great show standalone and I often need to watch it reacted to live on Twitch to not fall asleep. I think the unfortunate truth is that despite there being no "legitimate" Game of the Year and other awards, be it at TGAs or elsewhere, which is of the level of the "legitimacy" of the Oscars - which, uh, aren't slightly legitimate but whatever - the TGAs are freaking huge and TGAs GOTY is inarguably the most known about and it does put eyes on games and helps boost sales, so Geoff is right to pull the strings he does to make as big a show as he wants. It takes the sponsors to match his crazy vision of what a show like this should be, and publishers/developers he has no involvement with to come up with the goods, and year after year it feels like there is at least one big worthwhile announcement. I mean, what's the alternative, just straight up no major showcases between a potential September Nintendo Direct/Tokyo Game Show and, what, mid-January at the earliest? As someone who loves the excitement around announcements and releases and the conversation GOTY talks at the end of the year bring about, I'm sorry, but that sounds lame as hell. The TGAs are so big now in terms of viewership that, again, we get some legitimately huge things here, and a potential December shadow drop of a quality game or DLC is just awesome. Not to say that it couldn't improve, because the flow can be very messy, and there's normally a slump where we end up in ads without telling us we're in ads. They could do with dropping the eSports/personalities and maybe having some other awards for technical aspects, obviously last year was an overcorrection from Christopher Judge's Best Performance speech in 2022 and people were getting played off stage which was unfortunate if not outright nasty and certainly shouldn't have applied to the GOTY recipient, and for the love of everything food: stop with the damn movie tie-in for presenting GOTY and go back to having previous winners present the award! Josef Fares accepting GOTY from Neil Druckmann felt fantastic and encapsulated what I feel these awards ought to be, I love the small window into the industry that it gave us: Fares is so obviously a fan of Neil and Naughty Dog, and it felt great to have people in the industry actually getting to recognise each other's work. Maybe it's just me, but I love that sort of thing, like when the PS Blog interviews people from PlayStation Studios and you're like "oh, duh, of course people who worked on God of War 2018 are big Ico fans!" Hell, to get something somewhat legitimate, I say use some of the money from TGAs to have a Developer's Awards perhaps, where developers - not journalists - vote for these things and also have a greater focus on those other roles in the industry which TGAs doesn't deliver on. Anyways, I'm much more interested in the end-of-year personal favourites thread we have here on N-E, so

Yeah, unfortunately this isn't a surprise at all Like @Hero-of-Time said, everyone's leaning towards an all-digital future anyways, but no-one is really doing so at a faster rate than Xbox right now with their intentions for Game Pass – as soon as that became a priority, physical copies either started drying up or just became, like you say, worthless circles Heck, didn't they just straight up skip Hellblade II having a physical release just earlier this year? And they were hyping that game up for nearly half a decade as one of their big cinematic tentpole releases. Madness.

Which of the 30th anniversary themes has everyone settled on using? After toying around with all of them there was only one real choice for me: (PS2 ofc) With the 30th anniversary upon us, curious if anyone's got some interesting memories to share, or perhaps a ranking of the PlayStation consoles – not necessarily by library, but by what they mean to you? For me I think it would be: 1. PS2 - the first console I bought myself not too long before the PS3 kicked off, so many great games played at the time and so many games originally released on it which I've played through remasters or ports on other consoles since over the years. 2. PS4 - my love for the games may have started elsewhere in flashes before getting the PS4, but this is the console which really awakened my passion for the medium. And what a console to help you fall in love with a new medium it was. 3. PS1 - where it all began for me. I was really young when I played the PS1 back in the day, and so memories of the console are loose, but what I remember I remember very strongly. Much simpler times. Like the PS2, so many games I couldn't play at the time I've got my hands on some other way since and the brilliance of the system still shines through. 4. PS3 - simply because it's the only one I didn't have during or around its generation cycle, you may remember I didn't pick one up until just before COVID lockdown settled in back in March 2020. What I've played on it I've loved, but it definitely shows its age at times. 5. Vita - wrong place, wrong time. Vita may be life but picking one up as an adult who prefers to play on a TV or monitor...it was always a tough sell. Especially with how many games have either been ported to console or how many stupidly haven't been. I simply haven't played it enough - or enough of its library - to grow a level of attachment to it. First console I imported from abroad, though, and damn does it feel so premium in the hand. PSP - never owned one... Jury, of course, is still out for the PS5. But with half the generation gone at this point? I feel like there have been great games but not nearly enough of them, and I am still playing PS4 games in the best way possible more than I am current gen games. Second half of the PS4 generation was where it really sang, though, so I'm not about to give up hope on it just yet. Happy 30th PS, and here's to 30 more

Thought I spotted you playing this I've been popping back in myself the last few days to help with some of my hand-eye recovery, love this game so much! Yeah, not really sure what's going on there. Not sure if it's because I've uninstalled since completing these License Tests (as replays are tied to the game download, weirdly, so if you save any but then uninstall...it's gone for good), or because of this weirdness I remember reading about back at launch where you needed to do it through a friend's User Page. Probably not the latter if you can see the option for it, though? Actually, I wonder if it's to do with updates since then from tweaking the mechanics leading to changed goals? E.g. B-6 shows as Gold needing a time of 10.700s, yet I have Gold back from when I claimed it at launch from a best time of 10.843s? So maybe the ghost would mess things up – "Julius got a Gold for this, why didn't I after beating his ghost?!"-sort of thing? Anyways, glad that it sounds like you're enjoying it, the License Tests are great fun and a great challenge, I might need to do the Master License stuff at some point (though I wish they came with a new set of trophies, that'd help motivate me I think!). I'm nearly some 300 hours in now after coming back to it again and again, but mostly needing to delete it between grinding binges because of how chunky a game it was. Well, now I have my new SSD installed, so I guess it'll be sticking around for good!

Thanks for the heads-up H-o-T – ended up all Atlus'd out after I got halfway through Persona 3 Reload so I'm going to be giving this a pass for the time being I think enjoyed what I played of P3R, but it just felt so much like going through the motions in a way which wasn't as good as Persona 5. Have a feeling Metaphor might not have felt the same way but would probably grate on me after a while with how P3R played out. Think I'm probably just going to be a bit pickier with the games I pick up/play for a while, ended up with a bit of burnout (gaming and otherwise) these last 5 or 6 weeks

New feature update available. Download and restart, like, now - don't go asking any questions

Ben Hanson of MinnMax has come out of nowhere and said a little something about Naughty Dog's new IP: I've been listening to Ben for close to a decade now since the GI Show days, and let me tell you: he NEVER speaks out of turn like this. Very, very curious what this means. I feel like it's either an open world-ish "you can climb anything/go anywhere/find our lore!" game like Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring (I would assume not as large in scale or scope with more of a focus on story and interaction so it can still be of that high ND fidelity, but that's just me), or something very systems-driven like a Deus Ex. There have been rumours for a while that the new game would be sci-fi/space, but I feel like that's some Savage Starlight projection for the latter. Personally, I've wondered for a while if ND might do something in a medieval fantasy setting, just a linear game in a setting like that, but I actually wonder if what they're making might be something closer to my absolute dream game? I think Neil has mentioned being a Princess Mononoke fan before and I've always thought that film is an exact template of what a modern take on something like Ocarina of Time could be. A relatively small world - open because of today's technology allowing it to be that way - where maybe you have one or two or three smaller villages which are like factions you can interact and team up with against some larger threat that they're absolutely not equipped to deal with, and so the focus would be less on the exploration of the world and much more focused on your interactions with characters, with the decisions you make helping to form the narrative somewhat -- for instance, in Princess Mononoke, imagine if Ashitaka could choose between siding with Iron Town or the Imperial forces? Or if there were a small refugee camp which was against Iron Town's ideals you could side with? And then it all hurtles towards a final act where those characters from separate factions are constantly interacting due to the story forcing things to spiral towards the end, which is of course when your relationships that you've built up with them by this point comes into play. I think I remember some people pointing out the potential concept art tease for the new IP in Part I looked Mononoke-esque...man, I'd kill for a game like that. Sounds like there's a good chance that whatever this is, we'll be getting it before The Last of Us Part III. Find myself getting very excited about it all of a sudden

Developer message: Man, the premise for this one sounds cool, and the mechanic of passing on your powers and the challenge to the next generation of Emperors sounds really interesting. Again, another really great showcase for the game, really love how they've been communicating so much about the game in these short videos.

Arrives on PC 25th January 2025: Insomniac have also confirmed that no new story content is planned for the game (per PS Blog) – hardly a surprise at this point, but it does strengthen the case for us learning more about whatever they plan to release next soon.

Andrew Garfield talking with Elmo about loss was much more powerful than I was anticipating: Lost both my Grandad and my closest Aunt over the last 12 months or so, hard to not think about them watching that, but in a healthy - if a bit cathartic - sort of way Hope everyone and their loved ones are doing well as we head into the last few months of the year 2025 up next, wow. Crazy how time just flies sometimes.

Aye, a few people in the comments noticed the same – they also kinda look like the 'G' from the Team Galactic emblem Spinda slander incoming Glen-i witch hunt incoming

Super Nintendo World of Universal Epic Universe them park at Universal Orlando Resort is set to open on May 22nd 2025: "Universal" "Universe" "Universal" Such a stupid bunch of words to string together...

Surprised that one passed you by Glen, but like you say, it's definitely more directly relevant to the TCG and anime, so I guess it's easily done. I remember discussing this back in the day with friends on the playground back in primary school, I think I learned it from an edition of Pokémon World and found it pretty crazy (and funny) to think about at the time Anyways, in return for that very short trip down memory lane - and reminding me I wanted to share it with you in the first place because of bumping the TCG thread - thought you'd appreciate this animated Feraligatr card someone put together on Reddit:

Karate Kid: Legends, starring Jackie Chan, Ralph Macchio, and Ben Wang releases 30th May 2025. *waxing on and off intensifies* (or should I say jacket on and off? But that's a bit too close to something else, huh...)