Ronnie

Delayed 6 weeks.

How unpleasant and unnecessary of you, to no one's surprise.

It was a lack of first party support that had dire consequences for the PSVR, not the specs. It's the same old story for Sony. The price of the VR2 might come down eventually, but I suspect that after yet another failure sales-wise, Sony will abandon even their (already pretty modest) support of it.

Doesn't matter if the price tag is 'cheap' for the tech included, the price tag is too high. Dumb move. Could see its failure coming a mile off.

WHO COULD HAVE GUESSED PRE-ORDERS WOULD DISAPPOINT, I AM SHOCKED. You would think after all these years and after their experience with the PSP, Vita, or looking back to things like the Game Gear v Game Boy, that someone at PlayStation might just realise that top of the line specs and a huge price tag don't = sales. Especially in a niche market. And no backwards compatibility is another slap in the face idiotic move.

Can they promise a steadier supply of first party games while they're at it??

Coming sometime this year to PC/consoles. Demo out now on the former. Apparently three other Steamworld games in development at the moment. Quite an IP they've built!

The demo was apparently disastrously bad and it seems the final game isn't much of a step above that.

I’m not sure about pipes but I’ve had allies seem to idle the battle indefinitely a couple of times. Had to quit out. Happened again so restarted the game and it was fine after that. Really annoying though.

I might be going back to LA at the end of the year, so will obviously get a visit to this on the schedule!

Ok f it, watched it, as expected it didn't give much away. Looks great, apart from that one CG shot of Dr Pershing.

God I don't know how I'll be able to resist watching this. Having said that, similar to S2, they're in the admirable position of knowing that everyone is going to tune in regardless so they don't need to build a 'hype' trailer and can just show a few teasing scenes. It was amazing going into the last 4 eps of the second season without having seen any of it in trailers. I did see a quick screenshot of Paul Sun-Hyung Lee's character, I wonder if some of the Rangers of the New Republic storyline will get folded into Mando. I'd love that personally as I was one of the weirdos who was more looking forward to that series than Kenobi!

Love it when each film/tv season has different colouring

Awesome, the Mando posters are always great. Feels like it'll be quite an action packed season. Looking forward to your trailer impressions @Julius PS: it's nice to have posters that aren't just floating heads, like most posters are these days. A real throwback, which is fitting given the series itself.

Fair enough, I see what you mean. Lucasfilm Animation certainly feels like a well oiled machine at this point, in contrast perhaps to the live action shows that often start from scratch in a way by bringing in new production teams etc. Tough to predict really, I could see a Mando-verse panel like they did last year, except this one will feature Mando, Ahsoka and Skeleton Crew. Otherwise, an Andor panel would be nice given that show never really got one and it's a huge hit, plus based in the UK too. Exciting times! I'll probably skip this latest S3 trailer though, want to go in as blind as possible, even if they've been really good in the past about showing very little.

I was responding to your post that 'there wasn't much to do'. You might not have personally enjoyed the stuff there was to do, but it was there. PS: you were never supposed to collect all 900 korok seeds. It's why they didn't put a counter in-game + the prize for doing collecting them all. It was just a fun little activity as you roam around the world.

Yeah saw that video too. Alex is doing brilliant work these days, met him and his wife at Celebration, lovely people. I'm not sure consistency is quite on the animation shows' side, there are some forgettable episodes but I suppose that's true of any series. Still, out of 16 Bad Batch eps in S1 I'd say 10 of them are top notch. But then again even in the ones that aren't top tier, they still have character development stuff that's worthwhile and adds to the whole. Nice! Crazy it's less than 90 days away. We'll be in the middle of Mando during it too, which'll be interesting, a buzz in the air for sure.

Blown away by this week's episode of The Bad Batch. People talking about it being some of the best Star Wars tv around and it's hard to disagree. It's been all of a month and a half since I last heard that.

This board has those types of fanboys for sure, we all know who, but I'm not one of them, I've talked often how shoddy Pokemon games are and more recently their Sports titles like Super Rush, Switch Sports, Mario Tennis and the new Strikers are barebones and lazy releases.

Yeah lots of reasons for the underperformance. I did think it was a strange time of year to release the game and whilst the overworld changes are substantial it still feels like a very iterative game. Really surprising it took 5+ years to make. Another example of why Nintendo games don’t often go on sale. Gamers have been trained to just wait for sales, especially in Ubisoft titles.

This might sound like a small thing but I'd hear people talk about how the first thing they did in the game was run from tower to tower and 'unlock' the whole map, but to me this misses the point of the game. Stuff like that is fine in a game like Spider-Man or similar where towers are just a means to unlocking stuff to do, but in BOTW I feel like it would take away some of the magic of exploration, which is the whole point of the game. People are of course free to play games whoever they like, but it definitely feels like the designers didn't intend for that to happen and it's something Mark Brown from Game Maker's Toolkit has spoken about before, how players can optimise the fun out of a game. As for your point about subtle cues in the design, absolutely. I found it very jarring going from BOTW's openworld to another where it's crystal clear the design just isn't up to the same standard. Some games are of course like Read Dead 2 and I imagine Elden Ring too, I'm still yet to play that. Oh and 100% this ^ too. There's a fine balance between 'empty' and having areas of wilderness and I think the game walks the line perfectly for what it sets out to achieve. Like I said earlier, for me personally, I'd played 16 other Zelda games that did things a certain way. I'm more than happy to keep an open mind and for one instalment to try a fresh approach. That's a really good way of putting it. A great game (with flaws), but a masterpiece of an experience.

But the towers didn’t unlock a million check marks of things to do, all it did was fill in the map with the landscape. It was up to you to go wherever curiosity took you. Very different than a Ubisoft game where you have to climb a tower to be pointed towards things to do or collect. To be honest having read about how they designed the game the towers seemed more to give players a vantage point to glide down from than to actually do anything mechanically.

It re-invented how openworlds worked, from what was a Ubisoft formula of checkmarks and tasks to complete. Elden Ring is another game that did something similar. The sense of exploration and discovery meant you were stumbling on things whichever direction you turned. It didn't lead players by a dotted line telling them where to go, you created your own adventure. The physics and chemistry engine as they called it added an additional layer to how you interacted with the world, and the fact that all your abilities were unlocked from the start meant you really could 'go anywhere'. It was a sandbox to get lost in, and at the very start of the game, had the added layer of having to simply survive. As for stuff you could do, 120 shrines, 5 dungeons, lots of unique towns, lots of stables, lots of sidequests, enemy encampments, korok puzzles, overworld bosses, finding all the memories, and filling your compendium and other stuff like Eventide Island, the Lost Woods etc. What baffles me is people thinking the world is empty. It's not as artificially stuffed full of busiwork like a Ubisoft game, sure, but it was never trying to be that. It was trying to harken back to the original Legend of Zelda, placing you in a world and telling you to go have an adventure. For me it's more than worth all the overwhelming praise it's getting, and then some. I feel like I play the same openworld game year after year be it an Assassin's Creed or one of the Sony Studios usual narrative stuff, but BOTW made me feel like a kid again, a hugely memorable experience for me.

Such a strange online dichotomy between this message board where you'd think BOTW was the worst game ever created... and the entire rest of the internet where it's getting overwhelming critical acclaim, praise and awards. To each their own.