Dcubed

He's definitely a selling point, I immediately take notice of any game he works on

Crazy that it took two Canios to make it happen, but congrats!

@Jonnas, losing all of your lives in Sin & Punishment ends your run completely; forcing you to start the game over from Stage 0. You’re probably not gonna be seeing a true Game Over in Easy mode? But in Hard & Turbo? You definitely won’t be beating it your first time! S&P isn’t a particularly long game, but beating Hard mode is proper nails! Feels awesome when you finally manage it

Yeah… Black Deck is rough. Still haven’t managed to beat Green Stake with it yet…

Awesome! Let’s hope it doesn’t end up slipping again now

There’s a reason why the Roguelike genre has exploded in popularity in the past 6 odd years…

There’s no such thing as an “outdated” gameplay mechanic. Lives have their use and their place. At the end of the day, they are a system that gives the player a limited number of chances to make a certain amount of progress through either a portion of, or the entirety of, a game. Their ultimate purpose is to provide an element of tension and risk, and they are ultimately tied to a stake of progress. The higher the stake (i.e, the amount of progress a player stands to lose if they run out of chances), the higher the sense of tension & risk, but also the higher the sense of payoff and satisfaction that comes with completing a challenge. They are a means of adding difficulty to a game, and often are even directly tied to the difficulty setting chosen (Higher difficulty setting = less lives available to the player). An issue arises however when the stake that’s being wagered is so low, that their impact is rendered almost meaningless. In Super Mario 64 for example, its use of lives is almost pointless because you don’t really lose any progress for a Game Over (You get sent back to the castle courtyard, whoopdie do!). This also has the side effect of making 1up mushrooms a meaningless and unsatisfying reward for finding them. In this case, it’s not the mechanic itself that’s the issue, it’s the application. Lives with no stake at risk are pointless. Now. Let’s look at an example of the complete opposite application, and how the loss of their stake completely ruins their effect… Super Monkey Ball. In the original arcade game (and it’s GCN port), lives are the most precious thing you can possibly earn, because you lose all progress in your run when you run out of lives/continues; and in such a difficult game, the pressure rises exponentially as you get deeper into the run and come ever so tantalisingly close to reaching the end of each of the different difficulty modes. And on top of that, unlocking the Extra and Master stages require you to complete each difficulty without using a single Continue. As such, collecting as many Bananas as you can is utterly crucial to succeeding in this game, because you need 100 of them to earn an extra life; and of course, those Bananas usually require you to take the riskier paths and pull off those more difficult jumps… risk and reward! Oh! And don’t forget those secret exits too that allow you to jump ahead and skip certain stages… gotta take the risk if you want to get ahead and conserve those lives… It’s an expertly crafted game with a perfect balance of mechanics that serve the game design perfectly… and all of it is completely undone by its HD remake, Banana Mania. In the HD version? You no longer need to complete a run in one go, the game just saves after each stage. Now there is no stake at risk, and so, Lives (and subsequently the Bananas, secret exits, the risky paths, EVERYTHING that strays from the easiest critical path) are rendered completely pointless. This is a catastrophic change that utterly demolishes the original intended game design, an absolute butchering by developers that fundamentally did not understand the appeal of the original game. Lives are a powerful mechanic when applied correctly, but they are just one gameplay mechanic amongst many. There is no such thing as an “outdated” mechanic, but there is certainly such a thing as a pigheaded, dismissive and outdated point of view. And ultimately the most important thing is to consider what your game design is trying to accomplish. If you’re looking for a way to provide meaningful tension, dread and a sense of accomplishment with your game? Lives can be a fantastic way of achieving that.

Astro Bot is the 30th Anniversary Celebration game. It features a cast of characters and settings pulled from past Japan Studio titles, including Parappa, Concrete Genie and SOTC.

It’s really nice to see at least a small part of Playstation actually pay homage to their legacy. Sony does actually have a back catalogue that’s worth celebrating, and it’s criminal how much Modern Sony has shoved aside their legacy; when they should be proud of where they came from. A sight for sore eyes

Like I said in the SOP thread, it looks good! If it comes to PC? I’ll get it

Bit of a tough act to follow there

Astro Bot looks legit. If it comes to PC, I might give it a go

Not much I really need to add here. It's one of the greatest games ever made, and next to Super Mario 64, is the single most influential and important game of its entire generation across all platforms. It would go on to basically write the rulebook on how to make a 3D action title, and literally every single developer who makes 3D games today uses it as a reference when building their own game engine. You simply would not have the likes of Elden Ring or God of War without it. That being said, it's also worth noting that for however influential OoT was, it was itself a clear iteration on the formula that ALTTP had written 7 years prior. It's not really wrong to say that OoT was "A Link To The Past But In 3D", but that does sell it very short for the myriad innovations that it did bring to the table; even ignoring the obvious jump to 3D. And while retrospective looks at the series today are often quick to label OoT's sequels as being mere clones and repeats of the same formula, that's also very much revisionist baloney; it's a very unfair statement that is more a reflection of Nintendo's status within the console market as a whole than true reality. The Zelda series would live under OoT's shadow all the way up until 2017, when BOTW would essentially re-write history and abandon almost every convention laid out by ALTTP and OoT, but even that game owes a huge debt to OoT for its continued use of the Z-Targetting system and its camera system in general. I'd also like to point out that OoT itself also owes a debt to Virtua Fighter, which pioneered the use of 3D humanoid playable characters and the use of motion capture in video games. VF itself is a game that doesn't get anything close to the credit it deserves for how much it changed the entire industry (Indeed, the Playstation would never have existed without it), and it should be considered in the same breath as SM64 and OoT (certainly at least the 3rd most influential game released in that generation).

Ooh! What if we're getting the rumoured Greek God of War Remake/Remaster trilogy announcement here? Certainly has been long enough since Bluepoint's last release in 2021, and... well... you know... they made the original GOW HD remasters on PS3 to begin with... I'd be down for that!

Ooh, early this year. Nice. Can't imagine that there's gonna be much coming from first party this year outside of the new Astro Bot though... probably the last couple of PSVR2 games that were in production before everything got shut down with London Studio. I'd imagine that this'll be predominantly focused on games due to arrive in 2025 (Monster Hunter Wilds, Wolverine, maybe Media Molecule's, Housemarque and Sucker Punch's next titles etc), but perhaps we'll see release dates for Silent Hill 2 Remake and MGS3 Delta? They'll surely be coming out this year at least. Bend Studio putting out something this year isn't impossible, but considering that we've heard nothing in the way of rumblings, rumours and leaks? I doubt it. More likely their next title will be coming in 2025.

Happy 10th anniversary Mario Kart 8!! 10 years on and it's still the newest game in the series Shh, I'm not counting MK Live or MK Tour

This is the other Aleck 64 game that got a home release, one of only two (the other one being Star Solider: Vanishing Earth). What's also interesting about this one is that Capcom actually went out of their way to license the Temporary Landing System mechanic from Arika's Tetris: The Grandmaster series for inclusion in this game. Arika was made up of former Capcom staff, so there's another odd connection there too. Finally, this is one of only a handful of games that were designed for the N64 first as the primary target platform but then later ported to the PS1 (usually it's the other way around). Speaking of which... Glover just so happens to be another one of those handful!

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2024/05/28/play-call-of-duty-black-ops-6-day-one-game-pass/ So much for a COD price bump to Game Pass. Well, this is it. If anything is gonna give Game Pass a bump in subscribers on the current hardware, it's now or never.

It’s not actually a point of no return, but it is a very long trek back to safety. The pre and mid-battle cutscenes during the final boss are notorious for being nightmarishly long though, to the point that death during the final battle is a brutal punishment as you have to endure around 20 mins of cutscenes all over again if you don’t win. Will be interesting to see if they renege on that design choice or if they choose to stick to the original version’s guns in that regard… Because there’s definitely an argument to be made about how much those incessant unskippable cutscenes raise the stakes of that final fight! I'd actually have quite a bit of respect for IS if they do choose to leave it as-is, because it would NOT be a popular decision; but I do think it'd take away some of the unique flavour and tension that comes from the final battle as it was in the original game... It would certainly be a brave decision. But I'm gonna go ahead and guess that they'll please the crowd and make those cutscenes skippable...

https://blog.playstation.com/2024/05/28/get-ready-days-of-play-celebration-kicks-off-on-may-29/?sf273351644=1 Sony finally remembered that they have a PS2 library and are spinning up their PS2 re-releases again! Sly Cooper 1, Tomb Raider Legend PS2 and Star Wars: The Clone Wars PS2 join Playstation Premium on May 29th (alongside some other shit).

Not so great legs. 2.5 million of those sales came within the first 10 days, while its taken them almost 2 months to sell another 500k. Almost certainly due to the poor post-launch WOM and its myriad technical issues from its hasty launch. Hopefully Capcom learn their lesson and don't rush out unfinished games before the end of the financial year again.

The Super Mario Wonder GDC video is even better. Well worth a watch

Neat website I found that keeps track of what events are upcoming and what trailers have been released from each show... https://2024.gamesrecap.io/

The Paper Mario RPG games actively discourage grinding. They use a system where the amount of EXP you gain from a particular enemy decreases exponentially as your current level increases, meaning that there's a soft-cap on what level you can reach at any particular point in the game. Super Paper Mario takes this concept to an extreme, and revels in actively mocking the RPG genre's focus on time-wasting grinding (much to the chagrin of many a player who goes onto message boards and complains about games they've never played ).

Indeed. It's utterly criminal that 35+ years on, we STILL don't have a good version of these games in English outside of their original NES versions (which themselves have never been re-released, outside of a Japanese-only Wii collection). This collection is desperately needed.