Cakefish

I can’t play it sadly. I never was able to finish the first game due to the incredibly high difficulty so wouldn’t stand a chance with the sequel. It’s a real shame because it looks like such craftsmanship. Alas, when you make a game that’s even more difficult than Elden Ring it crosses my personal threshold from challenging to inaccessible.

Assuming it gets good reviews I’ll be getting it in October. For work travel related reasons I’m not able to play Xbox all of September so Switch 2 it is all month for me.

Until I see Sony publish a single player, non-live service game on Xbox I’m not convinced the era of competition between these two platforms is over.

I hope Borderlands 4 is good. Wonderlands was fine enough, but by the end I kinda felt burnt out on the whole Borderlands formula. It just felt a bit stale. There’s just the one moment in the game that I really liked, but the rest proved to be quite forgettable. 4 seems promising in the marketing so far, but the proof will be in the pudding.

@ozkrmz yes there’s no drop-off in quality. If you enjoyed the base game you will enjoy Overture. It’s great.

Last week I played Lies of P: Overture. Incredible DLC for an incredible game. Story is intense, the new enemies and bosses are really cool, the aesthetics of some of the new areas are very novel and atmospheric, and some interesting new weapons too. Superb.

More info on Fable.

I just want to be able disable the play history. I hope we a toggle in future. I submitted feedback via the insider app.

Usually these sorts of things come bundled in with unpleasant price rises, so nice to see that’s not happening this time. Good stuff!

We don’t ‘need’ it, but oh I sure do want it. Not right now in this year to be clear, but by 2027 I’ll definitely be hungry for an upgrade!

Plenty of things that can be greatly improved. Dedicated hardware for upscaling, dedicated hardware for ray tracing, a big boost to CPU performance, and more RAM for higher quality textures etc.

It would need to offer a proper generational leap over Switch 2 to tempt me into buying a second handheld. Otherwise, I don’t travel frequently enough to justify having two portable gaming devices.

This bank holiday weekend I’ll finally have a chance to start Lies of P: Overture, as I finished Horizon: Forbidden West’s Burning Shores expansion last night (really great game btw!). Looking forward to returning to Krat, but I’ll no doubt be rusty so will have to try my best to resist the urge to knee-jerk switch to the new lower difficulty mode! 👀

Just the once, Ultimate Edition back in 2021. My brother and I played through the entire series in co-op mode.

@Millionski true true, 2022-2023 were bleak years for first party output. Truth be told, 2021 was really the only year that I’ve been wholly satisfied with how Microsoft has handled XSX. I’ve think it’s been troubled ever since then. 2022-2023 for lack of first party games, and 2024-2025 for shifting the focus away from XSX and onto Cloud/PS5 and the next gen ‘Xbox PC’ instead.

We already knew that they weren’t working on Psychonuts 3, I think I recall an interview years ago clarifying that they wanted to focus on multiple smaller projects for the forseeable future. As much I love 2 if their heart’s not in it for 3 then it would be pointless, it only makes sense when they feel passionate about making another sequel again. I’ll enjoy all the cool things they cook up in the meantime. Keeper looks super interesting 🙂

This trailer does nothing for me. I was tricked by the cool flashy trailers of the first one and naively preordered. And it was an absolute abomination at launch and stayed that way for many months. I’m not being a foolish guinea pig again, I’ll only let myself get excited once I see reviews upon launch. That 2023 game is in a better state now with the 2.0 update, though still more janky than I would like. The core game is perhaps a 7/10 at best. It’s okay, but definitely flawed. I hope they do improve with the sequel. I’m willing to give them a second chance because they have shown genuine commitment to patching the original, but I’m certainly not touching preorders of this sequel with a bargepole!

If you want a preview of what this actually means in practice just look at Nvidia’s recent PC GPU tech demos and presentations. It’s essentially just that. Nvidia have been talking a lot about neural rendering and suchlike. Digital Foundry have a lot of YouTube videos on this subject if you want to learn more.

Go Hazelight! 💪 Split Fiction is still my favourite game of this year so far (as my current profile photo probably shows). Love to see it doing well.

Interesting to see AC Shadows do well. Evidence of why online narratives can be very misleading, I was the impression it had flopped in sales like Star Wars Outlaws did. Reddit is such a tiny bubble vs the wider population, always gotta remember this!

We still haven’t received Fable, or even any decent length of gameplay trailer footage, the game announced at E3 2020 (literally predating XSX|S) for crying out loud. It seems a little crazy that Microsoft are already ‘wrapping up’ the generation.

It’s felt like XSX has been on life support ever since January 2024 honestly. Not Xbox mind you, I mean specifically XSX. Ever since then it’s all been about the future, both with the media reporting on the never-ending ‘Xbox PC’ rumours and from Microsoft itself, repeatedly boasting that next gen is going to be the best thing since sliced bread while focusing primarily on PC/Cloud.

Poor XSX, it was great hardware but it never really got a chance to shine in the limelight. Microsoft’s attention clearly moved on 1.5 years ago. And thus, so has all the discussion online amongst media and enthusiasts. I’m super excited about new hardware for sure, I love cutting-edge tech, but I just wish that I didn’t feel as though the XSX swansong has been ringing out ever since Jan 2024.

I feel old, time is passing so quickly these days, I swear Borderlands was only just added recently. I own the game so it doesn’t bother me, it’s just the light speed passage of time that’s scary.

I’m not buying it. As disappointed as I am with current Switch 2 third party support, I just can’t justify owning two handheld gaming systems - I simply don’t travel often enough. I’ll reassess this when Steam Deck 2 comes out (and whatever Xbox handheld is available at the time), it may be enough of a generational performance leap over Switch 2 to get me to reconsider this stance.

I use one of the third party rechargeable/dockable battery packs for my controller. In a perfect world I wouldn’t have to buy it separately, but it is nice to have a backup option in case this battery pack ever fails. Having said that my Switch Pro controller is still going strong after 6 years, so that’s not a major concern.

With the Xbox design you can get some nice minimalist, sleek controller docks, whilst the Switch design requires a little USB dongle to be plugged into the controller to make charging docks viable. Not a major issue for the Switch, but that’s still an obvious win for the Xbox design.

So I say no need to fix what ain’t broken.

@Jenkinss yeah, I agree, I can get most of the news from just browsing Reddit, but I like reading the opinions of both article authors and commenters here.

@ValentineMeikin 100% agreed. They actually used to have it on the Xbox app but for some unfathomable reason they removed it a couple months ago. A complete step backwards, just baffling really. Meanwhile the Cloud Gaming app doesn’t even have any filter or sorting options at all.

They need to add a way to filter and sort games on the mobile app. The list is starting to get overwhelming and difficult to navigate now.

@Millionski I don’t disagree, it won’t affect their console sales, but think how much more money they’d be making if there were plenty of Switch 2 optimised third party games to choose from on the eShop. I’m gonna be buying the new Katamari game on Xbox instead of Switch because there’s no Switch 2 version available, just one example where Nintendo loses out. Yeah it’s only enthusiasts who care about this kinda stuff, but the people buying a new console within the first 6 months are primarily the enthusiasts!

There’s a notable drought of third party games on Switch 2 this year because of Nintendo being super stingy with the dev kits. As a Switch 2 owner I think they really shot themselves in the foot with this strategy.

@Master_Cthulhu70 I’ve been eagerly awaiting their next game ever since Psychonauts 2. That game is still easily my favourite first party XSX game to date.

Do save files carry over from the Ultimate Edition Remaster?

I think Wuchang releasing a couple weeks ago might well hurt this game. Both have very similar themes and style. Wuchang has the advantage of being on Game Pass and launching on Xbox day 1 rather than a year’s delay. I know my own interest in Wukong has diminished since seeing the positive reviews for Wuchang.

Keeper is the clear highlight. Really eager to see more.

@Balaam_ they tack on ‘Xbox Game Pass’ to the headline of every article possible. It’s search engine optimisation. It does sometimes make the headlines read a bit strangely though, as in this case.

Currently very busy with other games right now so can’t justify buying this at launch. I may get it later down the line, when it is on sale. Lots of games I still need to work through beforehand to get to that point though!

And if they still haven’t fixed the performance mode issues on console that Digital Foundry were describing last year then I’ll just pass.

I honestly don’t really know. Xbox is in a weird place right now. By expanding to other platforms and deprioritising in-house hardware, they’ve kinda watered down the significance of these anniversaries. It now feels not unlike if Spotify or Netflix etc. were to celebrate their 20th anniversaries or whatever - it’s just another subscription service now, focusing ever increasingly on cloud. Where’s the fun in that? Subscriptions don’t really care about anniversaries, they just exist and gradually iterate in perpetuity, that’s the whole business model. Strange times.

So I guess I’d like to be proven wrong. To see that Microsoft does actually still care deeply about their in-house hardware, outside of empty PR platitudes. I suppose it would be a good time as any to reveal the next generation of hardware and it really needs to be as revolutionary as all the rumours claim. I also want to see that new hardware maintain compatibility with the Expansion Cards as a gesture of good will to current Series X|S customers.

£600 is a very tough ask vs Steam Deck OLED. Yeah this has VRR and can play some games that SteamOS can’t, but ehhh that price is really suboptimal to say the least.

The higher tier one at least justifies its existence with a more powerful SOC than Steam Deck.

At first I was fully ready to moan when I saw the headline, but reading on… if this means they no longer clutter up the owned games list then this is actually a fantastic change. About damn time!

A one-off doesn’t really prove anything. Going to need to see other games like Stellar Blade to see that Sony has truly changed. Then I’ll thank them.

New Katamari is hype!

It’s a backlog focus month for me. I’m hoping to finish off Horizon: Forbidden West on PC, then I really need to play Lies of P: Overture and then I want to try out Wuchang: Fallen Feathers.

Hmmm Reanimal got delayed then? Oh well, I suppose we have Little Nightmares 3 in the meantime.

Darksiders 4 is cool, but not much to say about the teaser trailer itself.

Stellar Blade? 👀🤞

Shareholders will only be able to buy one super yacht instead of two, oof these really are trying times. Thoughts and prayers to the billionaires.

Ewww CEO pretending to care about layoffs they themselves ordered. While simultaneously boasting about record earnings. The fake sympathy is nauseating 🤢

I don’t like this, but it’s not Microsoft’s fault. Ridiculous law, this is the government’s massive overreach. Forced to upload the most sensitive ID documents in our possession to the dodgiest of websites around who will happily sell it on to criminal gangs on a silver platter, an absolute cyber security disaster just waiting to happen. I’ll reluctantly trust Microsoft, but there’s so many other smaller companies which are not trustworthy in the slightest. Terrible, terrible law.

Not played enough yet to give a fair vote. It’s on the backlog list after Lies of P: Overture.

Stellar Blade

The rest are mere pipe dream territory.

Looking at the state of most UE5 games, probably not. They only really started to optimise for performance in version 5.3 onwards and we’re only approaching what feels like a mature, polished engine at version 5.6 that only just released a month ago. A handful of the most elite dev studios have proven capable of overcoming the challenge of optimising with earlier versions of UE5, but I’m not confident that 343 have such top tier talent working at that studio - as harsh as that sounds.

I played the intro up to the first checkpoint. Reminded me of Lies of P - in a good way! It was humorous hearing these supposedly Chinese characters speak in thick cockney accents lol - a little immersion breaking but whatever.
Performance was a bit rough even in that initial tutorial though, so will need some patches. I still have Lies of P: Overture on the backlog and the second half of Horizon: Forbidden West so will be a while before I play, hopefully it’ll be fully patched up by that point.
A promising start though!

Ah seems I spoke too soon, they’ve changed it today to £60. Great! Glad they saw sense. I hereby retract all my grumbling at Microsoft.

I instead direct my moaning at any publisher attempting to charge £70 RRP for new games. £70 is $80 now. The exchange rate changed and companies need to acknowledge this fact (they never hesitate even for a second when pound weakens).

@darylb24 the US dollar has weakened throughout this year so 1:1 pricing no longer respects current market conditions.