Markatron84

I'll be working through the Christmas and birthday gifts, so Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Doom: The Dark Ages, Dispatch, The Rogue Prince of Persia and Pokémon Legends Z-A.

Oh, and more Helldivers 2, I imagine.

@Stoned_Patrol there's a Contact button near the bottom of the page; you don't need to post the same comment in every article.

@Jenkinss exemplary work 🤣

@jesse_dylan there's no shame in that. If I'm not enjoying something, I leave it.

Cyberpunk was something I wasn't enjoying when I started it in 2023. When I went back to it this year, I started over and committed to a specific playstyle and enjoyed it far more.

None of them were on Xbox - it was a mixture of Steam, Epic, Switch, Switch 2 and retro - and very few of them came out this year, but:

• New Pokémon Snap
• Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury
• Desvelado
• Little Kitty, Big City
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2
• Guacamelee 2
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2
• The Last of Us: Part I
• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
• Super Mario Odyssey
• Boxboy + Boxgirl
• Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
• Uncharted 4: A Thief's End
• Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
• Mario Kart World
• Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land (Game Boy Advance)
• Pokémon Scarlet
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Game Gear)
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Chaos (Game Gear)
• Rolo to the Rescue (Mega Drive)
• Death's Door
• Sonic 3 & Knuckles (Mega Drive)
• Knuckles the Echidna in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Mega Drive)
• Donkey Kong Bananza
• Mario Pinball Land (Game Boy Advance)
• WWE 2K25
• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
• Kirby's Dream Land (Game Boy)
• WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! (Game Boy Advance)
• WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Party Game$ (Gamecube)
• Monument Valley
• Pac-Man World 2 Re-Pac
• Picross S Nanco Legendary Edition
• Vampire Survivors
• Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged
• Monument Valley II
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Super Mario Galaxy 2
• Dandelions in the Sky
• Doki Doki Literature Club Plus
• SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Picross S7
• Yooka-Replaylee
• Dispatch

@Lup I started keeping track this year. Thought it would be a fun thing to do 🙂

@smoreon I'll look into that. Thank you and Merry Christmas 😃

If the first game is anything to go by, then:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no!

@Banjo- be careful what you wish for. Running the game on PC at anything above 30fps literally breaks the game and makes certain sections impossible to get through.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to the team and the community.

I bought 0 Xbox games this year. 100% of those purchases were physical.

It was my birthday yesterday; I treated myself to Dispatch and my brother got me Doom: The Dark Ages. So those and the usual too much Helldivers 2.

I can't be mad, honestly. As much as I'm itching to play First Light, I'd rather play the best possible version that launches. It's not like I've got nothing else going on; Helldivers 2 plus a backlog the size of a small principality.

@wncc1701p precisely. How many games in the grand scheme of things even have specific release dates further out than March?

@Stocksy next they'll be saying that EA Sports games aren't live service 🤣

@Allenspurs I'm including PC in your prediction. They've brought a lot over. We'll have to wait and see. If GT7 hasn't come to PC by the time GT8 comes out, I owe you a pizza.

WWE games receive multiple roster updates and dlcs....they are not live service games

I've straight up just got to disagree with this though. Have you played MyFaction? It's so designed to make you spend money it's practically got it's hand in my pocket fumbling around for my wallet.

@Balaam_ and can you order warm beers and iffy pizza?

What a tragic and sad way for somebody's life to end. And right before the holidays too. R.I.P. Vince.

@Allenspurs

It will never ever be on Xbox or PC.

I'm screenshotting this 👀😜

@MrClump

I mean the Recycle Bin is an icon...

@FraserG Hookshot needs a Comment of the Year award so I can nominate this one.

Remember when first-party games represented the pinnacle of what a console had to offer?

@Weebleman "games" doesn't have the ring (see: SEO) to it that "Xbox games" does 😉

@Brigurugi

GT player base seem far more refined, polite, helpful and supportive. All I ever heard in FM was hate for the game, others and MS. The love Gran Turismo players have for the game is leaps and bounds ahead of Forza Motorsport.

You've just sold me on trying out GT7 if it ever comes to PC. Contact SIE and demand a commission.

In all seriousness, is this a Sony fan base thing? Because Helldivers 2 is the same. I have 500 hours in the game and out of the thousands of people I've played with, only a handful have been toxic The vast majority are there to help each other out, have a sense of humour if something goes awry and just have fun playing the game. I bet if Xbox released a similar game it'd be a different story.

I haven't played a GT game since GT5 Prologue on PS3. I didn't spend much time with it, especially compared to the amount of hours I spent with FM3 and FM4.

I did like this gen's FM, but fell off it after about 60 hours. By that time, I was trying out the multiplayer and found the community really uptight and snobbish. I'm not the greatest at driving games but I feel like I'm OK and I never race dirty; I have the achievement for maintaining an S safety rating across 5 consecutive online events and was on track for getting the achievement for a 10-event streak, so I can't be that bad. But I was getting berated so many times for any little mistake or any time somebody felt I had slighted them in some way, it really put me off.

@swedetrap you got tinfoil lining the inside of that hat?

@Balaam_ Don't bother. SEO wins out over reader irritation on PX. Always has, always will.

Remember when they said they planned to release Ark 2 in 2023?

Chortle.

Man, I am so excited for this; it feels like they announced this DLC ages ago now. Dave the Diver is phenomenally good and I can't wait for more.

Must be nice to be winding down for the Christmas period. I am currently very much wound up 🤣

@IOI that's an entire article by itself 🤣

Two of these are really stretching the definition of "first-party games"
Then there's Hellblade 2, which released in 2024. Hellblade 2 Enhanced was an update, wasn't it?

I'm autistic and if there's two things I love, it's video games and lists. I'm absolutely reading through this entire thing later.

As someone who's undergone an existential crisis or two, I can relate to how Takahashi must be feeling right now. Hopefully he gets through the funk and returns with an equally weird and wonderful passion project; I haven't played To a T yet, but it's on the list.

The team has been working hard since launch to improve the experience and eliminate as many bugs as possible.

Then it's a pity that outlets were writing reviews of the game they were playing then - y'know, the version deemed fit for commercial release - and not the game they might be playing in six months' time. 🙄

I'm not a King of the Hill fan, so the controller does nothing for me.

That headline is fire, though.

Doesn't he know that Halo: Campaign Evolved isn't a remastered collection? Or did he slip up and reveal a Halo remastered collection? Either way, great work. Head of Xbox Game Studios, everybody!

The fact that your game - one game out of the tens of thousands of games that get released in a year - was well regarded enough to be in the top six nominees for GOTY should be enough.

I didn't have to listen to Fares give any speeches, so I'm happy.

Geoff has to be running The Game Awards for profit, right? There's absolutely no way he should be able to justify charging a million dollars for him to show off your three-minute trailer. He claims to love the industry and that these awards are supposed to celebrate the industry and its output, but he's charging silly money for exposure when publishers and developers could be putting that money towards skyrocketing development costs or, oh I don't know, keeping people employed.

Don't forget that Skyrim is also coming to PlayStation 6, Switch 3 and Xbox... something.

@themightyant Smurt Delivery™!

@Chip-Douglas Yeah, I hope so too. The problem is that most companies would rather sit on IP and do nothing with them rather than sell them to another company who might make money from them.

A perfect example of what I'm talking about is Microsoft's handling of The Initiative and Perfect Dark. Take Two wanted to buy it up and continue development, but rather than sell the studio and IP to Take Two, Microsoft would rather hang onto the IP and shut the studio down. And without the IP, there was no point in buying The Initiative and Take Two just spun up a new studio with two of the former higher-ups.

@Chip-Douglas that is true. I just think that if someone is looking to buy, say, NetherRealm, is it worth going through the process of buying it when you don't even get the Mortal Kombat IP with it and any future games need to be licenced out because Netflix needs its cut? At that point you're just buying a building and people and you might as well just spin up a new studio.

@Chip-Douglas that's the thing. Most of the WB Games IPs aren't game IPs, they're media IPs. So if Netflix sells the game studios, there's no way they're going to let Harry Potter, DC, Mortal Kombat go with them; Harry Potter especially is way too lucrative to let that happen. And on the flipside, who's going to buy these studios if they're not getting the IPs along with them?

@CaptnTedo Black Ops 6 also had a free trial period this time last year, likewise Modern Warfare 3 the year before. I don't think it's down to the game underperformimg.

I wonder if the effort is worth it, given how Xbox is willing to completely change up its entire hardware strategy and, let's face it, how precarious its position in the console and/or hardware market currently is.

They did all that work - backwards compatibility, FPS boost, etc - for legacy games running on Series X|S, only to seemingly pivot to a more PC-focused hardware strategy going forward. What happens in 5-10 years time if Xbox needs to or decides to change it up again in some way? Does a second round of costly legacy game compatibility development also essentially go to waste?

It's got to be a difficult position to be in, given that consumers more than ever want their libraries to come with them across hardware generations, and Xbox's future in hardware is so uncertain and likely to change at almost a moment's notice.

The Initiative was established in 2018 and shipped nothing both prior to and after Gallagher and Horton's involvement. I hope I'm wrong but this all ends in tears, right?

No. No it did not.

@Fiendish-Beaver I used to see games like that referred to as "second-party" a lot. Don't know if that's still a thing.

@Nintendo4Sonic don't get me started...

I don't actually know. I'm trying to play some of the (too many) games I've already got. I recently played through SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake and finished Cyberpunk 2077, but am at a loss as to what I should start next.

So I'll probably end up defaulting to ol' faithful Helldivers 2.

So Netflix is going to own DC Comics as well? Altogether now:

Nananananana Netflix.
Nananananana Netflix.
Netflix, Netflix, NETFLIX!!!!

Also, everyone remember to say how amazing this acquisition is going to be. Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard was the greatest thing ever, so it stands to reason that this will also be the greatest thing ever.