RadioHedgeFund

I fully expect the FFVII remake 1 to be added when part 2 comes out next week. It did a stint on PS+ for a bit so it wouldn’t be unusual.

Screw graphics. If UE6 doesn’t make things cheaper and more efficient to build without resorting to making derivative content with AI then it’s not worth it.

Microsoft can still make exclusives and still get games like this out the door. Personally I wish they’d relicence the first 3 games only on Xbox.

Ultimately it’s still Forza Horizon 2 on a new map with a worse soundtrack. That map is a beautiful expanse full of nooks and crannies but FH has still been pretty much the exact same game since it left the Xbox 360. It’s fun for sure, but I don’t think it could ever be considered GOTY material.

Things that need correcting:

• The AI drivers on the map are too aggressive. They just speed around and slam right into you head on without slowing down.
• If I’m playing offline let me change the season to whatever I want rather than syncing up with the servers. I couldn’t give two figs about the festival playlist
• There needs to be a greater variety in the music. Maybe I’m getting old but all the songs on Pulse, Wave and a few others are incredibly samey. I like EDM and Trance as much as the next guy but it would be nice to have a proper indie station or some classic pop.
• Add Out My Head by Chvrches

Everyone says Sony bought Bungie for their live service push but the likely scenario is Microsoft wanted them back to reinvent Halo and Sony made a snap.

And here’s me thinking they cancelled E3

I mean release E-Day all you want because Gears became tiresome years ago. But I don’t think that Halo should be on PS at all.

I like it because it’s essentially story, PvE and PvP all put together. It also means that those of us who don’t want to play Online can concentrate on other areas.

@Grackler I actually think the UK map is utterly terrible, despite being from the UK myself. There is no way you’re driving up the M1 from the Cotswolds to Edinburgh in the space of 5 minutes. The collapsed nature of it all is utterly nonsensical.

A better idea would have been to confine the entire game to Cumbria, bordered by the Irish Sea on one side and the M6 on the other. Replace Edinburgh with Carlisle and you’re practically there.

@BleedingDreamer I feel the first one is the only one where everything came together. The setting, season, soundtrack, cheesy NPC opponents was and still is such a slam dunk first time around.

Each game since has improved on perhaps an individual element but none merged them so well as the first game.

@Oppyz666 I have zero issue with them having a diverse set of preset Avatars because the game is sold all across the world and appeals to all sorts of audiences. But all the western guys had blonde hair when very few western guys have blonde hair. No black, brown or redhead options at all.

Each has their own plus points.

The first game still has the best festival setup and one of the best soundtracks in the history of gaming.

2 has the best weather and the lovely eternal summer vibes. The road trip was a nice idea and gave you a lot of endgame content.

3 had the most map variety. The biomes were nice.

4 has Mr. Whippy adverts.

5 has the best levels of personal customisation.

Here’s hoping 6 merges the best of all before it.

Each to their own but I cannot fathom why 4 is the favourite. The map is great but the campaign was bloody awful. There was no endpoint, with an endless amount of races amounting to largely nothing. At the same time every single piece of Avatar clothing you might want to buy were locked behind random wheel spins with only a few things being tied to the campaign. And to make matters worse every single European-looking guy had blonde hair. If you had black, brown or ginger hair you were out of luck. How many blonde men do you ever see in France, the UK or Norway?!

The most consistent experience we had in the past was Xbox 360 to Windows Phone. Having your Avatar cross that boundary was really cool, having this little digital version of yourself across devices.

I’d quite like the old social tab to reappear and reintegrate the old Avatar models into the dash since they binned the ugly new ones.

It would be nice if they found a way to port over the Xbox 360 premium themes to the Series too.

There’s nothing wrong with the combat at all but in this day and age a straightforward FPS is…. Kinda dull. Halo is, or has become the same 15-minute firefight repeated and stretched over a whole game.

If Nintendo and Capcom can reinvent and reinvigorate their older franchises then the same can be said of Halo. Rather than turning it into some silly RPG, blending some of the elements of Metroid Prime (like Metroidvania and inventive bosses, not space magic) might be a good starting point. Infinite was a step in the right direction but it needn’t be another open world snooze fest.

Give the Chief some upgrades and abilities that can switch up the combat a little without upsetting the balance. Oh, and go all out on the multiplayer which should remain the classic fast-paced ‘dad’ shooter gameplay.

@Nexozi It requires time. Microsoft should be developing their own smaller family
Oriented games or getting some of the unsupported 360 titles back and then bundling them with an extra controller for $299.

@Nexozi Really games are just games. I can watch movies on my TV or my phone. Most people with the Switch only play the large model in the confines of the home, like with a Steamdeck. The lite model is the only real portable console on the market.

What most people are looking for is a console they can play with their kids on and enjoy some downtime themselves. Sony started ok in this area but the Xbox is a terrible family console if you have younger kids and you want them to play anything of quality.

The Switch is the only one left.

I know RAM prices cannot be helped but I really do think the Series S could be a heck of a secret weapon if they actually marketed it, particularly to people who might be looking at a Switch 2 but unsure about the price.

The popularity of the Switch and titles like Minecraft and Roblox shows that gamers don’t really care about graphics so long as things are fun. Build on this.

I used to believe a firm believer in the value of Game Pass. But now I’m better off just paying full price for the games I actually want to play and get them in perpetuity.

If I’m going to go multi platform then im porting the entire Xbox 360 first party catalogue to the iPhone starting with Geometry Wars and Fable 2

@SuntannedDuck2 I kind of miss the days of devs pulling miracles with hardware. Larian did some witchcraft to get BG3 running on the S. Now we have games like Crimson Whatsit that barely run on Pro consoles. I call it laziness myself. Aim for 1080p60 on the base consoles and the rest will sort itself out

Developers should be building for Series S and Switch 2 and then up scaling so everything runs fine for everyone. Isn’t this how PC games are built?

The ability to pick and choose what games are in a suspend state would be nice. Currently it happens automatically and you can’t block one user from wiping your own which becomes frustrating. Let us use them as save states to the SSD itself.

And I can’t stress enough how much the console needs local user accounts again so that you don’t have to make an MS Account for your kids.

If they’re going to add a ‘social’ tab back to the dashboard then they need to reframe it back around the 360 Avatars instead of the ugly new ones. I believe they only kept the old ones around because some games use them; leverage them instead.

The Xbox One survived on the back of backwards compatibility and Forza Horizon. There was zero other reasons to buy one over a PS4 and it’s much stronger software library. The same is much truer of the Series consoles which only a fool would tell you is better than the PS5.

The Xbox 360 however was something else. Its OS gradually evolved from the ugly blades interface (yes, it was) to the lovely mature Metro Design one at the end. Ripoffs of the Mii they may have been but it was always kinda cool seeing your Avatar living in your Xbox with your friends was pretty cool. It supported offline accounts so you don’t have to do something weird like make your kids a Microsoft account just to play 2-player games.

And it had a better software library than the PS3.

They still won’t have fixed some of the more glaring faults. Getting a full complement of 7 crew is still locked behind far too much of a grind assuming you actually want to be good in other areas and the lack of health packs could easily be sidestepped with some regenerative health unlocking after the first Starborn puzzle or something.

Worse still is the completely obtuse ammo system. I get that they’re going for a level of realism but Pistol/Assault/Heavy/Laser/Rocket categories would streamline things nicely.

I still have a Fanta skin for Forza Horizon 1 on the 360! It’s really nothing new.

Gears of War: E3

It’s Gears of War: you blind fire at some bullet sponge bad guys before getting impatient and go in guns blazing.

Commission a load of family-centric games on a tight budget so they can be finished in a few months. Bundle the Series S with loads of new and existing family titles together with a second controller and launch in time for Christmas.

The reason Xbox is in the doldrums is because it has zero appeal to parents who want to game with their kids and as they age. Sony had this sewn up from launch with titles like Sackboy’s Adventure.

Not really shocked about any of this really. Fortnite has been spending far too much time not focused on its original gameplay premise and the quality has significantly dropped.

It’s worth a mention that whilst the collabs probably sell, if they wanted to save money they could cut all corporate ties with Disney etc and instead devote their time to the in-universe stuff and nobody would care.

Enhanced character models…. Same janky animations

Cruising across the stars with my crew sounds great but it would be even better if having a maximum complement wasn’t locked behind hundreds of hours of grind.

Oh no it’s the Croc situation all over again: a bunch of adults who were once kids who enjoyed an objectionable awful game now want to relive their childhoods.

Sonic the Hedgehog and Shadow the Hedgehog were both terrible games.

JSRF is amazing though.

I look forward to having to run the decrapify script on my console to get it to run games properly

I can only assume there are others like me who stick with Xbox not because of the future but because of the past. I have loads of 360 games I am just not ready to let go of, to the point that I replay Fable 2, Horizon 1 and the FFXIII trilogy on a regular basis.

Given the Series S will continue to support these games for a long time yet, what reason do I have to buy the next Xbox instead of a 2nd hand PS5 to catch up on what I missed over there?

It’s not that it was bad, but the change in seasons basically equated to the snow disappearing on the mountain and the lake drying up. The seasons were needed for the UK because it’s a country with very variable weather, but we only ever picture Mexico as summer.

They had me at ‘….just like the first game’. It will be nice to be forced into using lower class cars. The last few games just let you use the same car for every event if you liked which was silly.

Personally I think it’s time somebody like the EU came down on virtual currencies across the board. It happened back in the 360 gen when we went from Microsoft (and Nintendo) points to actual monetary value. Epic should be forced to list everything in localised currency with an in-game checklist getting you the next Battlepass ‘for free’ with the purchase of the last one.

And then apply it to every other freemium game.

I always liked the final 360 dashboard. Seeing all your friends Avatars at once was a nice touch, I liked having the shop baked right into the dash and it was dead easy to navigate with nice themes.

As with everything great about the Xbox 360, they ruined it with the Xbox One. First time around that was hideous.

A box that runs Windows without a power shell script to debloat it all doesn't sound promising. It will be like the Xbox One's Kinect runtime all over again.

"Finished the campaign? Play multiplayer on Xbox."

@Weebleman The trick system in Tricky is rather clunky by modern standards with lengthy animations and rather slow gameplay until you grind up some stats.

SSX3 on the other hand has a lot of nuance to its system, thanks in part to the board press system but also the ability to change the d-pad spin at the last minute to throw things off-axis for more points and much faster Uber animations.

Gamers are for better or worse quite tribal and consider which console brand they align with quite a personal one and part of their identity. At the core of this for Xbox has always been your gamertag and gamerscore. Achievements still mean something to people.

One thing I would do is reframe the mobile arm around portability of this identity, last seen on Windows Phone. I'm Microsoft and own King. Integrating Xbox Live and Achievements into games like Candy Crush is almost too easy and it spreads the brand and makes people align with it with almost zero effort from themselves.

Offer an XBL plugin for all mobile developers to integrate achievements into their own titles and bring back some first party bangers like Hexic Rush.

I would also put more emphasis on the value of the Series S. In a world of ever-increasing costs promoting a cheaper console should be really easy. Bundle it with 2 controllers and a selection of digital vouchers of games parents can play with their kids.

The family market has been neglected for too long by Xbox as a brand. Sony launched the PS5 with Sackboy's Adventure. They recognised that a console is used by all members of a family and offered a title to match. I'm not going to co-op Halo or Gears with my 6 year old.

We can lament the loss of Phil Spencer but he's the one who has been at the helm during what has arguably been the nadir of the brand and ran it into the ground. Gamer or not, he's not exactly done very well in the face of Sony and Nintendo.

Whether the new president will be any better we don't yet know but I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt before making any rash opinions.

“Seasons are more varied than Mexico”

Forza Horizon 1 has more varied seasons than Mexico and that is perpetually stuck in early Autumn. The map differences were negligible at best.

@Odium If somebody can name me a more comprehensive local multiplayer title released in the last 25 years I'd call them a liar.

I used to quite like the Friends tab on the 360 but now I'm the only one left with an Xbox so it's rather pointless!

Goldeneye remains largely pointless so long as Perfect Dark still exists