Vordus

Thing is, I don't really need to see Forza. There's only so much communicating 'we made a fun car playground and filled it with cars' that can be done before it's pretty redundant. Unless they've made some massive change to the formula, I don't really need to know about it, I just need it shoved in front of me.

Honestly, with the spiralling price of RAM, this may well have turned out to be a smarter play than anticipated. New PCs are increasingly unattainable, and the next generation of consoles is looking troubled. If there's any market condition for platform-agnostic streaming to make headway in, it's the RAMpocalypse.

Especially looking forward to Vampire Crawlers, the finished/console versions of Moonlighter 2 (It's shaping up to be something special, folks!), Mixtape, and Denshattack!. And Forza and Fable of course, but that kind of goes without saying.

Way to the Woods definitely coming out 2026, definitely. Certainly not going to take the struggling solo dev yet another year!

I overdosed on game showcases last year and gave up watching them sometime in August. By that time I'd watched trailers for over 3200 games.

I think there might be too many showcases?

Not many! Just The Exit 8, Avowed, Oblivion Remastered, Crypt Custodian, Ruffy and the Riverside, Wheel World, Boxville, South of Midnight, The Rogue Prince of Persia, Blacksmith Master, BALL x PIT, Winter Burrow, Powerwash Simulator 2, A Game About Digging a Hole, and Clover Pit.

Combat's pretty rudimentary and repetitive, but everything else about it is utterly stellar. The soundtrack, which essentially technically makes the game a gods-damned musical, is particularly of note.

"[as well as] forgotten games like a 3D remake of Chrono Trigger named Chrono Resurrection,"

Surely that was an unofficial fangame, so I'm not sure what that's doing there

@Trmn8r If you think this one isn't a game, you should see Blippo+. Literally zero gameplay, one of my GOTY picks.

Why the ***** is Scott the Woz here?

Right, because I apparently don't value sleep, and because @jesse_dylan brought it up, Spreadsheets.

GBP Version: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_2qz2_VzzNlRyrJU7psMmmQ2yYHae_brh41TkjAtoaA/copy?usp=drivesdk

USD Version:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ykDr8KCJOAXHhIJqm7MFJyZhIuXZkXVHaOvgwgQhfKY/copy?usp=drivesdk

There's some reasonably good deals here, a couple of these games haven't actually had any kind of discount yet, and some of them haven't gone below around 20%. There's also some absolutely awful choices that were on a deep discount just a few days ago. Hopefully the spreadsheet can help you avoid those. Assuming it works as intended.

@jesse_dylan It's not the best signposted deal. It's showing up as a tile in the 'Special Offers' section of the Deals page, with the image just being key art from My Time at Sandrock for some reason.

My Time at Sandrock is one of the two worst deals in the sale, ironically.

Not a fan. Doesn't feel like much thought has been put into it other than to shove part of the UI on the backplate.

@dreadful They always have at least one licensed kids game for Christmas. It's there to keep the kiddies occupied.

Reggie's wife could learn a thing or two.

You'd think this would be easier than it is, but there's just so many games these days that finding matches is hard.

Between work, a new kitchen, and a backlog of recently released games it would be madness for me to pay for early access to another one.

Thing is, he's not wrong. Gaming in general is losing out to more accessible and immediate pastimes like being fed a constant feed of algorithmically chosen slop.

Honestly, I'm surprised that supermarkets still have physical games in them at all.

There's no way that a 5 hour limit will stay in the long term. At a guess it's because they've only recently extended the streaming service to the other paid tiers, so they don't actually have the capacity on their current infrastructure to launch fully.

At some point they're going to want that free tier to exist because they can use it to sell games in less traditional markets or to these younger generations that don't look far past their phone for entertainment.

As fun as the first 5 Harry Potter books were, I've never liked the aesthetics of the films that have seeped into every extension of the franchise since. But then, I also don't love Jo Rowling's politics, and considering that all my friends are some level of queer I'd honestly rather play The Lord of The Rings: Gollum over this.

The problem here, of course, is that the stuff like the Fortnite pass and EA Play are being subsidized by the people who don't use it, so if they weren't being forced to chip in then those aspects would suddenly cost a lot more.

Bold claim, considering how many games get significant delays. Or just outright cancelled because Nadalla wants yet another round of 'efficiency' savings.

All dogs go to heaven, except the class traitors in the Paw Patrol.

I gave it a whirl but spent the first 40 minutes getting lost and annoyed that there's no map, the following five minutes getting annoyed that the map vendor is in a quite remote location that I somehow missed in the first 40 minutes, and charges more per map than I'd managed to find so far in the game, and then immediately quit when I got killed by a trap a couple of rooms later in a location that I don't have the direction sense to find again, alongside all the money I needed to buy the map to find my corpse. At that point my brain's innate soulslike mechanics prevention mechanisms kicked in and forced me to uninstall the game.

Seems pretty decent from what I saw.

Atari 50 spoiled me on this front and now a collection like this just feels incomplete if it isn't also a really well-presented museum and interactive documentary.

I've been playing a LOT of 9kings. Like, way too much.

It started with Bubsy and went downhill from there.

Which isn't quite as damning as it sounds as Fabraz's take on Bubsy looks genuinely fun and charming. But still.

Is there any more appropriate a publisher name than 'Game Mill'?

Oh, right, yes, there is a THQ Nordic showcase today, isn't there? I'm sure that'll be... something.

Did they fire everyone? They seem to do that a lot.

I'd have to assume there's a Oblivion: Remastered style rework of Fallout 3 in the works. Probably New Vegas too, seeing as they share a lot of assets.

Honestly I think it's time to license it out to some indies and see what they make of it.

@Nic-Noc20th-C Currently the infrastructure for cloud gaming only uses server rack versions of Xboxes, so in order to do PC as well they'd need a whole bunch of new server racks following a completely different standard and using completely different software to what they currently have.

My spreadsheet has it at a 2.87/5. For comparison last year's was 2.9/5, so same old same old.

I want to be surprised. It's been a long time since I've been truly surprised.

Failing that, a nice batch of Indie game pass titles.

@themightyant E3 used to feel incredibly cutthroat and competitive back when it was pretty much the only time in the year when gaming news could break into the mainstream. Every company was desperately trying to outdo each other in front of the press. I kind of miss that. But I also kind of like not sitting through sales figures, cirque du soleil performances, families of actors demonstrating motion tech, or well-dressed overpaid executives desperately trying to prove their gaming cred onstage.

Last year they resorted to padding their showcase out with games that they didn't even have footage for yet. I think they may have even showed indies that were nothing to do with them during the preshow. At this point pretty much everything they have would be new content for their ongoing live service games which are arguably the only thing that's consistently making money for them at this point, and also a chain they have put round their own necks that's slowly dragging them further into the abyss.

Best title on there by far is Hypnospace Outlaw, but it's come and gone before, and it'll probably come and go again (nearer the time when Dreamsettler comes out).

Ugh. More shoehorning in AI where it absolutely does not need to be.

Antstream really needed this win, so that's nice for them.

The audio completely stopped working within the first 5 minutes, like I walked away from the first room and left my ears behind.

Good lord, WB are in a mess.

@h3s In 2018 the EU passed an anti-geoblocking law requiring that all EU versions of storefronts be usable by anyone within the EU. As we didn't leave until 2020 we inherited that law, so it's a legal requirement that MS allow UK residents to purchase things on the EU storefronts. So that's why you can just do that.

They didn't really crack the more open THPS until THUG, so no objections here.

@BacklogBrad This isn't even emulation; They're actively decompiling x360 software and then patching it to run natively on x86 PCs! It's incredible!

@norwichred Rock Band 4 came out on Xbox One. Not sure if the licences to transfer songs from older games are still available, but yeah there's still a version of Rock Band knocking about.

I mean, maybe? But it sure didn't work for Kameo. And Perfect Dark Zero didn't exactly go anywhere. I guess there were a couple of Condemned games, but that fizzled out pretty quickly.

There's a few minor things I'd change (why can you only pin two groups? That's not enough for quick access to Entertainment apps, the backlog, and for some reason Quick Resume somehow counts as a group?!) but aside from that the UI feels remarkably comfy right now.

@Kezelpaso Well, more fool on me then!

Considering that the game knows whether you're using a controller or M&K, surely the better solution would be to give players the option to avoid folks using a different control system rather than folks playing on a PC?