playstation – AggroChat

May 2023 Sony State of Play

May 25, 2023 by Belghast

Hey Folks! Yesterday was a big Sony State of Play event revealing a good number of games to be released largely in the remainder of this year. It has been a while since I have done a post where I talk about a game presentation so I thought I would do so this morning and cover my personal highlights. There are some big-name games that I am not going to spend much time on. For example, a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3 was announced… and given that I hate stealth gameplay that series is very much “not for me”. Similarly, a new Assassin’s Creed game was announced that is supposedly a return to the stealthy gameplay form of the original games… but again… not my jam, and I preferred the more Witcher-3-inspired Open World gameplay.

You can watch the full presentation in the above link, without anyone annoyingly talking over it. Maybe this is just Old Man Bel talking here… but I detest the modern tradition of streamers milking these things for content and giving their moment-to-moment commentary. I’m largely frustrated by this because the Streamer SEO is way better than the official companies and it is much harder to find a “clean” stream link than any number of “talking head” ones. Right now Sony is winning the console power struggle… but that might change rapidly as folks shift to more and more cloud gaming options like Gamepass. At the moment… Sony is well behind the curve in their cloud gaming options and needs to rapidly catch up. However, the majority of the show really plays towards their strength of console domination.

Teardown

The show started off with a rather bland heist game called Fairgame$, but what caught my attention was a voxel destruction-based heist game that appeared not that far after it. I know nothing about Teardown but it looks outrageously fun. The idea of rampant voxel destruction combined with smash-and-grab gameplay looks like it would be a heck of a lot of fun to play. One of the games that I remember the most fondly was Midtown Madness 2, and the “capture the gold” gameplay mode where you had to pick up the loot and make it back to your base before someone crashes into you and steals it back. Teardown looks like it might be a similar style of multiplayer gameplay. I’m on board with this particular brand of nonsense.

Tower of Fantasy

I am calling this one out only because I think it is probably good for the longevity of Tower of Fantasy as a whole. I’ve written at length on this blog about how much I enjoyed my time spent playing TOF. It is my hope that I will be able to link my existing PC account to my PS5… which is not a thing I can do with Genshin Impact given that I played it exactly ONCE on the console and as a result cannot undo the fact I have a different account on the console. I personally liked TOF much better than Genshin Impact, and the pull rates and freebie currency were much more beneficial to the players than a Hoyoverse game. If you’ve never played TOF then you might check it out when it launches here.

Granblue Fantasy Relink

I know next to nothing about the Granblue Fantasy universe because while I have downloaded it a few times… I’ve never really gotten into the mobile game. I am just not much of a mobile gamer at the end of the day. That said I think this game looks awesome and I am looking forward to its release. I greatly enjoy the Genshin-Impact-style action combat gameplay, and based on how many people are gaga for this setting… it would be an interesting way to learn about the world of Granblue Fantasy. That said… this game has been teased for years at this point so I have no real confidence that we will actually see it this year.

Dragon’s Dogma II

I feel like I largely missed the boat with Dragon’s Dogma as a franchise. I’ve attempted to play it a few times and largely enjoyed what I played of it. That said the general clunky nature of the original game… made it hard for me to attach. It is my hope that maybe Capcom has learned a thing or two about system design in the intervening years. However… I also played Monster Hunter World and we loved that game in spite of its completely scuffed UI and multiplayer settings. I am somewhat taking a wait-and-see approach for this one. I will have to see what else I am playing at the time to determine if I am going to give it much attention when it ultimately releases.

Spider-Man 2

Okay, this trailer looks really freaking cool, and I am excited to see Symbiote Peter Parker in action. That said I should probably actually play Spider-Man and Spider-Man Miles Morales before getting too excited about this one. I am not sure why but it has never really been the right time for me to dive into these games, and I should fix that. Essentially it feels like I have homework to do before I can look forward to this game. We will see if that actually happens before it launches. Still looks freaking cool and I dig the setup for Kraven. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out given they are blending a bunch of existing storylines.

Marathon

So this is the fastest I have gone from excited to uninterested in a long while. I am not and have never been an “Apple Guy” and as a result, Marathon is just a piece of gaming history that I have no real context for. I was absolutely a rabid ID Software fan and Bungie devouts have told me that Marathon was effectively “better than Doom in every way”. So when I saw that this funky trailer I was watching was for a reboot of that franchise… I was admittedly pretty pumped. Then those hopes were immediately dashed when I read some more information about the game and saw that it was a: “sci-fi PvP extraction shooter”. I am just completely uninterested in a PVP-only game full stop, no matter how cool the universe looks. After the recent Overwatch 2 debacle… I won’t hold out hope for a PVE version of the game either. I guess I will follow this one from afar.

Alan Wake II

This was one of my highlights of the show, seeing more footage of the continuation of the Alan Wake story. I’ve become a zealot of the “Remedyverse” and I am so on board with more of this game and more of the funky shared universe they have created across multiple titles. I did not love the flashlight gameplay of the first Alan Wake game, and I am happy to see folks roaming around with more “traditional” weapons in this game. I have so much hope for this title and I am ready to geek out about the deep lore of this series once again. I want even more entangling with Control which is my favorite of the games in this series. I would LOVE it if the agent we see in the trailer crosses paths with the Federal Bureau of Control or even Director Faden herself. So pumped folks!

Revenant Hill

This was the highlight of the show for me. I love beyond love A Night in the Woods, and this is from a studio created by the two remaining creators of that game. The cat that you see in the trailer has deep Mae vibes and there is absolutely a statue from NitW about 10 seconds in. I have no clue if this will actually connect up to that game, or if those are just easter eggs for the faithful… but whatever the case I am here for it. If you have not played A Night in the Woods, please stop whatever you are doing and proceed directly to whatever platform you probably already own it for thanks to copious giveaways. It was a relatively short game and honestly… I kinda hope this one is as well. In reading there are books that I consider a “comfy read” or a “light read” and NitW was sort of the gaming equivalent of that. I really need to mix in more games like that as palette cleansers between my bigger titles.

The Not-Vita-2

On an investor call on Tuesday, CEO Jim Ryan indicated that Sony was about to announce some aggressive plans for cloud gaming. When you combine this with the fact that in the show they announced Project Q a game streaming handheld… my guess is that Sony is about to make a bigger play for the Gamepass/XCloud market share. The biggest problem with that is that right now… their product offering is pretty lousy. I have access to the rebranded PlayStation Now which is now confusingly called PlayStation Plus… and it isn’t that great. The gameplay hitches constantly and there is zero support for auto-resuming your last progress like you can with XCloud. Fundamentally if Sony wants to make a play for this market they need to update their infrastructure and improve their overall product offering. That is not to say that they can’t do precisely this… and honestly, I HOPE they do. What I want from Sony is the ability to stream every single game that I own on my account over a PC or Mobile device with full access to the latest save state for all of them. That said I likely won’t be buying this device that looks like Earl from R&D sawed a PS5 controller in half and J-B Welded it to an Android Tablet. A device like this needs to come in around $100 for it to really be successful, and knowing Sony we are probably looking at another $300 appendage to an already $500 console. Until then it will just be better to keep buying cheap Android devices for this purpose.

What were your favorites?

I am sure I missed some that were crowd favorites. Like I did not talk about the Destiny 2 expansion trailer that shows the return of Cayde-6. I am not entirely certain how I feel about that one. If they can bring back a character that they spent so much time killing off… maybe they can bring back all of that content that I paid for that is now cut from the game. I’m largely checked out of Destiny 2 so I didn’t spend much time on this one. What were some of the games that I did not talk about that excited you? Drop me a line below. I think for the most part it was a very strong showing for Sony, and with the news coming out that it is likely going to be three or more years before exclusives release on PC… I guess I will have to suck it up and learn to enjoy playing on a console with a controller so I can experience some of these games. The post May 2023 Sony State of Play appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #132 – The Cthulhu Game Show

May 21, 2019November 13, 2016 by AggroChat

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen talk Blizzcon news, Guild Wars 2, and Dungeons and Dragons stuff

Tonight is the tale of a game that we put off recording the show for weeks in the hopes of clearing up some technical difficulties. So while we do talk about Cthulhu, the show morphs into a general discussion about the preservation of video games, and what happens to these older titles that don’t quite function as intended on modern platforms. Additionally we talk a bit about emulation and how it might be the saving grace for especially the early cd based systems. We talk about this weird time in early FPS games where folks were willing to take chances and make something not entirely in the Call of Duty model. Given that this is the second of those games we have made a game club title… it seems like there was something interesting happening that it would be awesome to see again.

Topics Discussed – Technical Difficulties – Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth – Early FPS Titles – Early CD Rom games – Games Preservation – Emulation – December Game – Diablo II

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Snagging Playstation Plus Games

February 24, 2016 by Belghast

Playstation Network Trick

This is a trick that my good friend Ashgar showed me some time ago, and I have talked a bit on the blog… but given several comments from my twitter feed I thought it was probably time to create a dedicated blog post about it. One of the awesome things about Playstation Plus is the way that it synergizes between all of the available Sony platforms. For the longest time I had only a Playstation 3, but had even intent of some day picking up both a Vita and a PS4. At one point I think I was lamenting having to go upstairs and log in my PS3 because I had forgotten to grab that months free games. It was then that Ash shared with me that you could in fact log in through the Playstation Network website and not only grab games for the systems you owned but also for everything that was currently available. What was great about this is that for several months ahead of picking up my Vita and PS4 I was able to start stockpiling a library of games to play on it, so when I finally purchased them I had more than enough content to keep me interested.

Having done this now for a couple of years… I have to say the Sony Network site is less than easy to navigate. Since their site is somewhat resistant to deep linking, I sorted out the best path to get to where I needed to go in a matter of clicks. As a way of demonstrating the path, I threw together a quick image. Once logged into the website, from the site header click the “Games” tab in the menu bar. On the next screen that loads click “Playstation Plus” which is confusing because there is also a Playstation Plus Specials option that doesn’t really lead where you want to go. Finally on the next page click “Free Games” which will then get you to the area of that months games. Now something I have noticed is that it sometimes takes a few days for the PS+ titles of the month to show up in this section. From here it is simply a matter of adding all of the games to your cart and checking out. The games will all have a $0 price on them, but you still have to formally check out with them to get them added to your account. If you encounter games saying that you are “not eligible” generally speaking that means the game supports cross buy and you only need to have one copy of the game for it to work on all platforms. The store however will be showing a separate copy of the game for each platform it is available on. Go ahead and check out with what is available, and if you refresh the page all of the games should then show up as “Purchased” like the below screenshot.

Game With Gold As Well

The other thing I have realized is that this sort of trick works with Games with Gold from Microsoft as well. Their system of releases is a little bit more fiddly as they seem to like to stagger them throughout the month, and when the next batch is released you generally lose access to the previous batch. I have however been successfully adding Xbox One games to my account, without actually owning an Xbox One. I figure at some point I will pick one up, and it will be nice to have a huge batch of games to play on it when I do. The quirk with Games With Gold is that you have to check out with them individually, and often it still shows a price tag associated with the game… until you get to the final step of the checkout process. Hopefully this post helps some folks out, because it is nice knowing that you can quickly snag your months worth of games without booting up the individual consoles.

Virtual Reality

January 7, 2016 by Belghast

Next Big Thing

It feels like for the majority of my life, “Consumer Virtual Reality” has been roughly five years away…. or at least that is what the pundits are consistently saying. Granted I have been hearing this for the last three decades of my life. The 90s were really the era of this being the big thing, thanks to the popularity of movies like Lawnmower Man and the weekly reminder of just how amazing the Holodeck could be on Star Trek the Next Generation. The problem has been however that what we are actually capable of delivering, versus what we are expecting… has been a pretty huge gulf to cross. The first time I touched anything I would consider virtual reality, were the extremely expensive Virtuality arcade machines from the roughly 1991. You can see a screenshot of the type of graphics it delivered above. Sure it felt cool to be wandering around a fully immersive 3D world, but the amount of disconnect between your actions and the half dozen polygons that represented your hand… was pretty massive. The funny thing about this game is that apparently it was built on the Amiga 3000 as a hardware platform, which I guess only serves to show you just how advanced that system really was.

I guess for me Virtual Reality has been this failed promise for so long that I have doubted that it would actually really arrive. I threw in a few other examples in the collage above like Sega Holosseum from 1991 that chose to go down the smoke and mirrors route of creating the approximation of holograms, rather than trying to wrap you in a virtual landscape. In many ways it worked better, and playing the game felt like the 3D Chessboard from Star Wars. Then we had the famous Nintendo false step of the Virtual Boy from 1995, that came with the least ergonomic way of playing the game. I think the suggested method was to sit it on a kitchen counter or something…. and lean over to use it. However for MOST of the people I knew that had one they would end up laying on the couch and letting the console rest on their face. There were a bunch of negative effects of seeing the equivalent of gameboy quality graphics in red and black…. and the few times I used it I wound up with a nasty headache. Around 2003 I remember a good friend of mine having 3D glasses that hooked to the PC and provided 1024×768 screens for each eye, but this ended up working the hell out of the video card… and the framerates suffered. So basically… there have been a lot of technologies that have arrived telling me that Virtual Reality is here…. only to not really be the case.

Arrived at a Cost

It was roughly around this time last year that I got to play with the Oculus Rift for the first time. At Pax South I was scheduled to do a media demo of Elite Dangerous, and the marketing guy asked if I had ever used a Rift, and upon hearing that I had not shuttled me towards one of the two machines that had them. Granted there were around ten machines in total in the booth, and only two of them were hooked up and capable of using the Rift which immediately made me a bit suspicious. Firstly… I suck horribly at space shooters…. and they loaded up a dog fighting scenario for me to play where I was put up against a computer ship. The demo ended when either I killed the ship… or it killed me. Needless to say my demo probably took twice the amount of time needed as the other players, but it was really somewhat amazing the first moment when I realized that while chasing this ship…. I could look up through the top of the canopy to trace its movement. There was still the strange uncanny valley as I watched a set of hands move in the cockpit that were not my own. The computer was furiously trying to guess what my hand movements might look like based on the controls I was pressing on the real world HOTAS setup. After I destroyed the ship I asked the Marketing folks some questions, one of which was what sort of hardware they were running this demo on. Not surprisingly they had it running on an Nvidia Titan X which is still currently a roughly $1200 video card…. so I started to temper my expectations.

Yesterday the prices were released for the first generation of the Oculus Rift released for public consumer consumption. Granted at this point there have been several development kit models available for those daring enough to brave the potential issues of dealing with beta hardware. I guess in my mind the price point that seemed reasonable was around $300, because that is what the Samsung Gear unit retails for… and what the supposed price point of the Sony PS4 VR unit will be. I was not insanely shocked however when the pre-order price ended up at roughly double that amount $599. If that $600 price tag were a turn key solution that you simply plugged into the HDMI out on your existing PC, then I guess in truth that would probably be well worth it. However for the bulk of us… we are likely running hardware that is significantly less snazzy than their requirements. The minimum requirements listed are a Nvidia GTX 970 which is essentially a $350 video card. However I would not expect full performance in games like Elite Dangerous on anything lower end than a 980 ti… which pushes you into the roughly $650-700 price range on a video card. So before you have touched the rest of your computer set up at all… you are out $1300 in just the Rift and a high end video card. As much as I love this pipe dream, it is simply too expensive of one for me to even indulge the thought of.

Reality Sets In

The problem I have is that I have a $200 video card, not a $600 video card… and it is unlikely short of winning the lottery that I will ever be able to bring myself to spend that sort of money. I am sure as time goes on, people will get better at writing VR game experiences, and additionally the cost of the hardware itself will come down by the time it reaches the third or fourth generation of the Rift. For the time being, Nvidia gave some numbers that said rendering a game for a VR headset requires roughly seven times the amount of resources. So essentially I have ruled out the Oculus Rift as something I will ever be able to afford. I know my friend Scopique has been playing with some android VR options that supposedly allow you to create ghetto VR for the PC, and I am anxious to see how well these work out for him. Personally I think my first likely footsteps into this is in the form of the Playstation VR, and I linked in a video above to show off that unit and a few of the games. I already have the necessary hardware, namely in the form of a Playstation 4, and if the headset itself ends up being around $300 or even a little more… that becomes within the realm of possibility. Given that I managed to get my PS4 for only $200, that would make the total outlay for the system in the $500-600 price range which seems reasonable.

Essentially I am going to be happy as hell for anyone who manages to pony up the money to get a Oculus Rift. I’ve been watching another friend Qelric do videos every now and then showing off her beta hardware. I hope she can somehow end up getting one of the production units, so I can continue to live vicariously through her experiences. The problem is… that pricetag… is pretty damned steep regardless. The other big problem I have with the Rift so far is that I am not really seeing the killer apps other than Elite Dangerous. Most of the games she has played with feel more like “tech demos” rather than fully fleshed out rich gaming experiences that would sell a unit. RIGS on the other hand on the PSVR seems like exactly the sort of fun multiplayer hardware pushing experience that will get someone to add a headset to their Christmas list. I think the Oculus Rift right now is a true “enthusiast” experience, but isn’t quite “consumer virtual reality” just yet, and it is going to take manufacturers building games for the platform to finally make it worth the purchase price. In the time between however… I am going to continue being interesting in every bit of news I can find. From what I am hearing the units are apparently sold out through May 2016 delivery, so it seems like plenty of folks are willing to plunk down for purchase, and I am anxious to see the sort of experiences especially the youtubers and streamers showcase using the magic box.