It's a thread! (Games discussion, etc.)

[JG]

Since Sony isn't attending E3 or Summer Game Fest in a few weeks, today was their big broadcast of the year.

You can watch the video here. Skip to 50 minutes to begin the content.

A solid meh. They did the Nintendo/Apple one-last-thing right with a long preview of the first several minutes of gameplay of Spider-Man 2, but otherwise not so impressive. In fact, Sony advertised it as a wealth of new IP, and except for some of their hardware, there wasn't much new, as more than half the games presented were sequels (most to games I'd never heard of the first time around)


Games to maybe pay attention to:

Phantom Blade 0 - It looks to capitalizing on Ghost of Tsushima's success - maybe a bit too similar though. Potential dark horse GOTY nominee if the pieces fall into place.

FoamStars - This is SquareEnix's crack at trying to solve the Splatoon formula, with a team shooter that doesn't take itself too seriously and a surfing mechanic to quickly cross terrain. The main differences are human characters and colored soap bubble shooters instead of squid kids shooting colored ink. Some of the stages seem similarly humorous though, like a giant roulette table.

The Plucky Squire - Not PS exclusive (on all platforms) but has a nice Super Mario Odyssey effect of transitioning crayon-like cartoon characters from flat surfaces into the real 3D world. Its designed by the art director for Pokemon Sword & Shield so it has some pedigree and a possible nominee for indie game of the year.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater - Remake of MGS3 for PS5. It'll certainly look good enough and the series has a strong following so its almost a sure thing. (Doesn't interest me though)

Final Fantasy XVI - SquareEnix's biggest release of the year. Though I have to agree with the tagline that "the crystals have shaped their destiny long enough". Its time for the Final Fantasy series (and Creative Business Unit 3) to stop giving us stories that focus on restoring crystals to save a dying world.

Assassin's Creed: Mirage - Ubisoft wisely decided to reverse the decision to pump out a new AC game every year, as quality badly suffered in the last several. This one looks better and maybe puts the series back on track. If not, maybe its time for Ubisoft to walk away from the series and spend their money elsewhere. Might see more at Summer Game Fest.

Street Fighter 6 - Another series with a big following. And story mode actually looks intriguing. (Not going to buy myself, but I can see how it's got SF fans excited.)

Marathon - Bungie's newest FPS game, or rather, a complete remake of one of their first games. Bungie's track record is best in the business (even better than Nintendo or Rare's), so a lot has to go wrong for this to not be a hit. Savvy movie by Sony Interactive to buy them up last year. The game will release for Xbox, too, but any future addons or sequels are probably PS5/PC exclusives. Microsoft might get future Call of Duties, but Sony will get future Marathons.

Spider-Man 2 - The first was GOTY. This one is a likely nominee. The graphics of New York City look spectacular. I worry there is too much going on in the screen though with too much focus on the button timing mechanic. Great visuals don't matter so much when player has to focus on one area of the screen for a prompt of which button to press. It's giving me the vibes that it might be a better game to watch someone else play the game than to play the game yourself, which would certainly hurt its GOTY potential.

[JG]

Summer Game Fest day 1 recap:

Mortal Kombat 1
Wait, one again? Continuing the trend of video game producers to not know how to count properly, we're now rebooting the series back to one for the second time (following 2011's first reboot.) I gotta admit, it looks pretty bad ass, especially as cameo players jump in for some punches, but some of the fatalities are way over the top. Turning a half second event into this grand ten to fifteen second spectacle hasn't worked since FF7 made a similar 'upgrade' over FF6's for summonings. Looks neat the first time or two, but so damn long most players will just want to get on with the game.

Street Fighter 6 DLC
An Exoprimal crossover is not what anyone had in mind, and looks very dumb next to Mortal Kombat. In what reality is it smart to make cyborgs out of Ryu and Guile and have them fight dinosaurs? That's right: DINOSAURS in Street Fighter! No wonder Capcom wouldn't release details to people who ordered the season pass, I think they knew there would be a lot of very angry players.

Sonic Superstars
I think its a great idea for Sonic to go back to its 2D roots. The latest games have not been anything special. Its just never been as appealing in 3D as 2D. Its still 3D rendered so he can do neat stuff and do some 3D loops and stuff but plays like a 2D platformer. Of course Mario did this first, but Ill give credit to Sonic Team for finally adjusting. I do hope there is ability to change graphics from modern 2023 to classic 1990s style on pause screen like in Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX. They teased it at start and end of the trailer but seemed doubtful that it is a real feature.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Are they really changing a major event - maybe THE most major event - in the storyline? That is quite the bold move if true and sets up the final act in the trilogy to play out differently than the original. As the final third of original is quite dull compared to the first two, that may be exactly what they have in mind - to mix things up and generate interest. It would set up the final act as a must-play game of 2027 just to see how things turn out. Of course, the bad news in the trailer was the release date slipping out of the holiday season and into early 2024. PS5 is now without its marquee Christmas release, which is a major win for Nintendo.


I didn't really care about other games covered day 1 (like Alan Wake II.) I was watching a bit later than live so kept skipping through games that didn't register with me. If you saw something exciting, talk about it and maybe I'll go back to watch that bit.

[Moge]

What an odd Direct. Buncha indies and some stellar Mario games. Very happy to see Mario RPG is back from the grave. The original remains my favorite across all the Mario RPG franchises (that includes Paper and M&L), so this is definitely a day 1 purchase for me. I've never touched a NSMB game since i find them visually bland, but for the first time i find myself intrigued in a modern 2D Mario with Mario Wonder. The graphics really pop out, and the characters are very expressive.

[JG]

First NSMB is pretty good, but really on the hard side which is atypical for a Mario game (SMB1 or SMB3 level of unforgiving difficulty in some areas, not the easy stuff that came after.) They introduced a lot of stages with alternate exists that could only be reached if you stayed Tiny Mario almost the entire way through the level without any powerups.

NSMB Wii was really good, but broken in multiplayer. A fair challenge with one player and stage design that reminded me of SMW, but the fact you get turned into a balloon when KO'd that can be saved by the other players in multiplayer so nearly infinite lives. An advanced player can help novices along though, so fun if playing with a child. (I played some stages with my cousin's kids to get them past a fortress they'd been stuck on.)

NSMB2 is probably the worst SMB game. Its whole gimmick was collecting coins so the worldwide tally could be posted to Nintendo's website, so coins are all over the place and distract from good gameplay. Some stages are entirely coins with no enemies at all. It also wanted each player to collect a million coins to acquire all unlockables, but a full playthrough was maybe 30-40,000 coins, so the game was basically asking for over 25 playthroughs to 100% it, which is complete nonsense.

I don't remember NSMBU as anything memorable. I'm sure I beat it, but haven't ever replayed it. I think it was too easy. (And Super Mario 3D World came out the next year and completely overshadowed it.)

Super Luigi U is the complete opposite. It takes the NSMBU game and stages but makes them incredibly hard. Like a callback to SMB hacks or precursor to Mario Maker stages people have made with sinister intent. They sold this game for everyone but really should have labeled it better for expert players only. In today's world, it would have been DLC because as a standalone game it was terrible and probably had a high trade-in rate because of its over the top difficulty.

I am appreciating that the background elements change in Wonder - pipes squeezing and giving Mario a lift, or the trees stretching and shrinking with Mario's body to match gives some great new gameplay mechanics. Looks like high potential for fun. I'd have dropped the Bros part from the name though and just gone Super Mario Wonder, like Sunshine and Odyssey did.

I'm not sure the dog does enough to make Pikmin 4 much different from the previous four games. The nighttime exploration and Glow Pikmin might but they really didn't show off enough of this in the Direct. They're giving out a demo though, which is definitely the right thing to do because I don't think many people under 25 really know or appreciate Pikmin. If you had a Gamecube, you probably love Pikmin. If you didn't, its just another Nintendo IP.

I'm not into Warioware, but the motion control stuff looks like it would be more fun than just button presses like all the DS/3DS games were. I never thought this series was worth much advertisment until now.

Super Mario RPG excites me. I started the SNES game but never finished it. Everyone says its great though and I'd love to see it with all the new graphics and cut scenes.

The new Super Princess Peach game has me intrigued if its a proper (and long-overdue) sequel to Super Princess Peach, but I don't think it is. I think they're going for something different. I'd have a better feel for it being a sequel if they had DS games on Nintendo Switch Online or some kind of digital remake like they were doing with Pikmin 1+2.

I've already said that Sonic Superstars going back to 2D roots was exactly what the series needed after a half dozen ho-hum games.

I'm a big Dragon Quest fan, but not so much on the Monster series because they mostly either used unique characters and settings unrelated to other games, or characters people in the west didn't know or care about (like Terry from DQ6, before DQ6 was localized.) The Dark Prince gives a major backstory element to Psaro, a tragic antagonist of DQ4 that every Dragon Quest fan knows about. Its even got the DQ4 hero showing up so the stories overlap. Plus its coming December 1, which is great since just a month ago the DQ twitter teased a new Monsters game for 2024, meaning its coming earlier than expected and fills in the gap at Christmas.

Shocked Everybody 1-2 Switch! was entirely absent from the Direct. Not interested in it myself, but Nitnendo rarely misses a chance to advertise a game about to release. They not only did, but the WarioWare: Move It! game looks like it stole all its thunder for quick minigame gimmicks.