I wouldn’t be incredibly surprised if Sony restores no fuss PS2 emulation on the 5 if they’re feeling enough pressure (I hope they feel pressure). They’re probably keeping an eye on RPCS3 if ever they want to add it in a later update too, they’ll be in a good place CPU-wise, the last generation has muddied that a lot with all the remasters which will be compatible out of the box though.
This is one of my favorite Cave games.
Aesthetically it isn’t the best. It was late enough that they were starting to add loli shit, and early enough that they hadn’t started using weather effects.
The bullet patterns are fun. The chaining system is great. The hyper system is a really good risk/reward. You get a brief period of total dominance in exchange for permanently increasing enemy bullet speed very slightly.
Unfortunately, the ps2 port chokes pretty bad on the second loop. I’d guess the 360 version probably does too.
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Sony is so not feeling the pressure that they don’t feel like they need to show up. They dangled Death Stranding in front of our faces like a pair of keys.
Incidentally, I am extremely in the tank for Microsoft because uh they own Obsidian, publish Forza Horizon, and I used that $1 “upgrade” deal to get three years of gamepass everything for $5/mo. 
I’m definitely a member of the group that regards Microsoft as permanently tasteless and sclerotic and is unable to give them any credit for even their successes. it doesn’t mean I didn’t use a Windows Phone for four years or am not feeling incredibly fatigued by the way Sony’s approach to their internally produced titles has codified over the past generation, but my brain cannot produce a pro-Microsoft sentiment. Windows 10 is good considering how far behind they were and how many things they needed to do to make it good.
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I was taking a long time to disclaim my Surface Book 2 ownership. (APPLE! FFS! It’s RIGHT HERE. Make this!)
I melt when they do disability/accessibility product dev at cost.
Re: Sony it just sucks to see-saw between each of these companies getting fuck-you hostile until they come crawling back. OTOH, I guess I wouldn’t be very happy if the console market was dominated by Valve.
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before I played the yakuza games I watched an lp of kenzan and started to watch an lp of ishin but ishin looked so good, I just wanted to play it myself, and the lp wasn’t finished anyway. I love the bakumatsu period. kenzan was a little rough being an early ps3 game and all, though I found the ending moving.
then I saw this the other day
sounds like either coming here at some point isn’t completely dead in the water and could still happen.
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yes they are historically much better at accessible technology than SV which is an unambiguous good, and sometimes even in a uniquely Microsoftian way (Word produces PDFs that are more screen reader friendly than you often get elsewhere because unlike every other PDF printer it doesn’t just embed an open source library that doesn’t have certain features).
Forza was my favourite AAA last year! They do OK stuff sometimes!
I wish Sony and MS would join forces for one console. Their current consoles are practically the same and the next ones will be as much or maybe even more the same.
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Thought of this later, but Guwange, Ikaruga, and RSG are all on the Xbox One so it’s not like shooters are getting ignored altogether. I bet Phil Spencer saw a screenshot of Deathsmiles and noped the fuck out at some point.
I mean someone approved of putting Deathsmiles 2 on digital untranslated.
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I’m slowly, slowly getting better at Into the Breach.
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I was complaining over in the Switch thread that the leaderboards for Virtua Racing are only for Switch Online members. Maybe that’s because you can download replays from the top (I think) 50 records on each course. And while watching a replay, you can see the player’s inputs at any given moment. Neat.
Anyhow, I have a Switch Online membership now, and my first record for Big Forest in Grand Prix ranked me at around 394. Earlier today I got up to 132. Might try to make the top 100 before moving on to the intermediate course.
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My best rank on the beginner course after countless attempts is around 1700, I really suck at this game
Well I used to play a tonne of PS3 Daytona on max number of laps, so I think I’ve got some Sega racing muscle memory working for me.
But I bet you could improve with practice. I can offer a few tips:
- If you aren’t using it already, learning manual transmission might help your times. With manual, you should be able to shift gears through turns and reduce how often you need to break or let off the gas (I still need to learn this for Virtua Racing).
- If you’re playing Grand Prix, your tires degrade. I find that a pit stop around lap 15 improves my overall time because I’d otherwise lose more time on slow corners in the final quarter than the time I lose in the pit.
- There is a way to coax other cars to move out of your way as you approach them from behind, but I don’t properly understand this technique, and I can’t perform it consistently.
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I think I saw this happen on a replay of the no.1 spot on the leaderboard, but I assumed it was similar to the Mario Kart trick of getting a boost when behind another racer
do you recommend using Arcade or Normal steering? I switched to Arcade but was struggling to adjust for a while as I didn’t seem to be able to turn as sharply until I worked out that you can tilt the stick down while turning.
Seems the AI racers are somewhat scripted in this, I keep noticing the same blue car skidding out at the start of lap 2 in the intermediate track
i used mr shakedown to get 9 trillion yen and finished pocket circuit in yakuza 0…i truly feel like a pocket circuit fighter now
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i played through the psx adventure/horror title, “hellnight” aka “dark messiah”
it was good. maybe not great. i felt that the whole concept of an underground city full of refugees and sketchy characters built from the remains of an abandoned military base that has since been taken over by a cult wasn’t fleshed out enough. none of the characters were around long enough to show any type of personality, which i feel is important for a game like this. the monster that pursues you through the game starts off terrifying, then becomes either super easy to avoid, or completely disappears midway through the game, before coming back at the end and becoming the biggest annoyance.
the plot itself is fine, though this was not given a particularly great localization, so i’m sure it’s better in japanese. it’s at least appropriately weird and off the rails enough for my liking.
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Finally got around to What Remains of Edith Finch. It was more invested in linearity than I’d assumed going into it. One the one hand, it sacrifices the expressiveness and weaving together of story threads that made Gone Home so revelatory, and on the other hand the cool conceit of this insane secret passage filled tumor-mansion was wasted by not being a more straightforwardly puzzley Mystlike. The story, however, was excellent and this choice for linearity was made specifically to tell this story in the way it needed to be told. Instead of hiding its subtext behind mechanical manipulation, it hid it in plain sight right in its narrative like a traditional short story or movie. So even though it runs really close to the “why is this a game?” line, it was still really damn good, though it wasn’t quite as good as its very best influences.
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Yes you do get a bit of a boost when in another car’s slipstream, but that car may also move out of your way when you get close behind it. I saw this mentioned in a YouTube review of the game. The reviewer demonstrates it and it works everytime several times in a row, but he doesn’t explain what he’s doing to cause it. He just describes it as “smart positioning” or something. I can’t figure out the trick from watching the footage, but sometimes I can pull it off by fluke.
I haven’t tried arcade steering. Do you prefer it?
I think the difference between normal and arcade steering is just digital vs analog: steering in normal mode is maximum turning rate regardless of how much you tilt the stick, whereas arcade mode gives the gradations based on stick tilt. Thing is, tilting all the way doesn’t seem to give you maximum turn rate, you have to tilt it all the way and then downwards as well. At least that’s what it feels like to me.
At first when I switched, there was a noticeable increase in difficulty turning, and I was pretty much crashing into every wall. But after getting used to it more, I managed to beat my best time by about 3 seconds. Probably similar difficulty curve between automatic > manual.