The N64 controller is basically required for some games, but you don’t actually need the GameCube controller for anything unless you’re very nostalgic.
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That joycon mouse functionality was a real letdown. The joycons are straight up painful to hold in the mouse position. They should have made them more ergonomic for that somehow, maybe building a special grip into their little guide rail attachment or something.
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not sure if you mean this, exactly, but I do see folks on Etsy making their own things to make the mouse functionality more…functional.
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this is the problem that all new consoles have now tbh. there can’t be wnyone on earth who’s got through their switch/ps4 backlog yet, and switch 2/ps5 are such a small step up that most games still get identical releases on their forebears anyway.
there’s a limit to both the spec of a console that’s affordable to cobsumers, and that’s affordable for most developers to exploit all the power of, and that limit appears to have been reached a decade ago.
imo, instead of the ps5, sony should have worked on a switch-esque hybrid handheld version of the ps4
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the PS5 probably shipped too early, because it wound up with the equivalent of first generation (RTX 2000) ray tracing and DLSS, which are simply not very good – that was actually the complaint at that time for that generation of hardware, that in comparison to the 1xxx series which was pretty usable all up and down the stack, only the 2080/Ti/Super really had the muscle to do what they were trying to do. that said, the PS4’s single-threaded CPU performance was genuinely horrendous and a generation behind already in 2013 so they kind of needed to do something just to make developers’ lives better (I think this is kind of underappreciated when people are like “consumers don’t want this,” you do need to have a functional dev environment for the folks doing the work). if AMD’s CPUs sucked less in 2012 they probably could have waited another year or 2 for the PS5.
The Switch 2 is a significantly easier buy (I skipped both consoles this generation not as any kind of statement but because they seemed like a poor value prop to me and yet got a Switch 2 at launch) because a lot of Switch games were already maxing out pretty seriously (the Switch 2 hardware basically dating from ~2022/2023 more or less confirms that they would’ve liked to ship earlier and actually waited out the price as long as they could manage) and it’s a very straightforward/overdue upgrade (all my controllers still work, I now have an old Switch that someone else can use) in comparison to a new console that’s still hooked up to the same TV or not.
none of this stuff is in a vacuum and sometimes consoles actually manage to succeed because of that (the PS4 launched at a good time relative to the HDR spec and relative to mainstream adoption of DX11 GPUs, as well as the very severely overdue need to make ports easier than they were on the PS3 which was a Netburst-level dead end in terms of having a lot of vector math on the CPU cores rather than the GPU), it’s almost never despite that
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We’ve hit a saturation point where I don’t think there’s any reason to care about new games too much unless you really like spending too much money on shit
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i used to be the biggest console girl but The Console Contract (i.e. i can buy a reasonably priced box once every 5-6 years and it will play all the games released for it reasonably well) hasn’t really held since the awful PS4 era with every box having a Premium version that you were actually supposed to buy if you wanted your games to work right.
you don’t really have the used games market keeping prices reasonable anymore due to the death of physical media so Nintendo can charge $70 for an 8 year old game and get away with it. Sony can take your whole library away if you move country because their store is held together by duct tape and string. also if you bought a PS4 game digitally that just literally does not work on the base PS4, you couldn’t refund it even if you’d only clocked 5 minutes in it, all of which were boot → CTD
it’s just a bad deal and has been for a while
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i need to know what exactly sets this apart from the other two pathologics before i can muster any enthusiasm
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It is a sequel to 2, which was a self-aware second attempt at basically achieving the same goal as the first game. But this is the part of the story which focuses on the Bachelor. It plays significantly different from 2, which was very different playing compared to the original Pathologic.
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That’s cool!! I’m glad this one is pathologic 2 instead of a remake this time. I love the really harsh mechanics but I’ve already done all that many times over now between the first one (since you have to play it three fucking times) and the second one so I’m glad it plays differently too. I did my time getting stabbed by knife men while rooting through trash cans.
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Yeah I guess that’s how you could put it haha. This certainly doesn’t seem to play like either of the previous two games, even if the story plays out the same, which I really doubt it does. It has an interesting puzzle about investigating pathologies through conversation and reference to medical research. In the demo I played you would talk to someone, study their body, find symptoms, ask about their experiences, and then have to deal with the possibility that this person may have a reason to lie to you about something. It was interesting.
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I’d skipped the demo but took the plunge on this and after about 40 minutes I quite like it… it feels hilariously like a Majora’s Mask fangame, like that’s almost too obvious a comparison between the overly economical asset reuse and the time loop.
I only made it halfway-ish into Patho 2 but quite enjoyed my time with it and the writing here is tonally familiar and imo more immediately gripping
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I thought the same about the writing. It also seemed like there were fewer instances of the wry knowing tone that belonged to the mimes and the play director seeping out into characters whenever the writers wanted to convey strangeness. I felt like I was talking to unique people in the scenes in the patho 3 demo set in the hospital or where Bachelor is in the city talking with his educated colleagues.
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Interesting to see Bri’ish finally be the style compass for one of these.
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this isn’t describing the kind of social game I tend to play but I know a lot of people here like these more than I do and this studio is hiring a lot of people I admire to work on whatever it is
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Imagine spending so much time and effort making a game look this good and then spiking the character designs down the latrine
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yeah, i’m on the “second” day and it does feel like the story will play out differently, what with the time stuff. i’m pretty excited about it! i only worry that the new way you traverse across the map will reduce incidental stuff like the piano storyline in P2, but it’s early yet. may mother boddho bless yr journeys
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sword girl is cool but I don’t like the babies
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