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2021 VIDEO GAME CATCH ALL THREAD


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So, do any other "part time" gamers - I have my XBox on about once a week - think that damn $60 for a year of XBox Live is kinda pricey for what you're getting? I don't even use it for streaming services. I know it's a necessity for when I do play, but it's still overpriced. If you buy their $10 a month game service, do you get XBox Live as part of it, or do you pay for that separately? 

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55 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

Even if you play once a week, is a $5/month service really that overpriced ?

Yes. I am poor. $60 for a year was a significant little chunk of change for me today, but if I didn't pay it, the XBox basically becomes a doorstop.

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Been playing Watch Dogs: Legion. It sure is a video game made by Ubisoft. No towers to climb, I guess, but otherwise fits their catalog perfectly. It’s…fine? Not as good as WD2. The play as anyone gimmick is novel, but mostly meaningless in practice. I’ve reached the point to where I’m just floating in on a cargo drone, hanging out far above whatever my mission objectives are and using my spiderbot for literally everything that doesn’t absolutely require a person to complete.

Continue to bang away on Isaac runs, too. What a great game. Won an Apollyon run earlier that may have been the most powerful I’ve ever been in that game. I’m not sure I could have lost even if I tried to. Felt like taking hits was generating more HP than I was losing. Felt real good!  

I’ve preinstalled the XSX version of Flight Simulator, so I’ll probably dump a good bit of time into that come Tuesday. I need a good relaxation game and exploring places and landmarks I’m unlikely to ever have a chance to visit sounds perfect for that. Isaac is great. Relaxing, though? Not so much.

 

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On 7/24/2021 at 3:59 PM, jstout said:

Yes. I am poor. $60 for a year was a significant little chunk of change for me today, but if I didn't pay it, the XBox basically becomes a doorstop.

Not trying to be funny, when I was in my poor phase (lasted for like five years, not a brief period), Gold and PS Plus were on the top of my birthday/christmas list from someone in my life that could afford it, haha. It is hard to justify when things are tight, I get it, but hopefully you can find someone to help ya out for a normal gift giving situation so it doesn't feel like a handout.

To answer your other question, no, the $10 game pass does not include Gold, you'd need to get Ultimate ($15 a month) for both.

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I don't feel l'm getting much out of my Xbox Live Gold subscription, but for $5/month, I don't mind paying for it.  It all depends on how you use it.  I know people who think it's a great value.  I don't play online much and I have no interest in the free games (since you only have access to them so long as you subscribe.  I'd prefer to just pay for it and "own" it for the foreseeable future).  I get some value out of the discounts offered to Gold members and i like being able to hop online and play if I feel like it. 

On the other hand, I'm fairly certain I could drop the service and just go with the free Xbox Live account and never feel my Xbox was "basically a doorstop".

For $5/month, even if I only play online a couple times a month, I feel like I'm probably getting my money's worth. 

Edited by Eoae
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On 7/25/2021 at 10:20 PM, odessasteps said:

Once I'm done with ME3, I'll go back to my fall backs of RDR2 Online and NMS, so I def need the online hookup. 

Once I'm done with ME: LE, I'll start playing Mafia 3: Definitive Edition if the next Cyberpunk 2077 patch does not fix the shit I want fixed.

Edited by J.T.
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Ugh.  My PS3 suffered some sort of catastrophic failure over the weekend and died.  I own several limited edition PS3 consoles, so it was really only a matter of unboxing one, but I can't recover data from the first consoles hard drive either, so I'm having to redownload everything (I swapped out the new PS3's 320 gb hard drive with a new 1 TB drive).

I'd forgotten how slow the PS3 is.  Download speed is adequate, but I'd forgotten how long installs take.  Actually thought there might be something wrong with the drive, but I googled and asked around  and apparently this is typical for the PS3.  Guess I've just gotten used to later gen consoles being fairly fast.

The other thing I'd kinda forgotten is how annoying the user interface is.  Is there no way to order your list of (digital) games alphabetically.  The UI just seems to put the games in the order they were downloaded and installed, with separate folders for PS and PS2 titles.  All in all, it's clunky, and not being able to put the games in some sort of order is annoying since I have 70-80 digital games on the console

Edited by Eoae
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Anyone played the new Flight Simulator? It was just added to GamePass so I'll probably try it out regardless. Just unsure if it will be too... boring for me. It looks beautiful, I just don't know if it has enough of a story/purpose to grab my attention more than a few hours.

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20 hours ago, Kevin Wilson said:

Anyone played the new Flight Simulator? It was just added to GamePass so I'll probably try it out regardless. Just unsure if it will be too... boring for me. It looks beautiful, I just don't know if it has enough of a story/purpose to grab my attention more than a few hours.

I played it for a bit on PC and it is indeed quite beautiful.  I personally thought it was a bit too boring but I mainly have the AI take over and just enjoy the view.  Don't really care enough to try and fly a plane though for free on Gamepass it's hard to beat.

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On 7/28/2021 at 10:34 AM, Kevin Wilson said:

Anyone played the new Flight Simulator? It was just added to GamePass so I'll probably try it out regardless. Just unsure if it will be too... boring for me. It looks beautiful, I just don't know if it has enough of a story/purpose to grab my attention more than a few hours.

There's no story and the only purpose is to see the sights. I just started playing since the console release. It's definitely going to end up being my "zen" game for a while, I think. Just pop into a Spotify playlist and fly around while I decompress. I'm enjoying exploring places that I'll likely never see in person. You can dumb it down pretty far if you choose, to the point that the plane pretty much flies itself, whether autopilot is on or not. I've been shocked at how accurate the places I grew up are rendered. It's not 1:1 at all, of course, but I grew up in a rural area and, like, flying by the mountains and instantly recognizing the shape of the horizon had me in my feelings in a weird way.

It does ask a lot out of the controller. Every button feels like it has 15 purposes/modifiers, but again, it can be streamlined pretty well.

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The Ascent is a fun little cyberpunk twin stick shooter RPG type thing. It was made by, like, 11 people or something, but it still looks pretty gorgeous. The environments are really nice. Your character model is kind of limited with customization options, but that’s okay.

And I downloaded the Master Chief Collection - that took forever, good lord. I do like how they have the games in timeline order, that helps. I’ve only ever played 1-3, so hitting all of the other ones will be nice.

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Got my 221st Platinum trophy with Need For Speed Shift on PS3. Using the servers and multiplayer made the grind to the Platinum a lot easier; once the servers shut down at the end of the month, it will become a lot harder. Corner mastery on each track is somewhat broken; sometimes the game recognizes you've done the corner correctly but often it doesn't. So doing wins on all the tracks, drift tracks, and 250 podium places in multiplayer makes up for it.

Then I have the DLC to finish (there is one online DLC trophy for the game and oh the DLC is now delisted), but not too bad.

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Just finished The Pathless on PS5, really enjoyed it! I'd tried playing it once and it didn't grab me, but then coming back to it I got fully in and yeah, I'll absolutely clean up trophies for the Platinum AND likely go for the Plat on the PS4 as well! Highly recommended for folks who want to take their time and explore and want a beautiful world to spend some hours in. 

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Since it was added to PS Now and its Olympic season, I decided to play the 2020 Tokyo Olympics game. What a joke that game is. I remember the old days (when I was a kid) when Olympic games were the shit. I'd love a "realistic" full style Olympics game but the 2020 version is cartoony and some of the games are legitimately broken. Maybe one day.

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Another weekend, another PS3/Xbox 360 shooter that was surprisingly good  Finished up Singularity last night and felt like it deserved more attention than it got.  Ingenious story-driven shooter with a loopy time travel mechanic that actually works and some really fun set pieces.  I've only played a couple games from Raven Software and Singularity is probably the only one I'd go out of my way to recommend, but - from reading up on them over the weekend - it seems like they had a fair degree of creativity and worked hard to turn out some quality ips.  They probably deserved better than to be turned into a support studio for whatever Call of Duty game Activision is trying to polish this week.

Other than graphics and load times and such, are games really better now?  I feel like game design stagnated somewhere around 2014, probably because a lot of the quality designers got fed up with what they were doing for the major studios and left Capcom, Konami, Ubi, etc. to open their own studios.   PS4 generation has an incredible number of titles and is strong in just about any genre, but I feel like the AA titles were better and maybe the indies too.  I'm not sure the past seven years of indie games really surpasses Journey, Super Meat Boy, Braid, Limbo, the top half of Summer of Arcade, etc.

If nothing else, companies like Capcom still occasionally took risks in the early 2010's.  PS3/Xbox 360 have a lot of not-quite-great but interesting games that probably wouldn't get greenlit these days.  I feel like my top 10 PS4/XOne games would blow away my top 10 PS3/Xbox 360 games.  Maybe even top 20-30 would compare well.  But I'm fairly sure if I compared a top 100 or 200 from 2007-2014 to a top 100/200 from 2014-2021 (discounting remakes and remasters), the PS3/360 gen would win.

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There was recently an annoying slide show article on... Kotaku? that highlighted some of the unique shooters from 15 years ago, when that was the genre that was popular so game developers were thinking outside the box to put their own spin on it. You don't really see that as much now, focus has shifted to sequels, battle royals or somewhat generic "games as a service" shooters, I guess everything goes in cycles. I still remember fondly playing Haze and Army of Two with my brother. 

Luckily the other popular type of game to make, overly long open-world games, is a genre I enjoy so the lack of unique FPS games doesn't bother me too much, but I wouldn't mind it making a return. Part of it is that games now are expected to be long, I mean the original Halo was a 10 hour game, that probably wouldn't fly these days. Haze was as well. A game like Cyberpunk, if you take out the open world aspect and just had set pieces focusing on the shooter aspect (and it wasn't broken) could have been condensed to 15 to 20 hours and fit right in but in 2021 that isn't going to be popular. I haven't played Wolfenstein but it may be the best recent example of a game not designed to be online or a service, that was just a straight-forward shooter with its own twist.

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I agree, Jen.  It is a token resignation that allows Brack to collect his entitlements and land on his feet rather than a straight termination and using that golden parachute money for something else. 

It also does not address what new leadership will do about ActiBlizz's toxic office culture.

Edited by J.T.
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It's okay - Fran Townsend is still at Activision. She will make everything better once she stops blocking employees on Twitter and stops telling them to stop snitching

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