The Tuesday letters page is frustrated that Sony won’t talk more about its multiformat plans, as one reader finally wins at Balatro.
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Dream team
With the Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remaster likely to be the only other Nintendo game I’ll buy this year, my thoughts are becoming obsessed with the Switch 2 and what kind of games it’ll bring. They obviously delayed it because they weren’t ready, which I totally respect, but I think the question has got to be will it be just a new 3D Mario/Donkey Kong, and a few minor games, or a new Mario and one or two other significant games?
I can’t see them doing Mario and Mario Kart, but Mario and Animal Crossing? That would be a two-hit combo that would be pretty much unstoppable. Then again, there’s nothing there for ‘hardcore’ gamers, so maybe Mario and Metroid Prime 4? That would be my dream combo, with maybe a remastered Zelda: Breath Of The Wild thrown into the mix.
What makes it a good guess in my book is that we know they’re working on both games (or at least that the Mario team is busy) so there’s a good chance that it’ll actually happen. I can’t wait!
Gadfly
Talk to me
I’d forgotten until now that the PlayStation interim boss had never explained what he meant by multiformat and now the rumours have it that he did mean Xbox and/or Switch after all? Madness. Not the idea of Sony releasing first party games on other console but that they seem to be allergic to explaining anything they do. At this point they’re acting like explaining themselves to their fans will literally kill them or something.
It doesn’t bother me one bit if Helldivers 2 comes to Xbox, it’ll only increase the playerbase, but please Sony, for the love of gaming, do something about the way you communicate, or rather don’t. If I didn’t have a PlayStation 5 already I’d absolutely get a PC at this point, purely because of the unhinged way Sony is acting. It’s like they’ve had a nervous breakdown or something.
Lofal
Patented solution
I don’t want to point out the obvious, especially as GC already alluded to it, but if you find level grinding in a game so boring that you want the console to take over and play itself then either a) you don’t actually like the game or b) the game isn’t very good.
I’ll be honest, I’m kind of stunned about everything that was in that story about the patent. Why go to so much ridiculous effort, of inventing a system to let games play themselves, when all you need to do is design them better.
I’m not a big role-playing fan, so maybe I’m talking out of turn, but level-grinding just seems a pointless waste of time and exactly the sort of bloat I thought we were all beginning to agree should go. Maybe the patent should’ve been for a way to automatically remove level-grinding and repetitive side quests from a game.
Grossman
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Belated expansion
Helldivers 2 and Fallout 4 being the biggest games of 2024 is definitely not something I had on my bingo card for this year. We’ll see if the next gen update justifies the excitement around Fallout 4 but I think Bethesda are going to really regret not having a new game ready for the show coming out. They should’ve known whether it was going to be good or not, since they helped make it, so I’m not sure why they didn’t have something small at least.
Maybe if Fallout 4 is such a success now they could instead make a new expansion? I’ve never seen that done, with such an old game, but it’s more popular now than almost any new game so why not give it a go? Add in the new characters and have a sort of crossover episode but inside the game. I’d buy it.
Kriscutt
Peach power
I’d like to give a shout-out to Princess Peach: Showtime! Since buying it my kids were hooked to the point they bought a second copy so they could play at the same time.
One of the complaints I’ve seen in articles is that it’s not particularly difficult, but I’d be fairly confident that my kids are right in the middle of the game’s target market and for them it seemed just right. Without wanting to start a debate about games and difficulty modes, I kinda feel that if some games can be made to be hard with no easy mode and avoid criticism from reviewers because that was the aim of the game, then the reverse should also be true.
Anyways not played it myself (don’t think it’s aimed at a 40-year-old bloke), but my kids recommend it.
Tim
GC: That was far from our most serious complaint with it.
Gone forever
So in the space of a few weeks, we’ve had the closure of Super Mario Maker and the loss of all its player-created levels and now the loss of everything ever made for LittleBigPlanet, even though Sony specifically said they weren’t going to do that. I’m not sure who’s ever going to bother to make anything for these sort of games again in the future.
The problem with preservation in video games is getting wildly out of control now, especially given it’s obvious that publishers do not care at all. Games like that, and free-to-play games and online only stuff are going to continue to be shut down and never come back and there’s nothing we can do.
One problem I don’t think has really been mentioned with the slow death of consoles is that it also means that games become increasingly disposable. Unless absolutely everyone plays on PC, which is obviously never going to happen, games are just going to come and go and never return. And even if fans somehow keep them going any extras that come with them are going to be lost the second it gets too expensive to keep the servers running.
Bowie
Give it a hand
Well, I don’t believe it! After 30 hours of playing Balatro I finally won a game! By far the game of the year so far. It just goes to show that you can have all of the big budgets, enhanced graphics, and frame rates that you care for, but it doesn’t mean a thing if the game isn’t fun.
Balatro is just simple and addictive and beats everything that’s gone before it this year. What a fantastic game!
Saints Stickman
Byte me
In the 80s and 90s we defined consoles based on the bits of graphics they showed. The NES and Master System were 8-bit consoles. The SNES and Mega Drive were 16-bit and so on. The PSone and Saturn were 32-bit.
Then from the PlayStation 2 onwards we stopped defining consoles in terms of bits. Why? Today we say current gen and next gen. Could you tell me how many bit the PlayStation 2, 3, 4 and 5 are? Thanks.
Henry
GC: The number of ‘bits’ refers to the CPU word size, but that doesn’t benefit from being higher than 32-bits. Add in the increased importance of GPUs, to how powerful a device is, as well as things like CPU and memory speed, and the concept became irrelevant. There was a faint attempt to describe the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 as 128-bit but by that point it was purely a marketing gimmick. If they’d continued though, the PlayStation 5 would be 128-byte (there are 8 bits in a byte).
I’m #1 so why try harder?
I’m still stuck by the idea that almost all the top 10 games on each system are games that are six years old or more. Stuff like Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite. It shows why publishers are so eager to have live service games of their own, but it doesn’t really answer what they do when they haven’t got one and they’ve only got normal games to rely on.
To be honest, it makes me wonder why some publishers even bother to make other games. Activision hasn’t for years and now it all begins to make sense. Why bother to spend all that effort making a new one-off game when it’ll probably make less profit than a simple skin or new weapon in Call Of Duty?
Take-Two seem to be largely that way and it’s only really Ubisoft and EA, out of the big publishers, that put any effort into a varied range of games. Oddly, it’s EA that’s best out of all of them, especially given they’re quite keen on indie games, although I fear this is going to change now they’re giving up licensed games.
It’s not hard to imagine a future where the majority of all video games are things that have been going for decades and there’s no space for anything new that isn’t a low budget indie title or equivalent. That is not how imagined the future of the games industry being.
Corsmento
Inbox also-rans
Just a big thanks to Wonk for the Horizon Call Of The Mountain code. That was very generous of you and for GameCentral sending it to me. I’ve been enjoying it alot, thanks again!
Rob
So how long does anyone give it before this new WipEout studio is bought by Sony and then shut down? If I was a video game developer right now I’d want to pick a new career.
Ledgerite
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