There’s been a lot of news this week, and it’s partly thanks to this that it’s starting to feel like this year of gaming has finally woken up. We’ve had the announcement of Batman: Arkham Knight and the release date announced for Watch Dogs, but we’re also getting games in hands. South Park is now out, Titanfall’s next week, inFamous: Second Son and MGSV:GZ the week after.
It’s time to come out of hibernation and play some games.
Easily the biggest news story of the week was that of Jack Tretton’s coming departure from his postition as President and CEO of SCEA. Totally out of the blue, it sees him stepping down with Sony enjoying some huge successes with the PlayStation 4, bringing to an end a 19 year career with the company. He’s set to be replaced by Shawn Layden on April 1st.
KennyKazey was one of many who expressed their surprise:
That’s some unexpected news right there, I can’t believe it. Jack is a very likable and down-to-earth man, Layden has some mighty big shoes to fill. I hope Tretton finds great joy in whatever he does next. He will be missed.
Temascos joined in with his own throughts:
He was always a consistently entertaining speaker at E3 and seemed to lead well from behind the scenes. 19 years is a long time to be in a single job so leaving it now at a high point is a good idea.
Hopefully Layden does well at the job, for his sake as well as thousands of others.
This week also saw the departure of Amy Hennig from Naughty Dog. Unfortunately, alongside another outpouring of goodwill , there were rumours that she had been pushed out from the company by Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley, who headed up The Last of Us’ development, though this has since been denied.
SamBeThyName thought that this could potentially be a good thing for Uncharted’s next game, though lamented her leaving.
Its really sad to see one of the few women within the games industry with such a high ranking position being “pushed out”.
Having said that, I’ve just replayed all the Uncharted games and TLoU and I think that a slightly darker tone to the next Uncharted would be a good thing. Drake kills an awful lot of people, it would be interesting if it felt like you had to kill enemies like in TLoU, rather than just mindlessness of plowing through them like in Uncharted.
On a more positive not, the long awaited Watch Dogs finally got a release date and new trailer this last week. It’s now pegged for a launch of May 27th.
The trailer itself, though, has divided opinions. Some thought it was good, with bunimomike saying, “That’s an excellent trailer.” and that “Watchdog had promise but lacked that coherent feeling that gelled everything together. No longer. The trailer really ramps up the desire to play it.”
Others were much more taken aback by the seeming shift in graphical fidelity and gameplay, compared to previous trailers. Hornet1990, for example, said that “Graphically, in places, and particularly day time looked pretty naff. I need to get a HD copy on my TV for a closer look though.”
He continued, “I also thought the game was going to be more stealthy/sneaky and less shooty, but that video suggests over the top GTA-esque levels of violence. Maybe it was delayed because without that they couldn’t see it appealing to too many people?”
An interesting thought, and one where we’ll have to wait and see. It’s a game that hasn’t had many hands on appearances, and trailers can often be misleading, since they pick and choose the most attention grabbing details.
We’ll start off this weeks achievements with the biggest one, as TSBonyman managed to get to the third planet on Super Stardust HD. Top effort there, now to keep pushing and get all the way to the end!
Lyts1985 has been typically busy with collecting platinums, this week for both Trivial Pursuit and Trine 2, but now he’s eager to get to grips with some of the upcoming releases. Maybe he’ll take a page out of R1MJAW’s book and hop into The Lego Movie Videogame, which R1M took the fastest PS3 platinum for this week. R1M also finished two runs of EDF 2025, on easy and normal difficulties.
Every once in a while, there’s a game which has a trophy list that demands a little too much grind for the easily distracted. BadBoyBoogie’s determination and focus helped him grind his way to the Killzone: Shadow Fall, though. That’s a game which tactical20 has returned to and started to enjoy, now that he’s finished with Lego Marvel Super Heroes.
Though not current accomplishments, MrYd dipped into his catalogue of trophies to find a few older records that hadn’t been claimed or he could supersede. Resoance of Fate, Rainbow Moon, Record of Agarest War 2, Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 and Tales of Graces f are all now his.
However, it’s heartbreak for Freezebug, as we can only award him an honorary platinum trophy for his efforts with GRID 2. It would seem that taking advantage of a 1 hour free trial has caused some trophies to glitch, and will forever prevent him from actually having the platinum. I hate it when trophies don’t work properly.
We’ll finish with one of the golden oldies, where hornet1990 had gone and finished his good play through of inFamous and will soon embark on his evil play. I’ve always played inFamous as a bad guy the first time through, for some reason. How about you lot?
AIR’s without and internet connection this week, so has been unable to update the leaderboards this week. Hopefully we’ll see them back next week, but to round things off for today, we have the usual submission form for photos and accomplishments.
If people want to send photos in of their gaming rigs, I’ll be happy to post them. Just use the submission form below, get in touch with me on Twitter at @teflon, or just send me an email out of the blue to [email protected].
TSBonyman
Oh har de har, thanks Stefan :)
gazzagb
I agree with Mike, the trailer really upped my anticipation for the game. It’s also got me thinking about changing my mind to get the PC version and get the PS4 bundle. It’ll be coming out right at the end of the semester, so the timing couldn’t be more perfect.
Only thing that’s holding me back is justifying £450+ for a PS4, the console just doesn’t seem worth it yet.
MrYd
Who plays infamous the wrong way round? What sort of shenanigans is this?? Same with any game like that. You do the good version first, leaving all the fun evil stuff for your second playthrough. Otherwise you’re on your second game trying to be all boring and good and get about half way through before giving up.
This is where GTA fails, being basically one massive lump of chaos. Do 3 missions then just get carried away with driving around acting like, well, a Trevor really.
(This entire comment is just to prove that I don’t just play relatively obscure JRPGs)
Youles
freezebug – are the GRID2 trophies you need online or offline? If they are offline (and not stupidly hard) could you not sign into another PS3 somewhere, not sync your trophies, earn the ones you need, then sync your trophies?
freezebug2
That could be worth a shot mate, although I have already tried the deleting my profile then re-signing into the account with a new gamesave but that didn’t work. Mind, that was with the same console so it’ll be worth a try on another console.
Yeah, the two trophies in virtual limbo are easy enough offline jobbies…in fact unmissable really as one is story related at the start and the other is just a lengthy drift.
I’ll give it a try and let you know, it’s no sweat though if it doesn’t work, at least a lesson in caution has been learnt with those one hour full game trial thingy’s. ;)
On saying all of that, it’s probably Racenet being arsey :P
Youles
So when you tried with a new save after re-signing into the account, did you attempt to earn those 2 trophies again? And if so did they actuall “pop”?
freezebug2
Yeah, re-earned them several times with the XMB trophy list set to online and offline, also with brand new game saves. It’s quite unsurprising really when considering the trophy list is littered with glitchers, not least that stupid Global Domination one which was like flipping a coin whether it popped or not…regardless of it being earned.
Youles
Damnit, there must be a work around. I shouldn’t think it matters what the trophy list is set to, but I think you would want to earn them as if the PS3 has never known you’ve played the game before amd before even doing a trophy sync
freezebug2
It worked by not syncing trophies before playing the game on a different PS3 under my profile.
Had the 2 trophies within 10 minutes, but the big test was the main trophy sync to PSN and my profile. It showed all trophies apart from the platinum….here we go lol!
So I then had to go back onto my PS3 and load the game, PS button to XMB and do a profile sync after which the game wrote the platinum to the trophy list and then required another full sync with serever to show the platinum on the list!
I think the combination of Racenet profile association, the online/offline trophy mode and the one hour game trial trophies all had some bearing on this whole situation.
Massive faff, but many thanks for the suggestion anyway dude, otherwise I’d have written it off as another one that got away.
Youles
Glad you did it mate. I was concerned about the platinum not popping on the “new” PS3, although I assumed it probably would after syncing the remaining trophies from the PSN servers (after earning the 2 trophies and syncing those).
That was the good thing about having two PS3’s (before my 60gb fatty died) and always backing my saves to the Cloud….if a trophy glitched on me I could just download my save file to my other PS3 and earn it again. Providing it wasn’t an online trophy which relied on stats/records stored on a server.
Stefan L
It worked for you now? You got the platinum?
Youles
Yup! Now can I get “Member” replaced with Guru on my TSA tag thingy? :p
freezebug2
Yeah, after much manipulation and massaging the profile system and gamesaves between two Playstation’s including copious trophy syncing time after flipping between the two, Youles’ idea with using a second console worked.
Plat No. 79½ with the extra work involved! :P
tactical20
Excellent work Freezebug & Youles! :-)
Youles
Thanks :D
freezebug2
It was nothing!
cough *understatement police arrive*