Something For The Weekend – 18/03/17

With both Gazza and myself deciding to indulge in a little light revelry last night, I’m sure you can forgive the lateness of this weekend’s edition of Something for the Weekend. Now that I’m relaxing in bed and enjoying the final weekend of the Six Nations – it’s just a shame that the championship’s already been decided, really – let’s get cracking with a recap of everything of note from the last week.

In the News This Week

• Sony are ending PlayStation 3 production in the near future
  JR. eulogised the console, saying, “Thank you for the memories, the games and streaming. Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing. Who can live without it? I ask in all honesty. What would life be? Without a Vita or Playstation 3. So I thank Sony for the gaming. For giving it to me.”
• PlayStation Now to start streaming PlayStation 4 games
  “Come on, that doesn’t make sense,” Avenger opined. “They ought to make it a download not a stream, at least that would make it worthwhile on PS4.”
• Horizon Zero Dawn has sold 2.6 million copies
  The fastest selling first party PS4 exclusive, if you want a very, very precise fact about the game.
• Everything looks like an acid trip in video game form
• Sonic Mania delayed until summer, and Sonic Forces announced
  Are these the Sonic games we’ve been waiting for? Well the first of them might be!
• Nintendo are reportedly doubling Switch production for next year
  Seems like people want to buy them, so this makes sense.
• Nintendo Switch games cost more because of manufacturing cartridges
  Ron_mcphatty thinks that “What we need is more Minidiscs! The PSP got it spot on, since the mid ninteties the whirring and grinding sounds of an optical drive have been a joyous staple of gaming, taking that noise to a library and irritating middle-aged women is one of the only pleasures left in our cruel world.”
• Outlast 2 refused an age rating by the Australian Classifications Board
• LittleBigPlanet 3 is the first game to use the new PlayStation 4 patch preload feature
• How much was the UK games industry worth last year? £4.33bn is the answer

Games in Review

A lot of games in review this past week, with a mixture of new releases, catching up on recent games and some older titles. Here’s how they fared.

• Hollow Knight – PC – 9/10
• Future Unfolding – PC – 8/10
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands – PS4, XBO, PC – 7/10
• Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns – 3DS – 7/10
• Memoranda – PC – 7/10
• Death Squared – PS4, XBO, PC – 7/10
• Styx: Shards of Darkness – PS4, XBO, PC – 6/10
• Mario Sports Superstars – 3DS – 6/10
• FlatOut 4: Total Insanity – PS4, XBO – Score Pending
• Thrustmaster Y350P Gaming Headset – PS4 Accessory – Hardware, No Score

This Week’s Features

Look, if there’s one thing you read this week, it should be Aran’s blog about the normalisation of racism within the video gaming community and what that actually means for someone who has been the target of racist insults online. It’s an important issue to talk about and, especially if you’re a white heterosexual male, and important issue to be aware of.

It makes the rest of our coverage feel a little bit trivial, to be honest, but Aran also looked at Trove as this accessible voxel-based MMORPG came to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One this past week. Looking further back, I dove into Dirt Rally VR, calling it a practically essential game for anyone with PlayStation VR (and a racing wheel).

I also took a quick look at Mass Effect Andromeda’s multiplayer, ahead of our review of the game at the start of next week.

And while Jim highlighted one of the problems that For Honor faces, thanks to its rather unique networking system, I went hands on with the rather beguiling Rime, which looks very promising despite its troubled development.

Last, but by no mean’s least, we had What We Played, featuring Mass Effect Andromeda, Ghost Recon Wildlands and For Honor.

Trailer Park

Everything is… um… 

A preview of Prey’s Typhon aliens

A brief glimpse of Sonic Forces

And an equally brief glimpse of the much better looking Sonic Mania

Your Achievements

Turning to you, the community, it’s Tony C that gets us started by completing Dragon Age: Inquisition, before discovering that he now likes inFamous: First Light and Tropico 5 despite bad first impressions. Meanwhile, Crazy_Del nabbed the platinum trophy for Ghost Recon Wildlands, and is just one or two trophies away from the For Honor platinum.

Beyond that, however, all I’m seeing is plenty of Lego Worlds, For Honor, Zelda, The Witcher 3 and No Man’s Sky being played, but not any actual platinum trophies or campaigns being completed.

The Week Ahead

What do we have to look forward to next week? Well, let me give you some of the highlights:

• Everything – PS4 – 21/03
• Troll and I – PS4, XBO, PC – 21/03
• This is the Police – PS4, XBO – 22/03
• Mass Effect Andromeda – PS4, XBO, PC – 23/03
• Toukiden 2 – PS4, PS Vita, PC – 24/03
• Zero Escape: The Nonary Games – PS4, PS Vita, PC – 24/03

So with that, enjoy the rest of your weekends, and we’ll see you next time!