It DID outdo Nintendo’s equivalent - the previous mainline Mario entry - Super Mario Odyssey - in every way except maybe 4 :
- Quantity - Mario had more moons than Astro had Bots to rescue… so more collectibles.
- replayability - with the Luigi balloon challenges, they extended the game’s longevity with this feature and it is better than Astro Bot’s simpler “speed run challenges” because of Mario’s unique game mechanic of allowing players to create and compete by crafting one-of-a-kind challenges for each other.
- Nostalgia - Mario’s New Donk City party was absolute peak love letter to the origins of Super Mario and the sequence with the song sung by Mayor Pauline honestly brought me to tears…
Tap for spoiler
the Bowser hat body takeover sequence
…But everything else - the scale of and pure ingenuity of the boss mechanics, the visuals - from both a stylistic and technical standpoint, the Dual-Sense’s controller gimmicks, the complete lack of load times… it brought into stark contrast how far Nintendo has fallen behind - not so much from a game design perspective necessarily - but certainly at least from a hardware power standpoint.
I would love to play it some day. Shame it’s a $600 game.
You might, Sony seems pretty open to PC releases these days
And Death Stranding even got released on Xbox.
The ps5 controller is designed into the game, hard to believe this will be available pc anytime soon
The DualSense controller works perfectly fine on PC. Most first-party Sony games come with the full feature set for it (adaptive triggers, haptics, touchpad, gyro, speaker, …).
There’s a ~300 €$ demo if you go used and it plays a lot of good games
This is a disingenuous take. All games require hardware and you definitely don’t need to spend $600 to play it.
How exactly do I avoid paying $600 for it if I don’t own a PS5?
How does anybody own a Ps5 when it has no games?
Same way people have to buy a PC or XBox to play your beloved Starfield.
beloved
Starfield
Does not compute
If you buy a PC or Xbox just to play Starfield you got other issues.
If you buy a PS5 just for AstroBoy, same. Its Game of the Year but def not the best ever PS5 game. God of War, Horizon, Ratchet and Clank, Spiderman…
Consoles have been pcs under the hood for a while, they could run pc games just fine, they choose not to. Sony could implement a browser for their 500$ walled garden, they choose not to. Sony could let you install another OS on the PS5, they choose not to.
The big ones have arguably been that way since the beginning. The original XBox was a stripped down and fancified computer, down to using the USB protocol for the controllers.
You pay $400 for it new or buy a used digital system for less. Sony even sells a refurbished disc version for $400 if you are weirdly stuck on physical (since I assume you don’t buy it that way with your current gaming hardware). Do you also quote the highest possible price for a cellphone or a pc?
Yes you are right, paying $400 for a game is of course very much reasonable.
I mean, you chose your medium for playing games. The same thing exists for a lot of games. I’m quite sure you paid at least that to game in your platform of choice.
Astro bot aka “we already have Mario at home”
Except the mario at home was actually just as good as what you wanted out.
