The Many Mixed Fortunes of Sony – This Week in Games

Welcome back, folks! Because I don’t keep myself busy enough, I’ve gotten some Discord buddies together and will be starting a Mage: The Ascension campaign with them soon! I have a lot of love for Mage; it’s a messy system, but it was the first tabletop game I played, and its freeform rules and fascinating setting have captured my imagination ever since. The three buddies I’ve collected as players are excited to start playing later this month; I’ve given them a funky romp through the World of Darkness set in Puerto Rico that I hope they’ll enjoy. If you’re worried about this eating into my Xenoblade time… hey man, I’m already working on Manga Preview Guide; I’m already not playing video games!

Let’s Talk A Little About Astro Bot

Hey, so Astro Bot came out, and it’s a phenomenal game, yeah? No notes, no sad backstory to the thing—let’s take a moment to give Team ASOBI their flowers. They set out to make a fun, charming game starring a cute robot romping through several stages loaded with love for Sony‘s gaming history and the many characters that have helped establish Sony‘s gaming legacy, be they first-party classics like The Last of Us or God of War or even the third-party stuff from back in the day like freaking Raziel from Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. The Legacy of Kain titles wouldn’t be the first titles I’d choose to celebrate the PlayStation brand’s history—but a good choice and a very welcome choice, in my book. They and the many other third-party classics like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Tomb Raider helped carve Sony‘s unique niche for an older audience of players and more mature themes. But I’m getting ahead of myself; there are a lot of complicated feelings about Astro Bot, and there’s a lot of discourse going on about the title, and I wanted to contemplate my navel about some of it.

Astro Bot‘s success comes right on the heels of Concord‘s cataclysmic failure (the game was shut down after just two weeks, after eight years of development). Concord also has plenty of nonsense discourse surrounding it, and I think it’s important to remember that the stuff that led to Concord‘s failure aren’t really things that have anything to do with Astro Bot‘s success. A lot of the groundwork for Concord was already laid long before Sony bought out Firewalk Studio, and a lot of the decisions that led to its failure likely have more to do with out-of-touch executives trying to cash in on the Fortnite live-service model than anything else reactionary-types want to crow about. That, and live-service games are already a crowded market; Concord‘s failure is no different than the many would-be World of Warcraft killers from back in the day.

I don’t think that this is necessarily mutually exclusive with Astro Bot standing out by virtue of just being a well-made platformer, mind; Sony has a dearth of those kinds of single-player experiences, especially ones that cast such a wide net in terms of audience. And that leads to another factor for its success: it’s an honest-to-God exclusive for the PlayStation 5. Not a timed exclusive or anything like that: if you want to play Astro Bot, you need a PS5. No questions. A major problem that the Xbox Series consoles and the PS5 have is that they have no value proposition: why buy an expensive console if any title worth getting on them is coming to PC in the near future? Just wait it out, right? A lot of players have planted their flag on the desire to play their games on any platform whatsoever once they’ve bought their title, but as long as a company is putting out a console, it behooves the companies to make sure there’s something worthwhile on it. That, and as much as the people making terrible jokes about the “superiority” of people who play on PCs, we’re still not at a point where PC gaming is as accessible to the mainstream public as just buying a console and likely won’t ever be.

The other thing about Astro Bot that folks have noticed is that it’s a very tight game, clocking in at about 16 hours. So, a 16-hour platformer with charming design and fun levels has won out for Sony and is likely doing more for Sony than a number of its major big-budget graphics-so-advanced-you-can-see-the-molecules-that-make-up-the-floaties-in-Joel-Miller’s-eyes have in a while. Y’know, like what Nintendo‘s been doing since the Wii.

In a curious twist, even a lot of Nintendo fans have shown rapt attention and appreciation for Astro Bot (which should be a feather in its cap), but I don’t blame them for being a little snooty when they say “I told you so!” that smaller projects with an emphasis on charm over tech can be a lot more effective than just bludgeoning folks with the AAA hammer—especially in today’s day and age of hyper-inflated development costs and finicky tech. And even I have to admit, it’s a bit frustrating that it took Astro Bot to make a ton of people realize that when Nintendo has been pumping these kinds of games out on the Switch since 2017; Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Kirby and the Forgotten Land… these games never stopped being fun (especially not when made with care, like Astro Bot was), but Sony definitely did carry itself as though it was too good to make another platformer, and that kind of attitude has only hurt Sony in the long run—not only because its library currently lacks the kind of variety Nintendo has, but also because Sony has let a lot of its major mascots slip through its fingers.

Folks have rightfully given Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki truckloads of stink-eyes over his comments on Sony’s lack of original IPs (who closed the Sony Japan studio, Totoki?!), but—and I’m saying this fully cognizant of this column’s negative view on predatory mergers and acquisitions—Sony has let a ton of their major successes just slip through their fingers. The PS1 made tons of early in-roads courtesy of Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot, and those guys got sold off to Microsoft. And we all know how that worked out for poor Spyro and Crash. A sad fate that Sony, who was able to leverage their understanding of the music industry into their games (leading to beloved stylish classics like Vib-Ribbon and Parappa the Rapper), is in such a state.

Something like Astro Bot ought to be a wake-up call for Nintendo fans, I think—not because “Nintendo has competition” or anything dumb like that. I think it’s perfectly possible to enjoy both Nintendo‘s stuff and still get super-excited for games on consoles you don’t own. Heck, Super Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai loves the game. Rather, this ought to be a real showcase for what it looks like when a company really doesn’t care about its IP. If you’re not playing F-Zero 99, that’s on you. If you want more Legend of Dragoon, then too bad—even Team ASOBI didn’t put it into Astro Bot. But conversely, Astro Bot should also be a wake-up call for Sony. I get why there aren’t more Astro Bots out there—you can’t just engineer charm of its caliber on a dime. And gaming audiences have grown such that it’s hard to pin your console’s future upon the back of a platformer when folks want their Call of Dutys. Regardless, it’s a delightful trip through Sony‘s back catalog, and if anything, it’s also made people downright hungry for the return of Sony‘s older properties. People want more Ape Escape! People want a new Sly Cooper! We deserve a new Jumping Flash! and Parappa the Rapper. And it’s not too late to follow up on it. A lot about gaming is really bad… but there’s a lot of good in gaming that folks still love.

That said: Sony, credit the translators. Do better, man.

Hey, Let’s See What This PS5 Pro News Is All AbouOH GOD NO

God dammit, Sony, we were having a moment!

So, everything I wrote up there re:Astro Bot was written literally the night before the announcement for the PS5 Pro went live. And… good God. Good God, was this some whiplash. Sony seemed desperate to take whatever goodwill it had engendered with folks and fling it from the window. See, Sony revealed the PS5 Pro… and it’s about the biggest display of misplaced arrogance I’ve seen in years. Folks are quick to liken this to Sony‘s disastrous 2006 E3 show, and the comparison is apt.

Let me be really fair to Sony here. I like Mark Cerny! It’s obvious that he’s a man who is excited over technology, and while I dunked on him in the past concerning his excitement for the PS5’s “teraflops” of computational processing (long before I ever came to this column), it’s very clear that he has a lot of love and hope for the PS5’s technological architecture. He’s not quite Satoru Iwata, mind; Iwata always wanted the tech to be in service of fun, not just for its own sake. But it’s hard to hate Cerny, and I honestly feel pretty bad for him right now because folks aren’t sharing his excitement for the PS5 Pro.

Cerny hosted a ten-minute stream this past Tuesday, detailing the prowess of the PS5 Pro and how it would improve upon the PS5’s basic model. To be entirely clear, the PS5 is a stunning piece of technology, but it’s not exactly the best showcase of its own tech because so few of its games seem to take advantage of it (not helped by there being so few PS5 exclusives). This was a major problem with the entire stream: Cerny showcased the improvements the PS5 Pro makes with the performance of PS5 games, but not only are the improvements downright minimal (you need to look with a magnifying glass to see them at a moment’s notice during actual gameplay), all of the games used as examples are either older titles (like Horizon Forbidden West), showcasing cutscenes and not active gameplay, or running at a native 30 frames per second.

If any games are being designed specifically with the PS5 Pro’s hardware, we haven’t seen them. The PS5’s architecture thus feels really wasted. The biggest hit we’ve received so far is Astro Bot—a phenomenally fun game, sure, but not one that needs 120 frames per second. And that’s a big problem when Cerny says stuff like designing the PS5 Pro to satisfy developer desires for “more graphics performance” that “the dreams of the developers are bigger than can be supported at 60 fps”. It’s 2024, and current titles still struggle to reach a constant and consistent 60 fps framerate. Sure would be easier to do that if we didn’t try saddling processors with ray tracing and rendering skin pores and hair follicles! It was even more damning when Cerny illustrated that when presented with the PS5’s option to run games in either the detail-emphasizing Fidelity mode or the framerate-emphasizing Performance mode, 75% of all players preferred Performance mode. So Sony even has hard numbers backing up that the race for inane detail isn’t even what their audience wants.

So, to break it down some: the PS5 Pro’s three main upgrades (dubbed “the big three” by Cerny) are a bigger GPU that offers up to 45% faster rendering speeds, advanced ray tracing capabilities, and the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution; an AI-fueled upscaling system that helps with rendering speeds. That last one isn’t, to our knowledge, being fueled by scraped image sources (it only uses the visual data being rendered at the moment), but it sure sounds to me like a lot of “Blast Processing”—and it may as well be, because the improvements are painfully minimal. Sure, crowd scenes are somewhat crisper-looking when you zoom in! I’m sure that’ll be readily apparent the next time I play Legend of Dragoon on my PS5 Pro with my nose to my TV screen. As many have been quick to point out, it’s not a matter of us hitting diminishing returns for graphical improvements through technology—we hit that point long, long ago (arguably with the PS4/Xbone).

Let’s rip the band-aid off: Sony‘s asking for US$700 for a PS5 Pro. US$700 for positively miniscule improvements. The PS5 doesn’t have a single game that goes anywhere near the ceiling of what the console can do; Sony‘s made something that offers the slightest of improvements… and they’re charging the better part of a grand for it. And remember: even folks who want a vanilla PS5 still go through tribulations trying to get one. Also remember: this upgrade doesn’t come with any physical media drive; you have to buy that separately. It doesn’t even include the godforsaken stand needed to keep this thing upright. That is sold separately, too. So when you really get down to brass tacks, you’re paying US$810 for a giant, white paperweight, plus the stand, plus the physical media drive, and all the teraflops contained within. This is beyond audacity; this is lunacy.

I’ve mentioned above that PCs aren’t going to become a mainstream option for folks, and I stand by that. Folks can crow about how “easy” it is to build your own PC (having built two PCs: hahaha, no) or how cheap it is to do so (having lived through that superconductor shortage where even the budget GPU I used on my old PC reached inflated prices thereabouts what a PS5 Pro goes for: hahaha, no). Folks can crow about how even a pre-built PC would be more convenient—remember, your average Tom, Dick, or Larry isn’t in the market to read a mile-long dissertation on what a good model is; they want to walk into Walmart and walk out with something that’ll run Call of Duty. We here reading This Week in Games or even keeping up with gaming news in general, reeling at the price of a PS5, are a very separate audience from the regular folks who just play Madden. For a lot of people, just having a Steam account is something of a “hardcore” move. I’m not even sure a Steam Deck would necessarily mark the proper path for the industry on that account. But all that’s to say that a lot of game-conscious people are claiming that “you may as well just build a PC” or “you should just get a Steam Deck” because the value proposition on a PS5 Pro is so abysmal. And on that note… I do agree with them.

Don’t ask me which Castle Superbeast podcast it’s from, but Pat Boivin helped me reframe how I look at this by pointing out that the purpose of a company isn’t to make money but to make value. A company sells your value at a price; that value can be social, emotional, practical, or whatever, but ultimately, whether that value is worth money is up to the consumer at the register. A good suit has value because it’s satisfying to wear and helps project an image for the wearer. A Cuisinart has value because it helps with preparing meals. A plushie has value because when you’re alone in a hospital bed at night, it helps to have a big stuffed alligator on your tummy so you don’t feel alone (and so you can prop your phone on his nose when you want to watch stuff).

This is a major problem Microsoft and Sony alike have with their consoles: they seemingly do not provide value. Anything worth getting for Xbox plays just as well on PC (and PC even has its own GamePass service). Anything Sony offers on the PS5 is stunted by the difficulty of getting a PS5, plus the knowledge that it might get released on PC later. This isn’t something that a new console can fix; it has to be fixed with a full-on change in direction for your business plan—and this sure as hell ain’t that. Heck, last year when we discussed the value proposition of the PS5 Slim, we noted it was complete shenanigans (effectively just as expensive—and potentially moreso—than a vanilla PS5). Who is this for? Because the gaming community at large appears to be rejecting this on a widespread level.

It’s not just that people don’t have 8K displays at home. It’s not just that there aren’t any games that don’t take advantage of this tech. It’s not just that this will also cost people abroad even more than what it costs people in the U.S. (New Zealanders can look forward to spending $1400 on a PS5 Pro). It’s not that we’re in a time where most people barely have the disposable income to afford a trip to the cinema, let alone a video game console. It’s that, at the end of the day, there’s nothing in it for them. This is the Cybertruck of gaming: an overly expensive dongle that only people with more dollars than sense can hope to garner any kind of value over, all for the sake of their attempt at social cachet. This is a decision that leans further into eight-year dev times, into games that cost hundreds of billions to produce and die out within a year, and scores of devs losing their livelihoods to ensure that a paper-thin line continues an upward trend.

The lack of a physical media drive is further icing on the maggot-infested cake. A lot of people are insisting that “digital distribution is the future,” and publishers are very keen on pushing that outcome… but digital distribution sucks. GameStop and Limited Run Games have their issues, make no mistake, but you’re taking my physical copy of Blaster Master Zero from my cold, dead hands. People forget that it’s horrifyingly easy for a game only available through digital distribution to vanish entirely (remember P.T.?). Even now, Sony is sticking its hands in people’s libraries, removing Concord. And it’s easy to laugh at Concord getting 86ed. Not so much when it’s a game people actually like. And it can take a miracle to see a game brought back once it’s been delisted. Just look at fighting game fans; folks are buying up multiple copies of the Marvel Vs. CAPCOM Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics compilations across multiple skews because the Marvel Vs CAPCOM games vanished from availability in 2010. It took fourteen years before those games saw a physical re-release—and that was after fourteen years of collective fan efforts begging for CAPCOM and Marvel to get off their butts and do anything. Blaster Master: Overdrive fans haven’t been so lucky.

That the reveal of the PS5 Pro is on the heels of former Sony CEO Chris Deering insisting that devs should “live on the beach” or “drive an Uber” in order to weather the current storm of layoffs in the industry only rubs salt in the world. This feels like a turning point for the industry. This feels like watching someone drive a car at top speed into a wall, and you just realized that even if they slammed on the brakes, that car is going to pancake on the side of that wall. The PS5 Pro is the moment the gaming community at large furrowed its brows and shook its collective head.

At this point, it doesn’t matter what Nintendo does. They could sell you a $400 box with a Polaroid of short-haired Princess Zelda cradling a tiny frog, and it would still be a better value proposition than a PS5 Pro. I hate dooming and glooming about the gaming industry. But… jeez, man. This sucks.

Sony Brings Back Mr. Mosquito and SkyGunner Through PS+ Service

If you need something good to look forward to after looking at Sony‘s upcoming offerings—and really, who wouldn’t?—then look no further than Sony‘s September selections for PlayStation Plus. The PS+ Premium games are particularly fascinating, being a pair of PS2 games! The PS2’s phenomenal library offered a great mix of mainstream titles and weird widgets, and those widgets tend to be highly missed; sure, we still get quirky games in this day and age, but we used to see way more of them. So it’s nice to see these two particular titles brought back!

The first title is Mr. Mosquito, from ZOOM Inc. The premise behind the game is simple: you are a mosquito, and in your attempts at storing blood for the winter, you have to suck a certain amount of blood from the Yamada family household. There are two problems: first, you are very, very small, and the Yamadas can easily crush you. Second, over the twelve “days” (read: stages) that you harass the Yamadas, only certain parts of their bodies will be available. So you’ll have to carefully navigate stages and follow the Yamadas on their set patterns until you find an opening—or engineer a solution wherein you’ll be able to swoop in safely. There’s also a “Stress” system to keep things from getting stale: if you drink too slowly or too quickly, you’ll stress the Yamadas out and trigger a battle with them, where Mr. Mosquito will have to attack “pressure points” on the human in order to calm them down. Like I said: it’s a widget title, though most of that is purely from the localization seemingly not knowing how to handle the series’ dry narration.

Mr. Mosquito never quite took off as a character, even though he’s kind of cute; the Mr. Mosquito sequel was only released in Japan, following Mr. Mosquito’s exploits in continuing to harass the Yamadas during their trip to Hawaii (with an American mosquito also around as a playable option). Still, it’s been about 22 years since the game’s first release, and it’s a tiny miracle all its own that it’s been brought back.

The other title that stands out is one I was very excited for; it was one of the last games I ever got for my PS2 back in Puerto Rico and one of the games I was saddest to have to sell for rent when I was at my lowest in 2017. SkyGunner is a rare beast, originally released by Atlus in the U.S. in 2002. Taking place in a Porco Rosso-esque world of picturesque Venice-esque cities, you play as one of three pilots tasked to fight a mad genius’ aerial armada as he tries to steal a perpetual motion machine that would allow him to create a destructive giant robot. Also, all the people in SkyGunner are weird, earless people with tails.

SkyGunner is cute but intensely deep—and difficult. I’m not afraid to admit that as much as I loved it, I was fairly bad at it (I only ever managed to beat Femme’s story, and she’s the designated “Easy mode”). There’s a “simple” control scheme, but the game also offers an Ace Combat-esque control scheme that’s not only way more complicated but also affords you more precise control. It’s also a heavily score-based game… and using your main guns on your plane drains your “reward money” (read: score). So precise piloting is a must at all times. There are other neat mechanics, like a “balance” meter that gets tipped off if your plane takes too many hits in a row; that causes your plane to go into a lethal nosedive unless you mash all the buttons enough to “correct” your death-drop. (I always appreciated that the game threw up an inspirational “Because you believed it could be done” message if you managed to right yourself.) There’s also engine temperature to worry about; dealing extra damage to your enemies with your many fanciful weapons (bat missiles, piranha-esque bear trap missiles, giant cross missiles…) requires careful timing but also requires you to charge your weapons. But firing too many of your sub-weapons too quickly overheats your aircraft, forcing you to ease off the offensive until it cools down. Again: there’s a deceptive amount of depth to the game, and it’s all wrapped up in the loveliest of aesthetics and an intensely charming world.

If SkyGunner looks familiar, it might be because you’ve seen Gunner’s Heart, a 2005 doujin title based on SkyGunner, developed by EasyGameStation, the creators of Recettear. That’s “doujin,” as in “amateur-produced,” not “porn comic.” Gunner’s Heart takes place in the same world as SkyGunner and even features many of the same cast, along with a few new additions. It’s a rail shooter instead of an aerial dogfight simulator, but it’s no less charming and wonderful. Sadly, it’s abandonware these days; it’s very unlikely to get an official Steam release, but you can find it if you know where to look. Friend of the column Kimimi has a delightful write-up on Gunner’s Heaven, which I suggest you read.

SkyGunner was the title I was really excited to see in Sony‘s announcement; I obsessed with it after happening upon a random guy’s undecorated stall at a convention in Puerto Rico. He was also selling a few Phillipe Druillet comics, which I summarily picked up as well (I wonder where that guy is now…). It wormed its way into my heart in a very short amount of time and, in many ways, is one of the weird super-obscure games that I keep close to me—I’d argue more so than Izuna. I hope people pick it up with the other games on tap from the PS+ update on September 17. I mean, Secret Agent Clank is cool, too, I guess…

Arcueid Brunestud Has Been Located In Canada

While the Fate series has become Type-Moon‘s true crowning jewel, courtesy of the success of the Fate/stay night anime and theatrical films as well as Fate/Grand Order‘s rampant success as a mobile game, the thing that kicked off Type-Moon‘s successes was Lunar Legend Tsukihime. And sure, the anime for that game was probably not the best, but hell, I was mildly obsessed with it back when I watched it in Spanish on Locomotion in 2007. It all comes down to the character of Arcueid Brunestud, a fascinating character of many contrasts: a vampire princess who doesn’t know what money is, photocopies dollar bills, uses duct tape to reattach her severed parts, and could potentially become the living embodiment of the Earth itself capable of enacting great disasters as naturally as taking a breath. She’s simultaneously striking in her beauty and yet whimsical, casually greeting the man who cut her into 17 parts with an affable smile that could light up a city because she was just that curious to see who it was that could “kill” her so easily (even if it didn’t stick). She’s as close as you can get to being an actual cat as a person without giving someone ears. While Arcueid has long since been overshadowed by future Type-Moon starlets like Arturia, Jeanne D’Arc (not that one), and Nero, she was the first—and arguably the template that inspired them all, even if she’s not a Saberface. But the question remained for the fanbase: “What inspired her design”?

Unfortunately, the answer to that question was lost to time for a while. Type-Moon artist Takashi Takeuchi had offered an image of a foreign model as the basis for Arcueid’s design, claiming he had seen her in a fashion magazine a while ago and that the model’s design had stuck with him. And looking at her: yeah, it’s easy to see why. The short hair, the positively-striking smile… that’s the kind of face that sticks with you. If there was ever a face that would stun a guy like Shiki Tohno, that would be it. Sadly, Takeuchi had no way of knowing the name of the model, and it was even more of a shot in the dark for him to know what magazine he had seen her in. So the mystery of Arcueid’s visual origin was lost to time… but never underestimate enterprising people on the Internet! As detailed on Reddit by u/ali94127, he had set to work tracking down the mysterious model. Eventually, he came upon the assistance of u/StefanMorse, who had just identified the mysterious “Celebrity Number 6 mystery. A little sleuthing from u/x___aft, and they had a name: Amanda Dyer!

According to u/ali94127, Amanda Dyer was able to confirm this herself on her public Facebook account. Having been a bit of a globetrotter all her life, she had modeled for Spur magazine at the tender age of fifteen back in 1996; now 45, she had no idea that all this time she had been the basis for such a widely-beloved character. It’s rather dramatic to look at her; I’m gobsmacked at how exactly Takeuchi was able to capture her likeness with Arcueid, especially with her particular smile. Also: while Amanda Dyer now apparently lives in Australia, she hails from Canada. So, uh, folks have been having a lot of fun with the news that now Arcueid Brunestud, Archetype: Earth, “that hideously beautiful white girl”… is Canadian. And that also means that, by extension, so is… la criatura

So far, Amanda Dyer has said little about the connection—provided the news is still startlingly recent and is only just making the rounds at the time of this writing. Still, we hope that Dyer is proud to know that she has a legion of people who appreciate her impact on visual novels and anime alike, having served as the basis of such a beloved character who blazed a trail for future Type-Moon starlets. Craziest of all, she also grew her hair out (much like Arcueid as Archetype: Earth). But most importantly: she still has that smile. Arcueid is real, and she’s Canadian.

Let’s wrap up with some quick tidbits

That will do it for this week, I think. What a week. I really hope next week gives us something good to look forward to. Heck, I can’t believe I’m actually jonesing for Nintendo to step in and announce their new console. Just do it, Nintendo; walk on stage, drop the price for your console, and nothing else. I promise you, it’ll be the funniest thing to happen to the video game industry (and Sony) in thirty years. I’ve got the money saved up. Just drop the price. I’m dying here. Be good to each other, I’ll see you in seven.

This Week In Games! is written from idyllic Portland by Jean-Karlo Lemus. When not collaborating with Anime News Network, Jean-Karlo can be found playing JRPGs, eating popcorn, watching v-tubers, and tokusatsu. You can keep up with him at @mouse_inhouse or @ventcard.bsky.social.