As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself buying fewer and fewer games at launch. There’s a few reasons for this, price being the biggest but also things like poor launch performance and DLC. Seriously, launch is probably the worst time to buy games, especially those from AAA studios. So, I usually wait. Sometimes months, sometimes even years until, at last, the price comes down, the bugs are all fixed and even the DLC is bundled up at a discount. All this is to say that I got myself some good deals during the PS Store summer sale (after waiting forever)! What about you?

Stellar Blade

Okay, so as is tradition for just about any list I put up on here, this is a bit of a cheat. Stellar Blade is on sale on the PS Store for about $50 right now, and that did get the ball rolling for me to finally grab it after over a year of waiting, but I didn’t actually buy it on PS. See, I wanted a physical copy for whatever reason and still didn’t wanna pay $50 since that still feels like full price to me.

So I instead went around the used game stores here in Tokyo and found me a copy for about 4,500 yen (~$30)! Score! I’m only an hour into it so far, but I’m really enjoying its crazy visuals and tough combat. It’s a bit more difficult than I was expecting, but the learning curve has been shallow enough that the fights haven’t yet crossed over from fun to frustrating.

Sonic X Shadow Generations

No disc hunting stories for this one. I saw that it finally hit the $30 mark on the PS Store and I snapped it up as soon as I saw that. I’ve been wanting to play this since it launched back in October, but $50 to $60 was a bit steep considering that it’s just a remastered port of Sonic Generations with some new Shadow-focused content bolted on.

The Sonic Generations portion is just as fun as it ever was and performs at what I believe is 60 fps (it better since this is an Xbox 360 game on PS5 hardware). Playing through it again had me feeling a bit confused, though. Like, this is really fun, why on earth did Sega feel the need to start from scratch with every game after it? They were obviously able to do it, the new and very fun Shadow stages and campaign prove that, so why were they/ are they so determined not to do what works?

Oh, and why does the Shadow stuff run worse than the older Sonic stuff? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Alan Wake II

You know, I had all but written this one off as a game that I would never play, much less buy. I still don’t know the details of the story, but I heard from friends that it went in very odd and unexpected directions, and that you spent the majority of your time playing as some random new Control agent character. Like, the game is called “Alan Wake.” The only perspective I’m going to care about is that of the man himself, not some random new character whom I’ve never met before.

Like seriously, Remedy even went to the trouble of tying Alan Wake into Control, but instead of a cool dual-protagonist crossover with Director of the Department of Control Jesse Faden, we get Agent Estevez. Okay. I guess. That aside, I was already okay with the pseudo-ending we got in Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, so I’m not so sure I’m interested in seeing the story continue past that.

Anyway, the game hit about $24 on PS Store, and my friends keeps insisting that its good, so I grabbed it and will do my best to have a more open mind towards it once I get around to playing it. It’s still kind of weird though, you know? We went from “the story is definitely finished,” to “there might be a little story left,” to “the old ending didn’t count and there’s a ton of story left.” Well, hopefully it’s better than heresay would have me believe.

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You get any games on sale lately? Anything coming out this summer that you’re looking forward to?

Image is promo art posted to the official Stellar Blade X account