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.
Lack of load times? Were you fooled by the controller flying through a portal animation? I guess it might be slightly shorter than the Mario Odyssey load times? I don’t remember, I haven’t played Odyssey again since it was released.
Flying on the balloon was used to mask some loading times, but that was waaaaay longer than transitions from space into the world in Astro Bot.
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
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, …).
And it’s one of, if not the best on Linux, because Sony actually cared enough to port their driver. So if you’re a Linux/Steam Deck gamer, you’re in luck.
And Death Stranding even got released on Xbox.
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.
Considering I’d have a PC regardless, no. My GPU is the only thing that’s really “gaming specific,” and I pay about $200-300 per console generation for an upgrade, and I’d still need something for display out regardless.
There’s a ~300 €$ demo if you go used and it plays a lot of good games
Astro bot aka “we already have Mario at home”
Except the mario at home was actually just as good as what you wanted out.
100% agree. I grew up on Super NES and owned every console gen from Nintendo up through Switch. Got into PC gaming 7 years ago, and then picked up a PS5 on a ridiculous deal to try to enter into their market and play some games. Astro Bot is a charming and incredibly fun video game. So much love was poured into this game.
It’s an incredible game and it deserves all of the awards it earned. I still love all the main Mario games I’ve played, and Mario Odyssey was a wonderful and charming game, too. Astro Bot is certainly not a “we already have Mario at home” game - I hold it up there with one of my favorite platformers I’ve ever played.
It’d be great if it could get ported to PC, but they would have to significantly adjust the game controls to get around the purposefully tight integration with the PS5 controller. Playing that game with the PS5 controller was so much fun.
Edit: fixed some mobile typos
