The PSVR 2 has had a tumultuous first year and half. With all the uncertainty regarding the hardware, and Sony's future support for it, I wanted to spend some time sharing my thoughts about the hardware and the games that I've played on it, because I've actually really liked the PSVR2, and I think it would be a shame (and a mistake) if Sony kills it prematurely.

I've been a late adopter of VR. I played a few VR games on a few different headsets at friends' houses over the years, but never really got into it. The games were fun to a degree, but they never wow-ed me to the point that I felt I needed to run home and order my own VR headset. They also usually made me nauseous within 20 or 30 minutes of play. It wasn't until playing Star Wars: Squadrons and Ace Combat 7 on a friend's PSVR that I finally actually wanted a VR headset, and the PSVR actually felt comfortable to wear.

But I had already played Star Wars: Squadrons and Ace Combat 7 on standard displays, as well as Resident Evil VII, so there weren't any PS4 VR games that I was really eager to play. Déraciné was really the only PSVR game that I wanted to play at that point. So I decided to wait until I could get a PS5 VR headset instead.

When I actually started playing PS5, I was really liking it. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that when all is said and done, the PS5 might end up being my second favorite console after the PS2. The novel haptic feedback and surprisingly accurate motion sensor functions have even rekindled a long-lost love of Gran Turismo (and racing games in general), and it just so happened that Gran Turismo 7 was supposed to get a really good (free) VR update for the PSVR 2! Since I had been enjoying the system, I was a lot more inclined to spend more money to get the most out of it. I got a nice tax refund in 2023, and put that money towards a PSVR 2 headset.

The PS5 was heavily marketed as being fully backwards-compatible with PS4 games, so I would surely be able to go back to the PS4's VR catalogue and play any of the games I had missed out on. Or so I thought...

I wasn't sure about the Bloodborne board game initially. The Dark Souls board game wasn't particularly good, and I already had a pretty great Bloodborne-themed card game. But I kept seeing good reviews of Bloodborne: the Board Game, and it was designed by the same designer who made the card game, Eric Lang, who I trusted to make a compelling board game. So I bought it. And then it sat on my shelf for a couple years because my friends and I were busy playing other games, like Star Trek: Ascendancy expansions. One of these days, I'll get around to actually playing a new board game promptly after buying it... One of these days ...

A narrative-driven dungeon crawl

First and foremost, Bloodborne is not simply a Bloodborne-themed reskin of the Dark Souls board game. They are made by different companies and designers, and have totally different design philosophies. Dark Souls is built around grinding with no real purpose other than to eventually beat a single boss. Bloodborne is a much more structured and purposeful game, which is built around narrative-based campaigns. In fact, this Bloodborne game actively and explicitly discourages grinding by implementing a strict turn limit. As such, a Bloodborne session (a single chapter of a campaign) takes about 90 minutes to play or less. It won't drag on for hours, or into the next day, like some of my Dark Souls play sessions did. This, by itself, makes it a lot easier to find people who are interested in playing, and to get them to come back for subsequent sessions to finish that campaign.

Because Bloodborne: the Board Game does have narrative campaigns, I actually feel like I need to preface this review with a SPOILER WARNING. Some of the images may contain story-related cards, board configurations, and enemy placements, which may contain spoilers for the first 2 campaigns (mostly the first one). The review itself does not contain any explicit spoilers for any of the campaigns, so feel free to read on. If you are worried about potential spoilers, and want to go into the game as blind as possible, then I advise that you avoid reading any of the text on cards in any of my photos, especially cards that are labeled "Mission" or "Insight".

Bloodborne is more narrative-driven and less grindy than its Dark Souls board game cousin.

The core set comes with 4 campaigns, each with its own short story and narrative branches that take place over 3 or 4 chapters. As of the time of this review, I've only actually played the first 2 of those 4 campaigns. But I've played the first campaign multiple times, with multiple different groups of players, so I still feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the game -- good enough to give a meaningful and relatively informed review.

Each campaign has a deck of cards that provide objectives for the player to complete, as well as the occasional reward. It plays out kind of like an old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, with each card telling the players to draw a specific numbered card after completing the given card's objective. In some cases, the players will have a choice, or the card will have different conditions, and depending on which choice the players make, or which condition(s) is met, the card will instruct the players to reveal one card or another next.

The total of 4 campaigns is actually a solid amount of content, and each campaign can be played multiple times to see the different branching paths. But the campaigns aren't quite as replayable as they might initially seem. Each decision always has the exact same outcome, which means that once you've played a campaign once, you know what choices to make in order to get which results. Knowing the outcomes sucks out a lot of the mystery, intrigue, and threat from the game, and allows players to micro-manage their decisions to optimize their play.

Player choices can cause several branches in a campaign story, opening up different quests and rewards.

Over the years, I have frequently recommended that people stop buying new games from AAA publishers at retail. Don't buy them at all, or if you do, wait for a sale, or buy it used. This is because the massive, international, conglomerate corporations that publish these games are sleazy, scummy, or outright evil.

They underpay their employees.

They abuse their employees with cultures of crunch.

They hang the Sword of Damacles over their employees heads with the perpetual threat of layoffs.

They report record profits to their shareholders and award billion dollar bonuses to executives on a Tuesday, and then lay off hundreds or thousands of workers on Wednesday because they "can't afford" to keep them.

Some publishers even have active cultures of sexual harassment and abuse of female employees, which their HR departments are happy to cover up or sweep under the rug.

They harass and ostracize transgender employees and hold their healthcare hostage.

They fight against unionization.

They overcharge for their products.

They sell un-regulated gambling to minors.

They sell half-baked or broken products at full price.

They cancel promising upcoming products with little-to-no rhyme or reason.

They want to take away the consumer's right to own the media that we buy.

The list goes on...

Big, fat disclaimer, right up front: I have not played Helldivers 2. I haven't played it on PS5. I haven't played it on PC. So I don't really have a horse in this race either way. But since I do have an interest in corporations trying to pull sleazy bullshit, I've been casually trying to keep up with what's been going on with Helldivers 2, and want to weigh in with my own thoughts (for whatever they're worth).

Honestly, I think that both Sony and also the PC Hellidvers 2 players come out of this looking like assholes, and I have very mixed feelings over the whole thing.

On the one hand, Sony requiring a PSN account for online play of a PC game post-launch gives off strong bait-and-switch vibes. It's especially bad considering that the game was sold in regions that do not have access to PSN. So what the heck were those players supposed to do? Sony selling the game in those regions, knowing full well that it won't be playable a few months after launch, absolutely deserves anger and a middle finger. And those players should absolutely be outraged and demand refunds. Those players are the only actors in this particular instance who are completely in the right, and deserve everyone else's un-conditional sympathy and support.

And yes, Sony knew full well that they would be changing the game post-launch to require a PSN account. It was clearly posted for months prior to the game's release. Everybody knew this was happening long before the game launched. It should not have been a surprise to anybody. And yet Steam still sold it in those regions, and all these players bought it anyway. Caveat emptor.

Helldivers 2 on Steam required a PSN account to play.

I feel that PC players should have every right to be annoyed that Sony would require a PSN account in order to play the game. If you don't own a PlayStation, then you shouldn't need a PSN account to play a PC game, especially a PC game that was fully playable without a PSN account for months after launch. This is a matter of principle.

Like, if I were to have a stroke and suddenly start thinking that Elder Scrolls VI might actually be good at launch, and I decide to buy it on the PS5 (or PS6 or PS7 or whatever the hell generation of console it may eventually release on), then I would be annoyed if Microsoft asked me to create a new XBox account in order to play a game on my PlayStation. I wouldn't want to do it, and if I can get away without having to do it, without significantly damaging the gameplay experience, then I won't do it. But if it's required, then I'll bite the bullet and create the bloody XBox account. After all, it's Microsoft's game, and they have every right to require an account as a condition for releasing the game on a PlayStation console to begin with. And it's not like they're asking me to pay for the account, or to install some stupid launcher or DRM that is going to run in the background and spy on me or grind my system's performance to a halt.

So yeah, I sympathize with the PC players of Helldivers 2. But jeez, does this minor inconvenience really warrant the scorched Earth approach that PC players took? They boycotted the game, asked for refunds, and review-bombed it on Steam. If all this protest were being done in solidarity with the aforementioned people who bought the game in places where Sony does not provide PSN access, that would be one thing. But so much of what I see looks like angry PC players who just don't want to have to sign up for a PSN account. This, despite the fact that many other PC games on Steam require 3rd-party accounts in order to play, whether it's a Microsoft account, an EA Origin account, Ubisoft account, 2K account, and so forth. Almost every publisher has their own account that they want gamers to use when playing their games. Granted, very few games require such an account in order to play, but they almost all have them. I'm pretty sure I needed to create an Ubisoft account to play the awful Skull and Bones demo.

I'm not going to hold back on spoilers in this review, so read on at your own risk. If you want my non-spoiler opinion of the game (and didn't already get it from the grade above): it's good. It's not the watershed, lightning-in-a-bottle experience like the first game was though. It makes some smart changes, including some that seem to be based directly on feedback from the first game. But it also undercuts some of those smart changes with other changes and additions that aren't so smart. Bottom line though: if you liked the first game (and who didn't?), then you'll almost certainly also like this sequel.

I always get a little bit worried whenever an adaptation of Spider-Man decides to adapt the Venom storyline. It is usually where an adaptation goes off the rails. And even if it manages to stay on the rails, it's usually one of (if not the) weakest storyline of the adaptation. Whether it's Sam Raimi being forced by Sony to write the black suit and Venom into his 3rd Spider-Man movie, Spectacular Spider-Man depicting Peter and Eddie Brock as childhood friends, or Web of Shadows just being completely bonkers from start to finish, the appearance of the black suit always makes me nervous. Honestly, I think the 90's Animated Series is the only adaptation of Spider-Man that has ever hit the black suit and Venom storyline out of the park. It's Saturday morning cartoon nature means it completely fumbled the ball when it came time for Carnage though...

The black suit and Venom storylines is where a lot of Spider-Man adaptations go off the rails.

Surprisingly, Insomniac's take on the symbiote storyline takes a lot of inspiration from other Spider-Man adaptations, almost as if they think they can take poorly-received Venom storylines and improve on them. It starts off with the Sandman as a prologue villain before setting Harry Osborne up for a turn towards villainy, which closely mirrors Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3. Then it turns Harry Osborne into Venom, as in the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon, before basically turning into Web Of Shadows in the final act. The black suit itself also changes over time to reflect how close it is to taking over Peter's mind, which is an idea introduced in Spectacular Spider-Man. Also, the symbiote is a cure for cancer, and Venom's host being a childhood friend of Peter's are both borrowed from the Ultimate Spider-Man comics (and the Ultimate video game).

So yeah, a lot of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 resembles other adaptations of the Venom storyline, but yet it's still all put together in a way that feels original and works fairly well. It's still nowhere near as good as the Animated Series' Venom arc though, because Spider-Man 2's story and plotting is far from perfect.