Play
Final Fantasy 6. What the hell have I bought? I didn't know anything about this, except that it's revered as perhaps the best FF game. Considering its age (and previous FF experience) I was expecting a fairly standard JRPG - perhaps one that introduced a lot of the systems we use today - with a great plot. Instead I got some sort of bizzare avant garde nightmare.
It feels like Hideo Kojima tried to make a point and click adventure. I was stuck for an hour yesterday in a big field, with nowhere to go. Finally gave up and googled the answer, turns out instead of attacking the mobs in the random battles, I needed to buy a piece of meat then throw it at them. Because of course.
The whole game is like this, one long stream of wtf that goes out of its way to subvert traditional gaming logic. There is no 'normal gameplay', no watching your party grow and learning a battle system. Everyone has unlimited-use, incredibly powerful specials, so the meat and potatoes of normal JRPGs is largely ignorable. It's less about turn-based battles and more about going into the corner of a room, standing next to a random drawer and pressing X. Or working out which ghost to have dinner with. It's a Lucasarts' designer's fever dream that has bugger all to do with Final Fantasy. I think I like it.
Atelier Ryza 2. Mmm, thighs.
Want
A retro handheld. I've decided that I want something cute and compact, rather than expensive and loud, so an RG35XX Plus would go down a treat right now. Trouble is I'm skint until the next tax year.
Play
Final Fantasy 6. What the hell have I bought? I didn't know anything about this, except that it's revered as perhaps the best FF game. Considering its age (and previous FF experience) I was expecting a fairly standard JRPG - perhaps one that introduced a lot of the systems we use today - with a great plot. Instead I got some sort of bizzare avant garde nightmare.
Yeah there are some obscure stuff like that in the old FF games like this, including missable party members if you don't know what to do. Despite that I would say it's a traditional game but because it's FF6 it does have it's cool moments, such as the Opera house. (If you got the Pixel Remaster version they made this part extra special apparently). Story wise it will probably depend on what you make of Kafka, I'd say he's the reason is largely as well liked as it is and it's not just because he's a 'lol funny clown'.
Ryza 2
The qol and additions over Ryza 1 (bigger inventory weee) are so good.
RG35XX Plus
I don't have this, but I have a Miyoo Mini Plus which is functionally identical and they're fantastic. I have no idea if the RG35XX Plus has GarlicOS yet so maybe it's goodthat you can't buy it yet.
Play
Granblue Fantasy: Relink - After like…7 years (?) this is finally out and to pretty good reviews too, all of which are entirely warranted. This is not only a good Granblue game it's just a really good action RPG non stop. It's got a very short story but the meat of the game is the 'Monster Hunter' like missions that extend the life of the game well after the credits as you go further and further into the rabbit hole of upgrading your character. There are 20(?) characters in the game, all of who play differently and adhere to their own gimmick, there is a demo out and it features a very generous selection of them to try out, I reccomend at least trying the demo. Also it's pretty gorgeous.
Want
When some time has passed and I've finished playing the killers like Persona 3 Reload and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth I really wanna' try Palworld out. It looks fantastic, I wish most ofthe designs didn't look so obviously ripped from Pokemon though, it's not that I'm defending Pokemon's '''''honour''''' here but I can't help but feel how cool it would be with super original designs. anyway this looks very good.
Bin
The Silent Hill 2 Remake looks fucking awful, if it's actually good they picked a really horrible trailer to show it off. It's no secret that SH2 combat is 'bad' but I'm not really sure the RE2 Remake TPS route is actually the way to go here, it didn't help that they synced it up to some action-ey version of 'Promise' as it happened, super weird vibes for a Silent Hill 2 game. Also everything they shown of this so far looks about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth - still early days in what looks like it's going to be an absolutely massive game, I'm about ten hours in and it's still giving me tutorials on stuff every five minutes. I've just unlocked the Sujimon League, an intricate Pokemon Stadium/Pokemon Go rip-off where you pitch teams of captured criminals against each other in order to become the greatest Sujimon Trainer and fight the Discreet Four (don't blame me, I didn't write this stuff). On top of Sicko Snap and the elaborate Animal Crossing mode that I haven't even reached yet, there's certainly a lot of Nintendo-based inspiration here; somehow it gets away with it because it's all so relentlessly, gloriously daft.
The Steam Deck - still enamoured with this, much more than I ever thought I would be. There is nothing, literally nothing, that I've thrown at it that hasn't worked and run brilliantly. I thought Civilization VI would stump it but it takes it in its stride and actually controls surprisingly well using the little touch pad things it uses for mouse control. Batman Arkham Asylum didn't run initially but I got it working within ten minutes and felt like a hacker for doing so. Mostly though I've just been playing Slay the Spire, hard to think of a better fit for the machine really.
The Elder Scrolls Online - still enjoying this, I'm starting to see what keeps people coming back to this even once the hundreds of hours of story content have been completed. Collecting armour sets and making different builds is quite compulsive and there are a lot of dungeons in there that I haven't even looked at. Big game is big.
Want
Still hanging on for Assassin's Creed Mirage to drop below the £30 mark. Strange game that seems to have come and gone without anyone really talking about it, though those who've played it seem to have really liked it.
Other than that I think Infinite Wealth is going to keep me going for a very long time.
Play
We're back into Sea of Thieves in a big way. Season 11 has rebalanced all the voyages and raised the reputation cap with (most of) the trading companies, so there's loads to do and it's all making bars go up, which is satisfying.
I've made very little progress into Assassin's Creed Mirage, but enjoyed what I've seen so far. It's got more Ubification than I'd like - the world is still quite big, and there are a lot of icons and tat to collect - but it's not an RPG, so it's much more of what I want from an Assassin's Creed than Origins/Odyssey/Valhalla were.
Want
I watched/scrubbed through Playstation's State of Play announcement dealie from last night, and there was almost nothing in it that piqued my interest. Judas looks interesting, despite (or due to?) looking like a 1:1 recreation of Bioshock, but in space.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is out this month! The last day of the month, sure, but this month!
Despite coming very close to burning out on the main game, I'm still oddly tempted to pick up Horizon Forbidden West: The Burning Shore. Maybe next time there's a sale…
Bin
This might count as a hot take in some corners of the internet, but… I think I'm done with Baldur's Gate III. I haven't finished it - I made it into Act III, but the titular city is just so big, and the story branches off in so many directions, and I wasn't able to play it for a week or two, so I just lost track of everything and I'm not sure I can bear to try and figure it all out again. It's obviously very, very good - it's just more than I can commit to right now.
I don't have this, but I have a Miyoo Mini Plus which is functionally identical and they're fantastic. I have no idea if the RG35XX Plus has GarlicOS yet so maybe it's goodthat you can't buy it yet.
This looked great, and was even cheaper than the Anbernic, so my resolve crumbled and I bought one!
I'm going to fiddle with Garlic OS tonight. Alastor do you know of any reliable Internet Archive files (or anywhere!) that have full dumps of ROMs and the OS? If not I'm happy doing it myself, just wondered if the community had a go-to.
Oh my GOD that is the most 1990s-looking website I've seen for years. I think I'm in love.
Yeah I mean this is fucking incredible. No ads, no 'content', just actual useful stuff. If the internet had carried on like this we'd have been in a much better place.
Thanks Alastor, all super helpful. I now have a flipping brilliant little handheld filled with every game under the sun.
Because modern web developers feel they have to utilize the 500TB of Javascript framework they include with every single website so you get all this overdone layering and effects and fancy stuff that actually makes navigating a website worse. Dunno what happened to, you know, just writing a tiny bit of needed JS here and there for your specific site and doing any needed actual coding in the back end?
So out of the loop on web design and development. It's all beyond me now. If it doesn't look like a site from the 90s, count me out. What I described is how we used to do it and we liked it like that, consarn it and other old person swear words.
Also Want one of those retro handhelds. Considering.
Want
I want to play something fun and bright and not too challenging. De Blob is only £4 on Xbox so I could just buy play that… again. Mario Odyssey would be good but it wasn't that long ago that I played it. The really good Ratchet & Clank game on the PS3 would be good, but I'd have to plug in the PS3 and find the disc.
Suggestions welcome for something in that vein which I maybe haven't played yet.
Play - Civilization VI (or Sid Meier's Civilization VI to give it its full name, although I'm certain the venerable Mr Meier has had nothing to do with the last four or so instalments).
While I love the series, I always come to Civ games late. For such a long-running series it's remarkable that they still haven't really nailed the formula: each entry does some things right and other things wrong. So switching from something you're familiar with to something similar that's also completely different is always a challenge. It also takes years of expansions and DLCs for each iteration to reach its final form - and I think we are finally there with Civ VI. The "anthology" versions are perpetually on sale and there are rumblings of Civ VII in the wings. So, time to jump on board.
I like a lot of what this one does. It's nailed the feeling of controlling an empire without having Civ IV's problem of needing thousands of units in massive death stacks, or Civ V's feeling of only ever controlling a handful of units. You can create sprawling empires again whereas Civ V very much favoured small numbers of mega-cities. There's (finally) less micro-management of builders, and more worthwhile stuff to actually do each turn. Building up cities district by district is a great idea. And after two expansions and a ton of DLC, there are dozens and dozens of different world leaders in this and they all have a ton of personality.
Against that - I genuinely hate the graphical style they've gone for, the faded parchment look is over-busy and impossible to parse at a glance. City-states are as annoying and time-consuming as ever. The World Congress stuff is a bit undercooked. And there's just a little bit too much information required to manage cities, with food and amenities and luxury resources and bonus resources etc, all of which is squirrelled away on sub-menus while the main screen gives you useless info like river names instead.
So - Sid Meier giveth and Sid Meier taketh away. It's good - but is it better than the previous two? I'll need to put a few more hundred hours in before I can answer that one.
I don't have this, but I have a Miyoo Mini Plus which is functionally identical and they're fantastic. I have no idea if the RG35XX Plus has GarlicOS yet so maybe it's goodthat you can't buy it yet.
This looked great, and was even cheaper than the Anbernic, so my resolve crumbled and I bought one!
I'm going to fiddle with Garlic OS tonight. Alastor do you know of any reliable Internet Archive files (or anywhere!) that have full dumps of ROMs and the OS? If not I'm happy doing it myself, just wondered if the community had a go-to.
If you want a big old zip file with pretty much every game you would want to play on a Miyoo Mini Plus, you could download the one from here - https://archive.org/details/tiny-best-set-go - It's even set up specifically for GarlicOS and OnionOS, although it also works perfectly fine with ArkOS.
There are versions for 32gb, 64gb and 128gb sd cards depending on what you have. You might want to skip the 128gb set as you don't have analogue sticks on the Miyoo Mini, and that is just a load of Playstation games. I've actually got a R36S which is very similar (same chip set I think) but has analogue sticks. It was less than £50 and I can now put several decades of retro games in my pocket. I'm playing Earthbound on it. Earthbound would have cost £70 on it's own on release, and now goes for hundreds of pounds. These retro handheld things are just such fun items, as long as you ignore the whole illegality aspect. But I'm sure we're all deleting the roms within 24 hours, right?
@d0k - That one I have, the R36S, might be right up your street, as it is amazing value, but none of the under $100 retro handhelds emulate the Saturn very well, and I remember you mentioning you are a Saturn fan. The Saturn is, oddly enough, harder to emulate than the Dreamcast. So you can play some Dreamcast games on the R36S but Saturn games don't really run. Check out the youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/@RetroGameCorps - they do great reviews of all these devices.
I'm actually about three hours into Resident Evil 2 on the MM+. Maybe I'm a sadist!
I figured the OG Playstation didn't have analogue sticks, so I'm going for the authentic thumb-cramping experience. Crash Bandicoot plays great too.
The biggest revelation for me is that it makes retro games genuinely enjoyable again, rather than just a 5-minute nostalgia hit. I couldn't really play GBA games on the Switch because the screen was too large; it just made everything look like a blocky mess. But the tiny screen on the MM+ makes it feel like you're playing an original GBA, and I've already sunk a couple hours into Golden Sun.
One slight worry is that I've definitely got The Bug now. It won't be long before I have a second, more powerful handheld for PS2 games.
I got a Retroid Pocket 2, Retroid Pocket 2+, Retroid Pocket 3+, Miyoo Mini Plus and an Odin 2… and I still want the Anbernic 405M (it's metal, weee). It does get very addictive.
I think you can just use Steam Deck for PS2, right?
Will do a proper post at a later date but am properly addicted to Fortnite. Someone pointed out there was a Solid Snake skin this month so I redownload it and got the battle pass so I could unlock that, and have found myself really enjoying it.
Yep, that. From the Captain Socwash thread when I played it last month:
I gave the Skull & Bones closed beta a go today. I lasted two hours (of the permitted six) before I closed and deleted it. Absolutely not for me.
It's such a… well, a game. A Ubisoft game at that. All menus and cutscenes and places packed with tonnes of detail where you can actually do very little. Maps covered in icons, floating compass markers showing you the way, UI everywhere and people with massive names floating over their heads that block your view from miles away. Press Y to loot something out of the water without being near it, only for it to appear in another menu and make a gauge go up on your boat's overall weight. Sails that turn themselves. Waffling NPCs who ultimately just want you to go to location X and collect a certain amount of a certain item. Harvesting mini games that involve pressing a button when a line is in a green area. Combat that just involves putting a crosshair (!) over a target and pressing a button. Boats that manoeuvre like cars in water and enemy boats with massive health bars that goes down while the boat itself looks fine until it explodes (everything explodes, even when it's made of wood). Constant chat box intrusions that take up a quarter of the screen and endless group invites from strangers. It's so pretty (well, mostly, but it's still got that glossy sheen of oil slick on everything that screams GRAPHICS and all the characters look like mannequins with awful lip syncing) and yet so massively lifeless.
I'm sure it'll do well and I'm sure it'll be for someone, but I hate it so I'm out.
You lasted longer than I did! I'd wonder if the badness was because of repeated changes during development, but it's such a 2013 game that maybe they just stuck to their guns and didn't notice the industry changing around them? Kotaku described it as "The Division with boats", which seems quite charitable, to be honest - I liked The Division quite a lot.
Just got a 4K TV and spent yesterday playing Forza 4, Cyberpunk and a few others that test it and it among watching 4K stuff on Disney+. Never been. Graphics snob and will still happily play 9 frames a second N64 games, but my god this looks glorious.
Additional PLAY Chants of Sennar - I want to like this, but I already feel like I'm too dumb to play it. You have to decode the runes used in a language and piece together what people are saying to you, in order to solve puzzles, and I'm floundering only an hour or so in. If you get something right and can lock it into your journal, it confirms the words… but several that I'm convinced are correct aren't doing it. That's the problem with games that require specific input, since language is so variable. I'm already frustrated. Dunno if I'll last much longer before I delete it, which makes me feel even dumber.
EDIT: Had a bit of a breakthrough, made a lot of progress. It's still making me feel dumb as a bag of hammers, but then I guess that makes the Eureka moments all the more satisfying. Maybe.
Additional BIN Invincible: Guarding the Globe - Mobile auto battling tosh from Ubisoft where numbers go up and punching happens. It's taken the comic art style and made it 3D, so I hate it for multiple reasons. Didn't even finish the tutorial, deleted. Ugh.
Just started Palworld, that game is fucking dangerous holy shit. I can see myself getting addicted to this very quickly and I dont need that right now…
EDIT - Also tried Bloodstained streamed with the Game Pass app on android and it doesn't run perfectly but it's okay. It doesn't seem to be a 'play anywhere' game so I can't sync saves up to the PC/Console and I need to think if having it on handheld is worth the streaming hiccups because that's quite a drawback imo. As for the game itself, goodbye Aria of Sorrow forever? Why did I take so long to play this it feels like a dream game.
Anyone played "Cult of the Lamb"? Started that last night and loving it. Published by Digital Devolver.
Yeah, it's decent. I'm torn on it, because I really enjoy the dungeon crawling and combat side, but the base building and care of your flock parts (basically, the Don't Starve stuff) isn't my bag. I hear it's changed a bit as they've released updates since launch, so I should go back to it.
Additional PLAY: Balatro - Oh my, this is right up my alley. Deck building poker game that's clearly not what it seems… I sense a distinct Inscryption vibe, but it's early days yet. This one's got me hooked for sure, so I expect I'll be here a while.
We started The new monkey island today, taking little turns with my kid and playing it together whilst my missus was watching us, and it was an incredibly joyous occasion. Only played about an hour and haven't made an hour's progress as she wanted to click and see everything, but she was cracking up laughing throughout.
I have no idea where this would eventually live, but oh no… please hook Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket straight into my veins. Or put it on my phone, at least.
Additional BIN - the left analogue stick on my Switch Lite has succumbed to overuse, and now it doesn't really want me going up or down. Booooo. Not a fan of having to buy new hardware this far into the lifecycle of a console, but it's that or not play it at all (or, at least, only play games with the touch screen or D-pad).
I've not been playing much lately, apart from trying to finish off Cyberpunk (while getting endlessly distracted by sidequests), but the Unicorn Overlord demo has been an extremely pleasant surprise.
The tactics of the battles in 13 Sentinels left me doubting if Vanillaware could pull off a Fire Emblem game, but damn if this thing isn't tremendous.
I'm now trying to figure out if I like it enough to spend £55 on it, and whether to stick with the Switch version or get it on Xbox.
I played about the first 15 minutes of FFVII Rebirth before bed last night. There's an extra little prologue bit before you get to the demo section, which was a surprise, and I can only assume it'll be completely baffling to anyone who hasn't finished Remake. There's a "Story So Far" movie on the main menu, but it's the most accelerated recap of any piece of media I've ever seen, and won't be of any help whatsoever to newcomers confused by the unexplained Spoiler - click to showZack's alt-universe "most of the main characters are dead" intro.
Additional BIN - the left analogue stick on my Switch Lite has succumbed to overuse, and now it doesn't really want me going up or down. Booooo. Not a fan of having to buy new hardware this far into the lifecycle of a console, but it's that or not play it at all (or, at least, only play games with the touch screen or D-pad).
Additional BIN - the left analogue stick on my Switch Lite has succumbed to overuse, and now it doesn't really want me going up or down. Booooo. Not a fan of having to buy new hardware this far into the lifecycle of a console, but it's that or not play it at all (or, at least, only play games with the touch screen or D-pad).
Are Nintendo not repairing them any more?
Yeah, they are. But my Lite is old (out of warranty), I don't fancy the idea of being without it for a while or having all my data wiped, and with my discount it's just easier to get a new one here from the staff shop. So, meh.
