@Smellavision hope you are doing okay. I can't imagine what you have gone through over the last year.
Want
A functioning NHS in Wales
Amen, brother. Amen.
Play
Call me feltmonkey. 20-something years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little to no titles in my Steam Library and nothing particular to interest me on PS2, I thought I would play on the Gamecube a little and see the Nintendo part of the world*. It was here, within the game Metroid Prime, that I encountered the beast that would haunt my dreams. My White Whale. Meta-Ridley. Metroid Prime was and still is one of my favourite games of all-time, but I never completed it despite getting to within five minutes of the end, because I couldn't beat Meta-Ridley. Well, the remastered version has bought me face to face with that absolute prick once again. Even though the game now has controls that actually make sense, Meta-Ridley is still a very difficult boss fight. He repelled me effortlessly at first, so I went off and scoured the game for health and missile power-ups and returned determined. He swatted me aside again. Several times. Actually probably a couple of dozen times. But in the end I prevailed, through that bit where he's got about 5% health and for some reason your attacks stop doing any damage. I beat him. After 20 years. I didn't even have to get tangled up in a harpoon rope to do it. I then beat the final boss in about four attempts. Finally, I can say that Metroid Prime is one of the top ten games of all time without that nagging itch at the back of my brain telling me I had unfinished business with it. I'm not going anywhere near a remastered Metroid Prime 2. I didn't get past the first boss in that one.
*I'm abandoning the conceit of rewriting Moby Dick to make it about Metroid Prime here, because at this point Melville starts rambling about spleens and coffins. You try making that fit.
Death Stranding - I'm not really a Kojima guy. I can appreciate, and be excited by, his ideas, his game concepts, and the crazy stories he tells in his games. I love some of his games. But I do bounce off his stuff as often as I get drawn in. So it's probably a strange choice to leap into the most Kojima game Kojima has ever made. I'm enjoying it though. The story is extremely peculiar in every way. The world it builds is unsettling and nonsensical in a way that is clearly deliberate. ilweran and I are brimming with theories. There's a lot of stuff about dead fish, the compulsion to deliver packages, and the gap between the worlds of the living and the dead. You can make your guy have a dump, and his shit gets turned into grenades.
The game itself is a walking simulator, but not in the manner of Firewatch or Dear Esther. It actually simulates walking. Tim Rogers called it the Gran Turismo of walking simulators. You have to keep your balance while carrying increasingly absurd stacks of parcels, trying to avoid turning your ankle on rocks, judging whether you can wade through a stream, and figuring out routes over mountains. When it rains, it's not just cold and miserable (although the atmosphere is so vivid that it definitely feels like the temperature drops) but there's also the possibility that you might get stalked by invisible malevolent spirits of the dead. Fortunately you have a baby in a jar to warn you about them and pinpoint their location. I went into Death Stranding thinking it would just be a self-indulgent oddity, and it definitely is that, but I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I am doing. It is, surprisingly, really good.
Cricket 22 is the latest symptom of my disease which makes me get addicted to any sports game with a solo career mode. It simulates the sport fairly well, which means it can't be much less that okay as cricket is such a consistently fascinating sport, but everything around it is deeply cursed. The weird mannequin models are unsettling. At the start of the match the two captains toss a coin to decide who will bat and who will bowl. The coin goes up, and the two mannequins turn to stare at each other intently for a few seconds. Neither speaks. Then the game announces "Nottinghamshire will bowl" as if these two freakish specimens had decided it telepathically. It's like Scanners. I keep waiting for one of their heads to explode. The fielding animations are comically bad, a standard that does not belong in a commercial product in 2023. They would have been laughed off the PS1. The commentary is consistently wrong. Sometimes players get hit right in the face with the ball, and not only do they not flinch, but the commentator says, "they sway out of the way of the short ball." They didn't sway, and they certainly didn't get out of the way. The game now includes women's cricket, which is great, except they either haven't been able to or haven't taken the time to implement it properly. So for example the game has options for female haircuts, but they can exist on anyone's head. That's a great option for the player character, but the game randomly generates players to fill out the lower-league sides, and in every one of them there are always at least three or four players with clearly wrong gender haircuts. Fast bowlers running in with plaits and ponytails, that sort of thing. In a way, it's very progressive, but it's clearly an accident. I suppose it's better to be inclusive by mistake than not inclusive at all.
A couple of quick mentions of things I've dabbled with over the last few months but not mentioned. Boltgun is great - a Doom-style old-school maze-shooter set in the Warhammer 40K universe. It's fast, fun, characterful, and bombastic.
Bowzer's Inside Story is an RPG adventure on 3DS featuring Mario, Luigi, and all those guys. It's quite light and fun, but to be honest I'm a bit put off by checking how long it is. HLTB has it at 22 hours, which we all know means at least 40 in real terms (why do so many people under-report their completion times on that website? Do they think it earns them hardcore gamer points? idiots.) That's too long for a silly comedy game that doesn't have enough laugh-out-loud jokes.
Want
Game-wise, Baldur's Gate 3, but I'll have to wait until the price comes down a lot.
Bin
Again, game-wise Halo Infinite, perhaps. I know everyone else moved on from this a long time ago. I still dabble a bit in the multiplayer, but it's kind of joyless. The campaign is just rubbish. A great gameplay loop spoiled by a bland open world, a complete nothing of a story, and sod-all of interest to do. The multiplayer is a good arena shooter spoiled by a terrible front-end and a community full of pricks. I only play it for the 30p worth of Microsoft Rewards, really.
