PWB The Ides of June 2023

In before Gar or Brian because time difference.

PLAY
A pallette cleanser - In my quest to play something not Zelda after finishing BotW, I've downloaded the following to my Switch that have all sat there, unplayed since release: Metroid Prime Remastered, Astral Chain and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe. I'll play at least one of these soon.
McPixel 3 - Got it cheap off eShop, and it's as stupid as it appears. Repetitive, juvenile, not overly clever. It's alright. I'll finish it and bin it quickly.

WANT
Do I actually want Street Fighter 6? Maybe, I dunno. If I can get a cheap Xbox key, I'll probably bite. I still want AEW Fight Forever so maybe that'll scratch my fighting game itch.
Master Detective Archive: RAIN CODE - This is my project at work, since we're publishing in EU, and I'm looking forward to playing it properly. It's the 'what they did next' from the Danganronpa team, but it's basically Danganronpa in 3D with some barely disguised mechanics ripped straight from the previous series. Music is great and it's out at the end of this month. Gimme please.
Some other stuff - Darkest Dungeon 2 is already out, but I'll probably wait until the console version to be honest. We Love Katamari is out on Switch tomorrow. Crime O'Clock and the remake of Ghost Trick are out end of the month. Do I want the new Samba de Amigo, given its motion controls and has Carly Rae whatever in it? Eh, I dunno. We'll see!

BIN
Getting older was never something I really fussed over, but my body is coping less with the disability faster than I had anticipated. I'm getting sluggish, clumsy, lumbering a lot more recently, which isn't great. I'm trying to get out more to keep moving, but I can't do more in the time I have. So that's a bit shit. But hey! Not dead yet, that's something.

Play

Persona 5 Royal - I am impressed by this game's dedication to simply never, ever ending. I've been in what I would confidently describe as "the final stretch" for about 25 hours now, but no matter how many final dungeons I get through or how many multi-stage final bosses I defeat, somehow it just keeps on going. And I haven't even started the additional "Royal edition" content yet, which apparently takes place after the events of the main game and consists of another 20-30 hours of gameplay. In truth, I am loving this and I'm not really complaining, I'd even say the story is much more interesting and well thought through than I originally expected, so bring it on I say.

Judgment - Figured it was a while since I visited Kamurocho so I've started this for a little change of pace while I finish off Persona 5. Although it's a spin-off, it uses the original combat system (or a variation of it) so weirdly it feels more like a mainstream entry than the turn-based Like A Dragon did. It's good so far, not sure whether the new guy will develop the same sort of personality as Kiryu or Ichiban but he's got great hair so that's a good start.

Want

I'm also prevaricating over Street Fighter 6, if enough ham-fisted folk from this forum fancy giving it a go then that might tempt me. Also not sure about Diablo 4, I know it's supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread but I never got past Act 2 in Diablo 3 and it's kind of exactly the same thing, right?

I might have to play Tears of the Kingdom after all, watching my son pootling around has given me the urge to give it a go although it still looks like BOTW DLC to me.

Bin

I really wanted to like Coffee Talk Episode 2 but there's something missing, somehow - it's exactly the same as the original but this time it feels like the characters are going through the motions a bit, it lacks the effortless charm that the first game had. Sadly the original creator passed away so I'm assuming this was written by other folk that have replicated his style but not quite captured what made the original so magical.

Play

Shenmue 3 - Finally going to start this this evening

Disney's Dinosaur (on Dreamcast) - No one saw that coming but we had close to a 3 day period of no Internet again, and we were struggling to get even games with discs to launch. Ended up trying a load of games with my daughter and she oddly loved this one, so we have been playing through it.

Total War - Warhammer. Playing this and enjoying it, so naturally I bought all the DLC armies and haven't had a chance to play it since!

Advanced Wars and Metroid Prime ramek - Finally purchased these last month but not had a chance to start yet, so that's this month's plans

Want

Similar to Mart I think I want Street Fighter 6, I might actually just see if work will purchase this for the Xboxes there

Retroid pocket 3+ - I ordered one of these on back order the other week and it's shipping today! I sold tons of stuff on ebay to fund this and then it was on sale when I ordered so very happy about that. Should be here Saturday I hope.

That Alien game - which check the reviews but I really like what I have seen.

Bin -

Again like Mart, aging. Sorry to hear what you are going through. I have only been 3 times so far but have had to start jogging in the last 2 weeks as a way of forcing myself to exercise as was getting a bit heavy! It has helped though as had a really rough time at work and I hate jogging so much that it's difficult to think about anything else when doing it.

Play
Still slowly working my way through Horizon Forbidden West at a rate of about two hours a week. It looks incredible, and I've just hit the first big twist/reveal, which comes much earlier in this game than its predecessor. Very much looking forward to where this one goes, though I did accidentally spoil part of the plot when I googled one of the characters to remind myself who they were…

Sea of Thieves still gets regular weekend outings. We've not done the third Mystery voyage yet - the puzzle to unlock it was only solved at the eleventh hour, so haven't had a chance to make it on - and the locations it sends you to were apparently being troll-camped, anyway. Oh, well; I was never going to win the skull. Just hope we can get the in-game part done for the ship trinkets.

I'm also occasionally popping back into Spider-Man Remastered to finish up the DLC missions before I start MIles Morales, which I want to do before the actual sequel comes out.

Want
Quite a lot, which is odd for me. I'd quite like an SSD expansion for the PS5, so I don't have to juggle downloads quite so much. They're still about £150 for a decent 2TB one, though so I'll probably make do for now and see what pops up on Prime Day - which I think should be some point over the summer?

Once I finish HFW, I'll probably start on God of War Ragnarok, which came with the PS5. I'm also very excited by the prospect of Assassin's Creed Mirage, which is the first AC since Origins that I've been looking forward to. Just a shame it's cross-gen; I sort of thought we'd be past that now, though given that this started out as DLC for Valhalla, that's maybe not much of a surprise.

Out of everything announced at the PlayStation Showcase last week, not much caught my eye, but I want to see more of Helldivers II; the first one was great, but I'm not sure it'll work so well in a more traditional third-person perspective. The announcement of The Talos Principle II also reminded me that I've not finished the first one, so I might go back to that if I get a chance, too.

A general election. As amusing as it is to see Boris Johnson attempt to throw Rishi and the entire Cabinet Office under the bus over the Partygate message-redacting debacle, I'd really like them all to fuck off into the sea now, plxkthxbai.

Bin
Game Pass PC, probably. I've kept it up using Microsoft Reward points for over a year, after getting three months for £1, but I just don't play anything on it. Working from home so much now means that a lot of my time is spent at the same desk, and I'd much rather sit on a sofa for games. I'll keep building up reward points, anyway, but I'm more likely to spend them on credit for games I actually want (hi, Pentiment), or on future Sea of Thieves season passes, if they have anything interesting.

Want

Street Fighter 6

Waiting until midnight so I can download this as soon as I get paid. There's nothing like a brand new Street Fighter release for me. I enjoy a lot of fighting games but Street Fighter is by far my favorite. I played SFV for at least 6 years and even when I wasn't playing I'll be watching tournaments of it. I'm at the point now when a lot of people from the FGC are posting none stop on Twitter and it's getting me hyped.

Marvel Snap new competitive mode

They announced a new mode coming in June a while ago. I don't actually think it will and is likely to be delayed considering we've heard nothing since. I kinda hope it comes sooner than later though. It's more or less a best of three which stop gimmicky decks getting away with murder. It's similar to the tournaments rules so you'll see a lot more cards like Daredevil being played. At the moment I'm just hitting infinite rank in the first 2 weeks then pissing about making decks afterwards because you can't rank down. I enjoy making decks but without any kind of progression it feels a bit "meh".

Play

So far I've been a mostly passive observer of Tears of the Kingdom, called in to assist with engineering from time to time, so I don't think I'd call this a "Play" for myself. Instead, I've been sinking time into the same couple of phone games.

I feel like I'm brushing up against the edges of free content in Honkai: Star Rail, but I continue to make progress so it doesn't feel too limiting yet. The pipeline from "stuff you pay for" to "stuff you need in order to level up" (or "stuff you need in order to draw for characters") isn't entirely straightforward and seems, to me, to be absolutely terrible value, so I'm happy enough for now anyway.

This evening marked the first time I completed a stage in Isle of Arrows without losing a heart, but I annoyingly don't seem to have gotten the achievement, possibly because it was on the Daily Challenge. I still feel pretty good about it, though! The game itself is a bit swingy; it's got a card drawing mechanic but no deck-building, so there are times I'm halfway through a run and just feel burned out by the randomness. It's maybe why I've switched to more of the Daily Challenge levels, which have a consistent seed and can be restarted (and, presumably, have a "perfect" strategy to finish them?).

Want

It'd be nice if I could get myself into a reasonable sleep schedule, but given I'm typing this shortly after midnight after sinking a couple of hours into a personal programming project and then watching some anime, I don't expect this is going to happen anytime soon.

Bin

My inability to stick to a sensible bedtime, mostly. Being constantly tired isn't good for my anxiety (which also make sleep more elusive) and I've noticed myself getting ratty as well.

I've now finished the base game of Persona 5 (i.e. the point at which the original version of the game ended) after a mere 90 hours and a truly insane gauntlet of dungeons, mini-bosses and bosses. Seriously I would say that about a third of this game is end-game:

Spoiler - click to showPretty much everything after the casino escape (the point at which you catch up to the intro) feels like the end of the game. But that includes the police station story segment, the entire massive cruise ship Palace, a sizeable chunk of Mementos, the whole Shibuya section, a bunch of mini-bosses then the final boss which took me the best part of ninety minutes to take down. It is seriously nuts.

Of course after all that it barely takes a breath before launching straight back into a new story which I'm guessing must be the stuff they added for the Royal edition. I'm going to have to take a break from this for a little while for my own sanity, I've hammered this hard over the last week or two and I've got the battle themes on repeat in my head now. It's a hell of a thing.

Not something I'm playing, but the kid found my Vita the other day and has been playing through Tearaway and it's reminded me just how great the Vita was. Sony's latest handheld effort is even more disappointing now.

Also, how great was Tearaway‽ The music is bringing back all kinds of memories, and he's so excited every time he makes a thing or helps someone out.

Aw, yeah, Tearaway is great. I have the PS4 version, too, I, think, but never played it; I my imagine it's anything like as good.

Add Spider-Man Remastered to the Bin list - I finished the City That Never Sleeps DLC last night. The plot, anyway - I can't be bothered with all the map clutter.

It's… fine, I guess. Worth the fiver I spent on it, but not much more than that. Yuri Lowenthal is so great as Peter/Spider-Man that I can mostly forgive it that the wiring is mostly average, but the plot is just dumb. Not even fun dumb, either; just dull, uninteresting Mob Bullshit with superpowered cyborgs crowbarred in.

Combat is mostly an exercise in frustration, too, with the game constantly swarming you with far too many enemies, many of whom have jetpacks, shields, or miniguns, meaning it's often very hard to get any kind of flow going.

But it's done now, and Miles Morales is installed. Might blast through that so I have a bit of a window to play something else and clear the palate before Spider-Man 2 arrives.

Does the remastered version still do that crazy thing where, even if you take down the first 'wave' of enemies in a base silently, you then have to defeat the next two waves in loud combat?

That always seemed crazy to me.

I think so, but I've never been very good at stealthing the first round, anyway. 🙃

Does the remastered version still do that crazy thing where, even if you take down the first 'wave' of enemies in a base silently, you then have to defeat the next two waves in loud combat?

It definitely does. I'm playing through it for similar reasons to Ninchilla and it happened to me just last night.

That always seemed crazy to me.

It is FUCKING MENTAL. Where's the incentive to stealth anything? It isn't helped by the fact the wave 2 just seems to automatically spot you even if you're perched on a rafter or cross-beam after yoinking someone up there.

Not something I'm playing, but the kid found my Vita the other day and has been playing through Tearaway and it's reminded me just how great the Vita was. Sony's latest handheld effort is even more disappointing now.

Also, how great was Tearaway‽ The music is bringing back all kinds of memories, and he's so excited every time he makes a thing or helps someone out.

How old is your kid? My son played (and fully rinsed) both the Vita and PS4 versions a few years ago, when he was about 6 or 7. We then transitioned onto making actual papercrafts from the game. If you go to www.tearaway.me you can find all the papercrafts you have unlocked, ready to print out and make yourself. It's a genuinely brilliant thing. I completely recommend doing it. Some of them are pretty hard though. The memory of trying to make the Weaponised Squeezebox still makes me shudder. I managed it though, and it's now-tattered form is still on a shelf in my son's room.

Play
Metroid Prime Remastered - Every bit as good as I remember it being, which is quite something because it's a top 20 of all time game for me. It has a bit of Old Game about it, so it can be brutal at times, when you are fighting your way through room after room, desperately trying to find a save room. I've died and lost an hour's progress. It was such a novelty by today's standards that I didn't even mind.

Fire Emblem Awakening - This is just a brilliant game too. The strategy is light but fun, and the story is lovely but simple, and the social stuff is entertaining but inconsequential, but the whole thing becomes more than the sum of it's parts, and comes together into something really special. I think the social stuff is my favorite thing about the game, to the point that my strategy for battles is more about who is standing next to who in order to advance their relationship than anything else. The little conversation scenes are just so funny and sweet, and it's not as horny as you might expect if you've only played that mobile game that came out a few years ago. My dude has got married to a woman named Cordelia who rides a flying horse. Unfortunately some of her social dialogues invole her confessing to someone else that she has a crush on Chrom, the army's king, so that's a shame.

System Shock - More old game stink here in a remake that updates the classic System Shock. Amazingly, what they've managed to do is recreate your memory of the game. It is as garish as the original, and remains fiddly and complex like you remember, but having played a bit of the original fairly recently, everything in the game has been made more palatable, more controllable, more sensible. You no longer have to steer using the arrow keys for a start. It needs a patch to increase the accessibility options though. The text is the smallest I've ever seen in a game. I usually play PC games on my TV from the settee, but this was impossible with System Shock. Perhaps someone will mod it.

Want
I'm quite looking forward to Ghost Trick, and I'd like to get my hands on that new Zelda game I've been hearing about. I also have a strange urge to try to play Metal Gear Solid 3 again. This pops up every few years, and always results in my bouncing off the game. I'd like one day to get to all the good bits later on, but some of those codex conversations are quite gruelling.

Bin
I'm trying to stick to game stuff here to keep things light, but I can't think of anything I've played recently that I hated. Maybe Descenders, a Mountain Biking game on Game Pass that takes itself a bit too seriously and combines unfair difficulty, illogical physics, and terrible controls. Yeah, bin that.

Descenders is rubbish but inexplicably popular, I think at one point it was one of the most downloaded/played games on Game Pass.

Try Lonely Mountains: Downhill instead for your mountain biking fix, it’s an absolutely lovely little game that’s sadly often overlooked.

Descenders got its time in the spotlight because the No More Robots guy is a whiny arse who comes out with all kinds of bollocks and people listen. I don't understand why. But hey, schillers gonna schill.

Bin

My eldest child who I love very much trashed my 360. I can't be bothered buying a new one so I've got about 30 360 games to get rid of. They are basically worthless but I thought I'd ask incase anyone here wants them.
Spoiler - click to show Dragon Age Origins& Awakening, Metro 2033 Limited Edition, GTA IV & Episodes, Prototype 1&2, 5 Kinect games and a 360 Slim Kinect, The following are just discs and manuals Arkham Asylum, Ass Creed 1 and 2 trilogy, Beautiful Katamari !, Bioshock 1&2, Burnout Paradise, Child of Eden !!, CoD 2&4, Condemned, Dark Messiah, Dark Void, Darksiders, Dead Rising, DMC4, Dungeon Siege 3, EDF 2017 !!!, Forza 3, LA Noire, Crackdown!!!!, Operation Flashpoint, Pure, Overlord, Red Dead Undead Nightmare, Stranglehold,

Oh I also have cavalcade's Project Sylpheed which I suppose he might want back.

Oh man, if you'd have said the MGS HD collection I'd have bitten your arm off. Must… Play… MGS3…

I had no idea Descenders had been a thing. I only played it because you got Microsoft Rewards for it. I have played a fair bit of Lonely Mountains: Downhill though, and that is lovely.

I might take Overlord and Dead Rising off your hands…

I might take Overlord and Dead Rising off your hands…

They are yours.

Oh I also have cavalcade's Project Sylpheed which I suppose he might want back.

How on earth do you have that?

Play
Advance Wars (Switch) - good, although descends into a grindy eternal midgame slog a lot of the time, won by sheer force of resources rather than tactical nous. Still fun to play.
Forspoken (PS5) - not as bad as people say, especially the voice acting which is at least as good as any other feted video game of the last 20 years. Gameplay is… odd. But the combat is fun. It has a weird washed out aesthetic to it which I quite like. Enemy types present the occasional challenge, and the story, while not all that original overall has quite a few original wrinkles to it. It think this was just selected to be unfairly panned as it's no better or worse than Far Cry 354 or GTA 98.
Metroid (Switch) - I've hit one of the one hour walls felt was talking about and I'm not finding it as charming as he finds it. But it looks bloody amazing on the OLED Switch (what I can see of it).

Want
Working eyes

Bin
Can't think of anything non Tory related. So I'll go with that as per.

Forspoken (PS5)

This caught a lot of flak when it came out, and I even saw some videos where people were showcasing the "terrible" dialogue - but I thought it sounded fine. As you say, it's at least as good as 90% of other games writing. I sort of assumed that the woman delivering it was the real issue…

Oh I also have cavalcade's Project Sylpheed which I suppose he might want back.

How on earth do you have that?

I'm not sure. Maybe it was an apology for sending me WWE 2k18?.

Additional Play - the PS4 Pro. It's been gathering dust (literally) since I got my Series X but ever since watching The Last of Us I've had a hankering to play the second game and for some reason I've been thinking all along that it's only on the PS5. I suddenly remembered it's actually for the PS4 and hey, I have one of those. So I've picked up a copy, and initial impressions are that (a) it looks absolutely astounding, especially for a "last gen" game; (b) 30fps happily doesn't really bother me much at the moment as I've only just come off the back of Jedi Survivor, where it was fine; and (c) the absolutely godawful vacuum cleaner howl that the PS4 makes every time it has to render anything more complex than the dashboard is reminding me why I dropped the system in the first place. I'm going to have to turn the volume all the way up to drown the damn thing out.

Still, it's got me back in the PS fold for a bit and I've also picked up a copy of Persona 5 Strikers (which I'd been poised to buy on the Switch, before remembering I already owned a machine that would play a better version). I'm quite tempted to get God of War Ragnarok when it comes down in price, even, and possibly Miles Morales. This cross-generation thing has quite a lot going for it, really.

Forspoken (PS5)

This caught a lot of flak when it came out, and I even saw some videos where people were showcasing the "terrible" dialogue - but I thought it sounded fine. As you say, it's at least as good as 90% of other games writing. I sort of assumed that the woman delivering it was the real issue…

Yes, I imagine a lot of the moaning is because the woman isn't at the top of the Simpsons skin tone meme. A sassy lead who isn't a white man?!??! In my videogame?!??!?? The bracelet and her #bants are actually fairly amusing at times. It has the slight vibe of a mid 90s BBC children's TV show with a talking object snarking about everything. Also all the lead boss enemy monsters you have to kill are all women too, so this game was doomed to fail from the forces of Twitter inceldom as soon as the design was done.

That said, I don't think it's a great game. It has quite a lot of very weird design choices and a world that is far too large and devoid of interesting things, even if running through it is fun. It's an odd one for sure. I think in 5-10 years there will be a slew of Youtube (or whatever) videos with it being re-evaluated and everyone coming to the conclusion it was actually really good. Like Nuts and Bolts. Or EDGE and GTA 3.

BIN
Chicory - I had this on my Switch wishlist for ages, then it got added to Game Pass for free. Eagerly dove in yesterday during the German bank holiday and… eh. I mean, it's fine but the overly twee nature of it doesn't work for me, the main gimmick of colouring in everything creatively is totally lost on me because I just can't be arsed and the controls (using the brush with the stick you aren't using to move around) aren't really for someone as cack-handed as I am. Oh well. Deleted.
Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon - Another one that I've wanted to ages on Switch but was never discounted, but now it's free on mobile through Netflix. It's just… not very good? Or maybe I'm missing the complexity/don't have the brain power to play it properly. Like Shovel Knight Dig though, it's one I had high expectations for that then failed to meet them. It's mostly in the bin but, as it's on my phone, I've still got it installed for bus/tram journeys in case something about it clicks.

I may be alone - can't remember the reception that Remake got here - but I very much want Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

As someone with no real attachment to the 1997 original, I thought what they did with part 1 was interesting, if not necessarily well-realised (fuck you, Hojo's cauldron), and I started on the Yuffie DLC last week; but the trailer at Dorito Pope's Summer Gamestravaganza Or Whatever The Fuck™ has re-piqued my interest to the extent that I'm even considering going back to Remake for the platinum.

EDIT: Rebirth is apparently fucking ginormous, though, so I may need to expand the SSD on the PS5 before too long. Come on, Prime Day!

Oh I also have cavalcade's Project Sylpheed which I suppose he might want back.

How on earth do you have that?

I'm not sure. Maybe it was an apology for sending me WWE 2k18?.

Brian do you still have the rest, or by any chance some controllers? I am always after gear for my school. I have 4 Xbox 360s I am ready to set up for the last week of term to get some network stuff going.

Still have all the games listed (although two games have been claimed by Aniki) and the Kinect. No functioning controllers though.

More than happy to post them to you if you have a use for them!

Additional PLAY

Mortal Kombat 11 - I have this on both PS4 and Xbox, and I've played it to death. However, I never bothered with the Aftermath DLC because by the time it had come out, I was doing other stuff. The whole bundle being down to £12 and change on Switch - which is a decent version, surprisingly, and the format I play most purely for convenience on not needing to be on the TV - convinced me to pick it up again and go through the whole story, so I'm ready for MK1 in the autumn. What an idiot.

Additional Play: The Final Fantasy XVI demo.

Additional Bin: The Final Fantasy XVI demo.

Attempted to put together my thoughts on FFXVI.

Wall of text incoming.

The combat seems fine (what little the game permitted me), but the story is a ton of frontloaded, but underexplained world building, featuring about fifteen characters with stupid names and no context.

Clive-called-Wyvern daydreams about Gandalf the Phoenix fighting the Balrog Ifrit as they fall into the chasm of Khazad-dûm.

Back in the waking world, there's a war on. Clyvern is there, though it's not clear which (if any?) side he's on. I walk for two minutes, interrupted three times to tell me how to walk.

There's a five-minute cutscene of nobles bickering, then a woman with one of the worst Irish accents I've ever heard shags a man the approximate size and shape of an American refrigerator in a public corridor.

I'm allowed to walk a little bit more, then a mountain turns into a giant and fights Shiva. Now I get to run, but this brief excitement is interrupted, too - first by a very large rock turning one of Clive's companions into paste, theb by a 13-year flashback to teach me combat. A sickly boy who is Clive's brother cheers on the sidelines. Clive is also his brother's bodyguard; the boy will obviously die later, a failure that will see Clive demoted to Wyvern.

Combat tutorial compete, someone shouts that the Duke(?) is back. He is preceeded by the Duchess, Clive and Sickly Boy's mother, who hates Clive for as near as I can tell no reason whatsoever.

Dad arrives with portents of war; Clive's to meet him in the Throne room. I try to follow him through the same door, but there's no way to open it; instead, I'm directed to a side door, where someone drops an apple, and Clive has a five-minute conversation about it.

I decide I can't be bothered, and delete the demo.

---

Aside from the amateur dreck that is the plot, it is also very bad. Graphically, it looks like an upscaled mid-generation PS3 game. The lighting is hopelessly flat. Characters are all plastic mannequin-people with uniformly spectacular hair and uniformly shit beards in horrendously overdesigned clothing and armour. The particle effects are quite nice, I suppose, but there are far too many of them, and almost completely obscure what's happening; the creature designs, too, are just awful, with no attention paid to giving anything a recognisable silhouette. The Phoenix/Ifrit fight looks like two of Michael Bay's Transformers hatefucking in a bonfire.

I'm sure it'll sell a billion copies and get 9s and 10s across the board; I just can't see in this series what other people do.

It can't possibly be worse than FFXV, can it? That was a load of incomprehensible nonsense with baffling tone shifts and a combat system that just consisted of button mashing. It was so unfinished you needed to watch a two-hour CGI movie to understand the plot and the entire last third of the game was effectively on rails. It did have the world's best fishing mini-game but apart from that I can't think of a single thing it had going for it. After two years of patching in more and more bits of story to try and make it all make sense, they just abandoned it and to be honest that was probably a mercy.

Dunno, I never played XV - other than its fucking awful demo, which also put me off the full game.

Bin, addendum: the sleep pattern thing is getting worse, as I now seem to be having fairly regular insomnia. This is the third night in a row I've been unable to get to sleep, but there doesn't seem to be an obvious reason for it. It's not especially warm at night, I've not had restless legs, my diet and caffeine intake hasn't changed, and I haven't noticed any uptick in anxiety.

Make sure that you're eating the right things regularly. All of the time. Not just when you can't sleep.

Try meditation / deep breathing, not only as any sort of pre-bed routine but throughout the day if possible.

If all else fails, try listening to something that you know well in the dark. When I suffered from insomnia (probably about 15-ish years ago?) I found that listening to old episodes of Father Ted were a help. They were familiar enough that I didn't need to pay attention all the time, they were funny (relaxing!) and helped my mind to think about something other than WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I SLEEP?

[/dadmode]

Another Play:

Anyone else tried the Jusant demo on Steam?

It's a bit of a weird one. I like a lot of it, though the low-poly untextured pastel indie look isn't doing anything for me. Likewise the Journey-wannabe soundtrack and story-through-diary entries schtick.

The important thing is the climbing, though. Have any of you done climbing as a sport? I used to go bouldering every week, and this is the first game I've played that seems to really try to capture the feeling of scaling a wall (beyond the vertigo, which I actually didn't find too bad here).

The controls aren't going to be to everyone's taste; they're a bit more involved and require a bit more concentration than Breath of the Wild et al, and the continual alternating between the triggers is going to get exhausting after a while.

But it expects you to take a bit more care to plan your route, or place safety pitons before you try a dyno. It's maybe a little simplistic/forgiving in some regards, but given that this is a. the start of the game, and b. just a demo, I evident things will get trickier as it goes on.

I'm pretty sure this is going to be hitting Game Pass on day one, so I'm looking forward to trying out a more complete experience then – but it's worth checking out the demo if you've got 30-odd minutes to spare.

There's a demo for Stray Gods on Steam now, so of course I played it.

There are some technical issues, which I'm hoping are being-a-demo-related; the big one being that the audio levels are all over the place. Some of the dialogue is fine, other bits are way too loud; the songs are entirely too quiet. I also had a couple of places where the screen just blacked out for a second or two for no reason.

It's still a super-interesting concept, and I'll definitely play it through again to try some of the other options - as usual when I play these things for the first time, I picked the safer options, so I wanna get more out there and see where it goes.

Additional PLAY
Hitman: World of Assassination - Oh Hitman, why do I forget thee so? Went back to this briefly this morning because there was an Elusive Target I've never done, and now I remember all the reasons I love Hitman. I stopped at the first proper level of H2 (Miami), so I think now it's time to dive back in.

At work I have currently rigged up 4x Xbox 360s, one Xbox One X and one Xbox One into a network and we have been playing either 4 or 6 player Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or Black Ops after work. It's been decent playing them again and having that kind of casual multiplayer experience with people.

I definitely don't also let the students use it at breaktime as those games are 16+😬

I have another 2 spaces on the network switch but really can't justify more xboxes in my classroom.

I have another 2 spaces on the network switch but really can't justify more xboxes in my classroom.

Get some crypto mining going, set yourself up for retirement.

Ha, is crypto mining still a thing? I have actually just bought another 360 anyway! I was in the charity shop and it was 12quid with two pads. Xbox looks in very good condition but presume it has no hdd, but will clean the pads up and add one. 7 player it is!

Ha, is crypto mining still a thing?

Only if you're an immoral sociopath.

Something has had me replaying FFVII Remake on hard recently, to mop up the last few trophies; but after hitting the seven-bosses-in-a-row end stretch last night, I had a borderline epiphany: I don't actually care about trophies.

So that can go on the Bin list (once I've done the Yuffie chapter), then I'll free up some SSD space and get on with all the other stuff on my backlog that I haven't already finished.

AEW getting 6s and 7s across the board, pretty much as expected. That's a lock then, I'll grab a cheap code where I can and get playing (not paying £70 for it!).

So [FFVII Remake] can go on the Bin list (once I've done the Yuffie chapter)

And done. It's… a weird one. Yuffie is quite irritating, but the plot weaves through the events of FFVII in a fairly interesting way (albeit not one that I think entirely makes sense). Then it goes absolutely batshit in the last half hour, bringing in a bunch of stuff completely out of left-field - enemies in TRON cosplay and face-only straitjackets - that a quick Google tells me is related to long-forgotten shooter tie-in Dirge of Cerberus; I wonder if this means Vincent will be more significant in this version.

They try to do some dramatic, emotional character stuff with the ending that doesn't work at all because it hasn't done any of the legwork to earn it.

Spoiler - click to showOther party member Sad Boy With Stick has his Big Sad because his sister got fridged in the face by Shinra missiles back when everything was sepia, and now he sees Yuffie as a surrogate protectee he can try and save. This he does - dying in the process, because of course he does - and I felt NOTHING, because two cutscenes does not make a character arc.Then it goes and makes itself basically essential to the entire Remake project by elbowing in a couple of otherwise-unrelated-ot-the-DLC post-credit scenes featuring the main game cast, serving as a bridge between Remake and Rebirth.

The gameplay is fun, though, and Yuffie is a real powerhouse with a lot of cool abilities. I was only playing on Normal, but I didn't feel like I struggled with combat at all; even the bosses weren't much of a challenge - I don't think I got KO'd once.

The one thing I did basically compostela skip is the Fort Condor minigame, which is a weird little battle arena board game thing that seemed far too complicated to bother with. I'm frankly astonished they haven't spun it off into a standalone mobile game, though, since it already feels like one.

Additional PLAY:
Back on the Hitman bullshit - went back this weekend and cleared the Hawke's Bay escalation I missed, then went through Miami with a bulldozer. Not sure how I feel about it… it's a huge, confusing map and the separation between the track and the building makes for a lot of running about. I got lost a lot. But it's done, there are more than enough satisfying kills (those car snipes!), and I don't have to do it again. Well… except the seven escalations and a bonus level. Sheesh.

I quite like Miami. Yeah, there's a bit of separation between the targets, but there's also a bunch of interlocking stuff between the locations, which makes it much more satisfying than, say, Bangkok.

Shouldn't we be on a July threat btw?

The weekend doesn't count as a new month.