Presumably my starting this topic means Mart is dead? Oh well. Anyway…
Ghost of Tsushima
Loved it. It's the AC: Japan game I always wanted, except better, because it wasn't an Assassin's Creed game at all, and is a whole-hearted tribute to Kurosawa and co instead of having all the wibbly-wobbly sci-fi bollocks distracting from everything.
It didn't grab me immediately (I actually started it in September, and only came back a month or two ago), and it's not perfect, but it's a big, fun Samurai (and Ninja, not that I think the word is ever uttered) sandbox, and one of the prettiest games I've ever played, if not the prettiest, even when it's being played on just a base PS4. Great combat (once it opens up), a reasonable amount of exploration/collecting to do, and a technical wonder (all things considered, those load times are a marvel).
You can tell I loved it, because I even got the Platinum, when I can so rarely be bothered (it's also not the hardest one to get, to be fair).
Sonic Adventure (Xbox 360, on Series X) — God, this is a f–king mess of a game. I don't know how many of its problems are the results of a sloppy port and which have come from the Dreamcast version, but there are So Many Problems. The controls are twitchy, the camera is atrocious, the level signposting is wildly uneven (and much worse in the hub locations). The dub is, weirdly, not as bad as I remembered it being, although poorly served by the canned animations (which seem like they can't happen in parallel with the audio triggers). The story, such as it is, makes little sense and has no clear relation to the levels themselves. Removed from its context as the graphical showcase of a new console, it's got literally nothing to recommend it – except the enthusiasm our five-year-old currently feels for all things Sonic.
Don't careabout that game other than the bit at the end where everyone's chanting Sonic's name and he goes Super. That aside, 'Open Your Heart' justifies the game's existence.
January Blasphemous - Had this on PS4 after Kickstarting it and never finished it, but it was in the Chrismas sale on Switch… we all got a chunk of eShop credit as a gift in place of having a work party this year, so I spent it on a bunch of cheap games. I really, really love this one - I seem to have a thing for games that subvert religious messages (see also: Binding of Isaac), and this one's full-on Spanish heresy and folklore. I beat the last boss today and got the bad ending, then read up on what I missed… turns out, there's a tonne of stuff buried away that you don't even get told, you just have to work it out (ala Dark Souls), so I'm going back to do that and get the good ending. Then I'll move onto NG+, since the game had a massive chunk of free DLC a while back that's only accessible once you 'ascend' your finished save and carry on. Looking forward to it!
Lovely little retro-style JRPG-meets-golf game. Well, it's not that little , unless you're judging it against regular JRPGs, I suppose (it took me over 25 hours to finish, I think).
It could maybe do with a couple of minor QoL improvements, but my gripes are minor, and it's still lovely. Great fun.
This is a great game. I think I've tapped everything that I have the capacity or ability to tap out of it. The Journey mode, the individual stages, the quick play modes and the multiplayer.
God, when that multiplayer works, it's an almost revelatory experience. You and three others make lines on your own separate fields, craft wells and fill a meter by making full lines, with a tetris being worth more meter energy. Then when that meter fills, all three of the fields come together, and you have to create huge, broad lines across all three fields. The blocks collapse and all of a sudden you have nothing but potential in front of you.
The music swells in that way that music swells in a Mizuguchi game. The visuals explode and you and three others move the ghosts of where their blocks are going to go in a unison that's almost dance like. You place pieces, you shift around each other and you compensate for the mistakes others made. You can use special glowing purple blocks to flatten down any floating orphen blocks from a misplay. You raise each other up and build from each other's past work. When it works, it's exceptional and the first time I saw the three play fields merge into one, I physically gasped in surprise at how precisely timed with the sound, visual and vibrations it is.
Really astonishing stuff when it works. When it doesn't, when you have players that don't understand that when they overflow their field and are knocked out, they can clap with the beat to come back in. When you find people that don't understand that soft drop doesn't work in multiplayer and you need to hard drop. When you find people that don't get into that tipping point of 'holy shit, I get it' it can be a deeply frustrating experience.
It's a marvel of a game, though. It needs a better tutorial but it's deeply affecting in it's effect.
More of the same, but slightly improved, and also less. I liked it, but it's still jarring how it veers from 'Quintuple A blockbuster!' to 'slightly janky!' (although that might be partially the fact I'm still on a base PS4), and the Arkham games are just better.
Superhot: Mind Control Delete
A masterclass in taking one of my favourite concepts/mechanics ever, making it even better, then making it outstay its welcome. Also features one of the most irritating (not difficult, just irritating) trophies ever made - it literally constitutes a waste of electricity, seeing as (appropriately) it's basically a loading screen "joke" that lasts several hours…
Overall it's a great game (concept) though, especially for the low low price of free (which it was, to people who already owned the original). Got the platinum too.
Gris is a Search 'Em Up with a fantastic and unique art style. It might be one of the prettiest games I've seen in a while, with a Mobius-like visual quality to it mixed with really startling use of watercolours. I've not seen anything like it in a while.
It's devoid of threat and menace, and there are no real enemies that you can be damaged by. It's a nice story that seems to be about grief, and it's five stages. If you want something gentle, and beautiful to stare at, you could do a lot worse than this. The style gets in its own way sometimes, however, with routes and paths through the game being a little too obtuse.
Half Life
Yeah, 's Half Life, innit? Shooting mans, runnin' around, solving puzzles, sliding around weirdly off surfaces you shouldn't slide around on. It's a great game but there's stuff that just doesn't hold up to a viewing a full 23 years later. Weird, that.
Well that was just utterly tremendous. Like a Dragon manages to change almost everything about this long-running series - the protagonist, the battle system, the city - yet comes out not only feeling like a natural evolution, but as probably the best of the lot.
It's that RPG battle system that defines it, really. It gets a brilliant narrative justification - Ichiban, being a huge fan of Dragon Quest and something of a delusional idiot, is literally imagining the enemies transforming in front of him - and brings in every JRPG reference you can think of to back that up. Your healer is an Idol cheering the party with inspirational songs, your black mage is a fire-breathing hobo with bad breath, you're wielding a baseball bat like a hero's sword, and you're backed up by a range of modern-day professions from chefs to street musicians. Even better, the party system allows the game's supporting cast to shine, and their chatter as they wander the streets with you is one of the game's highlights.
Everything about this is brilliant, really. The plot is great, the substories are funnier than ever, the minigames are a mix of old favourites (bowling, darts) and fantastic new ones (there's a whole Mario Kart clone hidden here), the business management game is oddly compulsive… I could go on but you get the gist. Go play it. :)
It's brand new, I'm sure it'll get there eventually but not just yet. They are adding the remaining Yakuza titles though (3, 4 and 5 next week, 6 in March) so that's the whole Kiryu saga on there, for those who haven't played them.
Donut County - guess I liked this a fair bit less than Luscan, it's a kind of Katamari Damacy clone (swallow up things to make your hole grow bigger, then you can swallow up bigger things) but there's no challenge and (maybe two puzzles aside) no actual game to it either - playing each level is just a case of going through items in size order, and then watching as the interminable cut-scenes play out afterwards. It's partially saved by some very dry writing but ultimately it's dull and forgettable.
Really complicated thoughts about this one. On the one hand, I really pity the developers of it; they obviously were put through hell during the creation of this. It's just such a mess from beginning to end. It's partially a monster hunter game, it's partially a final fantasy game, it's partially an assassins creed game and it's not as good as any of those things. It tries a huge amount of new things for the series and - I've been told - is much improved upon in the FF7 Remake. The crush of the last 18 months of development is clearly on show throughout this game; they're bleeding time, money and manpower and just need to get it over the fucking line and out of the door so people can move on with their lives.
From a gameplay perspective, none of the systems work and it clunks and glunks and creaks and groans. There are a myriad of systems that are never fully explained to the user, and a pile of options that aren't exposed unless you just so happen to mouse over them in the inventory. It's the absolute worst part of Destiny 2's UI and UX with none of the great-feeling moment to moment play. You can chain-link attacks but in my 25 hours of playtime it happened 4 times seemingly totally at random. Apparently characters have limit breaks but I never encountered them. You can switch characters, which is something that's explained in a loading screen tip by having it say 'once you unlock this on the astral sphere you can do it' without explaining what any of that means. Bosses have a titanic amount of health and even at level parity, you never feel like you're hurting them.
Narratively, I really liked the last few hours of it. As soon as you get out of the interminable corridor sequence and get to the World of Ruin, you all of a sudden feel like 'oh shit there's stakes here' and the game actually begins to come together in the way that I'd hoped it would have done up until this point. The story begins to make sense, the environment begins to work with the player rather than directly against them and there's enough fast travel systems in place to make it feel not like a total pain in the dick to get around.
It absolutely doesn't earn the ending that it goes for. It goes for a big dick-punch ending, full of emotion and the voice actors and facial animators do a terrific amount of work. Maybe it's the fucking tidal wave of emotional damage that I'm keeping bottled up nice and deep from covid, but I felt a good chunk of sadness. That just winds me up. It's entirely unearned and I was frankly very annoyed at the characters by the end of it.
But I still reached the end.
It's not a good game. It's not even a game I'd recommend people play. It's certainly not even in the same ballpark as Dragon Quest 11 which I'm also playing through (gamepass is good) in terms of quality and gameplay but I still reached the end.
The Little Acre - charming but slight point-and-click adventure with strong Broken Sword vibes and great hand-drawn animation. It's very short (there's an achievement for completing it in less than an hour) and the way in which the first half of the game is far more detailed than the second half makes it feel like it's had chunks taken out of it at some point in development, but it's clearly a labour of love for the small development team (who also do all the voices, in a charmingly amateurish fashion) and it's a pleasant, untaxing evening's entertainment.
Donut County (Series X) — I assumed this would be a sandboxy, score attack kinda game more in the mould of Katamari Damacy, but instead got a bizarre story about raccoons hijacking a donut delivery app to steal people's rubbish. (I skipped through most of the cutscene dialogue because this was mostly just something lightweight for the kid to faff around in.) The controls are a little twitchy, and it could do with more clarity about where you can move and what you can eat, but it manages to switch up the gameplay more than I expected, was free on GamePass, and kept the kid entertained, so I can't complain.
February Horace - This was recently in an eShop sale for 99p, but I actually bought it full price at release because I was very intrigued by it… I was pitched it when I worked at RSG, but we ultimately turned it down.
It's a weird game. Predominantly a platformer with a relatively high level of difficulty (the spacial awareness requires concentration and the hit boxes on enemies/obstacles are really loose), it's got all kinds of other things thrown in too. There's a collecting element - the lead character decides he wants to clean up the world by collecting one million pieces of trash - running throughout, lots of side bits and minigames that cover many different genres, and all manner of 80s and 90s references as you go. The story is also insane, seemingly heartfelt in a Pinocchio way until you get to the bit about Earth being nearly destroyed by robots and then end up on the moon. It also doesn't know when to end - just when you think it's finishing, it keeps going. Twice.
Despite being quite cartoonish and seemingly suitable for kids, it's actually quite violent and also contains five (bleeped) uses of the word 'cunt'. That made me laugh a lot.
I didn't get the secret ending for collecting a million things (got to 989k all told, the number flies up so it's not as daunting as it sounds), but I think that'll do. Which, ironically, is the name of the final chapter - That'll Do.
Tetris Effect Gris Half Life Donut County Final Fantasy 15
Dragon Quest 11
A really titanic game. 70 hours long and I think I blew through it pretty fast. The first two acts are a really impressive JRPG on their own but then it goes ahead and offers up act 3, which is almost an entirely new game unto itself. It looks lovely, and it has a singular artistic vision. It's funny, charming, sad and kind.
The perfect antidote to FF15 and maybe the finest JRPG I've played in over a decade.
February
Horace Agent A: A Puzzle In Disguise - Very nice, very short point and click adventure that only suffers from a bit too much backtracking and a couple of places where the puzzles are a little obtuse. But I really enjoyed it, so it's probably worth grabbing in a sale like I did.
Tetris Effect Gris Half Life Donut County Final Fantasy 15
Dragon Quest 11
A really titanic game. 70 hours long and I think I blew through it pretty fast. The first two acts are a really impressive JRPG on their own but then it goes ahead and offers up act 3, which is almost an entirely new game unto itself. It looks lovely, and it has a singular artistic vision. It's funny, charming, sad and kind.
The perfect antidote to FF15 and maybe the finest JRPG I've played in over a decade.
Do you hear the Dragon Quest music in your sleep now
Tetris Effect Gris Half Life Donut County Final Fantasy 15 Dragon Quest 11
Yakuza 3
Quite the climb down from Yakuza 2 last year, you can really see the next-gen growing pains in this game front and center. There's a lot of issues with it graphically, it's lost a lot of the 'oh, maybe we shouldn't make the player wait two minutes at a time before giving them a minigame' that was in the last one. There's a real drop in production values and, basically, it's just not very good. It's also really not helped by one of the weaker stories in the Yakuza series thus far.
Not an especially good game, but looking forward to Yakuza 4.
It's definitely the most jarring change in the series, going from the remade Kiwami 2 to the very-early-PS3 Yakuza 3. But it's got some good stuff. I like the slower chapters set in the orphanage, Mine is a good villain, it's got one of the best Hard Men With No Shirts endings in the whole series, and
Spoiler - click to showRikiya's death
is the most ridiculously OTT melodramatic thing I've ever seen in a game, I think, it's just wonderful.
Interested to see what you make of Yakuza 4 - I thought the good stuff in there was very good and the bad stuff very bad. But you'll get to meet Akiyama, so it's worth it for that alone.
Yeah I really liked Kiryu's weird summer vacation. It manages to thread the needle between 'hey, look at this idyllic life this guy has' and 'oh by the way he will fuck you up' perfectly.
Hitman 3 - about 75% of all the words ever posted on the Society seem to relate to the Hitman series so I won't add anything here, I'll take it (back) to the dedicated thread.
February
Horace
Agent A: A Puzzle In Disguise The Burnable Garbage Day - A nice little mobile distraction that sees you as a robot destroying rubbish around a post-apocalyptic world. You collect rubble as you go, save cities buried underneath, learn how to make items from those cities and then craft them (randomly) from rubble to give to other cities. The translation is absolute garbage, especially when you get requests from cities you've saved asking for items that are inappropriate for the surrounding text, like:
'I need GRENADE for a man I love! I must give it to him!'
I was enjoying it and finished it once with the bad ending, but then hit a blocker right before the good ending. I needed to upgrade all cities to max and had one final request to fulfill. Would the item generator give me the item I needed to do so? Would it fuck. Three days of play with no luck. THREE DAYS. So I deleted it in a fit of rage. Ain't nobody got time for that.
I am sure it's not, but this feels like the first game I have completed in ages. Been playing a lot of endless sports stuff recently. Originally picked up the Shenmue Collection near it's release, and then a PS4 later all with the idea of replaying the first, finally completing the second (which I have started at least 5 times and given up on over the years) and moving onto the 3rd.
I appreciate it's dated but my word have I loved replaying that, I appreciate it has it's whimsical ways now and wouldn't be enjoyable for someone playing it for the first time, my missus has taken the piss out of the voices every time she has seen me playing it, and the controls are bad even by the standards and feelings of someone who still regularly plays the Dreamcast, but I had that tingling reconnection with the past feeling when it was wrapping up. First completed that around 2003, I liked that game so much I left it at home during my Uni days despite being in the process of playing it as I didn't want the game and the box getting trashed.
In what may very well be my only post on this thread all year…
Hitman III - sort of. Obviously completing the story is barely stretching the surface of what there is to do in Hitman. Thanks to the brutal Mastery requirements this time round, there's little enough remaining on most missions that I actually think I might be able to complete nearly all the challenges (for now)
Ghost of Tsushima
Golf Story
Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Superhot: Mind Control Delete
Monster Hunter World
In that I've finished the story, such as it is. Of course, since then I've played for about four or five more hours (including one as Geralt of Rivia), and haven't even started Iceborne yet.
Hitman 2 – I have said more than enough about this already in the other thread, but it's honestly amazing, the amount of variety that comes out of putting fundamentally the same toys in different sandboxes.
Tetris Effect Gris Half Life Donut County Final Fantasy 15 Dragon Quest 11 Yakuza 3
Valheim
All four bosses down, and bases that rival the finest cities in Skyrim constructed. It's a lovely game hampered by five million people jumping on it in the earliest of early access stages.
It's a lovely looking, sounding and feeling game. Some of the creature designs feel very placeholder, but the general look and feel of it is really rather good for something so early in development. It reminds me of the way that I remember PS1 games looking; not how they actually looked, mind, but how I remember them looking. A little low poly, big chunky textures, but enough beauty to evoke the imagination into filling in gaps. The music's lovely, the sound effects are serviceable, and the UI needs a considerable amount of work before it stops feeling quite so placeholder.
That's one of the watchwords with this game - placeholder.
It's in Early Access and you can really, really tell. If you've not gotten onboard with the game that's fine, but barring any major fuckups, in a year or so's time it could be something extremely special. It's already a survival game that's pulled me in like no other that I can remember. It just needs to become more feature rich, give players a bit more of an option on what to build, and work out some of the existing kinks. Mining Iron is awful, and crypt dungeons can be extremely challenging.
But, yeah. Overall, the right game in the right place at the right time. Really looking forward to seeing what happens next with it.
Tetris Effect Gris Half Life Donut County Final Fantasy 15 Dragon Quest 11 Yakuza 3 Valheim
Wolfenstein Youngblood
I have a special place in my heart for the new Wolfenstein games; they're a violent delight, really. Narrative heavy with some great feeling shooting, movement and progression. Tonally, they've managed to make something that had the potential to be incredibly uneven and downright insulting into a world that's almost believable and populated by characters you give a shit about. The New Colossus was pretty bad for driving a truck through this. BJ was like a stealth game character that'd wound up in an action game through some freak circumstance.
Youngblood's a co-op game. It has character levels, missions that happen in zones, doors that take two players to open and switches that need your buddy to flip. Everything can be done in singleplayer and it has a satisfying 'this kind of weapon does this kind of damage, this kind of weapon does the other kind of damage' mechanic. Enemies scale with you, gaining new weapons and armor that means you have to shoot them in certain ways to take them down faster. There's a currency you collect that lets you buy weapon upgrades and improve them, there's a weapon levelling system and skill points and on and on.
The narrative has some fun surprises and there's a couple of great scenes at the end where BJ returns, not so much as a big hero but as a person you need to help. The game's deep in a Dieselpunk version of the 1980s with German language covers of songs from the 60s, 70s and 80s scattered throughout the world. You play BJ's daughters, Jess and Soph who are two teenaged sisters that are maybe the best siblings in any videogame ever; I love these two absolute doofuses and would do anything for them.
The game's very middle of the road, elevated by two brilliant lead characters. They do these dumb things on loading screens in elevators. They clearly think no one's watching and… It's just a huge amount of fun in a world that's got some real, intense grimness in it. It's really rather good.
February
Horace
Agent A: A Puzzle In Disguise
The Burnable Garbage Day
March
Nothing, I believe? I genuinely can't remember, but I'm pretty sure all I played at any length was Sea of Thieves and Issac.
April A Way Out - Played this with the other half in lieu of spending money on It Takes Two, because this is free in EA Play. It's decent enough, until you get to the final few chapters and it just becomes a shitty cover shooter. The endings also suck - we didn't want to do them for… reasons because they totally go against the co-op gaming the rest of the game promotes. Left a sour taste, for sure. Oh well.
Ys: Memories of Celceta Ys: Lacrimos of Dana Ys Origin Ys I Ys II Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk Tokyo Xanadu Ex+ Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore Atelier Ryza Tales of Eternia
On the horizon, Persona 2, Wild Arms 3, Suikoden 1-4. If Brian gives the Retroid a good review then wew, lot of SNES and PS1 rpgs on the way!
February
Horace
Agent A: A Puzzle In Disguise
The Burnable Garbage Day
March
Nothing, I believe? I genuinely can't remember, but I'm pretty sure all I played at any length was Sea of Thieves and Issac.
April A Way Out - Played this with the other half in lieu of spending money on It Takes Two, because this is free in EA Play. It's decent enough, until you get to the final few chapters and it just becomes a shitty cover shooter. The endings also suck - we didn't want to do them for… reasons because they totally go against the co-op gaming the rest of the game promotes. Left a sour taste, for sure. Oh well.
Weird, we thought the ending was spot on. You could see it coming a mile off, but it was still fun. Patchy game to be sure, but some memorable moments throughout.
Spoiler - click to showMy partner and I play together though. We both absolutely hated it when it went from a co-op to a competitive game (specifically the warehouse shoot-out) and then how one of us had to 'win'. Totally ruined the experience for us.
I'd probably spoiler that mart. However predictable it was.
And we enjoyed it (that part). Reasonable twist, fairly low stakes (it doesn't really matter what happens - it's mainly for bants value) and didn't outstay its welcome. The entire game was interesting, brave in bits, shonky in others but something I'd love to see expanded on in a future title.
