PWB: January 2Pandemic2Isolated + Beer + Pies

Play
Paper Mario: Origami King - This is pretty good. Few surprises so far but it is fun and has managed to make me laugh more than once. It barely an RPG any more, similar to Super Paper Mario in that respect, it does still have turn based battles though, which are now a puzzle game where you have to arrange the baddies to take the brunt of your special attacks.

Horizon: Zero Dawn - Still haven't installed this because Little Miss Bloodaxe always wants me to play Mario: OK.

Hades - It's pretty cool. Haven't played much though.

A tabletop RPG! For a change I am playing. It's a Transformers game about Dinobots. We are the Dinobot B team. B team because we aren't as smart as the other Dinobots.

Want
Scottish Independence would be nice. Followed by re-entry to the EU.

A new virtual tabletop. I can't take any more of Role20's awful file management and mediocre everything else. I'm thinking of trying Owlbear Rodeo or maybe forking out for FoundryVTT.

Bin
Crash Team Racing

Any lingering idea that the United Kingdom had anything to offer the world.

Trump.

Play

Not actually played anyting yet this year, but still got a lot of Hitman 2 to get through on Series X so that'll take up most of the time. I also need to finish off the last bit of Yakuza 7, though I'm wondering if I should swap out some character classes and invest in some better gear instead of just grinding levels in the fight club minigame.

My 13th Age andThe Expanse RPG games are ongoing, though I'm looking at an alternative for 13A as two of my players might be unavailable with the arrival of a newborn due in the next couple of weeks. I've been thinking about how to run a Made in Abyss game since I first watched the anime, and have spent the last couple of weeks writing up tables and character options for a potential Electric Bastionland campaign – so that's a strong contender.

Want

Everything I see about Hitman 3 tempts me more and more. Once the books are paid this month, I might (read: will definitely) splurge on it.

Bin

For the first time since I bought it on Dreamcast 22 years ago, I managed to beat the final boss in Sonic Adventure (in the 360 port running on XSX), which the kid has been making me play all Christmas. I don't remember it being so twitchy and buggy on Dreamcast, but it was fucking atrocious.

Play

Yakuza: Like a Dragon - a classic, if you don't mind your AAA games bookended by literal hours of cutscenes. Once you get past that sizeable hurdle, this is the most inventive, most generous and downright funniest Yakuza game since Zero, with an instantly likeable main cast and some of the daftest side-activities in the series. The way in which it takes JRPG tropes and transplants them from the usual fantasy setting to a world full of homeless bums and washed-up thugs is nothing short of genius. And it's oddly refreshing to be playing a game whose cast consists primarily of down-on-their-luck middle-aged men, I think that's something we can all relate to.

Monster Train - essentially this is Slay the Spire's scrappier, more anarchic cousin. It lacks that game's extraordinary balance and precision but makes up for it with a staggering amount of different ways to play, with a range of different clans, leaders and strategies making every game wildly different. It's genuinely superb.

Moving Out - couch co-op for New Year, this is very similar to (and isn't as good as ) Overcooked but seems to lead to far fewer arguments - it's much harder for one person to completely screw up the entire team, and hurling people's TV sets out of windows into delivery trucks is never less than hilarious. It's pretty good fun.

Want

Every single person who voted for Brexit to have a massive lorry park built in their back garden. It's happening!

Only a few weeks now till Hitman 3.

Bin

Brexit. Covid. Tories. Not necessarily in that order.

Gaming-wise, I've put Assassin's Creed Valhalla on the back-burner for now, it's much less engaging than Yakuza 7 anyway and it clearly needs a few more patches. It's very much a 20-hour game strung out to 120 hours, and while I'm not averse to a bit of low-stress open-world wandering, I have a feeling this is always going to be something I tackle in the background rather than something I get massively hooked on.

Play
Just a Sapienza run on Hitman 2, so far, but will likely hop back on for a few challenges as a warm-up for 3. Still no next-gen for me, so I'll be playing without glorious 4k60RT bells and whistles. Hopefully it'll still be well-enough optimised for plebs like me.

Still going to be hopping into Star Wars Squadrons most evenings, too. I'm not brilliant at it - Dogfight is inevitably an exercise in frustration - but I'm really enjoying Fleet Battles, and somehow haven't been on a losing team since I finished my placement matches. I've only moved up from Hero II to Hero III, but it'll be interesting to see where I eventually plateau/bottom out. If there's one complaint I have, it's that most of the cosmetic unlocks are garbage, so I'm just stockpiling credits. Maybe something will show up eventually to tempt my space-wallet.

Want
Hitman 3. Until such time as I can afford a PS5, that's about it.

Bin
At risk of contributing to the leftie echo chamber above: Tories, Brexit, Covid.

Play

Watch Dogs Legion. I've got a soft spot for this, despite it being objectively a bit naff. The animations are janky, the gameplay's repetitive, the voices are awful, and it doesn't understand British people at all. (One mission involved cheering up 'all the people of Lambeth' by removing some propaganda from the millennium wheel. I'm not sure Brixton gives a shit what happens to the millennium wheel.)

But there's an undeniable thrill to walking around streets I know so well in real life. It's a tiny London – you can run from Brixton to the City in about five minutes – but what's there is accurate. Plus it has The Swan in Stockwell. Instant win.

Hades. I'm still slowly plugging away at this. I made it to the final boss on run 11, but haven't been close since. The writing and voice acting are excellent, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is a bit meh. There's no satisfaction in actually battling, and killing, any of the enemies. No sense that you're connecting with your attacks, it's all a bit floaty. Which in a game that's largely about fighting, dying, and fighting again, is a bit of a problem. But for now, the never-ending pool of well-written dialogue is keeping me coming back.

Bin

Crash Team Racing. It's no Mario Kart, is it.

We've moved on from "the rogue-like game is too rogue-like for my liking" to "the combat in a game highly lauded for its combat by virtually everyone who has played it actually isn't very good". Amazing. Where will we go next? Popcorn ready here.

I wouldn't take it personally.

I mean, literally nobody who has played Hades has ever criticised the combat for not feeling good, but you do you I guess. I'll look forward to it containing "too much Hades" tomorrow.

Play - Mainly still on the Madden online league we started in March, coming up to having played 150 games each now, picked up a few things in the sales too, mainly the Command and Conquer remaster so want to get into that, also been playing a lot of ToyBox mode on Disney infinity and Mario Kart 8 with my little girl, now 4 and at the stage where she can grasp the character is hers and reacts to what she does, and the motion/assists on MK8 are brilliant.

Want - To get back into Fallout 76, was really enjoying it but had little time to game with everyone else in the house and the Missus wanted to use the evenings for either shared time whilst we were both off to catch up on shows we had missed, or prep for the next days parenting.

Bin - My commute, at least for a week.

Play
Shenmue 3 - Impossible to critically appraise. It would be like trying to review my cat. One thing I can say is that considering this is an epic story-based game, and the fact that we've had to wait 20 years for this sequal, it's an odd decision to have so little story in this installment. The story doesn't get moved on at all for the first half of the game, in Bailu. You arrive looking for a stonemason to ask him about the pheonix mirror, and you leave 20-30 hours later looking for the same stonemason to ask him about the pheonix mirror. The balance between sections with Ryo wandering around asking people the same question and Ryo having endearing interactions with fun characters is completely off. There's too much of the former and not enough of the latter. Some of the story revelations fall pretty flat. However I am enjoying my time with the game. The Shenmue games are a nice place to hang out. They were always as much about laughing at Ryo's haplessness as anything else, and he's still completely hapless. Last night I discovered that you could phone loads of characters from the previous games, and I think that might be my favorite thing about the game so far! I had a conversation with Nozomi, Ryo's friend from the first game who is madly in love with the oblivious numbskull, which was the most authentically awkward and painful thing in the whole series so far.

I wonder what Ryo is supposed to be in Yu Sazuki's head. I wonder if he's supposed to be gay or if he just became a gay character by accident. His relationship with bad boy pirate-wanabee Ren of Heavens is the closest he has to a romantic engagement, and this is even quite strongly hinted at by another character, Joy during one of those phone calls. Joy is a character from Shenmue 2, who helped Ryo for completely alturistic reasons and was rewarded with nothing but blank looks and confused half-sentances from Ryo. "I see…" She is constantly frustrated with him and his empty-headed quest for revenge, and I think she is all of us. Most of the female characters find Ryo an infuriating character, actually, and they're all completely correct. He wanders the world exasperating women who are a million times smarter than him. That is Ryo.

Hades - Come on, it's excellent. It's really not my kind of game, but it's brilliant.

Want
A new government. One that has the compassion, integrity and competence to handle the biggest crisis this country has faced since World War 2. Unfortunately the one we've got keeps hitting record lows in all those categories. Imagine what kind of human being you have to be to take something like a pandemic, and a shortage of vital PPE which could keep our medical staff alive, and use it as an opportunity to funnel cash to your cronies.

Bin
To jump on a completely correct bandwagon, Tories, Brexit, Covid. I can't decide on the order either.

Shenmue 3 is really odd, I'm still amazed it even got made. Gameplay-wise it's the best in the series - all the little systems they've got feed into each other really well, and the new combat system was fun - but story-wise it's a complete dud as you say. Also it's very clear that they ran out of money and time and had to rush it a bit - the first area is great, the second area looks great but has exactly the same story beats as the first all over again in the same order, then the ending is basically a cut-scene. I did really enjoy tracking down all the tat you need to get the move scrolls though, even if I barely used any of them, and I'd be there for Shenmue 4 on day one like the big idiot I am.

… Impossible to critically appraise. It would be like trying to review my cat.

Please, please, please try to review your cat.

Too much fur, not enough purr - 6/10.

Since I've bothered to boot up my laptop rather than use my phone, I'll throw my list for the month in…

PLAY
Sea of Thieves - Me and the missus both hit 75/75/75 in the three main companies (digging up gold, killing skeleton pirates and delivering cargo), so we've moved onto trying to get all the commendations instead. That's quite a grindy task, but at least it'll keep us busy and give us goals to focus on. Plus, the season pass stuff comes in in two weeks time, so that'll be interesting.
Blasphemous - Still playing for the reasons in the 2021 Completed thread.
Binding of Isaac - Still playing, because I'm nowhere near done on Switch. Repentence has a release date! But it's on Steam, and consoles are apparently 'later' than March 31st. So, ballsacks.
Super Meat Boy - Hated the sequel so much, I bought the original again because it was £4 in the Christmas sale on Switch. It's definitely as good as I remember it.
Grindstone - Was waiting for this to get off Apple Arcade and come to Switch, and now it's here. It's great! Really nice, bitesized puzzle fun that makes you think. Right up my street.
Dead Cells - Another one I rebought on Switch in the sale, because I had it on PS4 and never finished it. Got all the DLC too, so there's plenty to play here.

WANT
Binding of Isaac: Repentence - As above. Hurry up, Ed.
More room for stuff - I have no more room for anything, but I keep buying board games and robots. Damn it.

BIN
Seeing everything happen from this side of the Channel's weird… it's clearly a shitshow in the UK but, as it doesn't really affect me, I can only wish it gone for the rest of you. Not even Brexit is causing issues, I just need to arrange my interview and I'll have my German residency card in a jiffy. Aside from the obvious Covid nonsense then…
Super Meat Boy Forever - It's shit, don't bother.
Xbox One S - the joys of Christmas see this one sent to the console graveyard. Someone I work with is taking it off my hands though, so at least it's going to a good home.
Missing medication - The pills I was put on to ease my increasing muscle issues, Baclofen, appears to have become impossible to get. No chemist can order it in, and my doctor says I shouldn't be trying the alternatives. He's bemused, because it's nothing special and shouldn't be hard to find… except it is. So, that's fun, yo-yoing back and forth between less pain and more pain when the pills run out and I can't get replacements.

Play

Ys: Memories of Celceta and Ys VIII: The Lacrimosa of Dana - The former on Vita, the latter on PS4 although both games are available on both consoles now, Celceta is one thing but I've heard if you can play it on PS there's absolutely no reason to play VIII on Vita because the PS4 version has way more content and runs much better.

This series is about Adol's insatiable wanderlust and how his passion for adventure usually gets him into trouble and local entanglements (In Celceta he begins having lost his memory, in VIII he's on his 4th or so shipwreck incident) and these games do a good job of capturing that feel of adventure. I've heard there's some debate over whether they're open world games or not and I can see why. In his quest to regain his memory/escape the Island he has to chart a new unexplored land and you're given pretty much free reign to explore yourself.

Celceta is clearly no Skyrim although the freedom is there, but Ys VIII is massive. You can basically go where you want on the island, with the only barrier for exploration being that some areas are blocked off by a landslide, broken bridge or collapsed tree and whatnot and the only way to proceed is to find your fellow castaways on the Island, once you have X amount of people you can all work together and remove/fix the barrier in place and open up the island more. Other than that the game is loaded with systems, defending your makeshift 'Castaway Village' from monster raids, raiding Monster Nests yourself, sidequests to upgrade the village defenses and facilities….it'd all feel so overwhelming if it wasn't so much damn fun to play being a really fun real time action RPG.

If you want to see what Ys (at least 'new' party based Ys, Ys Origin is slightly different) is about theres a demo for the new game, Ys: Monstrum Nox on PSN right now, I've yet to play it but it looks like a Ys game to me.

Want - a lot of the games being speedrun on AGDQ right now, Shovel Knight is looking pretty nice for £20 right now, especially considering it's cross buy..but it's a while of before I'm done to play it I think, I need to at least beat Celceta. Also…Ys 1-3 are on PS Vita PSN I believe, no reason not to play them eventually too. (I deinitely think I prefer the older Ys games).

Disgaea 6 - they upped the level cap from previous games of Level 9999 to Level 99,999,999!

Bin - After 100 hours, I finally escaped The Labyrinth of Refrain!. Good game but the gameplay gets kinda weak when you have a solid team honestly, it slowly became a visual novel for me…which wasn't terrible per se because it was a surprisingly good story, but I've no doubt that other Dungeon crawlers have better gameplay. Hopefully the as-of-yet-untranslated sequel fixes a lot of stuff and builds on the combat a lot more.

EDIT - Holy shit, I've played the demo of Ys IX now. It's a stupidly timed demo but god DAMN that game is going to be great! At least combat wise. Even just to the last game it feels super fluid and fresh, benefits of no Vita version I guess.

People who've played AssCreed Valhalla, what's the gameplay loop? I can't work it out.

I've been in England for a few hours now, and there doesn't seem to be that much to actually do. Which is obviously a ridiculous thing to think about an AssCreed game, so I know I'm missing something.

It doesn't seem to have proper sidequests any more, and the forts (or whatever they're called) don't seem to be worth the effort, swarming as they are with guards and maybe one chest.

Do I just stick to the main quest?

Yes. The majority of the game is now in the main quest, so just follow that. Everything else is basically a diversion - silly little skits, odd bits of treasure, weird collectibles - so you can use those as a distraction if you want but there aren't really any proper side quests any more. (The exception is at your main base, where there are a couple of meaty side-activities that open up new stuff, try and do everything there if you can).

The main quest is ridiculously huge though and takes you literally everywhere so don't ever get the impression there isn't that much to do. I assume this new approach is a reaction to everyone who whined about being underlevelled when they tried to just mainline the main quest in Odyssey - now you can mainline the main quest, it's just 120 hours long and includes the entire game.

Makes sense. At least it's a move away from Ubisoft icon fatigue.

And on a different note, it's bloody gorgeous.

I thought it was a bit mixed, to be honest. The landscapes are stunning and the lighting is amazing. Riding through the foggy fens of East Anglia at dawn is quite the experience. However the character models and especially the animations are really clunky, not helped by really ropey voice acting. (Why do Danes and Saxons sound the same? Why is Eivor the only one doing the accent? Why are all the children American? Why can no-one pronounce words in the same way?)

I am, overall, enjoying it less than pretty much any Assassins Creed game since Unity, though that might just be me being a grump; I've put it aside for a few more patches before I come back to it.

The accents are pretty hilarious. The king of Mercia is just a Brummie. They must have literally looked at a map of Mercia, decided it was modern-day midlands and fully committed.

A late night quickie – my work network now blocks this site for being not being secure enough so I've been reading on my phone but not keen posting from it due to fat handedness.

Play:
Colt Canyon: Pixel art twin stick shooter with an ol' west theme. I'm really enjoying this despite always getting whipped by the first boss. Takes about 20 minutes to get there and it's always good fun. Looks great, tonnes of atmosphere and is well thought out (e.g. buying things is a trade, you don't get gold or currency) it's also slightly deeper than you might think from first look. It's a bit Spelunky/Enter the Gungeon I suppose.

Sekiro: I'm nearly 40 and my Aunt still gives me cash for Christmas. When the PSN sale started I thought 'I'm not going to buy anything' and then I thought 'but… I do have that £40 and she said get something for myself i.e. not the kids' so I finally bought Sekiro.
Initially didn't get on with it but, as mentioned earlier/in Hitman thread, pals have been getting into streaming so I thought it would be a good idea to stream the first hour of this. Didn't pay enough attention to what was going on while chatting and having a good time so did my classic Dark Souls thing of starting again and immediately had a better time.
Really love this game, excellent mix of Souls with a Tenchu feel. Similar souls mechanics but with an ability to sneak and one shot enemies feels fresh. It looks a bit drab, especially compared to Ghost of Tsushima, but it plays so well; it just feels good.
These From games really bring the imitators into sharp relief. Can't believe I spent 30 hours on Mortal Shell, having played this for what probably amounts to 3 hours I've had much more interesting and satisfying experience so far.

Want: Hitting Mans 3 but I'm not going to get it for a while. I'm nearly through Hitman 2 but only on the surface level first run. I've not been as consistently blown away by H2 as the first season.

Bin: Loads. Just loads. Trying to get more early nights, trying to exercise more, trying to eat better, finish books, listen to albums and not endless playlist that I"ve made and obsess over instead of doing something useful with my time. After Christmas I felt like crap. We watched the Phantom Thread then this episode of Binging with Babish that my cousin recommended and then some of his health(ier) videos and then being inspired by this fucking youtuber to sort some stuff out. Anyway, it's going well.

Additional Play: In an attempt to find something to play that I can also entertain the kid with, I've given Dragon Quest XI a look on GamePass – and I'm surprised to find that I'm enjoying it much more this time around than I did on PS4. Maybe it's the orchestrated music (the synth stuff was dreadful), or just the quicker load times making random battles feel less of a slog. Maybe it's having a delighted five-year-old laughing at the monster designs.

The silent protagonist thing still feels a bit weird, and I desperately wish I could do something about that hair, but maybe I'll manage to get a third party member before I abandon it this time.

I played through the first Act on the Switch and it was about 35 hours long, I felt completely satisfied at that point and haven't gone back to it! It's a very long game.

The music is still a problem, honestly - there's so little variety. There's basically an overworld theme, a town theme and a battle theme and you'll hear them all endlessly. Note you can change the extremely grating overworld theme in the options menu to the DQ8 theme though and it's a LOT better.

For some reason I do not fully understand, I started playing Mass Effect Andromeda over the weekend. Maybe it's lowered expectations, the patches and fixes post-launch, or the fact that my most recent experience with the franchise was a Series X-emulated run through the opening mission of the poorly-aged original, but I'm actually really enjoying this. It's comfortable and familiar, but the new characters and locations keep it from feeling like a total retread.

Not all that impressed with the new alien bad guys, though. They look like a combination of all the dullest parts of the dullest alien monster baddies in all of videogames.

Why haven't we landed in the middle of some kind of war between several different species of varying advancement, where humans, turians et al. can sympathise with different factions and have some dramatic tension within the Initiative? Or give us a Star Trek-style Prime Directive dilemma where there are less-advanced planets that we could uplift, but the salarians and krogan disagree on the ethics of doing so, given their own history?

"The Collectors with bone spurs" is just boring.

The signposting can be pretty bad (although I was playing the first mission on my phone via remote play with a five-year-old asking me questions about everything, so it could have been outside the game's control), and it feels like there's a lot of back-and-forth between locations. The new vehicle isn't as fun to rally around in as the Mako was, and the first planetary surface I've been able to drive around on doesn't feel like it was designed with it in mind.

I've already hit on and been rejected by one of my squad, which I wasn't expecting – romantic failure isn't a traditional feature of these things, so even having the option to flirt with someone who wouldn't respond feels like a tiny, weird step towards more realistic human relationships in games.

The on-screen text is atrociously minute, with no options to change the colour or size of subtitles to make them more readable. I tend to play games in the evening, after a long day of staring at a pair of 4k monitors for work; I find it difficult to read 12-point text on a TV several feet away. Maybe we just need a bigger TV.

The on-screen text is atrociously minute, with no options to change the colour or size of subtitles to make them more readable. I tend to play games in the evening, after a long day of staring at a pair of 4k monitors for work; I find it difficult to read 12-point text on a TV several feet away. Maybe we just need a bigger TV.

This was very much a feature of the early PS4/Xbox One generation - when the leap to 1080p seemed to lead developers to assume that what was readable on their monitors at the distance of a couple of feet was perfectly fine for a TV on the other side of the room. There are several games I can think of from around that time that I found basically unplayable due to tiny text, and that's not even considering the subtitles.

These days the problem seems to have eased a litle - the jump to 4K seems to have prompted a bit more thought on the issue, and, well, we've got a bigger TV.

How quickly can you kill 15 enemies in it? Asking because that's one of my Game Pass challenges for the month* and while I don't want to actually play the game, I'll do it for 100pts.

(* The other one is in FFVIII remake and just says 'Save the world', which is… what? That can't be asking me to finish the game, surely?)

EDIT: Nope, it's for installing and starting the game. I think I can handle that…

How quickly can you kill 15 enemies in it?

I did it within the first mission, but since I was on my phone I didn't get a popup to say when it actually dropped. No more than half an hour, I'd say – though I did just go with one of the default Ryders rather than doing any character customisation.

Play:
Valorant, as ever. The new agent Yoru is great and the game overall remains the best in class. I tried a short dabble with CS:GO and watched some of the recent streams of a big competition and Valorant has it beaten in so many areas. The agent skills, the clean level design and the player/viewer feedback are all first rate (though you'd expect that from Riot). I'd hesitate to call the game fun - but it's my daily go to. Brutal, testing, strategic, tactical, satisfying.

Risk of Rain 2 (and 1): We picked this up as a lot of places had this in the bottom reaches of their game of the year for 2020 reviews. And you know what, it's pretty good. A cross between a rogue-like, Borderlands and Monster Hunter (and maybe a splash of Earth Defence). 4 player, co-op, bullet hell shooter. I guess it's fun in the way any co-op four player thing is fun, but it has lots of nice touches. My only criticism might be it can suffer from poor kill feedback (it's possible to just get one shotted by something you couldn't have planned for) and it's also maybe a touch easy as we managed to finish it. Admittedly on the lowest level, but still felt like it gave us a bit too much too soon. I'd sort of recommend it though - and keys are floating around for 6 quid or so. The first one is the same game but in 2D platformer style. If the multiplayer wasn't so borked (RoR1 requires fucking about with port forwarding on your router) I think it would be, maybe, more fun, but it's hard to tell.

Total Warhammer 2: Been playing this multiplayer. I still think it's a little vague and is missing something without an ability to slow or tactical pause, but it's still quite fun in a "lots of small things killing other small things" sort of way.

Cyberpunk: The latest patch…. appears to have made the game worse. But… apart from that, all good. And still great to get immersed in.

Want
A 3-series card, this is getting fucking ridiculous.

Bin
Finished No Way Out, the unique 2 player co-op game over Xmas with my eldest son. It's an absolute jank fest and has some truly eye rollingly awful bits, but I have to say if you go into this unspoiled and play it with a friend/partner/kid over a couple of nights I dare you not to still be talking about it weeks later. The end is cheesy but I'd say this has elements of game experience that push it into the Spec Ops The Line level in terms of what it's trying to do. So yeah. Give it a go (it might be on Gamepass?).

Not so much a bin, but an end to my career as a PDRA as I'll be the CEO of a fully fledged (lol) animal health biomedical company in April backed by half a million quid (some of which is your money, sorry). It's been a weird journey, but I figure I need to put three kids through uni and retire to the Caymen islands so it's the end of working for the common good of humanity and more addressing the 2 billion dollar global market for bovine mastitis. I will remember you all when I'm on my yacht.

When society collapses we'll see you on the Caymens!

/googles "Where the fuck are the Caymen Islands?"

The cavalcade series arc has got really strange. I thought it was a bit far-fetched in the first season when he bought all those Gizmondos, then you had that weird sheep-farming dream sequence, then for some reason everything was full of French people. Now he's a member of the PC Master Race and there's a crossover event with All Creatures Great and Small? I expect it'll get cancelled soon.

Mate don't get me started on graphics cards. I've been hunting something that works at 1440 with DLSS or Raytracing for so long. I'm stuck on a 970 and ampere cards are rare as pigeon eyelashes at the moment.

My life is a bit odd. I'm in the awkward position currently of collaborating with the world's largest animal health company having named every one of the antimicrobial compounds I have discovered something childish and stupid. While this was amusing when I was a postdoc, when you're in the middle of a conference call with some deadpan Americans explaining that their next drug for treating a serious animal disease is currently named after an indie videogame character or Magic the Gathering game mechanic I do feel some twinges of regret.

GPUs: Yeah, I did have a 3070 as a possible on rllmuk, but realised my PSU wasn't beefy enough. Dithered. Then it went. And I'm not sure if I want a 3080. I hear stock issues should be largely resolved by April. But then it's going to be sunny and I won't want it as much. smh.

Mind you I just rebuilt a PC for one of my kids. They've been "slumming it" on a 2012 AMD CPU which is weird and doesn't run Apex and other games and an R9 280. I've just put together an i5 build with a 980 and what an amazing card it is. For a relatively budget build it really does astonishingly well on some quite beefy titles. It's great a top tier 2015 PC can still cut it 6ish years on. What is less great that I am responsible for looking after 5 gaming PCs across my three kids + stepkids. Only one of which (my eldest) who appears to have any technical nous whatsoever. I have a server on Discord for them to flag technical assistance requests and it's like being on the front line at PC World.

"we're able to get rid of the MRSA bacteria by tapping Tim the enchanter"

I wish that was a million miles from the truth.

Amazing.

Examples, please.

One of them had better be named after your favourite Nintendo uncle.

Suddenly I want a cow vaccine named after me more than anything else in the whole world.

I'm afraid I'm under NDA. I'd tell you names, but then I'd have to kill you (and if you take my drugs this is almost certainly a possibility).

Only one person from here will be getting a drug named after them and it's feltmonkey (I'll be in touch for licencing and other rights).

feltmonkey; not tested on animals.

feltmonkey; not YET tested on animals.

Careful, you'll give the guy a reputation.

felt's been all over on rllmuk boasting about his custom title here. Dude ALREADY has a reputation.

Just remind him to call home once in a while ok?

Bin

Tokyo Xanadu Ex+ - I read the perfect description of this game the other day that sums up the game completely: It's if Cold Steel was remade with an algorithm. It's maybe one of the most bland RPGs I've played in a while, dare I say it…kind of 'souless'? Apparently it's made by new members Falcom and it shows so hard, it's almost certainly the worst game I've played from Falcom (Gods do bleed after all ). Which isn't to say it's bad per se but there's 4 Cold Steel games out there that this game is trying to be like, literally no reason not to just play them and then replay them and then buy them on Vita and replay them again then consider trying the Cold Steel 3 demo on Switch and deciding whether to replay from Cold Steel 1 again for the Platinum in an attempt to finally say good bye and move on or start from Trails in the Sky First Chapter instead and run through the games again in a vague attempt to fill up the time for when Hajimari no Kiseki releases…

…

ANYWAY

I'm going to do a slight swerve here and say the combat and customisation is kinda' fun, in some ways muffles into shirt more satisfying than Ys VIII, yes, Ys VIII the action RPG renowned for fun action combat…I dunno, I liked Ys VIII a lot but fuck Party Ys tbh bring back solo Adol…or Yunica. :/

The best thing I can say is, the foundation for a sequel is here (not that it's getting one, F). The game was so close yet so far to being great. They just needed to sprinkle more lore about the throughout chapters and give you a reason to want to explore, the main character (who isn't a silent protag yet still manages to be more dull than any given Persona MC somehow) doesn't even have a great motivation for being here other than 'he's nice, he may or may not be doing a lot of work/jobs to hide a depression but we won't explore this much'. Give us more well rounded characters, this a developer known for their NPCs and there's a guy in this who could be replaced with a mobius strip and be less one dimensional ffs.

FINALLY: they did sorta' try, sad to say the additional content in this PS4 version is quite big, I didn't play this on Vita but there's at least two false finishes and extended endings and none of them are earned so I kinda' got fed up by the end-end-end knowing if I did play it on Vita I'd be done ages ago…but the content itself is substantial for the 3 Xanadu fans still out there!

An okay game…but not a great one, very aggressively okay….

Play

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore

Like Wonderful 101 this is yet another Wii U game deemed worthy enough for a second shot, hence the' encore' tag. For those who don't know it's supposed to be Fire Emblem meets Shin Megami Tensei crossover with some Idol Bullshit sprinkled in (I say that lovingly >_>). The resulting game falls more on the SMT side of things as a more forgiving Persona in which for now I am using Chrom from Fire Emblem Awakening as my 'Persona' (Or Mirage as it's called here) and casting spells to hit elemental weakesses and whatnot.

It got a lukewarm reception for some reason given the games involved, I always thought this looked pretty nice but apparently people were let down by the Fire Emblem:SMT ratio or something? And I guess the Idol thing is a bit silly, the world is threatened by mysterious shadow things? Time to learn how to be a Pop Idol (this is a thing that happens)! But so far, the gameplay is close enough to Persona to be fun and I like Tsubasa a lot as a character so I want to play on.

Additional (still) PLAY(ing):
Sea of Thieves - Season One finally arrived yesterday and we (my missus and I) dove straight in. It's… a bit uninspiring? A total rip-off of every other game with a 100-level Battle Pass, and a huge list of tasks to do to earn them that seems to ask me to do loads of stuff we already did all over again. It almost feels like work, which isn't the most positive response that comes to mind.

It's also off to a pretty bad start, jank-wise. The Renown system has a warning on it saying that rewards are delayed, but it seems to be cherry-picking what you get rewarded for. I could understand if it was giving me nothing at all, or queuing up the things I've done and slowly dripfeeding me the points later. Instead, it's given me the points already for some things I did but not others; yes, you started this quest but no, you didn't talk to this guy despite you doing that immediately before starting that quest, etc. Very frustrating and it doesn't fill me with hope for how all this is going to play out.

I honestly think they should have delayed the launch, still behind-the-scenes testing of the point tracker has been playing havoc with the rewards system for a couple of months now (see this if you care to). But no, they ploughed ahead and it looks like rough sailing for the immediate future.

We also had our boat totally glitch out on us last night, right as we were finishing the new Merchant voyage (which, to be fair, is really nice and a good mix-up of the least popular company stuff). We delivered all the crates but had ignored investigating the shipwreck which would have ended the mission because there were big bad Reapers nearby. Just as we were about to leave dock to return to it… our boat just vanished, taking our rowboat with it. The three things we still had onboard (a storage crate, an empty chest and the Captain's Key - the bonus item that gives you the bulk of the loot on these missions) fell to the floor and… the key fell through the geometry of the island. It was still there, glowing blue when you looked at it from a distance, but it couldn't be picked up. So, we lost a tonne of loot just because the game decided to be a bit broken. Great.

It's looking like my long-standing crew is breaking up - we haven't played together in ages and one of the people still keen is leaving to return to the UK in a few weeks. Slooping around with my better half is preferable anyway, because galleons are awful, but it's still a shame. I'm going to plug away and stick to getting my commendations, but will make an effort with the Renown if it gets fixed. That said, the rewards are a bit shit so maybe not…

EDIT: Everything seems to have caught up overnight, so that's something. Even so, the rewards are crap… out of five levels, I've already earned two 'bags of gold' even though I already have nearly 2mil in the bank. Oh well.

Just remind him to call home once in a while ok?

Love you guys. I only post on rllmuk about football. I can talk about football literally forever.

Remember the best movie of all time Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs? Flint's Dad can only talk in fishing metaphors. I think that's me, except I only communicate in football metaphors. In my old job every time I wanted to tell the team anything, or motivate them, I ended up relating it all to football. Half of them never had any idea what I was on about. The metaphors would get very granular. "Okay, we're one down, but we have a free-kick on the edge of the box so this is a chance to equalise if we get it right. We need to make sure the right person takes the free-kick - Rachael that's you - but I want you, Debbie, to run over the ball and distract the goalkeeper. Joan you're on the edge of the wall so remember to duck and try to push over a defender if you think you can get away with it." This would be about something like tidying the bridesmaid dresses or something.

I read everything on here (I'm yet to understand a single one of Alastor's posts of course) but I rarely have anything to say about games. I don't play a huge amount of games and my opinions on the ones I do play are often very dull. For example I have an additional Play - Ori and the Will of the Wisps. It's very very pretty, and it seems a bit sad. It kept crashing on launch until I disabled my anti-virus. Not interesting.

I can talk about football literally forever.

That VAR is really ruining the game

Yeah, it's a pain in the arse apart from when it's giving Man Utd penalties.

Did you see that ludicrous display.

What was Wenger thinking sending Walcott on that early?