I enjoyed XIII when it came out too. The first c10 hours are only tolerable, but as others have said it really opens up once you get full control and hit a certain chapter. I could have coped better with the linearity if the systems opened up quicker, the spoonfeeding was the most frustrating bit.
I can kind of understand why they did it though - the battle system is actually really clever but takes a big shift in mindset to use properly. For ages I was frustrated that I couldn't select e.g. Cure quickly enough to keep up, but once I grasped that I was controllling the party not the characters, it suddenly clicked. I've still never played anything else like it really. Still, I'm not sure they needed 10 hours to do it properly…
I finished it on ps3 but didn't go back and do the platinum - that did seem like a hell of a grind. Got about halfway through 2 and always meant to go back but never did for some reason. Never played 3. Would definitely be up for a run through the sequels at some point.
Combat gets a lot of flack for the 'auto-battle (as if FF7-9 are super complex…) feature but I think it gets pretty fun and frantic the further you go (I think early as the Odin fight you need to understand it a bit). Character wise, I think MPH is going to absolutely hate Vanille running around and going 'Hmmmmmm, Waaaa ^_^' lmao but I don't remember hating the cast as much as everyone else.
Beating FFXIII in 2021 wasn't on my 2021 Bingo, but if I can squeeze it in after Arise maybe I will. Also like Gar said I'd like to revisit the two very unecessary but kinda fun sequels if they ever follow the first game. The second game is similar to XIII with some QoL improvements but XIII-3 was a super cool setup that I think ultimately hurt the XIII lore and was hurt by being a XIII game and not an original game. Very Valkyrie Profile style with you going around doing sidequests as some sort of Herald to save souls from the End of the World whilst rewinding/stopping time.
My biggest issue with the opening is that it drops you in the middle of a complicated world with weird, similar-sounding terminology all over the place and just expects you to keep up/work it out/care. I got the hang of it eventually, but it doesn't exactly meet you halfway.
It definitely expects you to head into the menus and read the glossary. It's incomprehensible otherwise.
Character wise, I think MPH is going to absolutely hate Vanille running around
I'd forgotten Vanille's stupid run. The absolute epitome of flappy-armed stupid JRPG girl running.
I finished it on ps3 but didn't go back and do the platinum - that did seem like a hell of a grind.
I did get the Platinum and yes, it's a hell of a grind. But a measure of how much I enjoyed the game. Refining my battle style to take down those massive armoured tortoises at the end of the game was a really fun challenge.
Goddammit I'm installing this tonight.
All I know for the Platinum is apparently 'don't sell ANYTHING'
I literally got to the point where XIII takes the handbrake off but there was a split in the disc and by the time I could get back to it I had no clue what I was doing.
I am planning on playing it again, I want to play all of the Final Fantasy games through to completion, I've got XII at a stage where I need to grind a bit as I'm nearing the end but finding the grunts tough and I think I'm on the home stretch of IV.
Does anyone know if XCOM 2 is any good on consoles? The bundle with all DLC is on the Xbox store with a staggering £68 discount, and twelve quid for the lot is extremely tempting even though I've already got it all on Steam – playing on the sofa is just much more appealing.
I got the base game on PS+ some time ago, and although I didn't play a ton of it, the controls seemed fine.
Edit/caveat: I didn't really like the PC controls on the first one, though.
I've played the Switch version a bit and, while it's got some fairly big frame rate problems, it plays and controls really well.
I'd assume the Series X version has no problem with performance.
The PS4 version seemed to run fine.
Had a quick look at a couple of videos and it looks very similar (unsurprisingly) to the UI and controls used for the first XCOM game(s) on 360. I've been playing Enemy Within quite a bit lately and the UI is really well thought out.
I'm not sure this counts as a bargain in this universe or any other but it might be of interest to cavalcade I suppose. RTX 3090 available at RRP at Scan: https://www.scan.co.uk/nvidia/products/3090/yqpinsxe9oeoxz
Bless you for thinking any in stock GPU would be there for longer than 30 seconds.
I'm actually good for GPUs at the mo 3080 main PC and a 2070S in a secondary. I'll try and get a 4000 series at launch.
It was in stock an hour ago! Naively I thought the market for £1400 GPUs would be fairly limited, but I guess scalpers gonna scalp.
Automated stock scrapers will get anything within seconds. That said the crypto market is in freefall so I expect to see a flood of second hand cards and a stabilisation of the market as the months go on. Unless the slump turns (but it has an air of a collapsing Ponzi scheme to it at the moment).
That said the crypto market is in freefall … Unless the slump turns (but it has an air of a collapsing Ponzi scheme to it at the moment).
Some of the shine has definitely come off crypto lately – the NFT thing has backfired spectacularly as a PR effort for the utility of crypto, and thankfully seems to be tainting anyone who touches it – but there have been a lot of downturns in the past that led to an even higher peak and I don't think anybody is able to predict where the hell it's going to go from one day to the next.
It's all a fucking scam, of course, but so long as there's a greater fool, the lesser fools will keep propping it up.
On the subject of NFTs, Nate Brown's Hit Points newsletter has this spectacular description of Zynga's latest effort to throw their hat in the crypto ring.
This week, Zynga’s VP of blockchain gaming Matt Wolf gave an interview to Axios about the company’s nascent NFT plans — and reader, I think this might be the dumbest thing that I have heard so far about NFTs. This Wolf has huffed, and he has puffed, and he has absolutely shat the bed. His error, while fatal, is devastatingly simple: he has stepped up to talk about a wildly contentious issue, and told the truth. He has said the quiet parts out loud. He has broken what I imagine is the first rule in the Big Book Of Marketing And PR, and then set said tome on fire.
Wolf was asked about the target audience for Zynga’s blockchain games, the first of which is set to launch this year (though whether Wolf will be in post to see it is now, I imagine, a matter of some debate). “When they enter into one of these products,” he said, “they come at it from an investor, or a whale, point of view and are interested in specific elements, including yield. […] We don’t want to assume that they want a super, super-deep gameplay experience.”
He actually called his target customers Whales in a public interview.
I don't think this is necessarily the PR implosion Brown does, though – crypto bros are, at this point, almost certainly not interested in or bothered by the labels other people tar them with.
The XCOM 2 collection is currently four quid in the Switch sale. The Switch doesn’t quite have the horsepower to run it at its best but that is a hell of a lot of quality game for that price.
There's a Sid Meier bundle over at Humble Bundle right now which gets you complete versions of Civs 3-6 along with a load of other stuff like Beyond Earth, Colonization, Starships, Pirates! and so on.
I mean it's more than worth it just for Civ 6 and all its DLC but if you don't already have a lot of this stuff it's pretty immense value.
Bundle for Ukraine - nearly 1000 "things" (mostly games, but with some books and soundtracks and tabletop RPG stuff thrown in) for a minimum of $10.
https://itch.io/b/1316/bundle-for-ukraine
There are quite a few (good) things in there that I recognise, and obviously a hell of a lot that I don't. But it's for a good cause, obviously.
I’ve spent the morning digging through it and have found plenty to enjoy. I’ve been meaning to buy Celeste for ages and there’s a few excellent Troika! books. I’m about to go and have a dig into the .dungeon and Lost Eons RPGs.
Yeah, Celeste and Baba is You are worth the price of admission on their own, plus there's another half a dozen things in there I've enjoyed time with too. The list is a bit overwhelming size-wise, but there's some real quality in there too.
There's a couple of cute looking games about exploring islands which I suspect my younger child would love. A Short Hike is one, I'm totally blanking on the other just now though. It looked quite like Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon. I'll find it after I've done the school pick-up.
I really like Cook! Serve! Delicious! 2!! (or whatever combination of letters and exclamation marks makes up the title of that game). Crosscode is pretty good too.
It also has Towerfall Ascension AKA the best local multiplayer game ever made, but I assume we've all got that one already.
Was it Wandersong you were thinking of, maybe, Brian?
Summer in Mara is the one I was thinking of!
Also for RPGs Lost Eons and Runecairn are both worth a look.
Finally pulled the trigger on getting the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary collection for Switch, since it's gone sub-£10 (until tomorrow) and I always said that was my biting point. Not going to complain about that for Third Strike, Alpha 3 and SSF2 Turbo.
Also! Watched The Batman the other day, and now I just picked up the trilogy on Xbox (Asylum, City and Knight) for €18 with all the DLC. Interesting that Origins seems to have been wiped from the face of the earth, even in the eyes of the publisher… 
Yeah, I was about to say that. I was looking on the Xbox store last night and nothing on Origins? With the new gameplay video that was uploaded the other day of Gotham knights, I really want to go back and play it. It's the only one I've not played and with it being the same team that's making Gotham Knights. I thought I'll give it a go. Shame really.
To be fair, Batman Oranges was shit. So no wonder they're trying to scrub it.
Gotham Knights looks meh too…
Mad Max is £2.99 on the Xbox store!? I've heard really good things from this, the driving mostly. I think it's FPS boosted too (120 if you have a series X).
If that's available at that price when I get to my xbox will grab it, I started to play it when it was on Gamepass and liked it.
If anyone's ever been tempted to read the original Witcher books, you can get the whole lot for 99p today on Kindle in the Amazon daily deal.
Now taking requests for Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes and Mario Strikers Battle League Football. 
That Mario Strikers Battle League Football looks so fun. My only worry is the last few sports titles from Nintendo seem light on content on release and later slowly add more characters, levels and stuff.
That Mario Strikers Battle League Football looks so fun. My only worry is the last few sports titles from Nintendo seem light on content on release and later slowly add more characters, levels and stuff.
Understandable. But free content is always good and Strikers is only really lacking in the character roster department from what I can tell (I grabbed my code today).
I'll look forward to your opinion when you get time. The one on the GameCube was ace!
The World Ends With You NEO on PS4 is £16.95, the demo was fun but I had to too many games to play at the time but this price is low enough to go for it now I think.
What are peoples Steam sale suggestions then?
Currently I have The Supreme Commander collection and the Star Dock Legends pack in my basket, but also looking at Medieval Total War 2 and Starship Troopers RTS from my Wishlist.
Anodyne is free on itch.io this weekend. It's a surreal homage to Link's Awakening.
https://han-tani.itch.io/anodyne/devlog/485565/anodyne-10th-anniversary-free-weekend
Anodyne is free on itch.io this weekend. It's a surreal homage to Link's Awakening.
https://han-tani.itch.io/anodyne/devlog/485565/anodyne-10th-anniversary-free-weekend
Thanks Brian! Will save this for when I finish LA 😊
Steam decks have 10% off at the moment, to celebrate a year on the market. My credit card is trying to hide in the corner of my wallet, but I think it will have to surrender to the inevitable soon enough…
Anno 1800 - the best city-building game ever - has just launched on console and is free to play for the first few days on both Xbox and PS5 to allow people to check it out. Took me a while to find the right version on the Xbox store but I can confirm that it's possible to download and play for free right now.
Jesus that's Anno 1800, Civ 6, Age of Empires 2 and Cities Skyline all free/on Game Pass in the last month.
I need a mouse.
Steam decks have 10% off at the moment, to celebrate a year on the market. My credit card is trying to hide in the corner of my wallet, but I think it will have to surrender to the inevitable soon enough…
Stop this. I absolutely don't want/need one.
Apparently Death Stranding is free on the Epic store just now.
They could be offering £20 and a free back rub with it, and I still wouldn't want it.
You do seem to get a 25% discount coupon for the Epic Store for other games when you add it to your library (or at least, I did).
Resident Evil 4 is 23 quid at the minute on PSN. Just picked it up.
Similar on Xbox - I nabbed it too.
