PWB April 2024

Play

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth - I am near the end of this gargantuan game now but I've been holding off completion of the main story while I level up and clear off some of the absurd mountain of side content. It's a brilliant game, no doubt, but somehow slightly less than the sum of its parts: there's SO much to do here that inevitably some of it will appeal more than other stuff, and the main story is surprisingly weak. Still, it's properly epic and everything to do with Kiryu in this game is an absolute delight.

Defense Grid: The Awakening - Steam tells me that I played and completed this (gulp) fourteen years ago but I've gone back to it on the Steam Deck and it's really surprisingly great. It's the most 2009 game in existence - it's Tower Defence, it's very brown and it's got a Portal tie-in - but honestly this is as good as tower defence games ever got (even its own sequel didn't quite hit the same heights) and there's loads to do here. I've been working my way through the aforementioned Portal DLC and while GladOS's shtick is as irritating as ever, it's a really fun and challenging set of levels with some great twists on the base formula.

Evil West - also very brown. This is simple fun, kind of like Gears of War in that all you really do is press forward and tackle little arenas of enemies before pressing forward again. But it's a nice distraction.

Want

I'll probably take a look at Diablo IV now it's on Game Pass but I'm honestly expecting it to be pretty much the same as Diablo III, which I never reached the end of. Several billion quid well spent I guess?

Bin

For the first time since starting work in 1995 I find myself unemployed, i.e. I've finished my current role and I don't have anything else lined up yet. The last contract I had was a bin fire and I'm demotivated and demoralised, looking forward to a break in all honesty. I think I now need to make myself take the time to find the right role, and not get panicked into taking the first thing that comes along. I do think I need a bit of a change - the job I've been doing has changed a lot, especially since Covid, and I don't like it much any more - and while I have a few ideas I don't know how realistic they are. So it's going to be an interesting month or two. Wish me luck.

Fingers crossed something positive pops up for you soon, Gar!

Play
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has been put on temporary hold by Helldivers 2, though I'm gonna have to go back to it soon or risk accidentally spoiling it for myself via game news website headlines. Just need to decide how much sidequest nonsense I can be bothered to do; I know full well that once I finish the main story, I'll almost certainly never go back to mop up Chocobo farm bullshit.

Want
Friends to play Helldivers 2 with. It's so much better with banter over voice comms, it's almost a different game.

Bin
Any traitor not following the Main Order. WHAT ARE YOU FIGHTING BUGS FOR!? THE FIGHT IS AGAINST THE AUTOMATONS, READ THE DAMN DISPATCH!! CALL YOURSELF A HELLDIVER!?

Play

So far this month, I've managed very little.

I played one session of Sea of Thieves with the kid (we finished a half-completed Tall Tale), which is essentially solo slooping soundtracked by giggling from an eight-year old who's plotting to splash me with a bucket of his drunken pirate's vomit and fire my dog out of a cannon.

After finishing Unicorn Overlord (I'm still working my way through some endgame content), I finally found a couple of hours to jump into Dragon's Dogma 2, which is basically just more of the same for the series, and therefore exactly what I wanted from it. I'm keen to get back into it, but since it's not really age-appropriate I can't play it while the kid's around. I was hoping for an option to turn off or tone down the blood (otherwise I don't think it's substantially worse violence than he's seen in other games), but sadly not.

Want

More time to play Dragon's Dogma – and, honestly, Sea of Thieves; I'm always caught a little bit off-guard how pleasant it is to just sail around.

I would like to give Helldivers 2 a shot, but I don't have a PS5 and I can't see myself actually playing it on PC. Not sure I have the hard drive space free for it anyway, though I do keep eyeing up SSDs.

Bin

Had to go to London last week for work – the first time I've met anyone I work with in person in over two years and two jobs – and while I'm glad I went and it was great to see that everyone actually exists from the shoulders down, I got very ill on the last night and had a miserable train journey back north, which I'm still feeling unrecovered from. I think the clocks going forward may also have exacerbated the disorientation.

So, bin travel sickness, I guess?

Play

Got a few things on the go currently

Witcher 3 - as mentioned in the Switch thread, I got this and am enjoying it despite the text and menus all being a tad small for the screen

Jedi Survivor - people said this was a brilliant continuation of the first game and they were right, had seen very little of this and had no idea it had Battle Droids, so that's brilliant, recently rewatched the Phantom Menace trilogy and do have a new love for those films.

Shadowrun Hong Kong - technically not started this but it's all queued and set for starting this month.

Football Manager 24 - I downloaded a database of all the non league set up and am about to hit my 3rd season having started at basically the lowest tier possible, and the actual league I played in.

Ghosts of Tshima - Not been on this in over a week but was really enjoying it. The open world is already a tad irksome to me as I just want to get to the game content, but am really enjoying this.

Fortnite - still playing a few games of this every day, my kid likes to watch this, pick my character, laugh at all the crazy outfits etc. it's nice being into a shooter that I can casually play without getting as competitive or engrossed as shooters have made me in the past.

Want -

Actually, nothing currently, feels like there is little on the landscape I am desperate for.

Bin -

Whilst thankfully finally getting over it, I have been ill from Thursday-Monday of this bank holiday. I have enjoyed sitting around and watching football and reading, but we did have other plans I would preferred to have done. Am convinced it's some kind of Covid hybrid despite not highlighting as that on a test.

More time to play Dragon's Dogma – and, honestly, Sea of Thieves; I'm always caught a little bit off-guard how pleasant it is to just sail around.

I'll message you next time we're Thieving Seas, if you like - we usually trio brig, but have been wanting to get on a galleon for a while, since Sarah's sister hasn't sailed one before.

Fingers crossed for you, Gar, hope things go your way!

PLAY
Sea of Thieves - The renewed drive to play continues, thanks to having something to work towards again now the level cap is increased . Even without specifically trying, we're making progress in each company (emergent stuff is ridiculously good, especially the random digs you get from bottles), though Reapers is going to be a grind since we don't want to raise the emissary flag for that. Athena actually seems doable now, given they've stopped loot being worth fuck all to the company. We've unlocked the Guild emissary flag too (finally!), so that's good.
Balatro - Kind of fallen off this a bit, but it's still great so I'll keep it in the rotation. Once it comes out on mobile, that's going to ruin me/make my trips to work more enjoyable (delete as appropriate).
AFK Journey - This kept popping up on Instagram ads for me when it was coming, so I just set it to pre-install on my phone and thought nothing of it. It's been out a week now and I'm kind of hooked, though whether that'll last is another matter. I hate games like Raid: Shadow Legends, so I'm not sure why this is keeping me going… it's really pretty, I guess? Numbers go up, which is nice? It has a story and the voice acting isn't terrible? Whatever it is, I'm enjoying it though it's a massive drain on my battery.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door - Because work, and I'm on the last boss after 50hrs of play.

WANT
Pepper Grinder is as good as I hoped it would be, so I'll get it when it's discounted. Other than that though, nothing on the horizon is particularly tickling me.

BIN
Someone buy my Bournemouth flat please. Please. Please.

Want
Friends to play Helldivers 2 with. It's so much better with banter over voice comms, it's almost a different game.

I have a discord with okay people in it that are in voice basically all the time on it if you're interested?

Noticed a couple of my D&D players have been playing, so I'll probably drop in with them when I can; I'm in a lot of discords already, and ignore 90% of them.

Are any of the Hell Divers 2 people playing via PC? Considering getting it on there, presuming my comp can handle it as never actually tried to play anything newer than Total Warhammer 2 on it, as presume FM24 doesn't count.

I'm on PS5, but it's got crossplay.

Additional PLAY:
Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed - I've had this for absolutely ages and so has my partner, but we've just never played it. Fast forward to yesterday when we lost much of the day and ended up with only a couple of hours left to do… anything before having to make dinner, which isn't nearly enough to do much in Sea of Thieves (our go-to weekend game). So we loaded this up and set about bustin' ghosts. It's… fine? Quite fun. Very much set up for constant play given the 'do job, chip away at ongoing task, rinse repeat' model of gameplay. Still, some things annoy like the four player setup leading to AI bots which either do all the legwork OR fuck things up by firing randomly at scenery and scaring the hell out of citizens, and how the ghosts themselves seem to get in the way of other tasks you're meant to be tracking. But I like it, and will probably dip into it every so often. It's cross-play so if anyone ends up with it and wants to play, I'm game.

Play - The Lamplighters League

An educational tale as to the stupidity and shortsightedness of the games industry. This game was declared a commercial failure less than a week after release, publishers Paradox "parted ways" with the developers Harebrained Schemes (of Shadowrun and Battletech fame), layoffs ensued, and support for the game was ended a couple of months later. The fact that the game was only released on two platforms (PC and Xbox), had very little hype and was on Game Pass on day one might you think have had something to do with low initial sales but who said logic has to come into this? Additionally it was clearly kicked out of the door too soon and initially had some quite severe bugs which can't have helped. I think we can chalk this one up to publisher stupidity, guys.

Which is a shame because this game, even as it stands, is absolutely superb. A kind of hybrid of stealth game and turn-based XCOM-alike (with the balance weighted toward the latter) set in the 1930s with a team of rogues and scoundrels globe-trotting and trying to take down some nefarious bad guys called the Banished Court. It has absolutely bags of character, a great sense of style, and lots of things to keep track of which makes it incredibly engaging to play. It really does have "lost classic" written all over it and I hope people continue to discover this for years to come.

Sadly - although most of the game's crash bugs have apparently been fixed - performance is still poor on every platform, I think PC owners have the better of this one though as it's turn-based it's still playable if slightly janky on Series X. We also got one small piece of free DLC and that's it, though the game was clearly set up for more. It's a real pity, because a slick and finished version of Lamplighters League would have been a superb game, but even in its more-or-less-finished form it is still worth checking out.

The first time I heard of this was a sidebar ad that made it look like a mobile game; I thought it was some kind of idle battler/gacha thing for ages.

It does have that exact graphical style beloved of cheap mobile games, all exaggerated facial features and long limbs like some sort of Dreamworks knock-off. I can see why you'd mistake it at a glance.

The turn-based tactics genre seems cursed, sadly. They keep making them and they're almost always decent but none of them seem to ever come close to achieving the success that XCOM did. Even the games with the biggest licenses (Persona, Gears, MARVEL ferchrissake) seem to tank. Hard to imagine a brand new IP with zero publisher support ever achieving any traction.

Additional WANT:
Animal Well is out in just over two weeks on Switch, so colour me excited for that one. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is the week after or so, so bagsy me that as well. Thems good indie eatin'.

Play

Fallout: New Vegas - straight off the back of the TV series, no idea how long I'll stick to it because I don't know if I even have time for a new Fallout playthrough but at the same time, I can't tear myself away. The fact that that it's 14 years old, a janky, glitchy piece of shit and still better than Starfield in any way that I remember is pretty shocking, what's even more shocking is that both games play like they came out a year or two apart so it's not just that it's a better game it's better in the same way Starfield tried to be. Didn't come here to shit on Starfield but playing New Vegas just brought all the disappointment back

Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception - one of the more impressive PSP games I've played I think, it's not that it pushes what I feel the PSP is capable of, but as an Ace Combat game this really does feel like a full on console game in the series but on the PSP. Mission variety is great, it feels great to play (well I am emulating it on a console that has enough buttons to mimic the console AC controls, the PSP default setup is kinda bad) and it even has an AC style story, I can't imagine fans were let down here.

Dragon Quest 8 - Slowly making my way through, the further I get the more obvious it is that DQ11 wins the 'which is better' contest hands down. This isn't a bad game though, but after the generational narrative of 5 it feels a bit weaker than I remember, as is the cast which doesn't hold a candle to 11's. Also this 3DS version is so good I don't think I'd touch the PS2 version ever again, no random battles, extra party members, on screen map…it's actually quite a checklist of QoL.

Want - tempted to see if I can start and beat Baldur's Gate 3 before the new FFXIV expansion is out. :s

Bin Probably New Vegas soon.

I've been playing a bit of New Vegas too but it's not really grabbing me, like you say it is very much like Starfield and I'm not sure I've got the patience for another Bethesda potato people jank fest right now. I'm not really a Fallout fan to be honest, but I am enjoying the TV show at least.

New Vegas' biggest strength is that it's not a Bethesda potato people jank fest, but an Obsidian potato people jank fest - so it's at least an interesting potato people jank fest. Once it gets going, at least. The early hours are a lot of wandering the wasteland and can involve getting repeatedly murdered by giant radioactive mosquitoes, so it's not going to be to everyone's taste.

I thought that was the point right? I always saw it as: want good RPG > play Fallout 1 and 2, Want Wasteland Survival Simulator > Play Fallout 3/NV/4

Out of curiosity, because I've somehow accumulated them all over the years, I installed the original Fallout.

It is not a friendly game, by modern standards.

Everything is very small and very brown. You have to repeatedly right-click to toggle how you're interacting with the world. The writing is wildly variable, but leans towards the bad. The UI is inscrutible and fiddly, but I eventually worked out how to equip and use items so I wasn't killed by a rat eight feet from the vault door.

I can just about see the outlines of what people liked back in the mists of 1997, but I'm not sure I'll be going back to it.

I just Googled Fallout, and Bethesda bought the franchise less than ten years after Fallout 1 came out. And they've been in charge of it for 17.

It felt like such an old, storied franchise when they first bought it. Isn't time weird.

Bit of a late start to the month, I admit. I've had a month of bouncing from one thing to the next.

Play
Jedi Survivor - I'm still playing through this. I'm currently getting distracted by sidequests. I think it might be one of the very best soulslike games.

Spiderman Remastered - I have dipped in and out of this, playing it on the ROG Ally. It's throwaway in a good way. It has a nice breezy atmosphere and seems like something you can just drop into without needing to really engage your brain too much. The traversal is the best thing about the game.

Final Fantasy 7 - I've modded up the PC version using something called 7th Heaven, adding in mods that do some really cool visual fixes and quality of life improvements. To my eyes this is the best way to play the original FF7, so I might finally get past the first disk this time.

Diablo 4 - I've never played a Diablo game before. Well, that's not true - I've never played a game in the Diablo series before. I've played Diablo games, such as Grim Dawn and Torchlight 2. Diablo 4 seems to be hated by gamerz, but I'm enjoying it a lot. It's incredibly slick and polished. The pad controls are perfectly-implemented, so again it is a perfect match for the ROG Ally. It has this whole appeal of being a kind of mindless exercise in erasing enemies and repeatedly doing the moves you've picked for your character, collecting loot and xp, and ticking off areas as you explore them. It's a very relaxing, frictionless method of delivering tiny hits of seratonin. It's like eating Haribo.

Splatoon - Yep, the first one. Obviously I'm not playing this now, but I played it a lot up until the servers got shut down, for a very specific reason. My son is autistic and prone to bouts of anxiety and obsessive behaviour, and Splatoon is one of his minor special interests. He knew the servers were going to get shut down, and a few weeks before they did he started to panic that he hadn't unlocked all the weapons. We calculated how many Splatoon coins he would need, and it was half a million. You get somewhere between 100-2000 coins per online match. He was really upset and convinced that it was impossible, he'd never get all the weapons because this was the last chance to do it, etc. So I decided to use it as a way of showing him that if you put your mind to it and put the work in, you can achieve things you thought impossible. And I did it. As luck would have it, I had a gap between commissions, so I played for an hour or so every day, and I got pretty darn good at Splatoon. By the end, I was consistently the player who scored the most ground coverage (the thing that actually wins you the game) and often the one with the most splats too. My team usually won, which was helpful as you get a 2x modifier to the number of coins you get. I persuaded my son to join in and we climbed the mountain together. We had the coins we needed with about a week to spare. We ceremoniously unlocked all the weapons. He turned the Switch off accidentally and panicked that he had lost all the weapons. We turned it back on and they were still there. He played Splatoon with all the weapons for about half an hour total before the servers got shut down. The end.

Want
To be able to just move my arms quicker, in order to paint the huge army I'm currently working on faster.

Bin
A sore throat I've had for what feels like months.

On the Fallout theme I am back on Fallout 76. It's difficult not playing a game for several years and then just randomly respawning in the middle of a location with a full quest log, then seemingly hundreds of things appear on screen.

I love feltmoney's Splatoon story. It's very relatable. Time to get started on Splatoon 2 now?

We played a bit of Diablo 4 looking for some couch co-op fun, and didn't really like it. It's mechanically very similar to Diablo 3 (obviously) and the UI is definitely better, but it's really grey and unpleasantly grim and it's got loads of tediously long cut-scenes. At one point we watched a whistling peasant push a cart really slowly for over a minute with nothing else at all happening on the screen. The previous game told its story perfectly well through audio logs and conversations so I'm not sure why they've regressed to these terrible momentum-sapping cut-scenes for what's supposed to be an exciting action game. Maybe it calms down on these as it progresses but I don't think we'll be sticking it out to find out.

I have about 50 hours in Diablo 4 and I can't remember having watched a cutscene.

Hit things. Collect loot. Skip anything that stops that gameplay loop. Repeat.

We have been having a lot of fun playing Archvale co-op. It's bullet-hell Zelda so it is hard, you need to learn how to dodge, but it's got a nice difficulty curve and co-op is easier.

I do remember the cut scene Gar is talking about, but I don't remember seeing another one after that. I do think the cut-scenes in the game are really well-done. They are something that Blizzard are really good at. The one at the start of the game with the band of adventurers trying to get to some loot is spectacular. After the scene with the cart, the game is not cutscene-heavy, but it is grim. It's a bit of a horror game, really. Some of the quests are pretty nasty, or sometimes pretty sad. I do take issue with the idea that it is supposed to be an exciting action game, though. It's not exciting. It's relaxing. It's a trance game. Press A, A, X, X, X, X, loot, run to next group, press A, A, X, X, X, X, loot… The only deviations from this are when you press the map button and realise that you're heading in slightly the wrong direction and adjust your trajectory accordingly.