I don't know how many songs are in there but he's definitely on the list, as for the soundtrack, I'm not the type of guy who even know who CHVURCHES were before DS but I fucking love everything I've heard in this game so far, what's better is you get an MP3 player like function to listen to your own playlist. A certain character's theme in the game I've listened to a lot outside the game too even!
I reinstalled Death Stranding last night, after writing it off early on. (I needed to make Sam do a poo, but he refused to stand up. That's not a problem I need in my leisure time.)
I had been trying out Skull and Bones after it landed on PS Plus, and god that's a depressing game. It's Shareholder Meeting, the Videogame: Focus Group Edition. Every box mind-numbingly ticked, every system developed separately into some terrible Frankenstein's monster whose only aim is to make money.
The sheer calculated awfulness of it all made me reinstall Death Stranding. Because whatever I think of Kojima, here's a game that exists because its creator had a story to tell. A game that has no target demographics, skin packs and season passes. A game that, last night, made me spend 5 minutes packing someone's bag for them, and then immediately restart when he fell over and died.
On second thoughts, maybe lootbox pirates aren't so bad.
Okay I'm sorry but I'm absolutely hooked on Horsegirl Gacha aka Umamusume: Pretty Derby, it's unlike any gacha I've played before, perhaps scary in how addictive and low effort it is but god damn I'm invested now, not just the game but the lives of these horse girls. Each one seems to have their own unique career mode storyline and also the random events from your support cards have me really rooting for their goals and dreams.
My favourite so far is an (android?) horse called Mihono Bourbon, I like how her story has her struggling to understand sarcasm and whatnot, oh Mihono. 
Watching your horse absolutely haul ass with a burst of shoneome resolve to win a race is gacha rush I haven't experienced man.
Who were the Death Stranding Truthers on here? cav and Felt? I think if you liked DS1 you should like this quite a lot. It's not gonna' convert many people IMO (it all depends) but it just keeps getting better and better.
I thought DS1 was astonishing (and I like a bit of Kojima bullshit - MGS4 being my personal highlight). I just didn't enjoy the core gameplay loop much. DS2 is pretty interesting, I might dip when it hits PC.
I think extending this into a megathread might make sense, but won't it drive traffic even lower? I appreciate no forum is getting new members anywhere (rllmuk is in a slow death spiral too) but fresh threads are the lifeblood of any forum.
If not a monthly PWB - maybe there need to be a few more repeatable threads that generate traffic. Or maybe we need a Play, a Want and a Bin thread.
I think extending this into a megathread might make sense, but won't it drive traffic even lower? I appreciate no forum is getting new members anywhere (rllmuk is in a slow death spiral too) but fresh threads are the lifeblood of any forum.
It'd be nice if people started threads for specific games, as they always drive interest and conversation - like Death Stranding for instance. But they always seem to get absorbed into PWB.
I don't think it matters where we are posting as long as we are posting. Maybe we will get more discussion without PWB. Let's give it a go.
We've all been here for at least fifteen years, we all post when we've got something to say. I expect we will all keep ticking along with occasional flurries of activity when something interesting happens in videogames.
Did Gar kill the Society? It's been dead in here!
Anyway!
Play
FF IX - I'm only an hour or two in. I have no i**dea who all these people are and why I keep swapping between them all. Does it turn into a more conventional adventure at dinner point?
Badland - Found this in my android app library and got totally hooked on it again. It's basically Flappy Bird+Limbo but some of the level design is fantastic. I think it's on Switch too.
Want
A switch 2
FFIX is very much a call back to traditional FF in many ways, hence the references like Vivi looking like a classic black mage and whatnot. I also bought this, I am almost certain the remake will pop up any day now, but I finished the FF7 Remake and instantly loaded up the PS1 game afterwards, I think doing it the other way round will be fine.
Also got it on Switch over Steam Deck, was slightly cheaper and I can choose between dock and handheld mode, I have a cable to play SD on TV but ehhhh.
The pixel remaster are on sale again and once again I'm going back and forth on them, they are for the most part, not definitive so I think the only ones that have merit to me are FF6 for the opera scene (also it's FF fucking 6) and FF3 because I played the DS remake, very different.
I'm playing FF IX on my Anbernic 35XX H.
I'm playing FFVIII on my RP Mini too, would have played 9 instead but hey. Sadly I can't fit a Switch 2 in my work locker. :(
Also should point out have an interesting FFVI romhack, SNES version adding all GBA extras as well as some changes to combat. So this doesn't really count against the Pixel Remaster but I do think I have merit buying the GBA cartridge off Ebay for my Analog Pocket like I have done with FFI and II.
@Garwoofoo I got the unlock in Monster Train 2. If you did that in "about 10 hours" then hats off to you. Took me about 25.
I've started playing Split Fiction with my son and I'd just like to echo feltmonkey's impressions in that it's absolutely fantastic. It's taken all the best bits of It Takes Two, thrown away the bad bits (excessively long cut-scenes, hateful characters) and ramped everything up to 11. The first proper level, a madcap sci-fi chase through a kind of flying traffic jam, with one player constantly changing gravity and the other hurling objects around, is the kind of OTT set-piece that most games would build up to as a climax; here it's the intro. Then about an hour later we are both trying to work out how to help one sausage put mustard on another sausage. It's just an incredibly well-executed, confident co-op game with what feels like a Mario-style overabundance of ideas and we are absolutely loving what we've seen so far.
I Played and then Binned Cyberpunk 2077.
I've never been the biggest cyberpunk guy generally, as a setting/aesthetic, but I'd heard Good Things about this, especually since all the post-launch fixes and updates. It's clearly made with a specific vision, but I really didn't click with it, and felt like I was fighting the controls more than I should be (especially while driving). Not for me.
I've started playing Split Fiction with my son and I'd just like to echo feltmonkey's impressions in that it's absolutely fantastic. It's taken all the best bits of It Takes Two, thrown away the bad bits (excessively long cut-scenes, hateful characters) and ramped everything up to 11. The first proper level, a madcap sci-fi chase through a kind of flying traffic jam, with one player constantly changing gravity and the other hurling objects around, is the kind of OTT set-piece that most games would build up to as a climax; here it's the intro. Then about an hour later we are both trying to work out how to help one sausage put mustard on another sausage. It's just an incredibly well-executed, confident co-op game with what feels like a Mario-style overabundance of ideas and we are absolutely loving what we've seen so far.
Wait until you get to the last level. 😁
Play: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
I bounced off this hard when it first came out, hated every minute of the short amount of time I spent with it. I've gone back to it now in a completely different frame of mind, on a brand new Switch 2, and oh my god it's a masterpiece, isn't it? And I'm an idiot.
I've realised part of what went wrong the first time (I somehow managed to go the wrong way around Tutorial Island, missing all the hints and instructions and having a miserable time clambering laboriously up cliff faces instead of the nice, gentle onboarding the game gives you if you actually go the way it hints you should) but it's also a mindset thing: it's got such a slow and gentle pace that you absolutely can't rush it because you want to play something else, you have to lose yourself in it and accept that some evenings you are just going to potter around finding random stuff just because it's there. So far so Breath of the Wild, I guess, but this also feels a fair bit more gamey with a stronger plot and more side quests and just generally more stuff all round. I am loving it, and I'd like to apologise to anyone who actually listened to me and skipped this (OK, no-one) because it really is quite something.
I loved Breath of the Wild but didn't get far into it. Playing an enhanced version is one of the main reasons I want to get a Switch 2.
No specific July thread and it's July 20th!? Look what happens when I take my eye of you lot for even a second!
Anyway, I recently bought a tricked out Amiga 600. As a sort of end of school year treat to myself. I am still trying to do all my YouTube playthrus on real hardware, but my most recent one using the A500 has been going really slower as it's just so slow to play. So this A600 has some faster ram and a modern upgraded chip powering it. So it's real hardware that's been tricked out, minus the racing stripes.
Play - Street Fighter. I recently put the PS4 Pro we have at work in a much more prominent position and then put Street Fighter on it. Part of it was we needed to write about Fighting games for the coursework and none of them know how to really play them, I taught them what little bit I know and now there are a group of 5 kids who spend all break and lunchtime playing Street Fighter 5 and have gotten really good. This is turn has then led to another cluster of younger kids playing it when the first group aren't there on a certain day. So that has actually been amazing to see.
Bin - the actual work of work! In a cruel twist ALL schools in Sheffield are finished for the year, bar one that doesn't have it's last day till this Wednesday! And we can all guess that is my school can't we. Absolutely wrecked now, both energy and mental wise. Dislocated my knuckle last week splitting up a potential fight/issue, and it feels like my brain is leaking.
Worse still as my own kid has broken up already we have had to get my Missus Dad across to look after her for these first three days, and this has the downside I am now on a camp bed for the next week.
No specific July thread and it's July 20th!? Look what happens when I take my eye of you lot for even a second!
@Garwoofoo you should've run these changes through the marketing department.
You replaced Marketing with AI
This is like that episode of The Office where Jim tries to consolidate all the birthday parties into one big one.
The next logical step is to consolidate the entire forum into one thread.
Thing Doing, Thing Wanting, Thing Binning
I don't know how many songs are in there but he's definitely on the list, as for the soundtrack, I'm not the type of guy who even know who CHVURCHES were before DS but I fucking love everything I've heard in this game so far, what's better is you get an MP3 player like function to listen to your own playlist. A certain character's theme in the game I've listened to a lot outside the game too even!
CHVRCHES, the V is the U, it's all very trendy. I used to teach Mother We Share in my French English classes (the original video for the song, now not on the internet for some reason).
So, Deadzone Rogue. I bought it. It's from a company of shady fucks who have shitcanned previous projects before getting them out of alpha. Some people think it's a crypto mining scam. I saw quite a few adverts for it, and it's essentially Returnal crossed with Borderlands. A Live/Die/Repeat FPS, where the guns make numbers come out of the enemies. I don't even know what the plot is. You wake up on a spaceship. Might be amnesia involved. Shoot things?
It's really good. And it's hard to say why as most of it is utterly generic. But I think what I like about it is that it gives not two shits about calm power progression. Most of the guns and powers you get are just ludicrous. Often the upgrades you get stack in rapidly escalating levels of insanity. And the combat is really tight and moreish.
It's also 3 player co-op. Someone was saying on a review that in many ways 3 players is a perfect number to design a co-op game around. More unpredictable with more interactions than 2 people, but without the overkill of 4 people wandering round an environment. They pointed out that the 2 and 4 thing is a natural holdover from the era of TV gaming where you'd want to split a TV into equal segments. And while that may, or may not, be true it really works. I think another game recently came out with 3 player co-op (Firebreak)? so perhaps this is a new thing.
Anyway - should you spend 20 quid on it? No. Is it likely to be a crypto scam and get pulled from Steam in 4 months? Yes. Is it really, really good. Also yes.
According to Steam I've played almost 90 hours of Monster Train 2. I don't think that's right (as I'm sure it counts time when I have the Ally suspended overnight) but even so, I have played a lot of Monster Train 2. In fact, I'm often sick of Monster Train 2 but play it anyway.
It, like this thread has become one all-encompassing Play, Want and Bin simultaneously. Everything is Monster. Everything is Train.
I have just bought the Phoenix Wright game (Chronicles) set back in the late 1800s, so I'm hoping that will drag me away.
Play
It's a bit random but I've been playing Shadow Hearts: From the New World, the third game in the Shadow Hearts RPG series. Despite it being usually looked down on, I'm really enjoying it and I can't see why it's so divisive, Covenant is held in such high regard and the apple doesn't really fall that far from the tree (positive) in terms of tone and gameplay, suspect a lot of herd mentality if I'm being honest.
Also pacing myself myself on Donkey Kong, it's not that I think it's bad, I still think going on Kong Bananza rampages is crazy fun but I'm not sure I wanna' do it for a single extended session. It's crazy that the banana density is so high that 'one more banana' turns into like an extra hour or two though. I am going to play Mario Odyssey after this and I'll be surprised if it's a worser game overall like I've seen people say. Maybe I liked Odyssey more than most people apparently, but I'm going to bet it's recency bias a little bit.
On my 50th attempt to start Vagrant Story and not bounce off as well.
Want
Metal Gear Solid 3 remake soon, big day for me obviously. Also hovering over the purchase button for Splatoon 3, something tells me I'll love it I just won't get to play it as often as I want or think I will.
The more I think about it, the more I want to go back to Japan more than anything.
Bin
For one, that fucking stupid UK law whatever that is requiring people to use ID for things like social media, I'm not fucking giving my ID to use Discord/Twitter, get the fuck out of here. I hear people are using VPN's to get around this so maybe I'll look into it, if they crack down on those then goodbye I guess. Already on Twitter people are reporting that images have been blocked with a message saying 'Due to UK laws this image has been deemed something or other', it's honestly really shocking to see this actually happening.