PWB November edition

Basically sat out October it feels like, work was manic and kept getting every illness going.

So am bouncing back by starting the Nov thread. If you want to feel particularly old and have kept track of things then my kid is 9 years old in a few days! Which doesn't feel possible.

Play -

Kotor 2 - its been half term this week and finally gotten back to this properly and started to make actual progress. Feel like its taken about an age and months and months of little bits of playing to fully start, have finally made it off the first major planet you get to pick and have now unlocked HK47 finally.

Football Manager 26 - This comes out of beta and into GamePass this week. I actually kept my full sub to try this as its been pretty poorly received it seems. Very different with lots of poor UI and bugs.

Wobbly Life - We play a little blast of this everyday and its funny and enjoyable, well worth checking out for people with younger kids.

Call of Juarez - was like £1.49 on the Xbox store and really enjoying it. Its poorly pieced together narrative doesn't detract from the gameplay, even if the enemies are particularly stupid it feels like. Its nice playing a FPS where everything feels like a 10-25 minute level again, as that fits perfectly with my gaming habits and times.

Want - a Switch Lite - want a device to fire in my bag for lunch times at work and seen these selling for between £70-£120 depending on condition and what it has with it. Ebay and marketplace for the lower end but seen shops with them at £100.

Final Fantasy 7 remake - I missed this initially as was PS4 only, considered getting it on the Switch2 though now.

Bin - the weather. My kid had spent months making and thinking about Halloween and trick or treating with her friends, she had made her Halloween costume by the first week of the summer holidays for example, and then it was an utter wash out last night, I felt so bad as she was so upset it was ruined.

Aw, sorry to hear about your weather. Ours get super excited about Halloween, too - E says she likes it more than Christmas.

Play
Tomb Raider II is a very different beast to the first game. I'm only a couple of levels in, but it's got way more combat, more focus on plot, and the puzzles are mostly of the "find the key/switch to open this door" variety. I assume that's a result of the development time - the thing was put together in 6-8 months, and I imagin puzzles are harder to design than "shoot some guys". TR3 had a similar production cycle, IIRC, so I don't know how well that bodes.

I must be on a bit of a nostalgia kick, because I've also been replaying Bioshock Infinite. It's a game that I seem to recall reviewed well, had a pretty quick reevaluation/backlash in some circles, and then kind of dropped out of view. I always thought it was at least interesting, and liked it better than most, but it is all very on the nose.

Want
I can't say there's much that I'm particularly excited for at the moment. I keep eyeing up Tomb Raider Legend in sales, but I'm trying to finish the first six before I move on, so I'll probably not reach it for a year or two at my current pace. Looking forward to Stray hitting PS+ next month; I played the start of it a while back when I was briefly on Game Pass PC.

Bin
I gave Tomb Raider: Unfinished Business (the expansion pack for the first game) a go, but it's just deliberately difficult and obtuse, so I'm not sure I can be bothered.

Play
Breath of the Wild - still plugging away at this, still loving it. I'm finally at the point now where combat isn't a threat at all. I have so many daft glowing weapons in my inventory but I rarely need to use them. The world doesn't feel so big any more now that I've been almost everywhere, and between fast travel and jumping up clouds and flying from peaks I can get almost anywhere in a minute or two. All of which is too say that this game really nails the feeling of progression you want from an RPG.

Wind Waker - I was half way through this when I picked up BotW. It's going to seem very basic if I go back to it now.

Want
I'm tempted to grab one of the Hyrule Warriors games. I remember Gar singing their praises.

Play

I had been making my way through Assassin's Creed II for some reason, but I started The Outer Worlds 2 and stayed up far too late last night playing that, so Ezio might be on the back burner for a while.

Want

A lottery win would be nice. I'm not greedy—just a couple mil is plenty. Enough to go back to Japan right this minute.

Bin

I think, at this point, I need to accept that roguelikes are not for me. I played several runs of Hades, nowhere near completing any of them (often not even reaching the first boss, let alone beating her) and feel like I've seen all its mechanical tricks. Getting the same vibe from Rogue Prince of Persia, which—don't get me wrong—is very stylish and slick and all, but I'm just not enjoying. Maybe I'm just not cut out for the progress-reset loop.

I'm tempted to grab one of the Hyrule Warriors games. I remember Gar singing their praises.

The original (which is on Switch, with all the DLC, as "Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition") is one of my all time favourite games. It's a kind of huge mash-up of the entire Zelda series up to Skyward Sword, where time travel shenanigans allow characters from all eras of Zelda to interact and fight together. The actual game is part button-mashing power fantasy, part battlefield management where you're trying to keep track of what's going on all over the field and zapping between characters to try and turn the tide of battle. It has an absolutely VAST amount of additional content and unlocks, so much so that I can't believe anyone has ever actually completed it. In fact just writing this makes me want to go and play it again.

The second game, Age of Calamity, is a prequel to Breath of the Wild so might be a really good fit for you right now. It ran like an absolute dog on Switch 1, is apparently better on Switch 2 but is still locked at 30fps if that bothers you so it might get a proper Switch 2 patch at some point maybe? Anyway I haven't played it, it's supposed to be really good with a surprisingly decent plot but doesn't have the insane amounts of side content that DE has.

The new one, Age of Imprisonment, is out this week, and is a prequel to Tears of the Kingdom. Reviews haven't dropped yet but it looks really good and I'm looking forward to it very much.

Yeah Age of Calamity sounds like the place to start. Although I'll probably just get whichever goes on sale first.

Play

Doom: The Dark Ages - I'm close to the end of this now. It's certainly got its issues (it's a bit long and samey, the plot is absolute bobbins, most encounters feel like loads of enemies chucked into an arena rather than anything that's had any real thought put into it) but on a moment-by-moment basis it feels absolutely fucking brilliant to play and I've enjoyed it immensely. It's a game that knows that at heart it's creating a power fantasy and it's there in every detail: the thud of your footsteps as you rush into battle, the shockwave as you land from a height that means even the act of you entering battle helps to start to turn the tide, the absurdly generous parry timing that in many lesser games would be used as a skill check but in this just goes towards making you feel awesome. It's big, loud, violent and stupid and I love it.

The Return of the Obra Dinn - absorbing and atmospheric mystery game that requires genuine thought and doesn't reveal its secrets easily. I've been chipping away at this for a week or two and I'm getting there, slowly. Sometimes it feels like the need to plod slowly round the decks gets in the way of the deduction a little (if you want to rewatch a particular scene, you have to navigate back to the corpse in question rather than just being able to review it from your notebook) and in that sense I felt Curse of the Golden Idol was maybe a more cerebral kind of mystery game, but the atmosphere is second to none and I feel like I've learned a lot about life onboard a ship as part of the process of piecing things together.

Want

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment - please be good please be good. I loved Tears of the Kingdom, I love Hyrule Warriors, what can possibly go wrong?

Anno 117 - still haven't seen a single impression of the console releases, I'm getting a bit concerned now. I mean obviously it's a PC-focused series and I could, if absolutely required, run it via my Steam Deck hooked up to my monitor (it works tolerably well for Anno 1800) but really I'd like to kick back with a proper console version if they can actually make it work well.

Bin

Nothing specific this month.

Play
The Outer Worlds 2 is a bit TOO janky for my liking. I don't know if it's Unreal Engine 5 (which really is a plague, isn't it?) or just a general lack of care, but it all just feels a bit naff. I love Obsidian, so it's a shame, but bleh.

The Outer Worlds 2 is a bit TOO janky for my liking.

I've not noticed any jank—it's been running fine (some aggressive LOD pop-in, maybe) and no obvious bugs or breakages so far.

Additional Play: I was talking to someone about Mass Effect a couple of days ago, so obviously I have reinstalled the most disappointing entry in the series, Andromeda. It's less janky now than it was at launch, but a little over an hour in, I already hate Liam all over again. Don't know if I'll finish it.

I never finished that but quite liked what I did play except for having zero interest in the characters like you mention!

You have someone who is injured or stuck in cryo or something don't you? I remember particularly disliking, or at least having zero interest in whoever that was. So when the game is trying to drive you to save them it's difficult to care.

You have someone who is injured or stuck in cryo or something don't you?

Yeah, your brother (or sister, depending on your character's gender).

I remember particularly disliking, or at least having zero interest in whoever that was.

The game doesn't give you much of a reason to give a shit, beyond "family!!!"; they've only appeared comatose thus far. I know they wake up later on, but I can't remember at what point.

I like Cora and Vetra okay. The krogan guy is just Wrex 2.0, and Peebee starts out annoying, but I remember warming to her. The blue alien guy is a snorefest. Liam is an irritating blokey-bloke and a fucking liability.

I haven’t played Andromeda but it seems to be the rule that every Mass Effect game has to have Generic Man as a key companion. ME3’s version was particularly forgettable.

I quite liked Vega, though he was admittedly a pretty generic dudebro marine who looked like he'd accidentally wandered in from Gears of War. I think he was a better character than Kaidan, and I didn't get half as fed up of him as Jacob "Daddy Issues" Taylor.

Andromeda suffers from the typical-of-the-time EA push into a more open-world setting (which didn't suit it any more than it did Dragon Age Inquisition), and a plot that has few original ideas and no real choices to make.

Spoiler - click to showThe Kett's Big Plan is basically a repeat of the Reaper Baby at the end of Mass Effect 2, and to jump from the political and moral complexity of the Milky Way to "there are two aliens, one is good and one is bad" is extremely boring. Throw in yet another ancient-race-technology macguffin, and it's all shit we've seen before, and better, as part of this same series.

I have some absolutely mad ideas about what I think they should have done, but the absolute core of it should have been the Kett and the Angara as equally valid allies for the Arks, with the Pathfinder having to navigate their ongoing conflict - be that picking a side, or (hard version) achieving some kind of peace between them. Maybe the Turians advocate for an alliance with the more militaristic Kett, and the Asari want to buddy up to the spiritual Angara, so you have allies with opinions and a stake in the thing. You know - Mass Effect shit.

I remember being really bored by the alien designs in Andromeda–more bipeds? Snore.

Shoulda gone down the Rachni route. Something really bizarre and, y'know, alien.

Everyone instantly understanding each other and having comprehensible cultural practices, too!

In the Milky Way, they at least had the Prothean directed-development angle to explain why everyone was similar, but Andromeda could have been really different.

They could've gotten so weird with it.

Cowards.

Can I at least ask, if the combat really is the best in the series? I'll believe it, I thought ME3 combat was so fun.

I've found it a bit twitchy, tbh, but I don't really remember how it compares to the others.

I remember it being easily the best combat. The combat is the only thing about Andromeda I can actually remember, couldn't tell you a thing about the story. I don't even recall if it happened in the same time period, or millennia later.

The Arks set off some time between Mass Effects 2 & 3, and arrive in Andromeda 600-ish years later. There are some emails and notes you can find about the place that explain that, though they weren't common knowledge, the Initiative's founders heard the Reapers were coming, and decided to get the eff out of the way before they turned up.

They slept through a galaxy ending event? Wild.

Xbox are doing a 'Play Kingdom Come Deliverance II for free over the week and you can buy it for 40% off when it ends so I figured this is the perfect chance to try it, although it seems the discount is on the Gold Edition which I guess is kind of a steal but to me it just feels like they're advertising a game being sold at a price before everywhere went insane? Unless I'm wrong about the edition, otherwise a bit misleading in my opinion, can't sniff at a free trial though.

I'm sure there's a good game behind this tutorial/opening but I swear, this is….not a great start, I have in my mind that this is Oblivion but without the magic and so far I'veb een forced into this really badly paced elongated tutorial. It doesn't even feel cinematic, I was taught how to throw rocks and then basically taught again in this really contrived part where I was told to walk to and fro so as to spawn the guards.

But…I'll persist, well it's free so whatever the fuck really, I'm only losing time…which is quite precious to me these days. If I had this on PC I'd probably hope there was a mod for skipping that otherwise I already don't want to replay it multiple times on different builds just for that reason.

It's not that sort of game. It's an engine for getting you into crazy scrapes and living with the consequences. It's more enjoyable if you try to react to situations like a normal human being rather than playing it like a videogame. If you try to min-max or look for optimal conversation options, it will fight you every step of the way. Having said that, I don't actually recognise the part you're talking about. Walking back and forth to spawn guards? Are you definitely playing the right game? 😜

I haven’t played Andromeda but it seems to be the rule that every Mass Effect game has to have Generic Man as a key companion. ME3’s version was particularly forgettable.

They're all variations on Carth from KOTOR. They're worse if you play as a female Shepard, though. That gives you a much greater appreciation of poor, dull Jacob (the guy with the Bad Dad who just hangs about sulking in the room with all the guns in.) At least he doesn't make you want to blast him out an airlock. Vega is an absolute arsehole to Jane Shepard, insisting on giving her a weird overly-familiar and vaguely sexual nickname, and then spending the rest of the game making comments that border on sexual harrasment. It's a fault with the game that it didn't give you the option of completely shutting that meathead down and threatening him with a court-martial. Kaiden comes across as some kind of incel stalker. I was bemused when he sat my Shepard down in a cafe in the third game for a long monologue about our "relationship" and how he had worked through his feelings and accepted this and that. He'd clearly overthought the whole situation to a ridiculous degree and invented a tangled web of feelings between us. Buddy, you are just some guy who looks like Mikel Arteta and lives on my ship. All I remember about you is that you suffer from migranes.

They're all variations on Carth from KOTOR.

100% this. When Kaiden turned up in Mass Effect with Raphael Sbarge's voice coming out of his mouth, I knew he was going to be a drag. I nuke him every time.

I killed off Kaiden at the first opportunity. Ashley might be a horrible space racist (and, hilariously, in ME3, a horrible space racist with a MAGA makeover) but at least she's interesting.

I was a bit surprised that the first party member you pick up in both Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 aren't insufferably tedious.

In Mass Effect 3 the first time Vega calls Shepherd "Lola" you get a "Cut that shit out" dialogue option which fixes 75% of his bullshit.

If you have Amazon Prime (I know, I know, they basically fund genocide, but at this stage it's hard to find a corporation that isn't complicit in some atrocity) you can play Kingdom Come 2, Indiana Jones and a few other marque titles via Luna.

In Mass Effect 3 the first time Vega calls Shepherd "Lola" you get a "Cut that shit out" dialogue option which fixes 75% of his bullshit.

I was gonna say, I don't remember him being a creep to my FemShep… tbh, the only memory I have of him is asking you to sponsor him for N7, or something?

I remember the variant in KOTOR2 being interesting because of his past and what you can do to him

It's not that sort of game. It's an engine for getting you into crazy scrapes and living with the consequences. It's more enjoyable if you try to react to situations like a normal human being rather than playing it like a videogame. If you try to min-max or look for optimal conversation options, it will fight you every step of the way. Having said that, I don't actually recognise the part you're talking about. Walking back and forth to spawn guards? Are you definitely playing the right game? 😜

It was just a tiny bit so I don't blame you for not remembering, in retrospect I wasm aking a mountain of a molehill but at the time I was just wondering how long it'd go on for. It doesn't matter though, I can see the vision already, at least from the stats page, and I respect that you need to brew potions to save, might inspire less savescumming and more living with the consequences of your dumbassery. Also the game is very funny, I'm loving the banter between Hans and Henry.

The save system is broken, to be honest. You can just save and exit. 😂

Have you got to a point when you're in the middle of a town dressed in just your pants, with no idea where to go or what to do?

I basically got to the first town after Hans gets shit poured on his face and stopped because it was late, I suspect this is where shenanigans would have ensued as I pissed around the place for a bit doing things the way I wanted, but the free period is over now and I'm not sure if I want to buy it right now, annoying because I feel like it's must play before I start thinking about GOTY.

If you weren't enjoying it I wouldn't buy it, to be honest. It's not the money - it's a further 80 hours of the thing you weren't getting along with. As you say, time is the most precious thing.

There's too much stuff for game of the year this year for anyone to play all the contenders. I think we'll look back on 2025 as one of the all-time greatest years for gaming. It's been ridiculous.

That Steam Machine is being bought day 1

A couple of updated Plays:

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment - yes this is good, albeit in a firmly 7/10 way. It's slightly hamstrung by being a canon prequel to Tears of the Kingdom, meaning that only 3 out of 19 characters are ones you'll actually recognise and the rest are generic Gorons, Zora etc. It offers lots of button-mashing fun and the combat system has some great touches this time around but it does err on the easy side meaning it's easy to pick up but also easy to put down. I'm sure I'll see it through but if I'm being honest it's no Hyrule Warriors: DE.

Final Fantasy VII Remake - this, on the other hand, is fantastic and I genuinely don't understand why people are/were so down on it. I played a bit on PS4 when it originally released but revisiting it now on Steam Deck it really is an absolute marvel, a complete reimagining of the (first third of the) original game which somehow manages to change everything from the plot to the combat system yet still feels exactly right. I think it's an incredibly impressive thing.

It's a great game I just have issue with some of the plot beats, the change to the bombing of the Reactor really rubs me the wrong way because it completely sterilised one of my favourite parts of the OG story. But like Rebirth after it it does some amazing character work, helped along by some really good voice acting. (Tifa's is my favourite, her voice when she's like "I gotta go! 😊" at Cloud's smooth talk is so good)

Also the combat is great when you get into it, unlike the PS1 version everyone is unique now both in function and feel. Again, Tifa's martial arts were a real standout to me but Aerith was a real nuke dispenser in this with the right setup, which shows just how well the well regarded Materia system was transferred over.

Also what the actual fuck is happening to Metroid Prime 4 and really bad trailers? Every trailer just makes the game look worse than the last, we had open barren desert biking sections in the last trailer, the latest trailer has a really Marvel coded annoying sidekick, now maybe this guy is in it briefly and maybe the desert area we saw last time in the last trailer wasn't an accurate representation but that just begs the question, again what is going with the trailers being so bad? It's on them to make the game look good I, shouldn't have to give the benefit of the doubt here, even if it is Metroid.

I'm not going full nuclear yet like most people on the internet are (they're blatantly buying it anyway but still) but I'm definitely a lot less excited now, should have been the easiest slam dunk of their big 3 IPs, it's not like Mario and the constant creativity or Zelda and wondering how next they're going to somehow top TOTK, I don't think anyone played MP 1-3 and asked 'we need something more next time'.

Maybe I'm presuming much and speaking for too many people, the internet gaslighting has begun already with the really extreme 'Other M was good' takes. Anyway, I guess it's a good thing Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is still one of the best games ever made eh.

Other M is exactly what it reminds me of.

If you can't run the chatty NPCs over with your motorbike the second they start yapping, then I'm out.

Potentially one of the biggest gaming disappoints of my lifetime honestly, I haven't played MP3 (I will eventually though) but I understand that had alot of soldiers in it too and that isn't considered absolute trash so I'm hoping I'm just overreacting. That said, I usually hear Echoes talked about more harshly than Corruption, and I love that game, people really do not like the Dark World I guess.

Recently I got the Hyrule Edition Switch Lite (spotted them on Game Collections Ebay store and ended up getting mine for a great price through presumably an listing error) and have started to play Xenoblade Chronicles 2 finally. About 4 hours in and the best thing I can say about it is I have spent all day looking forward to playing it later on this evening.

The form factor of the Switch Lite feels really nice too. I could do with maybe a tiny bit more of a curve on it but ultimately I love it.

I appreciated XC2 a lot more when I replayed it after beating XC3, combat system is awesome

I still can't quite figure out the controls for activating your partner or what the combo meter thing is top right, so will look that up as feel I need an explanation video as the text explainer in game didn't click with my brain.

I cant remember the controls but the combo meter is basd on who you have in your party, both the elementand the strength of the attack, and because your party can depend on the real gacha what you're working with can vary from what someone else had to work with, though you get some characters in the story and one of them is ridiculously strong if you put time into her affinty chart.

I'm probably not going to get Lumines Arise for a number of reasons, it's probably not a bad game by any means and may well be the definite Lumines experience but if it's anything like Tetris Connect it will be a bit hard for me (seriously why was TE so hard lol, or was it just me) and having tried the PSP version I think I quite like the loop but after a while I was starting to feel it's a bit long (then again, Tetris was probably Always Like That and I was never good enough to tell).

But man, it looks and sounds amazing.

Anyway I did get Lumines Remastered for Switch on sale still, very cheap and more than worth the price I think. I also had a quick go on Meteos for the DS after Lumines because they're like, sister games or whatever and honestly think I prefer it. Not sure we'll ever see that again due to the touchscreen being mandatory but hey, we got The World Ends With You on consoles so who knows.

If I could put any serious time into games of this ilk it would probably be Puyo Pop, I think the chain reactions in that game are a far bigger dopamine hit than get a big Lumines combo, a Tetris or errr, lifting up all the blocks on the screen into the planet at once.

I loved Lumines but the last time I played it one game was lasting well over an hour. Now I just put on any old Orbital album.

I'm back to playing Pokemon Leaf Green again and I know I stopped playing it for a while but it's a bit daunting! Feels way more open than I remember, at one point I think I had like 3 directions to go and some NPCs give you cool stuff for talking to them completely unprompted. I still think it's very good though of course, and I think levelling pokemon being a bit more involved in the older games is to the games benefit but maybe that's just me. I got a Charizard at last earlier and it's still one of the coolest Pokemon ever, then I stopped outside the Safari Zone and i'mv ery excited to see what I get in there tomorrow

The dream is to finally beat this so I can play Crystal on my Analog Pocket at last. But no rush…

Still playing Sakura Wars 2 and if this wasn't a direct sequel (and required Saturn emulation to play…) I would easily reccomend this as the game to get people into the franchise, it's leaps and bounds better than SW1, a game I still really like. Hard game to describe but, it's got a strategy game in there, some visual novel type sections where you can freely roam about the location and get into 'events' and it's got some minigames for good measure. But it's the way the whole thing is wrapped together like a Saturday Morning Cartoon, a tale of the righteous Imperial Theatre Troupe, part stage actors/part defenders of Japan vs the Demonspawn and also their own pasts. One of the best games I've played in 2025.

I did all the Cuban and Haitian missions in Vice City and these missions are starting to get a bit hard huh? Still miles ahead of what GTA3 offered in that regard so it's fine. Had a Danny Dyer jump scare when I did a mission and his character started talking to me, quite a few big names in this one actually. One thing that surprised me is that I remember taking over the Diaz mansion was a more epic and difficult mission that it actually was, in reality it was kind of mid considering it was a pivotal story moment and the big Scarface reference, but at least the 'Say goodnight, Mr Diaz' scene was amazing as I remember. Feels like the cinematic stuff is something they did better on in GTA4 onwards at the cost of a bit of sandbox-ey freedom in the missions themselves.

Finally, still trying to do at least a level a day on Nightshade, the sequel to Shinobi. The more I play, the more I appreciate the game for what it added to the formula, level design is still a lowpoint but it's good where it counts.

Big SHMUP hours

Sektori
This isn't a SHMUP but a twin stick shooter, I'm mentioning it first because it's like Geometry Wars both visually and mechanically and everyone played the shit out of that game back in the day. except I wanna' say it's a lot deeper than Gemotry Wars? Not to knock down GW but I don't recall you doing much than shooting and avoiding, this has roguelike/upgrade paths and levels morphing on the fly.

R-Type Delta: HD Boosted
The game itself is excellent even if the package is a little lacking, if you haven't played an R-Type it's a pretty damn hard horizontal (I think I prefer horizontal to vertical actually, sorry Ikaruga) SHMUP where you get a 'Force Ball' which is an attachment that you can put on the front or back of your ship in real time, this can absorb bullets and also fire whatever weapon type you have currently picked up in the direction it's attached…or you can just fir it and let it act as a turret for say, when you need to fire across the top of the screen but move to the bottom. Mastering when to place the force ball in a certain place part of the fun of learning how to play this game.

This is very memorisation heavy and not for everyone, something I feel this HD release doesn't alleviate at all, you get an unskippable intro every time you want to restart from the beginning and there's a practice mode but that's pretty much it. Maybe it's harsh to expect more but based on then ext games I'm about to talk about that have instant retries and/or save states and rewind, it feels like I get better practice on this using an emulator. That said, hasn't stopped me from playing it so maybe your love of the game will negate these issues?

Gradius Orgins
This isn't just one Gradius game it's like 5 but not even that like every game has the EU/NA/JP version and then they have like, unreleased E3 demo versions and then they top it off with a new game completely, Salamander 3, insane value. Gradius is like R-Type except the 'gimmick' this time is the power upsystem, you collect powerups and if you use it it activates the first powerup you have on the list, if you collect another it moves down the list, in this way you choose how you upgrade: do you get two speed asap and then missilies or gun for the laser upgrade? Also like R-Type if you die you lose every upgrade and start midway through a level with fuck all, oof.

As a package this is absolutely amazing, for the price I got it I can't complain at all…other than Gradius Gaiden not being here, that's like my favourite Gradius lol. But I can probably spend months just playing Gradius 1 which is all I've tried so far and the game still slaps at that, the fact that this has so many options to help you practice is also more than welcome and really just makes R-Type HD look kind of sloppy in comparison.

G-Darius HD
Another horizontal SHMUP and I would say the 'gimmick' here is you can temporarily capture enemies on the field and depending on what you caught you get different 'upgrades', one enemy can just give you homing lasers, another can act as a shield to shoot through and so on. Also you can choose your route down the Outrun style zone map so there's a lot of replay here providing you can even beat it once. Like Gradius (same team behind the HD port iirc) the options here are impressive, and the presentation might be the best of the bunch here, great stuff.

Astebreed
A SHMUP made just for me it seems, feelsl ike a mechanime if mech anime had long combat scenes every week instead of building up to them. This has quite the control scheme to keep in mind, it's not exactly Radiant Silvergun levels of complexity with the 6 weapon forms at once but you got melee and lock on and basic shooting, and you can combine. Feels like an Armored Core SHMUP or something.

Spent hours in the 'one more go' vortex on just one of the 6 modes of Sektori. It's called Crash and you dont even shoot, it's literally just about using the using the ability to ram into things (called a Strike in this). If you Strike into an upgrade you dont get the upgrade in this mode but you do instantly reload the ramming ability so you have this thing of 'shall i weave through these enemies and maybe get into distance of a powerup or shall I Strike now and get some breathing room but have to stay alive a bit longer until the Strike is ready again?'.

Sektori sounds great. I've actually been playing Geometry Wars again recently and am very tempted to pick those up too.