Play
I've really enjoyed Rayman: Legends on the Switch. It was nothing revolutionary, just a very well made 2D platformer. The main story levels are mostly linear without being dull, there's a lot of short dash levels which you have to finish in 40 seconds which I found to be a lot of fun and each world ends with a musical level where the platforming actions are also rhythm action moves. Overall, nothing new really, just well made and fun.
Want
Mario Wonder, since I'm enjoying my 2D platformers so much just now this looks like the obvious next stop.
Bin
Thief: Gold, I played about five levels. That was enough. The intentionally confusing level design, limited resources and "find all the secrets or you are fucked" structure make this less fun that I hoped. I'm still glad I revisited it though.
I fucked up the muscle in my arm a couple days ago. The only thing I can think of that it might have been was spending the morning playing challenge levels in Rayman Legends, which involves holding down on the Switch controller while rapidly pressing face buttons with perfect timing. Apparently I'm getting too old for this shit.
Play
Quite a lot of Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning, as it turns out. I've been feeling very under the weather this week, and its low-pressure world of fantasy nonsense is great to just fog through on the sofa.
My Stardew Valley game has taken a hiatus but I do want to get back to it at some point before I forget everything about how it works.
I also started a Half-Life replay with its recent 25th anniversary update, but it's not aged all that gracefully – Freeman's rollerskate movement is really not helpful in 99% of situations. I'm currently lost in a maze of air vents that doesn't appear to have an exit, so I might have to look up a guide to figure out where in the hell I'm supposed to be going.
Want
It's unlocking later today, but after playing the SteamWorld Build demo a few months ago I'm keen to get stuck into the full game. The Kid has expressed an unexpectedly high level of interest as well; he's been watching me play Stardew and Let's Build a Zoo, and seems to be keen to have a go himself but I wonder if the interconnected systems might be a little much to manage. One way to find out, I guess!
Bin
This sickness. I've had a sore throat for a week now that's finally bloomed into a full cold/flu thing, and I'm thoroughly ready for it to get in the bin before I start my new job on Monday. So I guess I can also Bin unemployment?
Play
At a bit of a loss, having finished Spider-Man 2 the other week, I've ventured back into Horizon Forbidden West, though I'm wondering about just bashing my way through the main plot and ignoring most/all of the sidequests I've accumulated. I've also got Ghost of Tsushima and God of War Ragnarok on the pile, so if I get to the end of HFW, I'll toss a coin for one of them.
Want
I've got half an eye on Assassin's Creed Mirage. The single-city scale and reportedly shorter run time is just that little bit more tempting than the more sprawling, hundred-and-something-hours that Forbidden West, Tsushima, and Ragnarok are promising/threatening. I really like the idea of starting a game I can finish.
Still, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is on the list, too, obvs.
Bin
Spider-Man 2 is done, unless they bring out some DLC or something (which I would honestly love - it really doesn't outstay its welcome).
I'm also going to try very hard not to buy anything for myself between now and Christmas…
Play
At a bit of a loose end having finished Like a Dragon: Ishin! this week. I'm still playing it and enjoying it, trying to mop up a few more achievements and complete all the substories, but there will come a point soon where the remaining stuff is too grindy to be worthwhile.
I've ordered a copy of Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition which is released next week so that'll be my next big game.
I dipped into Resident Evil Village last night, only played an hour or so - I'm not quite feeling it yet, but it's still doing the intro stuff really, trying a bit too hard to recreate the opening of Resi 4 I think. I hope it settles down into a more sedate Resi experience with keys and weird emblems and lots of backtracking - the first half of Resi 7 was a great example of this so I hope 8 is more of the same really.
Want
Steam Deck is confirmed for Christmas, I may have picked up a few bits and pieces in the Steam Black Friday sale.
Like Ninchilla I'm keen to get Assassin's Creeed Mirage at some point, I reckon it'll get a significant price drop sometime around Christmas time.
Bin
I'm trying to sort out my Dad's flat after he passed away a few months ago, it's one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I know it needs to be done but every bit of me is resisting doing it. But I can't concentrate on much else with it hanging over me. Need to get it done.
Like Ninchilla I'm keen to get Assassin's Creeed Mirage at some point, I reckon it'll get a significant price drop sometime around Christmas time.
If it's not £35 or less in January, I'll be astonished.
It already hit £35.99 in the Black Friday deals, I’m hanging on for sub-£30.
I took a dip back into Hitman 3/World of Assassination yesterday for the Codename 47 challenges, and surprised myself with how well I remembered some of the levels - in particular Berlin, which is a bit of a maze, and one I never spent a great deal of time with.
The suit is truly hideous, in the best possible way.
Anyway, it was an interesting change of pace; I dropped off Hitman a while back, but after the action-adventure likes of Horizon and Spider-Man, something a bit more sedate and considered might be just what I'm looking for. Maybe I'll even finish Ambrose Island…
Kwanzaa tidings to you all!
PLAY
Metroid Prime Remastered - Getting near the end already, but clean-up on collectibles is going to take a while before I try finishing it.
Diddy Kong Racing DS - Forgot this even existed, but it was in our staff Christmas sale for €3 so why not. Something to do on the tram, innit.
Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble - Same as above.
WANT
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk - A decent discount would be nice, I'm not paying €40 for this no matter how much I want to play it.
Do I really want Grand Theft Auto 6? I dunno. We'll see how my brain feels once the hype has calmed down a bit, I know I'm dumb enough to get swept up in the moment.
BIN
Leakers - Fuck those guys, always ruining the surprise for everyone.
Do I really want Grand Theft Auto 6? I dunno. We'll see how my brain feels once the hype has calmed down a bit, I know I'm dumb enough to get swept up in the moment.
I'm one of about eight people on the planet who doesn't seem to get the hype. GTAV was one of my last favourite games of all time, a sprawling, shallow parody of the most vile bits of pop-culture regurgitated over a world inhabited by three of the most nauseatingly loathsome playable characters ever created. I liked the (early days of) Online okay, but God's below, I hated the single-player.
Hard pass.
Play.
Arkham Knight. This still looks surprisingly good on PS5, despite it never getting a Pro upgrade. It's a ridiculous game, made by a developer who really believes more is more. Asylum was, for my money, basically perfect. It's such a tight experience, even the bonus collectibles feel worthwhile. Knight takes that structure and adds a billion Things to Do, none of which are as much fun as Asylum's basics.
The car is a bit crap, the side missions are repetitive, the riddler trophies are so numerous and tedious I've ignored them completely. It's still a fun game, but almost all of the fun comes from those Asylum basics. The added guff just gets in the way.
FF16. In true JRPG (not a JRPG) fashion, I thought this was about to end just before it opened up and started properly. It's basically God of War with a more mental story, and I'm loving it. I haven't read any online opinion but I assume FF fans hate it.
Want.
Baldur's Gate PS5. As soon as I've finished FF16 I'll be all over this. Can't remember the last time I was so excited to start a game.
I haven't read any online opinion but I assume FF fans hate it.
Maybe not at the level FF15 got (not a high bar though…) and I don't speak for everyone but I and some other people have Some Opinions but I'll prob have to revive the FF thread for all of them, but I think the best single line description of it I've seen is 'AAA Final Fantasy (Derogatory)' so maybe your GoW one isn't so far off either. I'll probably just wait until you're done so I'm not shitting on any fun you're having, but the combat is fun! Have you dragged like 10 guys into a corner with Ignition yet? Very fun. Also great VA performances (especially Clive and Cid)
Back on my Kotor play through. I just got HK and plan on trying to never take him out. I love this game so there is probably a tinge of that memory, but the writing is so good at times on the characters. Maybe it's an age thing but I never want to know anything about the companions in the most recent games I have played and enjoyed (maybe with the exception of Johnny in Cyberpunk and the Taxi Ai side character)
Resident Evil: Village is really, really odd.
The trajectory of the series goes like this:
Resident Evil 0 through to 6, plus multiple spin-offs: virus outbreaks, evil corporations, zombies
Resident Evil 7: hillbillies
Resident Evil 8 (Village): werewolves, vampires
Initially it barely even feels like a Resi game to be honest: it's set in a European village with a castle, although everyone speaks with American accents for some reason. Like 7, it's in first-person by default (a third-person mode also exists this time though) and it has a weird obsession with your characters arms - maybe because it's the only bit of him you ever see. They get stabbed, impaled, and occasionally sliced off completely, but it never seems to slow him down or bother him in any way and I really have no idea why.
More seriously it has a habit of wrenching control away from you suddenly which is really odd in a first-person game (Half-Life 2 twenty years ago understood that you need to keep the player in control at all times, Resi 8 didn't get the message). The first hour or so is a confusing mess as it throws set-piece after set-piece at you, trying to recreate the Resi 4 village sequence but with werewolves and without any real understanding of why that sequence worked. And the bad guys are so cartoonish it's impossible to take them seriously. They're certainly not scary.
But - when it calms down, and gets back to more traditional Resi fare, it's actually really good. Criss-crossing the map laden down with weird keys and emblems feels comfortingly familiar. The village acts as a kind of hub that you keep returning to which gives the whole thing a light Metroidvania feel. It looks great and the sound design is excellent. I've gone from nearly binning it in the first hour to actually having to admit that I'm thoroughly enjoying myself. It is really odd though.
Didn't 4 go off the rails too though? Filthy village, churches, giant bug parasites…
Yeah it did, and it's clearly the biggest influence on this game. I think maybe RE4 gets away with it a little more easily because it starts off more grounded, whereas 8 is just mental from the start. But I guess everything in the latter half of the Resi series is quite insane, thinking about it.
Resi has always been high camp if you scratch away the horror surface. The sillier the Resi game the better, I reckon. 4 is the best because it's completely absurd, and 8 leans into that massively.
Village is absolutely trying to channel a bit of 4 and 7, but it doesn't have as interesting enemy design or combat arenas. However I do think it is very satisfying to shoot things in this game actually, so I don't have an issue with the action in this game, I'd say I rather enjoyed it on that front, it passes the 'satisfying headshot' and 'Good Shotgun' tests for me!
As for the game itself, this sounds wild but for how heavily the part was marketed I wasn't keen on the first part in Giant Vampire Lady's house. It feels like it's setup to be the 'Baker House' part of the game and it kinda is, but it feels super linear and tiny, like you barely move without bumping into her or daughters and you'd think you'd be puzzling all over the place when most of the time soultions feel super linear and self contained.
Thankfully it improved massively after that for me, I definitely prefer this to 7. I like that Ethan is more fun this time, he was a plank of wood in 7 but in 8 he's got quite a mouth on him.
The Magneto dude was pushing it though lol
Additional PLAY:
Fortnite - Reinstalled this because it's my project at work and the launch of three more 'games' within it means I need to keep more of an eye on things. Don't care about Battle Royale, that's the same as it's always been. However, LEGO Fortnite and Rocket Racing are actually… good? I'm not into survival building games, but LF had me playing for a good few hours and I'll definitely dive back in. Rocket Racing is definitely my jam and while I dunno how it'll last or if the monetisation will fuck it up, I'll keep playing for sure.
The third game, Fortnite Festival, launches today. Since it's Rock Band without instruments and a rotating playlist, I have no idea if it'll be good. But I'll certainly give it a good go. Who'd have thought I'd actually want to play Fortnite?
EDIT: Festival is out. It's basically the PSP version of Rock Band in terms of inputs, but you stick to one instrument (RBPSP had you hopping between them). The music selection is… limited. The visuals are fine, but the staging is quite janky. Still… it's free Rock Band for my Switch. I'll take it.
Bit tedious this, but I have a quite powerful gaming laptop. I've had it a while, mobile 3070, fairly recent CPU, 144hz screen. I've always been a bit disappointed in its gaming performance. Even disabling the internal graphics in the BIOS and routing directly via the dedicated GPU made only a bit of difference. It was fine, but way short of my main gaming PC. I'd sorta accepted it was because it was a mobile GPU and there wasn't a lot I could do about it.
I picked up Returnal, wanting to play it on mouse/keys not pad. And installed it on the laptop. It just wouldn't run at 60fps, and indeed, the performance was shocking. Lurching all over the place. This was a bit of a snapping point, as while Returnal on PC has a reputation for stressing machines, surely it wouldn't be this bad?
I went on a short review of some forums across the interwebs.. I'd always assumed the NVidia graphics drivers for Studio use were basically the same as the gaming ones. But a post caught my eye saying that for games they were pretty poor. One short swap to the Gaming drivers later and I am now looking at 100%+ performance increases in some games. Returnal went from a shaky 40-50fps to a solid 90-100. Games like Apex, Starfield, Baldur's Gate, Outer Worlds and others have been utterly transformed. It was likely if Returnal hadn't come along I'd have just lived with it until I eventually sold the laptop in a couple of years time and replaced it.
I've basically spent the evening just putting games on for 5 minutes and going…. wow! Then fuck I'm an idiot! Then wow! again.
But this is a longwinded way of getting to Returnal. I'm too old for its shit, but it feels great on mouse/keys, with an almost perfect game flow and gun feel. I am absolutely never going to finish it, and it's doubtful I can even get off the first level, but it's undeniably a great game, and I'm sure the younglings dig it.
Found myself drifting back to Elder Scrolls Online thanks to a Microsoft Rewards quest that required you to play it for an hour - I'd last played the game three and a half years ago and honestly thought I'd just leave it running in the background while I did other stuff, but by the end of the hour I was hooked all over again.
You know what I love about this game? Big fonts. It has massive chunky fonts for everything that can be easily read from a sensible viewing distance. In fact the whole game has clearly been designed for/by knackered middle-aged people who just want something comfy to unwind with at the end of the day. It's simple to pick up and play - it took me five minutes to remember how my skills worked. It's very easy for the most part, and you can go off and play any part of the world you feel like at any time because it's all level-scaled (although harder content is in there for those who want it). It's got absolutely tons of content, years and years worth of expansions, and it's packed full of nice stories you can follow that are all fully voice-acted and take you to interesting places. And while you don't need to subscribe to get the most out of it, subbing for a month immediately gives you access to the whole game, every expansion (bar the most recent) and every bit of DLC they've ever released, so you don't even need to worry too much about what to buy or where you're able to go or not go.
Weirdly the thing it reminds me of the most is Starfield - which tried to do the whole "go anywhere/do anything" thing but without the content to back it up. ESO, which can be played entirely as a single-player game if you want, has got a huge world, thousands of quests and better storylines, it's no contest really.
Look, I'm not spending time making a bespoke gif just for a cheap 'You like big fonts and I cannot lie', so just forget it.
Additional Play/Bin – Resident Evil 4 Remake.
Great until the island, then crap. Was hoping they might have reworked the final section more, considering how famously dull it is, but never mind.
I'm half tempted to push through just so I can do the (wonderful) first 75% of the game again, this time fully armed in NG+. But that bloody lab.
Great until the island, then crap. Was hoping they might have reworked the final section more, considering how famously dull it is, but never mind.
All Resi games do this, though, don't they? It seems to be compulsory to end on a shit bit in some sort of industrial/lab setting. RE1, 2 and 3 all do it, even Village has an overlong section in a really dark factory to take all the fun out of the endgame.
A true Xmas story. I have mentioned before that I play games at work with my students. One of them is very into strategy games and discovered I liked Xcom. He was feverishly telling me how much better he is at me at Xcom, partly because he does that teenage thing where he can't comprehend that people are better at him at any games if they are older than about 23. Recently I spotted that the Original Xcom titles on 360 have system link*. Today we booted up the first reboot, it was clear to me that as soon as we engaged he wasn't actually that tactical, and then he confirmed this by putting 3 of his units behind the same car.
One rocket, one plasma shot and then a unit I'd flanked all around using Run & Gun, and he'd been squad wiped in 4 turns. Beat him in the follow-up game too. Merry Xmas youth of Sheffield.
*Been looking system link and trying to buy system link games on 360 and it's a minefield as the official lists for it are so poorly verified it seems. Found at least 1 game that mentions it has it, the game has it as a mode but then it just doesn't work at all. If I had the time I'd love to make a video testing as many as possible.
Haha, thanks. Very self indulgent I know but it brightened my entire day.
A beautiful, heartwarming Christmas story with a happy ending. Love it.
You should have ended it by giving him a lump of coal and telling him Santa is dead.
A couple of Christmases ago we had guests with a couple of younger kids (tween) come to stay (friends of my partner). The parents were non game playing, the two kids were convinced they were unbeatable at Mario Mart 8. Challenged me with the same air of bravado as Xcom man.
Wrecked the pair of them. Over and over again. No mercy.
It's the only way they'll learn about the reality of the life that awaits them when they grow up.
Found myself drifting back to Elder Scrolls Online …
… It has massive chunky fonts for everything that can be easily read from a sensible viewing distance. In fact the whole game has clearly been designed for/by knackered middle-aged people who just want something comfy to unwind with at the end of the day.
OMG sign me up. I'm so in for games that are legible without having to get up from the couch and walk halfway to the TV.
Today we moved onto "Lord of the Rings War in the North". Big 6 out of 10 action RPG vibes that I was actually loving. Xcom kid is now 0-5 against me so gave him a break and we played this, that we now want to try and complete.
Decent experience in system link.
I don't like the Avatar films, and, these days I have little tolerance for Far Cry related massive-map-collactandkillencampments-athons. So, I obviously picked up the Frontiers of Pandora game. I think someone said it was a bit like Mirror's Edge in a forest and that was enough for me.
There's also a lot of hype surrounding the graphics, which have been heralded as VERY GOOD INDEED by the neckbeards at Digital Foundry. And when are they ever wrong.
However the game starts with a godawful videogame tutorial section and story so eyerollingly shit I could barely make it through. The evil dude is such a videogame villain that's it's not even worth commenting on.
And by fuck does the Oblivion prison section go on for longer than it needs to. It even has an enforced stealth section. In 2023. The pathing directing you through the grey prison breakout is terrible - they use lighting (ala Half Life 2) to try to direct the player, but in one section I had to go onto Youtube (along with 1000 other people, I'm guessing, from the viewing stats) to work out how to open one door to progress, due to bafflingly poor signposting.
Anyway, the section ends with you literally running down a tunnel with a glowing end point ready for the world reveal. Thoughts of Oblivion and Zelda swirl with anticipation as you burst out into a…. quite well rendered forest (?). I will give the game that. It trees good. My PS5 was supposed to be rendering it all at 60fps as well, but that felt more like a Kier Starmer pledge as it's quite chuntery.
And after that? It's a videogame. All the systems are done better in Horizon and a million other variants of the same thing. The forest looks good, but because it's so busy and the pathfinding is so weird, it's more of a hindrance than a bonus. The parkour is OK, but again - Mirror's Edge understood the visual minimalism you need to make FPS parkour coherent. Getting stuck on a well rendered branch every 3 seconds: not so good.
And the story is just as shit as the films, with enormous smurf hippies shooting humans in robots for some reason I cannot be bothered to think about.
God I'm tired.
