PWB February 2023

Play

Marvel's Midnight Suns - still playing this and enjoying it more now I've realised how big it is and that I'm essentially in this for the long haul rather than actively trying to get to the end. It's a bit janky and doesn't hang together quite as well as it would like - the sections where you're wandering around looking for herbs are interminable - but the core of the game is really solid and I love all the interactions between the various characters. I even bought the season pass, which has given us Deadpool so far with three more to come.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes - also huge and therefore taking a bit of a back burner for the moment while I focus on one thing at a time. It's really good, but also (by its nature) quite repetitive. The main story missions are really good but they're padded out with a load of simplistic side missions which aren't nearly as much fun. Also all the character movesets are pretty similar, I really miss the crazy variation in play you got in Hyrule Warriors. But overall it's good, and a decent excuse to return to the world of Three Houses.

Hitman 3 - Freelancer mode is excellent but it's also pushed me back towards the bits of the main game I haven't yet finished off or need a refresher on. Spent an enjoyable evening murdering people in Whittleton Creek and looking forward to spending more time here.

Want

I don't really know what's coming out this year that I should be excited about. There's Star-something and Red-something coming out on Xbox but you can tell how interested I am in those because I genuinely can't remember their names. Nintendo's giving us Burp of the Wild and then seemingly nothing at all so surely we are due a new console announcement at some point this year? I guess I'm quite looking forward to the Star Wars Fallen Order sequel, otherwise I guess I will wait and see what lands on Game Pass as unexpected gems I didn't know about at the start of the year formed most of my GOTY 2022 list in the end.

Bin

Gave up drinking at the start of the year and feel loads better for it. Long overdue.

Play slowly plodding through Mass Effect Legendary Edition. I'm about 20hrs/halfway through ME1. It's still great but it's a bit cheap with the janky combat and copypasted locations. If I had ignored the sidequests it would have been a more polished experience.

Powerwash Simulator and podcasts is a good way to relax.

Want
A good deal for renewing my Gamepass.

Want
A good deal for renewing my Gamepass.

Has your Game Pass subscription run out? If it has, there's a trick you can do involving buying Xbox Live Gold membership, adding it to your Xbox account on the Microsoft website (it is apparantly important to turn off recurring billing, although this might only be important if you are shooting for the moon and adding three full years to your account), then clicking on "subscriptions" and selecting the option to upgrade your Live Gold to Game Pass Ultimate. It will cost £10.99 for the initial sign-up, I believe. All the Live Gold you bought, up to a maximum of 3 years, will then be converted into Game Pass Ultimate. To be completely transparent, I haven't done this myself. Googling reveals it was still working as of December 2022. You can buy a year's worth of Live Gold from CD Keys for £47. Not bad for a year of Game Pass! Alternatively, CD Keys also has a month of Game Pass Ultimate for £5.99 - This is the stackable version. There's non-stacking for cheaper, but those ones don't stack.

Cool. Thanks!

Play
Return of the Obra Din - I'm obviously late to the party of this, but holy moly what a game! I think everyone must know about ROTOD by now but for those who don't, you play as an insurance agent tasked with finding out what happened on the ill-fated voyage of the Obra Din, a merchant ship from the early 19th century. I know this doesn't sound particularly thrilling on paper. In order to help in your deductions, you have a magical compass that lets you see the moment of death of any body you find. You hear a few moments of sound, then are presented with a static diorama which you can explore to a limited degree. You have a notebook with a few clues in, and you fill the rest in as you go. You have to discover the identities of each crew member and passenger, and figure out whether they survived or how they died, and who (if anyone) was responsible for their death.

It's just brilliantly done. I can't compare it to any other video game, as there's nothing else that nails being a detective as well. The closest thing to it that I can think of is the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective board games. The most important things for a game of this nature are the difficulty and telling an interesting story, and it nails both of these. You will sometimes be stumped, even after you've witnessed all the events on the ship, but re-examining the information you have, and making a few educated guesses will reap dividends. The story is a lot wilder than you expect it's going to be. I am not going to spoil anything, but if you're anything like me you'll be fully hooked as soon as you gain access to the second sequence of events the game leads you to. It's also, oddly, a great couch co-op game. ilweran and I played it together - me in charge of the controller, her solving the mysteries. You can make deductions together and bounce suggestions off each other. "Oh, do you think that guy's a midshipman? Look at his trousers!" It's quite possibly the best way to play it. It also means you have two people's brains to help you remember facts and the faces of a collection of grim-looking salty sea-dogs.

This should possibly be in the Games Completed thread, as we've finished it now, but I wanted to give it it's due in the PWB thread

Want
God, I don't know. Lunch and generally better times would be a start.

Bin
Tiredness, troubles, and toothache.

The feltmonkey cheap Game Pass approach definitely works. The first post in this thread gives a more detailed breakdown of the steps required - key thing to note is that your existing subscription must have expired before you can take advantage of this.

https://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?/topic/297970-xbox-game-pass-guide-to-best-deal-in-first-post/

Linking to rllmuk threads now, these truly are the end times.

Play
Apart from HiFi Rush, High on Life and a few other titles covered here my big play this month is going to the ALGS Split one Apex finals at the Copperbox Arena in London this weekend with my eldest son (who is flying over from France). I have grown to absolutely love esports, specifically the LEC, Valorant and Apex. This year London is bafflingly hosting the MSI League finals and all three Apex major LAN events. Nobody is especially happy about it (and Brexit has caused visa chaos for a lot of teams) but as an opportunity to get to a proper event in the UK it was worth grabbing with both arms. This is probably only time I've ever been even remotely excited to visit London.

Want/Bin
My partner's house to sell. Due to her toxic, delusional, controlling mother she has been trying to complete a sale for 4 years through a haze of sabotage. It is a saga of Viking proportions, and has sent her spiralling into debt and chaos which I am trying to cover but is causing constant stress and pressure. I am constantly reminded how lucky I am (and was) to have a set of entirely normal fucking human beings for parents/relatives.

Absolutely Bin
January gym goers. Look guys, I know you're making an effort to stick to those resolutions, but can we just skip to the bit in Feb where everyone gives up and I can get a running machine again. The uni campus gym feels like visiting a Rage Against the Machine gig in the late 90s. And most of the activity is people taking photographs of their arse, rather than exercising.

Running a business. If you actually try to pay taxes and staff fairly it's a total ballache. I can quite see why offshoring all the wealth and currying favours with Tory MPs is a more profitable, lower effort enterprise than trying to do anything properly. I do sometimes think it would be a lot simpler just to do a salaried job for The Man.

Linking to rllmuk threads now, these truly are the end times.

I don't make a habit of it but that guide is a very detailed set of instructions for something Brian was specifically asking about. I couldn't be arsed to copy and paste it.

I think in this instance I can brave those treacherous halls in pursuit of saving a few quid.

I at least had the decorum to send Brian the link via pm.

It's all true. I had felt in my DMs.

Yeah, sorry about those pics I sent. That was an accident. They were meant for cav.

Haha lol mine too

Linking to rllmuk threads now, these truly are the end times.

I don't make a habit of it but that guide is a very detailed set of instructions for something Brian was specifically asking about. I couldn't be arsed to copy and paste it.

felt certainly does go the extra mile in this regard.

The feltmonkey cheap Game Pass approach definitely works.

I hope it does, fingers crossed. My GPU runs out in May, having done a bunch of stacking with cheap EA Play codes before they deactivated it. I tried to renew using money given as a Christmas present at work (in lieu of Christmas parties during COVID, we each got €100 of claimable store credit which I used at the German equivalent of Currys PC World), but the code I bought didn't work. Seems that despite changing my country settings when I moved, my GPU region is set to UK and so can't be topped up with German codes. I need to wait for it to fully expire, then start fresh with EU codes. Thanks, Brexit (this is genuinely the reason I got when I spoke to MS customer service).

PLAY
Hi-Fi Rush - Only just on the first level, but I can tell we're going to get on just fine.
WWE2K22 - Picked up a cheap Xbox code online so why not… it's supposed to be good, from what I've been told.

WANT
Something to do in Sea of Thieves - Because Debs and I hate PvP, season 8 of SoT has been quite the bust. It's not that we've stopped playing because weekends still see us hitting the waves, but all we're doing is rattling off commendations (current target: skeleton captains and crewmates) rather than discovering new things to do. That's fine, but it also means I'm not as enthused about the game as a whole currently… the fact I'm still not even Renown 100 yet on the season pass speaks volumes. Bring on season 9, please, and make it worthwhile for non-PvP players please.

BIN
The political comeback - As much as I don't care about the UK any more, I despair at the whole 'disgraced politician relaunches career and everyone cheers' thing. Boris is a lying scumbag, but his eventual return seems inevitable. Now Liz Truss is storming back too, twisting the narrative to suggest it wasn't her fault I'm now paying 300% more on my mortgage. Seriously, these people need firing into the sun.

the fact I'm still not even Renown 100 yet on the season pass speaks volumes

Wow, that does say something; I didn't think we play a lot, but I hit 100 weeks ago. Maybe it helps that we aren't really an objective-based crew; we do the Adventures pretty religiously, but anything else is optional. Last night, for example, we just flagged up as a Gold Hoarders Emmisary and did some treasure hunts. No reason, we're all Legends already, and I don't even like the emissary rewards. Then we got invited into an Alliance with two other ships doing an Athena's Run at Thieves' Haven, and got some passive rep, which was nice.

For us, Sea of Thieves is less a game than a social platform with side activities, where we hang out and chat with Sarah's sister in New Zealand for a couple of hours on a Saturday.

Additional PLAY (with):

New Xbox controller - I was saving all my Microsoft Rewards points for the AEW game, but then they released that stupidly pretty Stellar Shift controller and I caved. Thank you, Microsoft online store, for accepting credit balance from my Xbox account, meaning I didn't spend any real money. It'll be here tomorrow.

New Xbox controller - I was saving all my Microsoft Rewards points for the AEW game, but then they released that stupidly pretty Stellar Shift controller and I caved. Thank you, Microsoft online store, for accepting credit balance from my Xbox account, meaning I didn't spend any real money. It'll be here tomorrow.

Martonomics FTW!

I'm so used to the Elite 2 controller now that I don't think I could go back to the regular one, though it's an expensive habit. The bumper on my original Elite 2 stopped working (a common problem, it appears) and MS wanted £80 to repair it as it was out of warranty. Thankfully they then released the Elite 2 "Core" which is essentially the same thing without the paddles, charging dock and swappable sticks, so I was able to buy one of those for not much more than the cost of repair and transfer all those other bits over from my original broken one. I hope the build quality on the newer ones is better.

I'm slightly surprised that MS haven't refreshed their controllers to include gyro and/or better haptics (they are very expensive for what is quite a vanilla controller by modern standards) but I guess we are still early in the gen.

I've been through Two Elite 2s and 3 Elite 1s. The build quality on them is shocking.

I've been waiting to see if there are any early reliability reports on the new pro PS5 controller that looks good - £200 is ridiculous, but I like the back paddle design and swappable sticks, and it obviously comes with the Duelsense features.

Well, if you insist on biting chunks out of them of course they're going to break.

Alastor plays more games on pad in a day than I do in a year, so I can't be blamed for treating them badly.

Just back from London and the ALGS. Was actually super thrilling and, while Apex is a B-tier eSport, the event was pretty well put together. And TSM won, which was great (NRG in second, which is my son's team). Due to the matchpoint format in Apex the winning game saw the arena go absolutely nuts when TSM clinched a final fight against another team (also on match point). Also met a few of the players afterwards with my son (who got them to sign an Xbox pad cushion I got him for Christmas) and they were all gracious, lovely and very giving of their time.

If you guys are looking for a new cheaper alternative controller from the the elites. I highly recommend the Turtle Beach Recon controller. Its around £40 and it has more features than the elites. A few options for mic and headset but more importantly it has 2 back buttons you can map to. The only down side is it's wired only. I'll post the IGN review. A lot better explaining it than me, but I love it.

I'm not keen on the feel of it (I have tried one), and I need 4 back triggers. Wireless can be handy. Also, iirc, it doesn't have trigger stops, which means it's not great for competitive FPS games. Unless you're naturally gifted, like feltmonkey.

Ultimately the issue is that once you've tried the Elite, apart from some of the top level SCUF controllers, everything else feels a bit shit. It's just a shame that they appear to be made of tissue paper and spit.

I've never held an Elite. Extra bits aside, does it actually feel nicer to hold? Are the buttons more satisfying, does it feel more expensive?

Or are you paying for the sticks, paddles etc?

It does feel a lot nicer. It's heavier for a start and has really nice textured grips on each of the "handles".

The sticks are swappable, with different textured domes and of varying heights, so you can change them to ones of your preference. You can adjust the tension on each stick too which makes a difference to the way they feel.

The triggers are adjustable so you can have them as a normal trigger or as a button press or somewhere in between. The actual face buttons are pretty much the same as usual though I guess.

The paddles are the big game-changer of course but all of the above is really nice to have too. I guess one drawback is it's based on the old Xbox One controller design so doesn't have the X/S "share" button, but I don't use that anyway, so it doesn't bother me.

I still use an Xbox 360 controller on PC.

I've never held an Elite. Extra bits aside, does it actually feel nicer to hold? Are the buttons more satisfying, does it feel more expensive?

Or are you paying for the sticks, paddles etc?

I'd say the buttons are, weirdly, worse than a normal controller - and also are decoloured to make them super l33t and cool (and annoying). I think they're a bit spongier than a normal controller though.

The rear paddles make a huge difference to any game where it's a genuine advantage not to have to take your hands off the sticks. So, say in Apex Legends, you can bind jump and crouch to the back (rather than A and B) which lets you have a full range of 3D movement without momentarily moving your right hand. You can also bind say healing items and prepping a grenade or something, which allows you to continually be looking for threats and repositioning, while doing another activity. Once you use a pad with back triggers it is quite hard to go back - unless you hold claw to begin with of course, when it's far less important.

And yes, generally it feels a lot more premium than a normal pad, as Garwoofoo says. But, I can't remember having a single normal Xbox pad that has broken, and the Elites I've had, even with light use are unreliable. That said, I'd certainly use one with a Series console if I got it, even up against the most recent pads.

Play

Hot Wheels Unleashed

I only downloaded this for my son to mess about with. 10 hours in and I'm hooked. Really fun arcade racer with some super cool looking cars. Definitely recommend.

I also downloaded this, but I deleted it before I'd ever finished the tutorial race. The handling is so slippery, the drift is wildly overtuned and the AI feels like the worst kind of Mario Kart rubber banding, so it went in the bin. Shame, but it didn't do it for me. Glad you've found the sweet spot though!

We've been playing with real hot wheels today, does that count? Am looking to get a load of rain guttering to cut in half to make a real life Mario Kart style track that starts on top of the bunk bed.

If you want more stuff to do with your HotWheels: https://ospreypublishing.com/uk/gaslands-refuelled-9781472838834/

The handling in Hot Wheels Unleashed is a war crime.

Shit, cav and I agree on something… truly, the end of times is upon us!

I've been in a post Monster Train haze on Steam Deck trying desperately to find something that fills the same space. Slay is too slow. Across The Obelisk, Inscryption, Griftlands, Roguebook and countless others either have poor pad controls, or are too small on the portable screen. But Ring of Pain is the first thing I've found that is a scratching a similar itch.

It is a roguelike with a character building aspect. You're faced with a series of dungeons represented by a circle of cards. Each can be a monster, or bonus of some sort. You have to level up by killing stuff and collecting buffs and then get to the exit. You can skip cards in the ring via stealth or other effects.

It's very clockwork. Most interactions are shown before they occur and while there's a fair bit of luck on rolls and stuff the entire thing plays quickly, interestingly and is brutal enough to have a just one more go factor. It was only 3 quid (and it's been given away free on Epic so you might already own it) but it's the only thing that's come close to the tempo and moreishness of MT I've found so far….

I've been playing a couple of games that approach comedy from completely different angles.

Return to Monkey Island is good genial fun. It's gently funny rather than laugh-out-loud so far (I'm at the start of chaper 3 out of 5), but is charming and likable. It's a good hang. The puzzles aren't too obscure or tricky, and I haven't had to resort to trying every chicken in my inventory with every pulley I can find. The characters are just nice to spend some time with, and the atmosphere does a great job of mimicing the first two Monkey Island games.

God Of War III is so brutally over the top that all the grimness, the horrific ways Kratos dispatches his enemies, and his overall behaviour is all so extreme that it becomes very funny. Kratos will casually drop a 100ft stone giant onto a town full of innocent civilians, or kill the god of the sea, causing floods and tsunamis. He tends to see other people as tools in his various quests, to the degree that he pulls Helios' head off and uses it as a torch, and (in a previous game, not this one) throws King Midas into a waterfall to turn it to gold, so that he can climb up it. The solutions to every puzzle seem to generally involve brutalising someone who may or may not deserve it. Through Kratos' progress up Mt Olympus on his errand to kill Zeus, occasionally the game deliberately gives you glimpses of what life is life for the ordinary people, and it gets worse every time. It's unclear whether the game is trying to be grim and edgy (David Jaffe possibly thinks it is, but he wasn't the lead designer on this one) or has it's tongue firmly in it's cheek, but personally I just find it hilarious. It's all just so silly! You could rename the game Big Man In His Pants Murders EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING without really affecting the tone at all.

Aside from this, it's just a very impressive game. The combat is tense and occasionally very difficult but stays just the right side of infuriating or unfair. The classic GoW system of battering stuff, dodging, and completing hilariously brutal quick time events still holds up, surprisingly. At one point I realised that I could just grab hold of a crowd of previously-troublesome minions and tear them in half one by one. I felt no guilt as I popped them, like a man demolishing a whole box of Christmas crackers on his own in search of a promised set of nail clippers. Kratos would do this, and he would wear all the hats at once and read all of the jokes just to make himself angrier.

The sense of scale is unrivalled in anything I've played before or since. The game zooms out to show you titans battling gods, with Kratos a barely-visible dot running about on their shoulder. At one point Kratos climbs a huge chain, a section of the game that involves pushing up on a thumbstick and nothing else, and the camera swoops up and around, zooms in and out, and shows you such spectacle happening around Kratos that it becomes a thrilling action sequence. Talking of the camera, it feels very old-fashioned to be playing a game that has a fixed camera, but although the limitations of such a system are evident as you occasionally struggle to explore parts of the environment that you can't get the camera to point at, the strengths also become obvious, as the game is able to set the scene how it wants, and direct the player's attention accordingly. Basically, if you are struggling to point the camera into a specific corner, then there's nothing there, and no need to examine it anyway. The aformentioned sense of scale and the sheer drama of the action would be harder to convay with a modern conventional camera.

With this and Obra Din, this has been quite a good year so far for me in terms of rediscovering games I had previously passed over. I did try one new game, Hi-Fi Rush but I didn't get on with it. Once you see past the rhythm gimmick, It seemed to me like a quite repetitive arena battler with a deeply unlikable main character. I think the fact that I came to that conclusion about HiFi Rush, but love God Of War 3 says something quite worrying about me.

Disagreeing with feltmonkey and agreeing with mart in one day.

That's it. Time to pack the universe up, we're done.

I think I can pull us back from the brink by saying I love the old God of War games, and his description of GoW3 makes me want to set up my PS4 all over again.

Additional Play: Persona 5 Royal

I'd kind of forgotten how slow these games start off - I mean the story is interesting enough but I haven't actually done anything of my own volition yet and I'm a couple of hours in already. I think it's just getting to the point where it'll let me loose on the first Palace though so hopefully that's the time where it all starts to fall into place.

I did love both P3 and P4 so it's earned enough goodwill for me to stick with it.

My mute avatar seems uniquely dislikeable though (often all his dialogue options just make him sound like a sulky twat) and I kind of hate the English dub already. The way they pronounce Japanese names is very strange, and of course everyone is a whiny American. I might switch to the Japanese dub to see if it's less distracting, or just turn the voices off altogether.

I'm replaying P4G at the moment – more successfully than my Vita or PC replay attempts – and I'm surprised at how proscriptive it is about how you spend your free time compared to my memory of it.

When it comes to P5, I think I read that Royal relaxed some of the "you don't have time to do that" for evening social activities, but the original game felt very locked down in places.

Disagreeing with feltmonkey and agreeing with mart in one day.

That's it. Time to pack the universe up, we're done.

I've been agreeing with both of you quite a lot recently. I've found it a touch disturbing. I'm hoping Gar says something mad about Elden Ring or something as a general forum reset.

Not a fan of GoW3 then? I can see how it isn't for everyone, but I think it might be as good as anything in the GoW series. I've not played much of the new ones though, so I don't really know what I'm talking about.

God of War III is the apotheosis (appropriately) of the series to that point.

It is kind of hilariously OTT with the violence, in a very back-of-the-high-school-notebook G of way (L3 + R3 as a QTE prompt may stay with me forever), but I do think it's less adolescent at its core than it first appears. As the gods die, the world dies with them - the lands flood, the plants die, the sky darkens, all in an effective but admittedly on-the-nose demonstration of the cost of Kratos' all-consuming vengeance on everyone and everything around him.

Jaffe wasn't directly involved in a God of War III, iirc, and I can definitely see the fingerprints of Cory Barlog all over it; there's a clear thematic line bretween this Kratos and the 2018 version, hiding from vengeance and terrified what his godhood might mean for Atreus.

Did anyone ever play the one after 3? Was it called Ascension?

I remember it coming out but I don't think I've ever seen a single video of it.

I think I have it on PS3 (it was given away on Plus at one point, iirc?), but never played it. It was a different dev team, I think, and I seem to remember that the reviews were middling; it never made it to the list of things I felt like I needed to play.

The PSP ones are surprisingly accurate translations of the experience, though.

Ascension pretty much killed the franchise as it was at that point, didn't it? There wasn't another GoW game for five years after it.

I know exactly which QTE you are referring to, Ninchilla.

I think I did? I'd need to check though. I was heavily into pre-reboot GoW because I have so much in common with Kratos.

…

…

I love the PSP ones, even the shit one (one was great, one was about Kratos's brother and not so great? I think). I really should go back.

EDIT: Wasn't Ascension the one they put multiplayer in? I think I played it a bit, but not enough because it wasn't good.

Yeah, it had multiplayer. I think I played it once (in beta?). It was not a necessary addition to the franchise.

What's the GoW where you can smash a woman to death on a massive door opening cog?

Was that 3?

I think that's all of them.

I seem to remember it was universally the moment a few of us in the Soc checked out from the franchise.

Latest 2 are decent, in a Sony Saddadathon sort of way. Can't really remember much about the others.