PWB May

Play
Videogames: Not yet. I do have a few that I want to play but suddenly I have an exam next week which I need to pass.

RPGs: Whitehack still going well. Eight sessions in, two PC deaths so far. Yoon Suin is such a great world to explore.

Want
I want a Switch, mostly for Zelda. Little Miss Bloodaxe wants all the Mario games and Splatoon.

If I can't find the cash for that I might grab Witcher 3 or Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Our new car. We just ordered a Toyota RAV4 Hybrid. I think it's due to arrive in July.

Bin
Everything but revision I guess.

Play

Nothing for a while, but I'm determined to get back into Sea of Thieves before the big updates start to hit later this month. I've also just bought Yakuza Kiwami in the PSN sale - now I just need to decide whether to jump into Zero first. I also desperately want to get back to Breath of the Wild and actually push through to Hyrule Castle; I think I've resigned myself to not doing any more of Mario Odyssey for now.

I'm running a tabletop RPG tonight, which is our group getting together for the first time since October (so, no pressure). It's going to be Monster of the Week, which none of us have played before, but I've been listening to a Real Play podcast for the last couple of weeks for prep. Now I'll have to stop tweaking the mystery every time I have two minutes' downtime at work…

Want

Oh, God, time to play what I already have, never mind any new stuff. I've got a friend who's agreed to lend me God of War at least, so that's one less thing to eye up every time I'm on the PSN store.

Play

• Sea of Thieves is pretty much it at the moment, videogame-wise.
• D&D, still, in a weekly adventurers' league. It scratches the itch, but my cleric really belongs in a proper campaign, I think, rather than the piecemeal, adventure-of-the-week style. It's been interesting, though - he's pretty well known among several of the other players, and I've been getting more ideas for how to play the character if I ever do end up in a proper game with him.

Want

• God of War, for one, though also the time to play it.
• I also need to get back to Horizon Zero Dawn, Burnout Paradise, and the gods only know how many other Playstation Plus games that are filling up my PS4 hard drive.
• RPGs - Our weekly online D&D game fell apart due to scheduling issues, but I've been noodling away at a Firefly conversion for the FFG SWRPG/Genesys system, and have a couple of people interested in playing it - in meatspace, even, which will be novel.

• RPGs - Our weekly online D&D game fell apart due to scheduling issues, but I've been noodling away at a Firefly conversion for the FFG SWRPG/Genesys system, and have a couple of people interested in playing it - in meatspace, even, which will be novel.

I would totally play in that if I had the chance. It was actually one of the reasons I bought Edge of the Empire in the first place; I wanted to do exactly that.

Do you have the Firefly boardgame? I was thinking it's board would make a reasonable map for a Firefly RPG.

Yeah, I've got everything for the board game. Managed to squeeze everything into one box, even! I'm planning to use the Whole Damn Verse map if I ever do get the chance to run it.

One of the things I like with Firefly as a setting is that there's usually very little space combat, so I never have to deal with the godawful FFG space combat rules.

I'd play a roll20 game with you weirdos.

Monster of the Week is great fun. Also, the author of it gave some great information about the impact of being on The Adventure Zone had on the product. The day after the episode went up they saw more sales than they had in the rest of the time it'd been available.

Yeah, I've got everything for the board game. Managed to squeeze everything into one box, even! I'm planning to use the Whole Damn Verse map if I ever do get the chance to run it.

I hadn't realised there was more than just the main game.

There are 2 map expansions (Blue Sun and Kalidasa, which add another section to each side of the board - Rim Space - with its own nav deck and new Contacts/Stores, plus new rules for Reavers and a second Alliance ship that can go anywhere in the 'Verse), 2 card expansions (Breaking Atmo, which is mostly new crew and items; and Crime & Punishment, which among other things doubles the size of the Misbehave deck), and 3 ship expansions (Pirates & Bounty Hunters, which adds PvP boarding rules, crew bounties, and the SS Walden and Interceptor ships, plus 2 captains; and a pair of 4-series Firefly expansions, Jetwash and Esmeralda Jetwash featured in one of the comics, and has a captain version of Zoe).

Pretty much all of those also come with new setup cards, too.

Haven't played a full-scale game yet, though - there's always someone new and don't want to overwhelm them.

EDIT: oh, yeah, the box weighs a fucking ton now, though.

Well that all sounds awesome. I've still barely scratched the surface of the main game though.

Out of everything, I'd probably recommend Pirates & Bounty Hunters the most. It gives a lot more opportunity for player interaction, which is something missing from the base game (where everyone's just basically doing their own thing).

I have added it to my wishlist.

Play

Final Fantasy XIV - very much back on board with this, closing in on the end of Heavensward and enjoying it immensely. Got to say that this expansion feels like an entire JRPG in its own right, and the standard of storytelling is vastly better than the base game ever was. Plus I keep getting sidetracked by interesting but ultimately pointless activities, which is always the sign of a good game.

Nintendo Labo - as much fun as we thought it would be, and an absolute masterpiece of design and engineering. So far we've built the piano and the fishing rod, and they're so much fun to play with it's slowed us down on building the others. There's loads of entertainment to be had here and anyone who tells you "it's just a load of cardboard!" is an utter fool.

Xenoblade Chronicles - which has the weirdest pacing ever. It starts off and it's absolutely lovely, really open-ended, quite MMO-like in style, and it carries on in this vein for about 30 hours. Then the plot kicks in, the wheels suddenly come off and it turns into the slowest, most turgid JRPG ever, with endless cutscenes full of people standing in rooms chuntering at each other. I dropped this at Christmas for exactly this reason and only recently went back to it - thankfully it turns out that it reverts to its original style after a few hours and I'm enjoying it again, though I'm a bit wary of it now.

Want

God of War - unanimous praise and a general agreement that this is an entirely different beast to the other games in the series have got me interested in this.

More Marvel movies! I'm really going to miss these once I get to the end of my current runthrough. Still at least I might have time to crack on with my increasing Netflix watchlist.

Bin

Fire Emblem Awakening - just too punishing, in the end. I really enjoyed it but I was replaying every level several times over trying to keep everyone alive, and it was just turning into a slog. I need to play something in a similar vein with a bit more leeway to it - I sense a Disgaea playthrough coming up.

Monster Hunter World - game of the year for me without a doubt but I've basically run out of stuff to do now, and I'm not in the mood for the endless grinding that the remaining trophies require (maybe after a break I'll be happy to return to it). It kind of highlights the problem with the "games as a service" model it's using - one new monster every month or two simply isn't enough to maintain my interest, though I'd snap up a proper expansion without a second thought.

Play

Monster Hunter: Generations - So I looked it up and this game has almost twice as many monsters as World, I'm treating it as an extension more than anything and it's really fun.

Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood - I'm goingto try and be a good Machinist again, but it's way harder than being a good Bard. Other than that, I'm going through the Final Fantasy 6 raid pretty fast in my static (We're on Kefka) but I hate playing as Bard in my team's party composition, I'm providing a lot of raid utilty and not really getting any back and besides my lower dps it's just nowhere near as fun.

Want

Monster Hunter XX on the Switch…still - Would be nice, also, the Dragon that is like a Jet and can break the sound barrier in flight and leaves a smoke trail…isn't in Generations, lame!

Shenmue I and II HD - Yakuza not only didn't fill that hole, it made it bigger….

Bin

(This portion got longer and longer, I guess I just needed to get it off my chest)

Yakuza Kiwami - enjoyed the first day or so of this, then I started to get really bored of the minigames and substories which I've heard are one of the most loved stand-out parts of the games, full of crazy and weird shit in contrast to the serious main story and then I do a whole bunch and they're….nothing like what I heard. Most of them are pretty mundane 'one and done' shots that almost all end up in a dust up, so that kinda' bummed me out. So I just rushed through the last few chapters and enjoyed it more as a result. (which doesn't mean I thought the story was great, because it had terrible characters/vilains, besides Kazama of course who is amazing)

And speaking of dust ups, the fighting is fun…at first, you get to pick up a couch and knock people over with it, build 'heat' to do the hilariously OTT special attacks but every single non boss fight just feels the same and once crushing someone underneath a motorbike gets old you just have a really shallow combat system. And I ranted over Twitter for this but this game has hands down some of the worst, ball bustingly shit boss fights I've ever had to fight in a game I don't want to go into why just yet but they are such broken, unfair pieces of shit, and really exemplify why in my opinion this game just doesn't have a good combat system, I think it's a significant problem (Boss/non boss wise) since you do so much fighting in this game.

TOO LONG;DIDN'T READ (seriously, who gives a shit what I think since everyone loves the fuck out of this game and series anyway) I was let down by the side content of the game and the combat got really repeptitive after a while and the main story was confusing at times but not awful I guess? (how many times did we need to see the main villain eating shit and crying though?)

There are 6 more of these bastards, I'm told that Kiwami is by far the worst in the series, lacking many later stuff later games had most people liked about later games (and experienced first I believe, since they'll have played the PS3 games and maybe not the PS2 original) with Yakuza 0 in particular receiving special praise so maybe I fucked up and didn't play that….but I only got Kiwami because it was cheap and figured that if it was that faithful then it should have been okay to play first since there was no supplementary Yakuza 0 on PS2.

So that's that, I finally played Yakuza and feel like the only person in the world who did and does't think the game is a treasure or something. :<

Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition - The base game, on the WiiU had so much fucking shit to do before any of the DLC dropped, that I don't even know anyone personally that got through it all, it was just a well made Dynasty Warrior game with tons and tons of content at the time. Then…the DLC dropped with more adventure mode maps and characters and stuff, and then the 3DS version came out with even more gameplay refinements and even more characters and modes and adventure mode maps and now this Switch version has ALL of that (plus BOTW outfits for Link/Zelda) making it like what? Three times the game I had on the WiiU? the game I didn't even get close to truly experiencing, it's nuts. I'm not even going to be able to cover every element or this post will turn out too long.

This was probably the best Dynasty Warriors spin off game at the time of the WiiU version and the only one I think can even challenge it now since is the recent Fire Emblem? (I hear Hyrule has way more content but the mechanics in FE are more refined). But it IS a Dynasty Warriors game, if you hate them you might not like this BUT if you love Zelda then I honestly think you might have a ton of fun with this, the Dynasty formula has come quite a long way over the years and this game in particular mixes that formula with Zelda mechanics really well. You still run round a field taking over bases but this time the levels are Hyrule Field or Skyloft or Termina, and you're cleaning a bridge of a hole battalion with Princess Ruto's tidal waves or parting armies like the red sea with a slash of Links sword, not chinese/japanese factions, but Gorons and Moblins and Skeleton Knights.

There are 31 characters (from several Zelda games, not just the last two :^)) that each have several completely over the top weapon styles and attacks (Young Link has a special that cuts the Moon from MM clean in half) and it's just really fun trying them all out. If you hate Dynast Warriorsyou might not like this but if you love Zelda I'd consider it.

I absolutely love Hyrule Warriors, it's in my top 5 games easily. I've put dozens of hours into both the Wii U and 3DS versions, and really only scratched the surface both times. There is an absolutely insane amount of stuff in there to do and it's such a fun game.

I'm glad everyone's getting to enjoy this on the Switch now. I'm probably not going to get it for the third time (although I wish they'd stuck an extra character or two in there just to give me an excuse) as it really is just the exact game I've played already on the 3DS. But still. I played Fire Emblem Warriors and it wasn't even remotely as good - it had boring characters, the levels were all the same and the History Mode wasn't a patch on Hyrule's Adventure Mode.

Dammit, I want to play it now.

There are things in here that weren't in the WiiU version that make it more fun too, like mid battle switching and I think ordering people to certain areas? They can't fight too well but by the time you've done a side mission on the east side of the map as Link, Sheik will have reached the camp on the West side and you can switch. Also, I'm told the Ocarina item and the Owl Statues are another 3DS improvement, so not only can you swap characters they have a form of teleportation. There's also bosses getting weaker if all heroes stack in the same area.

There's also a weird Fairy thing where you can level up your own fairy? Sounds interesting. They apparently fixed other mechanics like Challenge mode having unrealistically hard A Rank requirements. It's basically a much better game now before DLC content is considered (saying that, I remember the two Adventure Mode maps we got, Normal and Master Quest with MM getting ine as dlc….there's still lile 5 other maps to do, what the fuck?).

I did a mode where you play as the Ganon from end of BOTW, it was a little repetitive, but still fun seeing the whole map from the perspective of a giant monster.

If it’s the same as the 3DS game with season pass, which I’m fairly sure it is, there are 10 or 11 adventure mode maps, you’ll unlock the rest as you complete the existing ones. They’ve been rebalanced completely since the Wii U version though so the difficulty curve is nowhere near as steep.

Yeah, which blows me away, since when I heard we were getting a Master Quest and Majora's Mask Adventure maps back on the WiiU I was like "whoa". Not only is the mode fun though, it's also where you get new characters and new weapons for characters (I think Link has seven weapons to use overall, lmao) so its worth doing.