PWB October: CHAOS

What are the odds that they've done this because the game goes on Game Pass, gets a tonne of new players and some bright spark at SE went 'Shit, now's the chance to make some money!'.

Undoubtedly - this has the mark of executive interference all over it. I'm fairly sure the game is going to go F2P fairly soon, and the appearance on Game Pass is the first step in that direction. If they can't make money from actual sales, they'll claw it back through microtransactions.

Won't affect me, I'm just playing through the campaign and that's actually pretty great - if you want to spend time and money on an ongoing GaaS game then there are clearly plenty of better alternatives than this.

I'm still on Sea of Thieves, but went back into God of War last night, for the first time in ages. I just got to the bit where Spoiler - click to showyou get the Blades of Chaos back. I get the feeling that it's supposed to be this big, dark, weighty moment, but I just had a massive grin on my face. I forgot how much fun those things are.

An absolute highlight at the moment, though, is There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, on Android (though I'm sure other mobile platforms are available). It's essentially a puzzle game, but it's the most inventive, meta thing I've played in ages, as each chapter takes on a different format, from Lucasarts-style adventure game, through Zelda clone, to James Bond title sequence.

The core conceit is that the game really doesn't want to be played, so you have to trick it, breaking each of these genres in bonkers ways to jump from dimension to dimension, trying to get into the actual game. It has a lot of voice stuff - the game backchats constantly, and the whole thing has a fantastic sense of humour about itself and games in general. It's very well-written, surprisingly touching in places, and has a helpful multi-stage hint system to help through its more obtuse moments; there have been several times where I knew what the solution to a puzzle was, but not where or how to implement it.

It's £4.19 (or, was when I bought it), but there is a Game Jam version, too - a proof of concept, basically - which is free, and gives some idea of what to expect.

Seconded on There Is No Game. Finished that back in July (also on Android) and it's really quite lovely.

Having done Metroid Dread, I flicked back through all the other games I've got installed on my Switch (deleted a few that I'd started and tired of already), then settled on Part Time UFO. I've already finished the mobile version but the Switch one has more content and a raft of achievement-like challenges, so I figured I'd play. It's great, really nice bite-sized levels and a good level of difficulty. Really enjoying it.

I also picked up Tetris Effect: Connected despite having it on PS4 and Xbox (Game Pass) already. Figured I'd probably play it more on a handheld device. I was right, I've already got further on Switch than I ever did on the other TV-based formats. So that's nice.

I bet you can get past the tropical island level too because you're well g8mer :(

Probably, I'm playing on Easy.

I bet you can get past the tropical island level too because you're well g8mer :(

The fiery/tiki bit? I fucking hated that on the PS4 version, took me forever to get past it.

I'm definitely going to end up buying Effect on Switch too, despite the fact I still play 99 a few times a week anyway - I actually came 2nd in one the other day during the MH Rise event, but I've still never won a round…

Play

Control - should get a look in again now the weather is a bit more appropriate, and I've "finished" Hollow Knight and Murder By Numbers. Really enjoying it, it just got squeezed out a bit.

Borderlands 3 - still just occasionally going through on TVHM with a nearly-fully-levelled Zane, just to get to the DLC and get the trophies for the PS5 version. I still sort of wish I was playing Fl4k instead sometimes, but maybe I'll just play again with him at some point, especially if they patch it like they did with the second game so I can start with a semi-levelled character instead of doing all the shitty low-level character stuff again.

Various things on the Switch - I'll probably keep on with Hollow Knight until I'm closer to 100%, and am still intermittently playing a little of Tetris 99, MH Rise, various roguelikes, Demon's Tilt, etc.

Want

Erm. I'm sure there was something. I forget what. Advance Wars 1+2 I think I've pre-ordered? Metroid Dread I'll probably pick at some point. Shin Megami Tensei V I'll probably buy and forget to ever actually play. MH Rise Sunbreak? I'm definitely forgetting something else…

Bin

vague hand gestures

Advance Wars, had forgot about that. I am tempted to grab some of the more recent Evercade carts too, particularly the one with Cannon Foder on.

Metroid Prime
Just got the Varia Suit and beat the big plant boss and so far this is holding up SUPER well, I might have been a bit worried it wouldn't, but not anymore. Not only does it still look great for a Gamecube game but the level design is still on point and the music is a real standout, both elements are responsible for possibly the most atmospheric game in a series known for it's atmosphere.

So far the only issues I have are sometimes missing platforms by a small margin, which might just be me…and Free Aim is hard to use because Samus keeps trying to revert to neutral, I wanna say it's my pad but if it were why is my normal movement fine? Maybe I should have played the Wii Trilogy version but I'm a slave to nostalgia and I beat it on GC once so I'll do it again.

Still think it's hilarious that Samus investigates the space frigate at the very start and then even that ends up self destructing for some reason, thank fuck she never comes to Earth.

Metroid Prime is timeless - I must dig out my copy of the Wii Trilogy. I'm sure the graphical style has held up perfectly well despite its age and low res.

The first game has the best atmosphere, but I think overall I slightly preferred the second, some of the design in that game both in terms of architecture and puzzles was absolutely amazing. I never put much time into the third at all, maybe I should go back and rectify that.

I'd definitely recommend playing the Wii versions if you can, not only are the controls absolutely pitch perfect but they rebalanced the difficulty too. The OG version of Echoes was a bit hard for most people, especially when it came to the bosses; the rebalanced version is a lot more fun to play.

I remember that difficulty thing, the Spider Ball guardian in particular is burned into my memory somehow, I think the only boss anyone talks about in the first is Meta Ridley and the Omega Pirate so I guess they really did up the difficulty.

Additional Play - well, Brian does board games in here so why not - we've been playing Pandemic Legacy: Season 2. As you can imagine, it's a cheerful diversion from current events. In fact, it's basically Brexit Britain The Board Game, as you struggle to contain repeated outbreaks of plague while supplies constantly dwindle and bits of the world cut themselves off from each other.

It's quite, quite brilliant though. We loved the first season but it was very heavily scripted - in every game you'd get certain things happening each month and everyone's experience would be pretty similar. This is much more player-driven, you can explore the world at your own pace and a combination of reconning new areas and searching existing cities means a lot of the surprises are a result of your own actions and choices rather than the ticking clock. It starts off small (you only have access to a handful of cities at the start of the game) and it's up to you how far and fast you expand. It's more ambitious, and more clever, than the first game, and we're absolutely hooked. Up to May and, barring an absolute drubbing in March, we are doing pretty well so far. So far.

We were fairly positive at the start but goodwill eventually dwindled. I think Season 2 is better designed than 1 mechanically, but you see more and more evidence of Rob Daviau's misplaced belief that he's a real writer and capable of crafting memorable stories. He isn't. And, if allowed to flourish to its natural end point, shorn of the mechanics of Pandemic, then you end up with Seafall, comfortably the worst boardgame we've ever played by a country mile, with writing so poor it makes your toes curl. We have a code in the boardgame group for when an obvious Rob plot twist or design element is about to be introduced and make a loud oil tanker HONK noise (heard as the massive obvious thing comes over the horizon). Which has entered our daily language when referring to something that is almost certainly about to happen. HONNNNNNK.

Risk Legacy was interesting as the first stab at the concept, Season 1 had the benefit of the freshness and maturation of the ideas (although, as you say, it was fairly rigid and the "twists" were largely shit), Season 2 is a bit of a difficult second album where the pedals start spinning and ideas start getting flung about which don't really work. And the storytelling is absolute bobbins. After finishing it (which we did after Seafall, to be fair, so were already running out of patience with Rob) I think we were done and nobody has ever talked about doing Season 0. Maybe in a year or two when the trauma subsides.

Ah, I've got a sealed copy of Seafall in the games cupboard, that doesn't bode well.

Still, Season 2 hasn't beaten us into submission with its story elements yet, occasionally we get a card full of word soup but it always translates into fun new game mechanics so it's all good so far. In fact the number of "twists" has been quite low so far, far less so than the first season where I guess it needed a couple of big upsets early on to prove the concept.

I've heard Season 0 is the best of the three, so I suspect we will get to that eventually.

You'll probably love Seafall. There are people who do. They're wrong. It's spectacularly bad.

Play
Rift Apart - I'm maybe 4 or 5 hours in now and it's largely great. It's Ratchet and Clank so it was hardly going to be terrible, but they have streamlined a lot of the gameplay, the story is fine, and it can be visually spectacular at times. I do have an issue that they insist on mixing up the gameplay with wacky mechanics that are still as scattershot as ever (the core loop is good enough that occasionally you just feel like shouting "just let me shoot stuff with my guns!" at the screen) and the uneasy attempts to do a more freeform navigation/hub approach rather than linear game design (ala Gears 5) don't really convince anyone. But at the core it's fun and challenging and a good demonstration of the PS5's capabilities (load times are ridiculously quick/non existent).

God of War - as mentioned, ridiculously good looking and a good game to boot. Which is the same for Horizon, that I've also been dabbling in.

Apex - after many an existential crisis and testing myself on AimLabs to try to work out what my issues were I have been on a generally good run on Apex recently, winning 4 games out of 5 attempts last week (which is pretty pog for a Battle Royale game) on Rampart, who is now my main. Rampart in Apex is a British Indian character who drops cover and also can pull out a massive fucking machine gun and laser people. I was getting quite a lot of downs but not finishing people off, and this was a good step to take, as I'm now a thirsty fuck who tends to hover back from my team, snipe at range and then hare in at the end of fights mowing down the weakened remainders. Noice.

Knockout City - we're starting to finally tire of this, but it's been great. A joyful, challenging, amazingly balanced game that deserved more exposure than it got. Maybe if it had been free to play? I'd still recommend it, it's like a less brutal version of Rocket League and when you get good at it, it lets you pull off moves that make you feel like a gaming god.

Star Wars Squadrons - we've been doing a bit of this. It's fine. Looks great, but ultimately the fighting is a bit meh. Co-op missions are rock hard at 2 or 3 players (which do make them more entertaining).

Geoguesser - become a bit obsessed with this playing with my son. I am still grappling with how close Niagra Falls is to built up areas. Like, what the fuck? I've even been to them, but I obviously have a fake memory of them being in the middle of a desert….

Want
Season 11 of Apex - new map and Ash from Titanfall 2!!!111!!!!!
Returnal I think?

Bin
gestures vaguely at everything

Knockout City - we're starting to finally tire of this, but it's been great. A joyful, challenging, amazingly balanced game that deserved more exposure than it got. Maybe if it had been free to play?

Judging from my son and his mates, no multiplayer game is going to stand a chance of getting into their rotation unless it is (a) free to play, (b) cross-platform and (c) has cross-platform voice chat. His crowd are (I'd say) probably about 50% PC, 30% PS4 and 20% Xbox, and they're not going to pick anything that limits who can join or makes voice chat complicated in any way whatsoever.

So they basically just play Fortnite.

I think KOC is cross platform (and I've never met a kid who uses in game voice chat on anything - it's all Discord), but the F2P limitation is baffling. It was heavily pushed by streamers and already has a fairly comprehensive customisation framework in it (with plenty of drip and swag and battle passes and the like). I assume, like Fall Guys they thought it would get enough traction to have a few months of heavy revenue generation before dropping off (and going fully F2P was too much of a risk). Shame though, as the devs really nailed it and it's very original and brilliant to play. Maybe with the keys on amazon being given away this month they're going to try releasing it on Plus/Gamepass soon to see if they can get a second wave of engagement. Which would be good, as we have reached the stage we're recognising players on the service when we're matched against them now….

Knockout City was on Game Pass day one, clearly didn't get a lot of attention though. I guess that's the problem, there's so much on the service that it really takes good word of mouth for something to break through. I thought Back 4 Blood would do well (it's basically Left 4 Dead, and also day one on Game Pass) but I tried playing it less than a week after release and it was completely dead. Shame.

With Discord voice chat, I assume that's done separately through phones etc rather than through the console - doesn't that mean they can't hear the in-game audio then? Or do they all deal with massive echo from each other's speakers over their mics?

I can only talk about my kids all all their mates, but either they talk via a Discord overlay on PC, or literally wear buds under phones when playing on PS4/mixed platforms or whatever. The slow native integration of Discord onto consoles is baffling (don't Sony even own it now?).

I didn't know KOC was on Gamepass. Well, that's a bit of a bruh moment then. Shame.

I downloaded B4B and never even tried it. This is something of an issue with the absolute torrent of free games there is today.

I forgot another play, Rust! I've been playing this with my youngest and it's absolutely fucking brutal. Like, lose 2 hours of progress because you get attacked by a bear levels of brutal. But I generally despise crafting loop games, and there is certainly something more to this than many of them. It can be very atmospheric while being an odd mix of entirely novel and simultaneously quite old fashioned. Reminds me a bit of a crueller Sea of Thieves - similar emergent chaos crossed with random brutality.

Back 4 Blood is fine, but it's clearly Turtle Rock trying to remake L4D without Valve's wise, guiding hand.

It doesn't have any of L4D's polish or restraint. (I know restraint is an odd word for a game about hitting zombies with guitars, but the design was honed to perfection. When you listen to those old dev commentary nodes, it's apparent just how much thought has gone into stripping the fat and focusing purely on the fun bits. Back 4 Blood has none of that – it throws a billion mechanics at you in a very haphazard fashion, and just about gets by on L4D nostalgia.)

The biggest problem with L4D-alikes is that Left 4 Dead was a perfect game; there's nothing to take away, and there's nothing to add that improves it. Even L4D2 kind of went too far with the addition of really powerful melee weapons. Uncommon Common infected didn't add a massive amount of variety, and the newly added throwables weren't all that different from the existing ones (a bile bomb performs basically the same function as a pipebomb only it can go more wrong for the players)

You can add a card based system where you slap modifiers on a map, you can do some gear based stuff, and you can add a bunch of evolved forms of specials but all that does is add cruft around the edges of the game. L4D has such a purity of design intent that adding to it is like trying to add puff pastry crusts to a diamond.

L4D is fine, but it has aged a lot in terms of gun feel and traversal. I'd certainly like to see a modern reinterpretation of it.

It is pleasing to see people hear agreeing that L4D was better than L4D2 though, usually that opinion gets me told to shut up. Turing the original up to 11 but not in a good way, is usually how I describe it.

Felt like no matter how many times you played the original scenarios you still got hooked into the little narrative of move and survive. The 2nd took the pauses away and thus ruined the tension and pacing.

I think that the slower movement speed and the slow reload speed on weapons are both very intentional.

If you could move faster, slide under things or mantle over stuff easily you'd lose a huge amount of threat from the zombies who already have to be runners in order to keep up with the player. The slow reload time on firearms doesn't have a huge impact when you're just travelling through ambient packs of zombies, but the moment you're reloading when a special has your buddy pinned or when you've just been boomer'd and the hordes descending on you, you get a nice shock of adrenaline.

The way the guns flinch when you're hit, the audio design on them, the little hint of bullet magnetism you get's all still really, really solid. I don't know what you'd change :(

New Play: Moonglow Bay. A gentle little mix between Harvest Moon and Spiritfarer that tasks you with building up a seafood business in a crumbling seaside town. There's a lot of fishing, and a lot of cooking, and plenty of villagers' problems to solve. As you progress through the story, you unlock more areas and more equipment, which allow you to catch more fish, and cook more dishes. There's also a fair amount of indie game jank here, and the voxel style is an acquired taste (I rather like it, as it happens), but that hardly matters - this is an exceptionally laid-back game that's the perfect antidote to the bombast of The Avengers, and I can see myself dipping into this regularly.

More Knockout City stuff: it's coming to PS+ in November (it's still on Game Pass too) and is getting a PS5/Series X upgrade next week - so hopefully it'll get a new lease of life.

Nice. More n00bs balls to batter.