PWB October

Yeah it's on mine, that's one thing I've enjoyed from this generation, the returning popularity of the jrpg.

Want
I'm an idiot, so I want an Xbox One X. Largely just so I can play Forza Horizon 4 and AC: Odyssey in ultra-shiny mode. Despite me knowing full well that the PS4 is clearly the only console you need.

I'm going to use the Xbone X as my main machine for third-party stuff, and keep the PS4 as an exclusives-only console. Still think I'll get more use out of the PS4. (Like I said: idiot.)

Play
Oblivion. Seemed like a good use of my needlessly expensive Xbone X.

Oblivion's good, innit. I've always preferred it to Skyrim. And on the One X, if you squint, it has even more pixels.

I played Oblivion. As soon as I got out of the prison, someone said I should go right… and I went left. Never met Sean Bean. Never triggered the story. Never got any oblivion gates or demons. Just 40 hours of wandering and doing side quests until I got bored and stopped.

So, that was nice.

Think off all the re-releases Skrim got and Oblivion didn't. :^)

I've never played Oblivion. I think I've got it on disc somewhere though.

I nearly finished it on 360; got to the last-push final bit, but then… stopped? Maybe something broke. But I remember liking it much more than Skyrim, which I never got very far with at all. The world just felt… hollow.

Our copy of Oblivion crashed as soon you tried to leave the sewers.

Forza Horizon 4. Exactly the same as 2 and 3 but with roundabouts. I find the universal critical acclaim baffling.

Not played 4, actually only played the first Forza Horizon but FH4 has the Escort RS Turbo, RS200 and you race against an Avro Vulcan 😍 (admittedly that's in the Aston Martin Vulcan, which is actually a "track only" car so shouldn't be allowed in the Horizon festival).

I played Oblivion. As soon as I got out of the prison, someone said I should go right… and I went left. Never met Sean Bean. Never triggered the story. Never got any oblivion gates or demons. Just 40 hours of wandering and doing side quests until I got bored and stopped.

So, that was nice.

Isn't that every Elder Scrolls and Fallout game (from 3 onwards)?

I think I'm turning into a phone gamer, downloaded the new Nintendo phone game/gacha/RPG Dragalia Lost and I'm addicted to it, it looks like a nice 3DS game, controls are slightly janky imo and Gacha is hit and miss (which is the whole point of it) but I'm enjoying it so far. I have a lot of gacha games and this is the only one not menu based like FEH and FGO are. They released a raid event and I got to team up online with other players to kill a fire dragon and i can't believe it was on a phone tbh.

There's also crafting and building your Castle area, but it's probably grindy as FUCK endgame (the whole game too) because it's a gacha and people will spend a lot of money for a jpeg of their favourite waifu if FEH i anything to go by, although here it'll be a cute chibi and stuff.

I assume you're somewhere that it's available in? I've wanted it for a while, but it's not out in the UK yet…

I use an app called APK Pure to download stuff off the US store

I played Oblivion. As soon as I got out of the prison, someone said I should go right… and I went left. Never met Sean Bean. Never triggered the story. Never got any oblivion gates or demons. Just 40 hours of wandering and doing side quests until I got bored and stopped.

So, that was nice.

Isn't that every Elder Scrolls and Fallout game (from 3 onwards)?

Yeah the main quest for Oblivion, especially, is bobbins.

Also, just to stick up for Horizon 4 – it's brilliant. It's everything to everyone; if you want Forza handling models and tarmac races, stick to the street racing circuits and fiddle with the car tuning. If you want to ignore that completely and have bonkers fun (which is the correct choice), then go smash through fences in an off-road car and race the aliens from Halo.

The default handling model is utterly perfect arcade fun (and can be tweaked if it doesn't suit), it's visually stunning, and it lets you jump off Roseberry Topping in an Aston Martin.

The more I hear about Hitman 2, the closer I get to the preorder button; the latest announcement is Ghost Mode, a 1v1 competitive mode where two players (in separate instances, admittedly) are assigned random targets through a level and have to race to complete them all fastest/most quietly.

Admittedly, it'd probably be a bigger draw if I knew anyone else who was likely to also get Hitman 2.

WANT
Borderlands 2 PSVR! Sounds fantastic.

WANT
Borderlands 2 PSVR! Sounds fantastic.

It'll be interesting to see what they do with the controls. Apparently the games supports both the DS4 and the Move controllers, but neither sound ideal - you'd ideally want the Moves for proper aiming, but then you lose the analogue stick for moving around. Skyrim VR had the same issue, and I never found its Move-based movement options very intuitive; it kind of works there because it's a fairly slow-paced game, but a full-on shooter like Borderlands 2 could be problematic. They've already confirmed it won't support the Aim controller, which would actually resolve the issue, so I'm holding off until impressions come through.

It's a real shame PSVR doesn't support the actual 2-part Move controllers as seen on the PS3, just the wands, as a lot of games struggle with this a bit.

I played Oblivion. As soon as I got out of the prison, someone said I should go right… and I went left. Never met Sean Bean. Never triggered the story. Never got any oblivion gates or demons. Just 40 hours of wandering and doing side quests until I got bored and stopped.

So, that was nice.

Isn't that every Elder Scrolls and Fallout game (from 3 onwards)?

Yeah the main quest for Oblivion, especially, is bobbins.

Also, just to stick up for Horizon 4 – it's brilliant. It's everything to everyone; if you want Forza handling models and tarmac races, stick to the street racing circuits and fiddle with the car tuning. If you want to ignore that completely and have bonkers fun (which is the correct choice), then go smash through fences in an off-road car and race the aliens from Halo.

The default handling model is utterly perfect arcade fun (and can be tweaked if it doesn't suit), it's visually stunning, and it lets you jump off Roseberry Topping in an Aston Martin.

The default handling mode in Horizon has always been like chasing a block of soap around a shower tray. It's no better here. My criticism in general though is that for all the advancements in graphics tech it's still soulless and doesn't feel like a real place. For all its faults GTAV nails this, and it's simply because I think the era of photorealistic worlds with no humans in should really be coming to an end.

Additional PLAYs that no-one bar me will care about:

WWE2K19 - I've played far too many WWE games over the years and none of them have been much cop for the last, say, five years or so. This one though… well, it's actually pretty great. Still some relatively stupid issues regarding targeting, rope physics and the AI being tough as nails, but equally it's got a huge amount of polish and finally it looks like they've overhauled the engine which was so overused, it was on its last legs.

Visually, it's impressive; content-wise, it's absolutely loaded to the gills; gameplay-wise, it's got some good tweaks to things that have been problematic before, though it's still not perfect. I still hate the submission system, the actual way of deciding on what moves you do is rather wooly, but the reversal meter (which puts a limit on how often you can reverse moves) actually works, since it stops the AI basically shutting you out of everything over and over. I'm impressed.

What I think sucks, however, is that 2K is being devious on PSN - you can buy the game and season pass separately for £79.98, or you can get the digital bundle for £85. The latter has zero additional content over the former, aside from the fact that you only have to push a button once to buy it rather than twice. That's it. It's literally for people who can't do maths and think the bundle is the better deal .Very dodgy. 2K being 2K yet again.

Mortal Kombat X - Went back to this over the weekend and it's a very lovely fighting game. Surprisingly solid, good mechanics, fun characters. Lots to do as well. But having spent my time earning trophies for fatalities, brutalities and other such nasty endings, I feel rather desensitised to it all now. It's incredibly horrid in places, and given that I hate gore/horror, I dunno how I managed to stomach it. Shutting my brain off seemed to work, but it doesn't make it less nasty. The DLC characters, especially, are harsh given they're more believable (Jason, Leatherface) and their finishers aren't pleasant. Spent most of Sunday playing it, wondering if doing so was being disrespectful to whatever imaginary god you may believe in and thinking that Jesus would probably main Mileena if he was a player.

Additional PLAY:

Black Bird - Side-scrolling shoot-'em-up on Switch (and PC, I think) from Onion Studios. They previously did Million Onion Hotel on mobile, which is a weird-as-fuck puzzle game that I really enjoyed. Black Bird is also weird-as-fuck with a very similar art style and even some of the same characters. But it's very good! Challenging too. I like it. Glad I took a punt based on my enjoyment of their last game.

Additional Play: Super Mario Party. It's OK I guess. I haven't played Mario Party since the N64 days and it's pretty much as I remember it but by god it can be frustratingly random and also painfully slow. Rolling dice, watching the stars move around the screen, waiting for the CPU to take its turn… all take absolutely ages. Then you lose through no fault of your own because the computer places the star right in front of the same player for three turns running, or dishes out awards for random bullshit at the end of the game.

If you don't take it seriously then there's fun to be had but it's telling that the best modes are those that skip the board game rubbish entirely and let you play more mini-games, more often. There's a good co-op mode involving rowing down a river together that keeps the games flowing, plus a separate Sound Stage mode full of little rhythm-based challenges. But once we've seen everything I'm honestly not sure how long this will continue to be played.

Also, you can't save the main board game mode mid-game, which is an absolute crime when the shortest game takes at least an hour. The fact that's only ten turns illustrates perfectly what a plod this can be.

Sounds much the same as the Wii game. It was too random to really be any fun, it just felt pointless. And like you say, the games go on forever.

It's payday and I've got Dragon Quest XI and Assassin's Creed Odyssey burning a hole in my wallet, against every logical thought.

I'd love a nice, bright turn-based JRPG to get stuck into, but Dragon Quest is tough to justify when I've got most of Octopath Traveller to finish – and on that note there's a Switch version coming later likely to have additional stuff in it that's maybe worth holding out for.

Meanwhile I got so little out of the last couple of Assassin's Creeds I've played (including the well-received Origins, which did nothing for me) that I thought I was safe, but the resounding praise for Odyssey's characters and story – two areas that particularly bored me in Origins – is making it a difficult thing to resist.

Of course, deep down I realise that I don't have to buy either of them, but… well, it's payday.

And I want them.

(Sort of.)

Do you like fighting games? :^)

No. I'm dreadful at them.

Damn. scrunches up piece of paper

For my sins, I've started playing Elite Dangerous again (apologies for the gibberish). Decided to give the passenger missions a go, which of course meant I had to spend around 65 million credits on a new Python.

(This is the most expensive ship I've ever bought, though it's still worth less than my fully-specced Chieftain and is only a quarter of the cost of the most expensive ship in the game.)

I've managed to scrape it to 18Ly per jump by swapping over the FSD from my Chieftain; the Diamondback's too far away to have checked how its drive would perform, but I expect it's probably going to push 30 in the Python. That should be good enough to make crazy money from the really basic loops - you can earn something like 20 million in an hour - so it'll pay for itself in no time and then I can start outfitting it better.

So far I've just crammed in as many first-class passenger cabins as will fit, sold all the standard weapons and stripped down a couple of parts to eke out enough distance to do a couple of tourist routes, which earned enough to cover the rebuy at least.

So was at Play Blackpool over the weekend. Had a great time playing various things, Dreamcast on system link was good as never experienced that and got to play a ton of other stuff. However I entered the Mario Kart competition they had up and ended up getting to the semi finals after posting the 6th best qualifying time, however more importantly this has exposed me to the community of people who still play the original and are dedicated to getting world record times.

Never going to be near that but now keen to sign up to their site and have a go. Really struggling for gaming time and so mainly been playing games I've played before (Halo, Dark Souls, SM3) so well up for getting back into what used to be mine and my bro's favourite game.