PWB September 2023

Summer's over guys, time to get the jumpers out. Quite a small update from me this month.

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The Last of Us Part 2 - I'm nearing the end of what has been a very long game, but I suspect it's still got a few tricks up its sleeve. When I'm done I'm going to want to talk about this game in detail, because in all honesty - technically, artistically and in its sheer bloody determination to never make it easy on the player and give them what they want - I think it's a masterpiece. It's vastly better and more interesting than I thought it was going to be, and the pacing is exquisite.

Want

Starfield next week! I've not been following this particularly closely but nobody does epic jank like Bethesda does and it should land at just the right time for me to finish TLOU2 and move onto this. Xbox could do with a megahit, I hope it's everything people want it to be.

Rumours are circulating again of an upcoming PS5 Pro. May be nonsense, maybe not, but I think I'd probably jump on board the Sony train if they did release some kind of mega mid-gen refresh.

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I've finished Venba and Toem and found them both to be nice little palate-cleansers between grimier fare. I ditched Tears of the Kingdom and felt nothing but relief.

The Last of Us Part 2[…]. When I'm done I'm going to want to talk about this game in detail

I don't think I know anyone else who's played it - make a thread when you're done and I'll be there.

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Been giving Sea of Stars a go on GamePass, and it's pretty good! I always appreciate when a JRPG actually makes my mid-attack button inputs do something (it's a superstition I developed in Skies of Arcadia, for reasons I still don't fully understand). I could take or leave the pixel art style – same as with Chained Echoes, though this is much nicer-looking – and the story so far is pretty slow and cliché. I can play it while the kid's around, though, so that's an automatic win for me.

Blah blah Honkai Star Rail blah blah Isle of Arrows blah.

Want

If it hadn't been for the slightly-suspicious handling of review codes around Starfield I'd probably have bit the bullet on paying for the Premium Edition preorder that gives you early access, even though I get the game itself for "free". I can understand MS and Bethesda wanting to massage the early Metacritic scores for this, the first really big Xbox tentpole of the generation, but still.

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My "sleep" "schedule", which is swinging wildly between going to bed at 9pm and 1.30am.

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Pikmin 4 - I'm still making my way through the post-game (only the last area to clear 100%) but I'm looking to be done soon, simply because there are other things I want to be playing. I finished Olimar's Shipwreck Story by the skin of my teeth, but the ten-floor cave that unlocks as a result can get to fuck… it's super hardcore and I'm already stumped on the third floor. I think I'll finish up what I can and then move on.
Broforce Forever - Still ridiculous nonsense, I'll finish it in bitesize goes.
Something something something Wonder - SHHHHHHHHHHH

WANT
Gunbrella - Looks fun, out in two weeks.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk - Waiting for a discount.
Blasphemous 2 - Next on the list when I'm done with Pikmin, it's sitting there on my Switch just waiting.
No Man's Sky - Currently £20 on Switch, I reckon this will scratch the Starfield void I've now lost.

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Starfield - Or rather the thinking that I might give this a go. I've seen a couple of gameplay videos, it's Fallout/Skyrim in space, there's no way I'm going to enjoy it. Not even going to waste the time finding out.

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Starfield - a Friend got the early access and is already a bit "This is just Fallout in Space" so that is obviously excellent news to me. I collected the limited/themed controller today which I had ordered a while ago but think I am going to keep it out the way for now - My kid wanted the next pad we got to be 'hers' and wanted to make one, where as I got this with vouchers! So she is going to kick off…

Old Football games - Still on this project. A couple of my videos have gotten over 40 views and I have gathered 5 new subscribers so shout out to those heroes. Whilst this is all very small scale it's really enjoyable to do something and know that even a small amount of other lunatics seem to enjoy it in whatever way, as whilst that wasn't why I started it does help to keep going. I haven't shown it or sent links to anyone because of how niche it is, so have just naturally allowed people to find it so have no idea who is watching.

Switch games out the wazoo - I have Xenoblade 1 & 2, Atari anniversary, Cowabunga Collection, Black Flag, Advanced Wars and then more all sealed and unopened. All stuff I was really keen to get immediately or play this summer. It's probably worse on the Xbox. I don't know why I thought getting the Batman collection to replay over the summer was feasible. I actually hate myself a little bit for doing this.

Want -

Full control of my eyelid back. Whilst my Bells palsy has already massively eased and people can't even notice it now. I do still have the annoyance that one eye or eyelid hasn't returned to as before, which I always forget about until the exact moment I start screaming because it's filled with shampoo in the shower and started burning like it's on fire, because I keep forgetting it looks like it closes but doesn't actually.

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Back to work on Monday and my new line manager who only officially starts then, seems like a right tosser. Emailed me to explain he wants me to stop teaching the course we are part way through, to move to a different one. Seemingly because he has promised this in his interview.

What's your youtube channel called, BMB?

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Sea of Stars. This is great, definitely a highlight of the recent (/decade of) 2D SNES-alikes. More than anything, it shows you how much of a difference the writing can make. This isn't Shakespeare or anything, but it competently (and sometimes humorously) tells an interesting story. Most of these SNES-alikes sound like they were written by the same guy who did the sprites, level design and music. Because they were.

World of Warcraft. Dragonflight is the best WoW has ever been. I'm nearing the end of my interest now (but certainly not the content, there's a whole world of raiding that's not for me), but it's been a joy from start to finish. It's just a shame that no bugger seems to be playing it, I think the previous expansion turned everyone off.

Want
Starfield

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The only time I've had to go into the office all year is… tomorrow. The day Starfield launches. Which is just super.

I don't know why I thought getting the Batman collection to replay over the summer was feasible.

I really wish they'd do a proper re-release of this for Xbox/PS5. The previous remaster they did of the first two games was rubbish (wasn't it locked at 45fps or something really weird?) and Arkham Knight is still the last-gen version running under backwards compatibility. It seems odd that they've put so much effort into an apparently pretty good Switch release without thinking about doing the other consoles too.

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Sea of Stars. This is great, definitely a highlight of the recent (/decade of) 2D SNES-alikes. More than anything, it shows you how much of a difference the writing can make. This isn't Shakespeare or anything, but it competently (and sometimes humorously) tells an interesting story. Most of these SNES-alikes sound like they were written by the same guy who did the sprites, level design and music. Because they were.

I'm not generally a big retro/JRPG guy, but I picked this up via PS+ Extra, and it's pretty cool! It also ramps up in difficulty quite a bit once you get into the world, so I've stuck the Storyteller relic on to make things easier for myself. I don't know if I'll make it to the end, but I'm enjoying it so far.

I do need to finish Horizon Forbidden West - and want to - but the more I do, the more dauntingly huge it seems to be. I'm mostly wandering about mopping up side quests, but it just never stops. I think it suffers a little from sequelitis, too, in that they've added a lot of stuff - new weapon types, in particular - that don't really add anything except more fetch-quest nonsense for upgrade parts. And I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the new machines; the monkeys, in particular, can fuck off.

Also, and always, Sea of Thieves - albeit intermittently, as the Monkey Island stuff is coming out. The Tall Tales are good, but do seem to run quite long - particularly egregious in this latest one is the insult sword fighting, which is well-enough implemented but frustrating when you're in a full crew of four, because only one person can actually do it at a time, even though there are eight possible locations for it. Baffling.

Want
I've got Spider-Man 2 on pre-order, so hopefully I'll get Horizon finished (or close enough) by October. God of War Ragnarok is also glaring angrily at me - I got it with the PS5, but it keeps getting bumped down the list by other stuff. Some day, Kratos. Some day.

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In before Garwoofoo inexplicably puts 80 hours into it in 3 days, Starfield is…. fine. 7/10

Shit, he's reading the thread [hammers Submit Reply]

In before Garwoofoo inexplicably puts 80 hours into it in 3 days, Starfield is…. fine. 7/10

Hey, I'm not Alastor, I'll have you know.

I'm expecting 7/10. I'm not a massive fan of Bethesda games (the only one I've truly loved is Morrowind) and space opera isn't really my thing. But I'm always happy to play a big open-world RPG.

Al hasn't been in here telling us about the latest JPRG he's finished in 20 minutes for ages. I fear he may have finally expired from forgetting to eat or hydrate in the middle of a 300hr gaming session.

Or he's trying to finish visiting every planet in No Man's Sky and he'll be finished in a day or two.

He's still posting borderline impenetrable, context-free stuff about gacha games and yuri manga on Twitter, so I don't think we need to be any more concerned about him than usual.

I forgot to mention above that I've also played (about a third of?) Stray Gods, David Gaider's Roleplaying Musical.

It's… a bit hit and miss. The story, writing, and performances are very good, but the audio mix is awful; at times I'm having to adjust the volume from one line to the next because one line is turned way down, and the next is way up; and at no point does it sound like anyone is inhabiting the space that they're supposed to be in. An early scene sees Grace visit a nightclub, but it feels like the world's worst after-school disco, because the music is so quiet, there's no background chatter SFX, and everyone is just talking at a completely normal level - no sense of being in an active place and having to strain to hear or be heard.

The songs, too, are kind of a letdown. I'm a big Austin Wintory fan, and watched a couple of his YouTube videos and podcast appearances about the process of making the game. His approach was to give characters iconic instruments, rather than themes or leitmotifs. The result is that there's not a lot of recognisable callback from song to song (or sometimes, depending on your choices, verse to verse), so it feels more like a lot of bits rather than a cohesive whole. Further harming this are the lyrics, which… oof. There were (I think) four lyricists on this, and not one of them seems to be able to manage a decent rhyming scheme, and even the rhythm of the lines suffers.

It's definitely an interesting experiment, but the execution hurts it quite a bit, and instead of feeling like its raison d'être, the "musical" aspect ends up feeling like a gimmick. I'm still going to see it through to the end - the characters and dialogue are more than enough for that - but it's disappointing that it didn't all come together better.

Four hours into Baldur's Gate 3 and I'm considering restarting so I can change my character's race… Cutscenes just look weird when everyone's an elf or a human or a gith, and I'm standing there as a halfling demanding to be taken seriously.

I had that in Starfield.

I picked the wrong Traits at the start; you can delete existing ones, but not pick new ones. Always annoys me when games do that, how the hell am I supposed to know what the UC and the Freestar Collective are before I've started playing? At least give me some blurb about them.

Additional Play
Hearthstone. It's been a long time since I last played this, and I'm so far behind with my card collecting (or if you're a knobhead, the 'meta') that I basically can't play multiplayer. BUT they've added a load of fun single-player stuff - actual story content based on the individual heroes. There are around 200 different battles, each with their own prebuilt deck so you don't have to worry about building up your card collection. I'd definitely recommend playing through them, especially seeing as it's all free.

Yeah my Starfield traits are terrible too. I removed the worst one at the medical centre but I can’t choose anything better to replace it. Ah well, I’ll just have to live with it I guess, I’m not starting again now.

Are you 80 hours in, if so….

And the meta isn't a wanky term when applied to living/competitive card games. It simply indicates what decks are hot and what aren't, so if you're intending to play competitively you can get a handle on what's performing and what isn't. It's just shorthand and has been used since about 1993 when Magic The Gathering started to popularise the concept.

Four hours into Baldur's Gate 3 and I'm considering restarting so I can change my character's race… Cutscenes just look weird when everyone's an elf or a human or a gith, and I'm standing there as a halfling demanding to be taken seriously.

I’ve been playing a bit longer, I think, and keep similarly questioning my choice of class. I’m going to just keep going for now though; I’m prone to mild choice paralysis when it comes to speccing/choosing upgrades, have never really played a crpg (or DnD), and am just generally a bit thick, so I’ve picked what I assume to be a fairly simple class to play (Fighter), and am just going to try and keep on keeping on until I break something and have to start again. I figure this way that, even if this first attempt grinds to a halt, I might’ve learnt enough for the second attempt to go a bit better, but who knows.

(I am also really enjoying it, incidentally.)

There's an NPC you can recruit to your camp who'll let you respec or change class entirely for 200 gold.

Spoiler - click to showHis name is Withers, he's a blinged-up zombie you can find in the basement of the old chapel in the starting zone.

I did restart, in the end; the obvious animation bodge was just too distracting. So now instead of a halfling, I'm a half-elf. Same colours, class, hair, scars, and face tattoos, just… two and a half feet taller.

I also kicked someone out of the party already.
Spoiler - click to showAstarion, get thee hence! You can tell he's a vampire the instant he appears, but that's not necessarily a dealbreaker; however, he's also a smarmy piece of shit, which absolutely is. When I woke up in the middle of the night to find him about to get his Dracula on, that was the final straw, so I told him to get fucked.

Wonder how that'll affect the story..?

Additional Play: TITANFALL 2! There was a sneaky patch a couple of weeks ago, and now the multiplayer servers are back up! There are also a bunch of easter eggs related to Apex Legends, apparently, but who cares?!

TITANFALL 2!

Additional PLAY:
Lorcana - Disney Magic The Gathering, basically. Sold out everywhere (and our local shop in FFM only stocks the German language version anyway), but we stumbled across a small board game shop in Dublin while away on a weekend getaway today. They had two of the three starter decks, so I nabbed them. I can see the awful money pit this could end up being (€24 for a starter deck, but then the same again for a fucking single player playmat?!), but at least I can tinker with it now.

I’m playing as Astarion.

Says it all really.

I’m playing as Astarion.

Says it all really.

To the two people here who know what you’re talking about, yes. 😉

Though, with that said, I am genuinely curious as to how it all plays out differently if you choose one of the ‘Origin’ characters, even if I can’t see myself actually ever doing so at the moment.

Additional Play: TITANFALL 2! There was a sneaky patch a couple of weeks ago, and now the multiplayer servers are back up! There are also a bunch of easter eggs related to Apex Legends, apparently, but who cares?!

TITANFALL 2!

Didn't realise they were ever gone. I didnt play the 2nd anywhere near as much as the first online, but will look into this at least.

They were DDOS'd for about two years straight, it was basically impossible to get in a game (on PS4, certainly; on PC, someone modded in a custom server browser so you could at least get a match).

Additional Play: TITANFALL 2! There was a sneaky patch a couple of weeks ago, and now the multiplayer servers are back up! There are also a bunch of easter eggs related to Apex Legends, apparently, but who cares?!

TITANFALL 2!

I'm just back from the Apex ALGS Finals in Birmingham. It was amazing.

Additional PLAY:
Gunbrella - Played the demo and it's fun, decent action and surprisingly dark in tone despite how it looks. Splashed out since it's payday and now I'm having to plough through the demo content again because the save data doesn't transfer. Whyyyyyyyyyy.
Trombone Champ - Promised I'd buy it for the missus on payday now it's on Switch. It's ridiculous.

Additional WANT:
Dave the Diver - Played the demo, it's great, gimme this when it launches at the end of October on Switch please.

Trombone Champ - Promised I'd buy it for the missus on payday now it's on Switch. It's ridiculous.

How is it, genuinely? Is it a 10-minute novelty or something you'd get quite competitive over? And how do the controls work on Switch?

A bit of both? It's silly, the songs are mostly very short and it's absolutely not a rhythm action game anyone's going to want to get perfect scores on. There's content at least - you earn toots for your efforts, which you then spend on unlockable cards (all ridiculous) and there seems to be unlockable instruments, tones and characters too. The four player mode looks a nightmarish mess of noise and laughter.

Controls I've used are decent enough. Stick-only is very much not the way, but gyro control works very nicely - you just tip the controller up/down and press the shoulder button. Even works well with the Pro Controller. Haven't tried the one where you hold both Joy-Con and actually move like you're playing the trombone. I can't imagine the IR method works very well, but I haven't tried that either.

At the end of the day, it's £11 and change. You get what you pay for.

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Cyberpunk 2077. The 2.0 update is excellent, and I’ve started a new character to enjoy the updates rather than jump straight in to the expansion. I had every intention of playing differently this time (melee and shotgun beast) but settled back into another athletic netrunner. Because why wouldn’t you.

Lord of the Rings Online. I can’t stress how big of a difference the difficulty options have made. I’m not one for difficult games, but the option to add a small challenge to every encounter has been transformative.

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Starfield. Cyberpunk made it look silly.

Yep. Once you've played 2.0 Cyberpunk it does yeet Starfield straight into the "maybe after 3 years of patches" bucket.

My son was appalled at my build - he's all full hacking intelligent play and I'm about negotiating with Mantis Blades and a shotgun that sets you on fire. I'm not sure I've hacked anything (apart from limbs off with a blunt instrument). I may refund my skill tree one more time though as it's a lot to take in and explore - so I could be swayed to a more cerebral build. Or, as you've done, restart a new char just for the expansion.

I had a late play: Phoenix Wright on the Switch (the collection thing). I don't think I've ever played them before and it's been strangely.enjoyable so far. I'm a huge fan of genius format US TV shows and this sort of feels like you're in a slightly deranged one.

I had a late play: Phoenix Wright on the Switch (the collection thing). I don't think I've ever played them before and it's been strangely.enjoyable so far. I'm a huge fan of genius format US TV shows and this sort of feels like you're in a slightly deranged one.

I think this is why I like it too - and it's helped by the fact that the first game is a good one, and comparatively grounded compared some of the other games.

As a series it does tend to lean into spiritual mumbo-jumbo a bit more than I'd like, but then that also hilariously leads to the situation whereby the later games are obviously set in Japan with Japanese mediums and villages and folk stories being integral to the plot, but because the translators of the first game set the whole thing in Los Angeles, that's where it has to remain. It leads to an absolutely brilliant push-pull of cultural influences throughout and it ends up as something really unique.

Trombone Champ - Promised I'd buy it for the missus on payday now it's on Switch. It's ridiculous.

Bought this. It's uproariously funny for 20 minutes then deeply annoying thereafter. It peaks with the unexpected appearance of a massive fried breakfast just as you're tooting your way through the final chorus of God Save The King.

Additional Play: Quake (the original). I remember really enjoying this on release but that was over 25 years ago and it was the first proper FPS I'd ever played so I wasn't really expecting it to stand up. It absolutely does though. It runs like shit off a shovel, is entirely rendered in shades of brown and has some truly incredible sound design. It's been intelligently adapted for a controller as well which obviously isn't the way it was originally meant to be played but with a bit of auto-aim actually works quite well. It's a very fine palate-cleanser to break up all the endless Starfield loading screens.

It's a seemingly small detail, but the thing that saved Phoenix Wright for me was figuring out how to stop the text beeping. (Options, Skip by Line, press B on Xbox to advance text instead of A).

I can't stand the audio design on most Japanese games. It's like they've tried to do the exact opposite of ASMR.

Additional PLAY:
Disney Speedstorm - Went free to play today. It's fine. Feels a bit slow even when it's trying to be fast, and the AI rubberbands all over the shop. But it's fine. It's free. Eh.

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Lies of P

I'm enjoying this way more than I thought. I've never really got into the souls games, but this one is doing it for me. Maybe because it's meant to be easier from what I've been hearing from the souls fans. Although I think it pretty bloody hard so what do I know. 😆 The gameplay is great, but the whole dark pinocchio world is really interesting.

Quake

You owe it to yourself to play Quake properly. Go to a PC, get a mouse and keyboard, get Quake from Steam and ignore its "new" version. Download a good sourceport like vkQuake or QuakeSpasm, make an id1 subdirectory under where you installed/extracted it, drop the original PAK0.PAK and PAK1.PAK into it (from Quake\id1 in Steam), get the music from Steam's Quake\rerelease\id1\music and drop that directory into the new id1 in vkquake/quakespasm.

You should have id1 directory under vkquake or quakespasm with pak0.pak, pak1.pak and the music directory with track02-track11.ogg.

Fire that sucker up with the sourceport executable, and play one of the best games ever created properly. May sound like too much work but it's worth it to play Quake as it should be and without id's new hacked up engine that isn't that good.

(There's also Darkplaces which lets you mess around with lighting and fancy effects as well as stuff in high resolution packs, but the end result looks like an ugly mess when I try it.)

Oh yeah: watch this. All the way to the end. :D Try that with a controller.

Additional PLAY:
Blasphemous - Went and started Blasphemous 2 the other day, got five minutes in and realised a) I couldn't remember how the first one finished and b) that there was a lot of the first one I didn't do, since they released all the extra content and DLC after I was done with it. So I've gone back to the first game to play through that totally first instead. It's not as hard as I remember? Definitely seems shorter too. But maybe that's because I know what's coming (until the new content anyway). Hmm.

Cocoon (Game Pass) seems really good so far. It's a overhead-view puzzle game that's a bit reminscent of Death's Door or Tunic but it's clever and inventive and it never quite lets you get a handle on what's happening. I like it a lot.

Please tell me it's based on the film IP.