PWB September Everything's back to normlol

Play

Tales of Arise - FINALLY. Willing to go out on a limb here and say this is going to be this gen's 'Tales of Symphonia' or 'Tales of Vesperia' which were the two big Tales games for the respective generations. Across the board everything just feels quality: characters, gameplay and story all seem really interesting so far. Which is exactly what makes those two games classics….although Tales of the Abyss is better than Symphonia in every way

I really like the main protagonists dynamic, Alphen can't feel any pain and Shionne can't not hurt people by touching them, I'm interested to know why this is the case and if it's connected at all. Also, the game is set in the usual Tales setup of two opposite Planets, Dhana and Rena, with the latter having enslaved the people of the former, only adding to this dynamic between the two. (Alphen being a Dhanan and Shionne being a Renan)

Doesn't hurt that due to their specific circumstances, Alphen can pull a super powerful burning magical sword out of Shionne's chest UTENA STYLE and not feel the pain of the burns and she can always fix up his arms afterwards.

Streets of Rage 4-This is fucking brilliant, it's still got that feeling of the original Streets of Rage games as I remember them but there' so much depth to the combat system in this now. When you know what you're doing you can juggle people for ages and suplexing people backwards and watching them bounce off a wall into you dash attack into your super never gets old. There's so many characters to unlock too and they all have their quirks, I did a whole playthrough of the game with Axel who is your standard 'main character', very satisfying and quite punchy. Then I tried Blaze and I feel like my third eye opened as I got use to bouncing people off the floor into her aerial combos which is something that Axel can't do.

Want

Bin - I'm getting my second jab today and I'm just saying if my arm dies I will fucking play 60 hours of Tales of Arise with my one arm and foot if necessary.

Been playing Mechwarrior a few times this week, really enjoying it. Anyone tried that before?

Which Mechwarrior? I played a bunch of 2 (Mercenaries?) about… 25 years ago…

I think I have 4 on disc somewhere, too.

Sorry my phone was so busy constantly correcting the spelling of that I missed it had removed the number, I meant Mechwarrior 5,the one on Gamepass. Think it only came out on consoles this year and PCs recentish.

Play: Life is Strange: True Colors

Maybe it's impending old age but I've come to increasingly enjoy what used to be known as "Telltale games" - gentle narrative experiences with a modicum of exploration and decision-making. I've become a particular fan of the Life is Strange games, which feature casts of adorably nerdy - but occasionally psychic! - teenagers in a perpetually autumnal world where nobody listens to anything other than twee acoustic indie-folk.

True Colors is, well, more of the same and I love it. Your character Alex is incredibly awkward in a really relatable way and her "ability" is that she can read - and unwillingly amplify - other people's emotions. It's a beautiful game, despite a little bit of launch week technical jank, and after the first chapter it's already going to some fairly dark places. I'm going to really enjoy this one.

Played a couple of rounds of PS+ offering Predator: Hunting Grounds this evening, and.. it's fine. It doesn't quite live up to the license; missions aren't long enough to get a real sense of dread, though when I catch glimpses of an uncloaked Predator jump 30 feet through the trees, it does give me a bit of a chill.

The basic setup is pretty much as in the first movie: four players in a squad are sent into a jungle to do some shooting/blowing up of various nondescript Bad Guys. These missions seem to universally be set in a quarter square mile of jungle, and always have three stages. Enemy AI is not very good, and to be honest, neither are the controls, guns, or netcode.

While you're busying yourself cutting down [INSERT CIA TARGET ORGANISATION HERE], another player takes on the role of the Predator. They can take out NPCs, too, but their main goal is to wipe out the fireteam. You'll be happily tromping through a drug cartel camp, when all of a sudden Those Targeting Lasers sweep across the screen, and all hell breaks loose.

I played five or six games, and in every one where the Predator turned up, the fireteam lost. Killing the Predator involves dealing a substantial amount of damage - very difficult, given how quick it is, and how twitchy the controls are - then, when it's down, shooting its mask off(?), and finally killing it with a headshot. All before it activates its self-destruct, which ends the game in something of a stalemate.

Anyway, shonky as it is, it has a certain charm, and manages to be more than the sum of its parts (parts mainly scavenged from Evolve and Ghost Recon Wildlands). I wonder if it would be better in a squad who were working together, rather than sprinting individually through the jungle towards objectives without any care or caution, but let's be honest… we'll never know.

I'm not sure I have access to Doom on PC, but I'm suddenly tempted to try and find it…

I've been playing PSone Doom on my Retroid. It's still great.

I'm not sure I have access to Doom on PC, but I'm suddenly tempted to try and find it…

"The Lady's Not For Returning" is a tagline for the ages.

Ok. I missed the link earlier. This does look like the only good way to add Thatcher to anything.

Been playing a bit of The Artful Escape on Game Pass. It's utterly bizarre, barely even a game, more a mildly interactive migraine. It's like Bill & Ted ate too many Skittles and started hallucinating alien environments. It's extremely pretty, very original, obnoxiously hipsterish and ever so slightly dull.

I downloaded that. If it's short, I'll blaze through it just to say I did.

Started playing Flynn: Son of Crimson this morning, also through Game Pass. It's nice. Not what I'd expected - thought it was going to be a Metroidvania like Chasm since they look so alike, but it's more like Super Mario World with many individual stages that have branching paths, requiring you to go back to previously finished levels. Playing it on Easy because all the achievements are accessible on it and who has time for anything more these days, amirite.

I'm not sure I have access to Doom on PC, but I'm suddenly tempted to try and find it…

I think all you'd need is a copy of GZDoom? Like, a free to download source port or something.

Control - tried it. Why is everything grey and like a game from 2003.

It's definitely worth sticking with Control. In my opinion it's one of the best games of the last ten years. Everything is supposed to be grey - it's evoking monotonous, sprawling, terrifyingly monolithic office buildings. It's one of the themes of the game. The environments get much more interesting as the game goes on, don't worry. The humour, inventive environmental storytelling, and varied action are amazing.

Anyway,
Play
Cyberpunk 2077 - Sure, it's a bugfest, but I'm quite enjoying it so far. It's strange, the game's main strength is how immersive the city is, but then that immersion is broken by seeing someone floating in mid-air. I quite like the story stuff - V is a good main character, and the missions have some nice twists and turns. I like the freedom to approach things in different ways. Halfway through a mission I switched from talking my way through it to killing absolutely everybody because one of the baddies made a sexist joke and the rest of them laughed.

Mario 3D World Bowser's Fury - This is great. It has the bitesize chunks of gameplay you get in the 3D Mario games, with individual puzzles, challenges, and bits of platforming dotted around the map, but also built into it is the regular appearances of a huge oily Bowser onto the map to turn everything into a chaotic scramble to avoid lava and meteors. Also, everything is cat-themed for some reason. I like the fact that it's very short, as it doesn't outstay it's welcome, and I have very little free time at the moment.

Lonely Mountains: Downhill - This is on Game Pass, and it's well worth giving a go if you haven't already. It's a mountain biking game. You start at the top of a mountain, and you cycle to the bottom. You can go fast, or slow, stick to the path, or find shortcuts. There's no music, just the sound of birds and occasionally goats. The controls are fiddly at first but soon become wonderfully intuitive. It's really, surprisingly good.

Want
I dunno, I have a barely-resistable urge to buy the Games Workshop Kill Team box. God knows I don't need any more miniatures, but the box contains everything you need to play Kill Team for £100. If I want to play Kill Team withou buying the box, I will have to buy two books and a set of markers for about £70. So I would get all the minis for £30, if you ignore how much of a rip-off the books are. I know I'd get a couple of game in as there's a work trip to Warhammer World coming up soonish. Would I play it after that, though? I could sell the minis to offset the cost of the box, but I hate people who do that. Argh.

Bin
I mean, where do I start?

I started off justifying my violence in Cyberpunk, but now I think I'm basically just a psychopath. I'll arm blade people to death for looking at me funny. It's a bit like a Cowdenbeath simulator.

Started playing Flynn: Son of Crimson this morning, also through Game Pass. It's nice. Not what I'd expected - thought it was going to be a Metroidvania like Chasm since they look so alike, but it's more like Super Mario World with many individual stages that have branching paths, requiring you to go back to previously finished levels. Playing it on Easy because all the achievements are accessible on it and who has time for anything more these days, amirite.

This is quite nice, if a bit generic. It reminds me of old Amiga platformers which were always quite technically proficient but rather uninspired in their design. Shame it doesn't support Quick Resume though as it'd be a nice one to dip in and out of between other stuff.

Doesn't it? I could've sworn I managed to turn off my console and pick up right where I left off without rebooting. Hmm.

Brian brought up Saga in the other thread so I might as well mention it now, I've been playing Saga Frontier Remastered recently, my first Saga and I've been really enjoying myself. It's somewhat unfriendly to newcomers making it a hard recommend, unpolished and sometimes overly obscure but it's always fascinating. You get eight characters and stories to choose from and then basically write their stories for them, It's like if Octopath Traveller but if it didn't tell you shit. And was good. It's hard to illustrate the 'freedom' aspect but I will try:

As I said you can go anywhere you want and characters that you see all over the world have specific recruitment criteria, some won't even join some of the playable cast, some of the people who join ARE the playable cast. There's locations all over the universe that some characters never need to visit, there are some that DO need to visit. You can get the same characters in one playthrough to the next and they will play differently in combat depending on how you build them. The one constant is that besides everyone's unique opening scenario and gimmick the game just simply lets you go where you want, when you want even if the execution of all of this is a bit janky and fiddly at times like how some areas are just dead ends for some characters.

This open endedness and unique series mechanics extends to gameplay too, no levels in favour of stat boosts after a battle isn't new anymore but there's also the series signature 'Spark/Glimmer' system that ensures unless you really grind then you probably won't have the same skills on the same weapon for the same character between playthroughs and you either grind more or work around it. there's the fact that to revive 'dead' party members you just heal them with a regular heal before the enemy can keep hitting them on the floor to deplete their LP, which will perma-kill them until you get to an Inn.

So there's a significant knowledge rollover effect where you know more of the game and where to find the best stuff you need for whatever plan you have for that specific character at the time with every playthrough. It rewards exploration and experimentation with significant power and effectiveness, Mech characters in this game don't even level up stats after battle, and they can't spark but they level up based on what gear they have so it's like 'oh hey remember last playthrough when you raided a tomb and found a really strong sword? Why not recruit the mech this time and give it to him so he's almost endgame strong in the first hour?' but the real beauty being it doesn't actually say this to you, you have to put those pieces together yourself.

PLAY/BIN
Dandy Ace - I'm getting really tired of titles appearing where certain circles of the media go 'OH, THIS IS LIKE THAT OTHER GAME YOU LIKE' without putting any consideration or research into whether the thing they're trumpeting is any good. This got the 'HEY, IT'S LIKE HADES' alarm, but it's not because it's shit. Just because it uses the same viewpoint and features rooms full of enemies, doesn't make it worth shouting about. Played, binned.
Psychonauts 2 - Back into this, it's still fun and funny. So that's good.

This got the 'HEY, IT'S LIKE HADES' alarm, but it's not

See also Curse of the Dead Gods, which has most of Hades' features and the same viewpoint but none of its charm.

We're going to see a wave of these over the next few months. But that won't be as bad as the follow-up wave, which will be a bunch of roguelikes that have shitloads of plot and cutscenes stuffed into them without any consideration for why that actually worked in Hades.

This got the 'HEY, IT'S LIKE HADES' alarm, but it's not

See also Curse of the Dead Gods, which has most of Hades' features and the same viewpoint but none of its charm.

Yep. Got it, played it, really didn't enjoy it. The hatred wasn't as immediate at with this, I tried really hard to like it and thought I was missing something the review crowd hadn't. But no, turns out it's just crap. Huh.