Your Games Completed of 2022

Katamari Damacy Reroll is also on Game Pass, and Beautiful Katamari works great via backward compatibility if you've got that kicking around.

I forget what all the Katamari games are called. I'm fairly sure I've played them all. Is re-roll the one on the Switch? Because I've got that. I did have the 360 one, but my Xbox S won't be running that.

Yeah, Reroll is the one on the Switch, it's a re-release of the first game Katamari Damacy.

We Love Katamari was the sequel but it never made it off the PS2.

Beautiful Katamari was the Xbox 360 "best of" that included levels from the first two games plus some of its own.

Katamari Forever was the PS3 equivalent with even more stuff in it.

There have been a ton of portable/mobile versions too but they're nothing special.

I really liked the PSP game (Me & My Katamari maybe?). I've played all the others you've listed except for the PS3 one. I think We Love Katamri was my favourite, it would be nice to get an update of that.

It was great to finally get to play the first one when it was released from the Switch. I think I blitzed it in two nights.

I'm surprised they've not also re-released We Love Katamari, it's widely accepted to be the best one and they must surely have the engine up and running from the first remake.

I suspect they've noticed diminishing returns from releasing them too close together. It's not like you need many Katamari games.

I think I would enjoy a Katamari open world game. Procedurally generated, roll a different route each time and roll up the whole world in about an hour.

I want a Katamari battle royale

Sold

Borderlands 3

A Plague Tale: Innocence

Playing a game about a plague during a plague was a fun, uplifting idea. Well done me.

It is good though, even if realistically its strengths meant that I found myself wishing it leant a bit more towards walking sim, and a bit less towards third-person stealth game. I actually actively wanted less gameplay, in what was already not that long a game (12-15 hours?).

I think that might be down to the nature of the gameplay though, and my own personal gaming proclivities, rather than it actually being subpar; it's a good narrative, with a decent stealth game bolted on, I just found that sometimes the gameplay (and addition of collectibles, and therefore the compulsion to go looking for them) was a detriment to it as a whole, as it detracted from the sense of immersion. The themes and imagery do hit pretty hard at times.

File under 'extremely polished AA's that are well worth a play', alongside the one about the Viking crow lady. cav knows the one I mean. Hellblade?

Completely agree with that, JDub, I thought it was a very atmospheric game that progressively got more and more bogged down with unnecessarily complicated game mechanics. I much preferred the first half with its simple stealth puzzles to the latter half with its multiple ammo types and boss fights. It's a great game though. It's also worth playing in French with subtitles, if you can: the English dub is decent, and uses the same actors, but does have a faint whiff of 'Allo 'Allo about it.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is also great, as you say - and it looks spectacular now it's had the full Series X upgrade treatment. I think Hellblade is the better game of the two, but they're both getting sequels soon so it'll be interesting to see how they both build on what's already there.

File under 'extremely polished AA's that are well worth a play', alongside the one about the Viking crow lady. cav knows the one I mean. Hellblade?

The one with Prole's aunt in, right?

I'd agree that Hellblade is the better of the two, yes. They're both extremely polished, well made games, which deal surprisingly well with THEMES, but Hellblade hangs together a bit more cohesively, as well as just generally working better as a game, I think.

File under 'extremely polished AA's that are well worth a play', alongside the one about the Viking crow lady. cav knows the one I mean. Hellblade?

The one with Prole's aunt in, right?

More like my ex-wife, tbh.

That's a complicated relationship.

The Gunk
Mass Effect 1
Sonic Racing Transformed
Mass Effect 2

Enjoyed this much more the second time around. Once you're onboard with its more linear approach (it's basically Gears of War with RPG-lite mechanics) it's great fun, and most of the characters are brilliant. It's a shame they couldn't reconcile this level of polish with ME1's big, open, more traditional RPG feel, but on balance I now think this is the better of the two games.

I can't even remember ME3, aside from one moment of Mordin and the ending. I'll get around to that after playing some Hitman levels.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus

Full Pokedex done, so I'm finished this with brilliant game. I have some issues with it, like World design isn't awful, but it lacks a certain sort excitement to how it's placed, like I finally got to fly on a bird so I decided to check out the cave inside this hollowed out mountain and…there's nothing there. This is basically the case all over the game, it really really isn't Breath of the Wild in that sense after all…on the other hand, it's really fun to get around in and each biome feels different (Which is more than Shin Megami Tensei V can say), also doesn't look half as bad as people made out tbh.

Also, it has a fair amount of trainer battles, no issues there, but due to how much it breaks away from the standard formula I do think the game is missing something. I mean, there are no Gym battles so you really don't need to stress over getting a solid Pokemon team of 6 in this game? OR we just get a PvP update? No PvP in a Pokemon game that isn't Snap or whatever is kinda' insane right? (Again, on the other hand this also means it's really stress free, you don't need to fuss about making a well rounded team of 6 Pokemon, you can just carry on with the game and its fresh gameplay loop)

Ultimately they don't affect the game too much, for a first shot at trying something drastically new it not only isn't awful it's an awesome game, I'd say it's even better than Shin Megami Tensei V as far as Switch RPGs go.

kino as fuck tbf

What does kino mean?

[whisper] I don't know, but pretend you're cool or Alastor leaves here and all we've got left are gaming boomers who think the Gamegear only came out 5 years ago

What does kino mean?

It's a term from cinema, usually referring to short, low-budget films made by small teams.

What does kino mean?

It's a term from cinema, usually referring to short, low-budget films made by small teams.

It's also literally German for cinema.

How would you know that? Have you ever even been to Germany.

The internet has taken that definition and used it basically as shorthand for 'the highest level of cinema enjoyed by true patricians'. Then it rapidly got twisted even further to describe games and anime, there's a thread on 4chan's anime board for the anime series 'White Album 2' as RomanceKino. (One girl has her birthday on Valentine's, it's definitely romance kino tbh)

What is the difference between one film/game to the next? What makes Marvel simply cinema and David Lynch films kino? Answer: it's a dumb internet meme and don't take it or me too seriously.

Mart, reading this would you say in Pokemon Legends Spoiler - click to show Valo revealing he has the last Arceus plate and challenging you to a battle on, the peak of that mountain, then calling Giratina to fight you is kino?

Once again I've made Aniki have to clean up my mess. T_T

Mart, reading this would you say in Pokemon Legends Spoiler - click to show Valo revealing he has the last Arceus plate and challenging you to a battle on, the peak of that mountain, then calling Giratina to fight you is kino?

You talk like I actually played it.

Back to completed games:

Final Fantasy XIII, a game which has aged both amazingly well and terribly badly. Technically and artistically it's a minor miracle; it's had a glow-up thanks to the Xbox's backward compatibility features but it's still the same underlying code and it looks tremendous. Artistic design is strong, the setting is an interesting and unusual one and the design of some of the Fal'Cie in particular with their uncomfortable mechanical approximations of human faces is tremendous. The characters are - well, if not exactly always likeable (Hope I'm looking at you, you aggravating little fuckwit) - at least well-realised and full of personality, it's one of the strongest core casts of any Final Fantasy game. The music is great. It's a game that looks current-gen, not eleven years old.

Gameplay-wise, though, there's no nice way to say this. FFXIII does two things, combat and cut-scenes, and that's literally all you get. The entire game is a corridor (often, a literal corridor) filled with bad guys and battles. (There's an "open world" section in the second half - however that's really just the same thing but you get to double back on yourself a few times). There's no puzzle-solving, no exploration, no dialogue choices, just move forward, fight, move forward, fight. Repeat for forty hours. The first half of the game does try and mix things up a bit by constantly switching up your party members and abilities, and keeping the plot moving along at a fair old lick. The second half of the game, which does neither of these things, is a trudge.

Thankfully the combat system in this game is excellent, probably the best in the entire series. It's fast and varied and gives the player plenty of choice both in how you fight and how you prepare for that. It's frustrating that you get an automatic party wipe if your lead character goes down, with no opportunity to resurrect (the last two chapters in this are filled with enemies that can one-shot you with ease, where you need to retry fights over and over until you get a chance to get your buffs up before the enemies randomly wipe out your main character) and there is, overall, too much combat in the game but it's a really solid system and I can see why they retained it pretty much as-is for the sequel.

I still had fun with this. While it's a bit limited, I still prefer it to the dreary FFXII or the unfinished and incoherent FFXV. I am, however, pleased to be done with it, and I'll be taking a break before jumping into FFXIII-2 (which was my real reason for replaying this in the first place). Back in 2011 I completely rinsed this game, did absolutely everything possible and put 50 hours into it after the end credits. I must have been insane. Safe to say I won't be doing that this time.

I'm fairly sure I remember people telling you that you were insane at the time.

To be fair, there's a lot of interesting post-game content in FFXIII, lots of optional missions and boss fights and monsters you don't otherwise meet. And min-maxing the characters opens up a lot of new options. It's just interesting that when I first played this, I was clearly still really enjoying it when the credits rolled and wanted more; whereas this time around I am just utterly done with the constant combat and need a break.

I tried playing FF XIII on PC via Game Pass, but it refuses to save my progress.

JANUARY
Inmost
The Pedestrian
Gorogoa
Botanicula

FEBRUARY
Kirby and the Forgotten Land - Lovely game. Called it a day after beating the last proper boss, having saved all the Waddle Dees. That's 90% complete, I'm still missing a whole bunch of collectible figures and the last tournament in the Colosseum remains unbeaten, because it's hard as hell. Will tinker away with the figures, but I think I'm done here.

Borderlands 3
A Plague Tale: Innocence

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

I actually finished this weeks ago, keep forgetting to post. Felt like a PS2-era Castlevania, in a good way, and I was very much engrossed for a good couple of weeks.

I got the “bad” ending at about 48%, but bearing in mind the heritage I knew to go back and have a further explore, and ended up all but 100%-ing the thing (99.80% I think it was).

I am wrong never mind, this is why I should stick to dumb games. :^)

Destiny 2 - Beyond Light

What a long and winding road this was. In a very real way, I'm still alive because of this game. When the pandemic was at its absolute worst, when the world was at its coldest and times were at their darkest there were a few nights where it was coin toss between finding a permanent solution to temporary problems and logging onto a discord voice channel with some friends and just silently playing Crucible for a few hours.

Everyone has felt abandoned during the last two years; everyone's felt lonely and neglected, but I live outside of town and I don't live with anyone. I could go two, three weeks without seeing another human being's face in all three dimensions and having a meaningful conversation; meaningful in this context is more than saying 'no thanks' when they ask if you want a receipt with that. It's been really, really tough and really, really shit.

So, when Beyond Light hit and I was able to more reliably find the same group of people to hangout with and play with, this game became a lifeline in the most literal of senses. It landed and wedged into my brain like so few games have managed to. The spaces that exist in it, the people that I play with and the uproarious laughter that sometimes comes from just the dumbest shit imaginable. The cackling brilliance of some of the nonsense that gets swung in PVP, the cackhanded idiocy of some of the awful shit we do to each other in raids, and the hours worth of frenzied discussion after each story beat is about a community that's vitally important.

Whenever I tried to trick people into playing Destiny, I always kind of knew that it wasn't going to land when I found a generalized resistance to hanging out on a voice channel. It's hard to explain and even harder to really begin to get the fun out of without having people to hang out with. Partly there to explain how to trigger a warmind cell with an Ikelos SMG, but also partly to talk about that time that Spark found a way to wipe an entire raid team with one that 'went in the wrong place, sorry lads.'

The play itself is pretty serviceable, and the minutiae is, essentially, bottomless if you want it to be. A 120 revolver or a 160 revolver's an interesting archetypal choice to have to make but that 160's got firefly and killing wind on it but 120s are just more dependable damage and have better head tracking by default. I bet that Bottom Dollar's going to come in real handy in PVE next time the master lost sector flips over to Dreaming City, you know? All those void shields to pop and set off chain reactions with-

The music's pretty great and the UI's beautiful. It's occasionally ugly and confusing as an MMO's UI is wont to be, but the way that everything in the UI tells a story is fascinating. The loading symbol's started to break over the last week since the final patch of the expansion dropped, the light that's been so important to the game being stolen away by a fiendish enemy. The loading icon that shows the class symbols is degrading, breaking down and collapsing like so many boundaries. The sacred geometry that's used throughout is a fascinating style that I've kind of fallen in love with - space age mandala's written in white fine liner pen against black velvet. The songs swell at the right moments, hold back and sing Deep Stone Lullabies, Music to Splice To, and the End of the Dream.

It's a difficult, complicated mess of a game that I have difficult, complicated and messy thoughts towards.

Part of me thinks that the best exit for this post is a comedy 7/10.

Shit, I don't really know what to say to that apart from to acknowledge that things have been fucking shit over the last two years in ways we haven't really begun to recognise and that the fallout and repercussions from that will take everyone years to work through. Hope you're OK, Luscan. Sometimes it's the strangest things that keep us going.

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack and we're going to be doing it for a long, long time to come.

Anyway, witch queen's out tomorrow and I have Wednesday off because I wanna spend the say playing videogames like an adult.

So sorry to hear how shitty it's been for you Luscan, but very pleased you found a lifeline. Ffxi did something similar for me once upon a time. When all you need is to be somewhere else, anywhere else, finding the right game can be a literal lifesaver.

Borderlands 3
A Plague Tale: Innocence
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Call of the Sea

I liked this, but I should probably accept that, just maybe, walking simulators aren’t really for me. I love a good story, but in this kind of thing there’s something about the sort of linear or narrow narrative structure they generally use that means I just end up frequently feeling that the story would’ve been better suited to a film or (more likely) book, to the point where I get distracted thinking about the (method of) delivery rather than becoming engrossed.

In a game for me I think it’s become much more about inhabiting and exploring a world, and learning its rules and systems, rather than just seeing what happens next. Implied and incidental narrative can be as important as the explicit. Eventually during most games like this I get annoyed at the story bits not fitting the game, or the game bits artificially prolonging, getting in the way of, or detracting from the story, just because there’s comparatively little else to the experience, and I end up wishing I’d just experienced the story in a more traditional format.

(I’m probably not explaining this all that well, and I feel I’m perhaps coming across as overly harsh to a very fine game, and interesting sub-genre, that maybe just isn’t quite my thing, but hey, it’s late, and I’m on a phone.)

It’s still good, occasional cognitive dissonance and slow movement speed notwithstanding. Some striking visuals, nice atmosphere, good puzzles. There’s just that slight feeling of disappointment, given how much I wanted to, and indeed still did like it. I just wanted to like it more, especially seeing as it shares themes with some other stuff I really like, in quite interesting ways - it’s almost certainly the most vibrant, colourful thing I’ve ever come across that owes a debt to Lovecraft, for starters.

Also, that was the second time I’d started writing that post - the first time I actually sort of replied to Luscan, though really it just boiled down to me saying that I was sorry to hear you’ve had a hard time with things, but I’m glad it seems like you’re coming through it, and hope things are on the up now.

Also, I do still sort of miss Destiny. The world, and the wacky lore, as much as anything. So much lore. So easy to get engrossed in, or completely ignore, depending on how you’re feeling.

I’m forever tempted to give it another go, start up another new character. Another Warlock, I think, after starting there, and then playing a Hunter from late D1 and throughout D2, until I stopped playing, just throw a bit of space magic around again. I’ve just missed a lot of stuff now, so other than the time I downloaded it last year, just to see what it looked like on the PS5, I think I might be done with it.

Probably.

The Gunk - if there was a "generic Game Pass game" genre, this would be top of the list. It's short, it revolves around a single gimmick, it's completely linear and I'll have forgotten it in a week. It's fun enough while it lasts - hoovering up stuff is quite therapeutic - but it doesn't have the character of Image & Form's other games and it runs out of new ideas long before the end.

I thought initially it would be some sort of Metroidvania, partly because it makes a lot of noise about upgrades (which turn out to be largely inconsequential), and partly because the environments remind me a bit of Metroid Prime, but it's not that sort of game. It's quite pretty and it has a great soundtrack and it's a decent palate cleanser but it's not the sort of thing you'd enthuse about, exactly.

Look, don't make me say I told you so several months back.

Didn't you really dislike it though? I wouldn't say I disliked it at all, it was just a bit underwhelming. It's the gaming equivalent of tofu.

I think I hated that it ran out of ideas fast, had an overly preachy message and was generally boring all round more than you did. But my issues were the same.

JANUARY
Inmost
The Pedestrian
Gorogoa
Botanicula

FEBRUARY
Kirby and the Forgotten Land

MARCH
Nobody Saves The World - I enjoyed that. A lot of grinding to complete form missions, and a few biting points where it got a bit hard unless you were playing a very specific way (which is silly in a game where you have so many options), but otherwise fun. I maxed out everything, but that means NG+ has nothing but some ridiculously difficult dungeons to complete - the first one is literally one hit death. Considering the only reward for completing it is 85 gamer points, it's the very definition of 'Fuck that, I'm done'. Moving on then…

I like Nobody Saves The World - I'm probably about halfway through, opened up the second half of the map and put a fair amount of time into it - but as you say, levelling up the various forms gets a bit tedious. I feel like I need to try and unlock the later forms but getting some of the earlier ones up the rankings is a bit of a slog sometimes and some of those missions are a bit obscure. Still, it's good, I stick it on a couple of times a week when I'm in the mood and I always have a fun time with it.

Almost all of the later missions are using powers from one form with another: using Horse's Gallop to mow down enemies as the Rogue, using Rogue's Back Stab to kill enemies while playing as the Turtle and so on. It's fine, just a means of prolonging the gameplay since you need to actually unlock those forms and moves first.

I'm surprised how long it took me, the final completion screen has me clocked at 27 hours… that's just another reason why I can't be arsed with NG+, even though in theory having everything done already should reduce the time needed significantly.

The Procession to Calvary

Possibly - no, definitely - the stupidest game I have ever played. And I mean that as high praise. This utterly absurd point-and-click adventure uses classical pieces of artwork for all its graphics and has the vibe and general appearance of Terry Gilliam's animated skits for Monty Python. It's relentlessly stupid, completely irreverent and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. Give it a go.

I loved the first one (played that on mobile), and have this one on Switch. Bounced off it because the control scheme feels unwieldy, but will definitely go back to it.

First one?! There's another of these things?

Amazing. It's like an entire sub-genre of sheer stupidity that I never even knew existed.

It's £4 and change on the Google Play store.