Garwoofoo

New Want - Monster Train 2!

The first game was an all-time classic (one of the rare occasions where @cavalcade and I agreed on something) and this looks like more of the same. Not sure when it's due out but there's a demo on Steam now so hopefully not too far off.

Fallout 4, if you play it via Gamepass will copy your Xbox saves over, no?

It depends whether it's marked as Xbox Play Anywhere. Most new games work seamlessly but older stuff is less dependable. It doesn't look like Fallout 4 will work, sadly.

I played NMS a bit at launch and got bored of it very quickly. There was really very little to do apart from jumping from planet to planet collecting resources and cataloguing stuff.

Coming back to it years later and it's like a whole new game. I don't much like sandbox creative stuff either but it hasn't felt like that at all, it's constantly throwing objectives and quests at me and I'm juggling loads of different stuff without ever feeling like I'm having to make my own fun. The base-building is there if you want it (and unlocking what seems like a million base bits to build with is a game in itself, even if you never use them) but you don't need to stay in one place at all as you can teleport to and from your base pretty much at will. And the multiplayer stuff is definitely there but the chances of running into anyone "at random" is still infinitesimally small so it's really just there if you want to team up with friends, it definitely still feels like a solo experience.

I've been putting off returning to this for years, thinking it wouldn't be my sort of thing, but it turns out it absolutely is, at least for the kind of mood I'm in right now.

I've been reading up about the Sony presentation though, I think Days Gone Remastered represents some kind of nadir for the industry. Who wants this exactly?

A timely discussion because I've started playing No Man's Sky this week and I'm completely in love with it, partly because it isn't just Sad Men Killing Things. It's bright, it's colourful, it's totally bonkers in many ways and crucially I have no idea what's going to happen each time I boot it up.

So many games these days are fun for the first hour or two as you work out the systems and then the appeal wears off quickly once you realise you'll just be doing the same thing over and over for ten, twenty, a hundred hours. With NMS it's constantly surprising me, while also not leading me by the hand in any way whatsoever, and it reminds me of how gaming used to be: when you'd load up a cassette or stick a cartridge in the machine and expect to see something new that you'd never seen before.

I know it's not really fair to compare things in this way (NMS is, after all, the result of over a decade's constant development, which is pretty much unique for anything that isn't an MMO) but surely a bit of this kind of imagination in our AAA games isn't too much to ask for.