Resident Evil 2 Remake
(Leon's story, anyway - I'm going to carry on and do Claire's "second run" now, despite my misgivings about how they've apparently dropped the ball a bit with the concept).
I really enjoyed revisiting this. It looks spectacular for a last-gen game (it's had some upgrades, though) and it has bags of atmosphere. The police station is the obvious highlight here, if the whole game had been as good as that it would have been a 100% all-time classic, but sadly the sewer section is a huge letdown and the final bit in the Umbrella labs, while good, can't quite turn it around.
I messed up my run quite a bit:
Spoiler - click to showI used up almost every bit of ammunition I had in the sewers section where you have to cross the waterway bit that's filled with the horrible sewer monsters, I don't really know how I was supposed to do that otherwise as there's no space to get around them, but I'm guessing there's a trick I missed. I also managed to completely miss picking up the flamethrower (actually in retrospect that might have been what I needed) and only realised when I kept collecting ammo for it later on - and that made the ivy zombies mighty tricky later on. I really thought I was going to run out of ammo completely during the last couple of boss fights but I made it through somehow. Didn't fancy doing those with the combat knife!
Lengthwise this is perfect, 6-8 hours is ideal to encourage replays and speed runs and all the various modes it offers.
They keep trying to do it, though, don't they? Other M was exactly the same, Samus could only use certain items of equipment when she was given permission by her (male) commanding officer. Nothing to do with having to find them, she just had to be told by a man that she was allowed.
4 though, ooof.
I hadn't played the previous game so when Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor came out early this year I don't think I even noticed it. It appeared in a couple of GOTY lists though and it sounded good, I'm pleased to confirm that actually it is. It's basically Vampire Survivors with a more traditional game structure wrapped around it: lots of unlocking stuff and levelling up and playing through different modes here, which gives context to the various auto-shooter runs you'll be doing. It looks and sounds pretty good and there seems to be masses to do. I'm really enjoying it for a bit of brains-off Christmas blasting fun.
It's a shame it's only the Timesplitters 1 campaign….but there's some extras it seems, and one of them has the very first area of the Soviet map in Timesplitter's 2, making for a nice teaser.
Timesplitters 1 was the first game I had on my PS2 and a few of us played an absolute shitload of the split-screen multiplayer back in the day. The single-player campaign was pretty basic, really just a series of time-based and other challenges, but it did have an absolute ton of unlocks so I'd play that during the week and then at the weekends when my mates came over we always had new characters and stages to play. I never really gelled with the second one the same way (but it was a different time) and skipped the third one completely.
Banjo Tooie, on Switch 2. I'd forgotten how mental this game is. It's fun, but it's massively overcomplicated. It can take hours to earn a single jiggy, as you trek across four different levels and multiple characters. Definitely peak N64 collectathon, but I'm having fun regardless.
I love this, it's just so mad and ambitious for an N64 game. I think DK64 is probably peak collectathon (all those different coloured bananas!) but this was probably my favourite of the Rare platformers.
I still think I like the RE2 Remake best in the series
I liked the RE3 remake a lot (it was a fun, replayable action game) and I've got the RE4 remake still to play. But I'm kind of fascinated now to revisit the RE1 remake, something tells me it'll hold up pretty well for a 23-year-old game, and bizarrely I wonder how RE6 is these days.
There must be some difference though because you can still play Leon/Claire or Claire/Leon - doing the second run is a different option from just starting a new game with the other character. I'm not sure what the difference is though. I'm sure @Alastor will know.
Garwoofoo