Garwoofoo

No-one's started this yet this month so let's go.

Play

Final Fantasy XIV - still absolutely loving this. It's the kind of game that elbows almost everything else off the agenda, because there's always stuff to do and whatever kind of mood you are, there will be something that fits the bill. I'm partway into Stormblood now, which I know is thought to be one of the weaker expansions but I'm still having a great time.

However I have found time for a couple of Fire Emblem games, here and there: Path of Radiance on the GameCube, via NSO, and Fates on the 3DS (my reliable holiday companion). They're both good, in slightly different ways: Path of Radiance is fun but very simplistic, with a linear campaign, while Fates is much more involved to the point of having a little too much fluff and stuff to do around the good bits. Neither have the "oh shit" rewind feature that Three Houses had, though, which means I spend a troubling amount of time playing levels twice to undo obvious fuck-ups.

Want

And following on from the above, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is out in a week or two, at which point I'll probably move over to that. It looks great, and I am assured by Mart that there is loads of stuff in there that hasn't even been touched upon in the previews. Three Houses was probably my favourite Switch game overall so I am expecting great things from this.

And, still in a strategy mood, Star Wars: Zero Company looks great: I like XCOM, I like Star Wars, I even like The Clone Wars, so this is getting bought sooner rather than later.

Bin

I hate to say it, but probably Game Pass? I'm paid up until next year but I'm using it less and less: I'm not sure if the game selection is getting weaker or they're simply not getting word of mouth out any more, but I scan over the list of recent titles and I have no idea what any of them are and no-one seems to talk about them like they used to. The various discovery tasks that used to be part of Microsoft Rewards did a huge amount in terms of encouraging people to try games out, and since they removed those it's just a list of titles you don't recognise. Now they're introducing a farcical 15 hours a month limit for their cloud streaming (a feature I do actually use), there's increasingly little reason to keep it going. When my sub runs out I might just knock it down to Core and keep playing the games I've bought that I actually want to play.

I replayed the first twenty hours or so of this a few months ago and really enjoyed it, before getting sidetracked by other stuff and life in general, so this remaster is great timing. They’ve confirmed saves will carry across too so I should be able to pick up where I left off.

Yes I definitely want to get this - like you say though performance looks ropey on all platforms so I’m hanging on for a little while to see if patches make a difference.

What with this and the new Fire Emblem, it’s a good month for strategy fans.

I watched the first X-Men movie for the first time in the runup to Doomsday, and it was so bad I'm astonished they made any more of them.

It has about 15 characters to introduce, each of which gets their allotted 5 minutes of screen time to do their one mutant party trick then it's on to the next one. No-one gets any actual character development at all, apart from possibly Wolverine who gets ten minutes at the start where he acts completely differently to show how much he's changed by the end of the movie. Every plot point is "Mystique is pretending to be this guy, oh no, however could we have possibly seen this coming". The fight scenes are slow and clunky with obvious stunt performers, but the editing for everything else is abrupt and frantic with nothing given any time to breathe.

I know it comes from a different era of superhero movies and maybe this is how X-Men always is but it honestly just felt like a bunch of action figures rather than an actual movie. Drivel. I'm going to watch the rest of them now.

I think they went a bit too hard on the TV series to start with - stuff like Falcon & the Winter Soldier and Loki felt like required viewing, which started to become a big time commitment. While they were often good, keeping up with Marvel started to feel like work. Then they went the other way and several movies (Shang-Chi, Eternals) and shows (She-Hulk, Echo, Wonder Man) just seemed to go absolutely nowhere. So the narrative momentum has been completely lost.

Incels howling "woke" at everything with a female main character didn't help.

Then the whole Kang thing happened - they built up a shit villain over the course of several of the worst movies they've ever made, then dropped him abruptly when real life stuff happened, leading to the next Avengers movie suddenly being Dr Doom with absolutely no build-up whatsoever.

I've kept up with the movies (which have been a real mixed bag lately) but I'm several shows behind and not really inclined to catch up. I'll probably see Avengers but it's definitely not got the hype of Infinity War, and I'm not sure how it ever could have had.