feltmonkey

Anyone here "playing" Dispatch? I really like the general flavour. Strong Invincibles/The Boys vibe (SWEARS and hyper violence) but charming all the same. is it really a game though? It has the Telltale "Mr Boogle Will Remember That" aspect to dialogue interaction + some QTEs and minigames (not a surprise considering who the devs are), but basically you're just watching a fairly entertaining cartoon. I am enjoying it, though.

Yes, actually! I just started it, and have played through the first chapter. I think the moment when a big superhero fight happened in which one participant's knob and balls were flailing around the whole time was when I realised that I was going to enjoy Dispatch. I mean the game may as well have put the words "Feltmonkey will remember that" on the screen.

I'm jumping in late because I've finally had some time to play some games this week after finishing a dwarf-painting job which had gone a bit sideways and ended up requiring 7-day weeks until 1am every night.

Play
Death Stranding 2 still. I never just plough through the campaign in any game, but in this one I've taken that to an extreme. I will spend days just building infrastructure, not doing any of the missions, neither main nor side. I'm now getting to the very end of the story, and characters have started breaking the fourth wall and turning to the camera to say stuff to the player. The first time was okay, quite creepy and good even. The second warned us of a long cut-scene, which is at least considerate, but the third one was really shit and egregious. Proper bollocks, and should have been cut. It happens during a lengthy cut-scene that explains a load of stuff (well sort of, naturally none of the explanations make any sense) and a character literally turns to the camera and says, did you work out the hidden meaning behind this name? It completely takes you out of the moment, the "hidden meaning" is completely lame, and I resent one of my favorite games ever doing something so stupid. Still, it's one five-second moment in a 100-hour masterpiece, so it's not that big a deal.

Evil West This is a strange one. I hadn't heard of it, but it's on Game Pass, and it turns out that it is a very 360-era third-person action game. You jog down corridors and have a series of fights. There is no whiff of an open world, to the degree that you get the impression that the developers have never played, or heard of, an open world game. The secrets are all very short obvious detours from the main corridor. The story is stupid in a good way. It's the wild west, but there are vampires, zombies, werewolves, and stuff. You punch them with a big electric fist. There is no subtext whatsoever. Again, it's as if it was written by Garth Marenghi, who considers all authors who use subtext to be cowards. The vampires do not represent the aristocracy impinging on the freedom of the wild west. They represent vampires. If you are reading anything else into it then that is your own moral failing.

As a game, it's like the 360 era never ended, which is obviously a good thing. That era was full of games where you just pushed forward, engaged in the combat, and carried on to see what happened next. There is still something great about that. You don't need to think about anything except how best to punch the vampires. It's not perfect, it does get repetitive, and you soon see that all it's really doing is linking together a series of combat arenas, each of which just give slightly different combinations of the same enemies to give you very slightly different challenges, most of which can be dealt with by doing a big jump-punch forward, the first attack you unlock. The game is not trying to disguise this at all though. I think it's the point, to be honest. I'm just happy to be playing what is to all intents and purposes a new 7/10 Xbox 360 game, which makes it an 8.5/10 today, of course.

Want
More of a need really, but a new car. Mine has got to that stage when it's started costing me money on a regular basis. It's cost £2000 since last August, and I could have put that money towards a new one. I'm thinking I might get a Dacia Duster, but the advert jingle somewhat puts me off.

Bin
Error - It is currently impossible to make a flippant comment in this field due to the state of the world.

Yeah, I'm steering clear of that one. I thought Danganronpa was a bit too long! I'm not going to finish a 200-hour visual novel.

No, sadly I tried to eat it.

Play
Still Death Stranding 2 which I think is one of the best games of the generation, along with Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring. Elden Ring might not even count, actually as it's on PS4. I play on PC mainly, so I have no idea when generations start and end. I don't know if I prefer this or the first Death Stranding, but this is definitely the one I would recommend to someone coming to the series fresh, despite the fact that the game assumes a LOT of story knowledge of the player. The game part is just much more comprehensible. The difficulty curve makes more sense. The first game went from a horror walking simulator to a cosy pootle-em-up over its course. This one stays an open-world exploration, delivery, and action game for it's run time. That's not to say there isn't variety, because there absolutely is. There's a bizarre sci-fi bike race at one point.

It's still perfectly possible to get completely lost in a self-imposed side mission of building roads and monorails, or delivering kangaroos to the band Chvrches. There's always another gadget or weapon to try out, which seems to tie in cleverly to the game's (much more coherent this time) theme. I say "seems to" because there's still time for the game to throw everything away in a cut-scene twist and for Kojima to say, "Surprise! It's actually all about toenails!"

Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc - I actually finished this, after a decade of false starts in which I played through the first few hours of the game repeatedly over the years. It's really good, but I'm not going to jump straight into the sequels yet. There are two reasons for this - it's so long, and it's so dark. It took me something like 30 hours to finish, maybe more. Being as I play games for at most 40 minutes a day if I'm lucky usually, and don't have any days off in a normal week, it took me most of last year and into February this year to get through it. As for the darkness, it's a game about getting close to a selection of characters, and them being suddenly killed off. It's pretty bleak.

So in case anyone is unaware, all these characters are trapped in a school, and the only way to escape is to commit, and get away with, murder. Every time anyone dies, there is an investigation period, followed by a class trial. The trial consists of Phoenix Wright style logical deduction, pointing out contradictions and building a picture of what happened, combined with some light action elements such as a rhythm game and shooting "Truth Bullets" at characters' statements. It's well judged in that I went into every trial (with the exception of one or two which contained mid-trial rug-pulls) with a clear idea of exactly who had done it and how, but I had only put it all together right at the end of the investigation period. The only problems that arose during the trials were the times when I knew what had happened but was unsure of how the game wanted me to communicate it. If anything though, it's generally a bit less prone to this problem than Phoenix Wright.

I think I need to play something shorter and breezier next.

Want
I dunno. Good things to happen, I suppose. They never do, though.

Bin
Expensive car repairs that come up a couple of weeks after Christmas. That I could have done without. The same goes for dental work.