feltmonkey

I've not had a huge amount of time to play games recently. I completed Dark Souls largely in a Tesco car park.

Play
Demolition Girl
An old PS2 game about a woman in a bikini who gets zapped by aliens and turned really big. Like 50-foot tall or something, I'm not good at estimating height but she's really tall. Like, it's the first thing you'd notice about her, even before the whole bikini factor. Fortunately, her bikini grows with her to protect her modesty. All the jiggle-physics you would expect of the era are in effect.

You play as a helicopter tasked with firing syringes into the woman as she frolics about knocking over trees and demolishing buildings. For reasons that are not explained, you have to shoot the syringes into specific parts of her - her arse, breasts, ankle, back of the head - and you have secondary weapons like a radio that makes her stand still and dance. Each level is slightly different to the previous one, so you might be fighting off aliens who are trying to attack her unconscious form as she is being dangled between other helicopters. I'm not making that up. In another one you're trying to shoot an alien squid off her head - it's mind-controlling her. In possibly me favourite level you play as a tank shooting shells at the woman as she makes her way into Tokyo on her rampage. You drop plates on her head to stun her as well. The city is being evacuated and as you drive along, there are civilians fleeing in the opposite direction along the same road. These civilians are your main antagonist of the level as they get in your way, slow you down, and damage your tank as you drive over them. The handling on the tank isn't good enough to avoid them, so your only option is to shell these innocent fleeing civilians. I shelled the fuck out of them. I killed so many fleeing families, surely causing far more deaths than the huge bikini woman ever managed.

The final level is a really difficult boss fight where you have to simultaneously dodge almost unavoidable projectiles, syringe the woman, and blast a giant squid, all in a helicopter that moves agonisingly slowly. It takes five seconds to rotate 90 degrees, so it's almost impossible to do any of the three tasks, never mind all three at once. I did manage to complete it in the end, but I needed to get lucky with a run where the boss did it's more dodgeable attack more than it's two undodgeable ones. But yep, I completed Demolition Girl. It was rubbish, and deeply problematic. Most people would have been able to tell that from one look at the box art, but I'm here to confirm. No need to thank me, it's all part of the service.

Crimson Desert
My brother bought me this for my birthday, and my goodness it's quite the thing. It's unbelievable massive and complex, and yet somehow really shallow. The map is MMORPG size, with beautiful vistas and eye-candy graphics. The quests are often "go to this marker, click on this NPC, then go to this marker, then back to the NPC." The town seems to be bustling and alive, but the NPCs seem to have about five lines across the whole lot of them. Every maid makes the same weak joke about needing to do the washing. The combat at first can seem quite button-mashy, but is actually really deep, with a huge move-list like a virtua fighter-style fighting game. Mercifully, you don't even need to engage with this for the most part, and mashing is absolutely fine. The animation is spectacular whether you're mashing or actually good at the game. It's incredibly fluid, and every hit, block, or move of any kind seems to land realistically. It is like magic. The story seems intriguing but is so badly told it's immediately unclear what is going on. I'm still not sure if my guy is supposed to be dead, or having recovered from a terrible injury, or what.

The controls are busy. There are so many systems and things you can do on top of each other that every button seems to have about five different uses dependent on context or whether you're holding an object, or holding down another button. You do get used to it, but I still have incidents where I go to talk to someone and instead leap over them because of the context sensitivity. The game has one of those walking around systems where you are given too much control over your character. Your guy cannot be trusted to make his way through a crowd without ploughing into everyone. I walk into everyone all the time. I consider this a positive, though, because everyone you run into swears at you, and for some reason this is the only area where there is variety in the NPC dialogue.

I haven't seen this comparison, but the game it reminds me of is Breath of the Wild. It has the same gliding, climbing, and cooking mechanics, but a thousand other things layered on top. I haven't scratched the surface of it. It's too much - I have played 20 hours, but I don't feel ready to even consider investigating the crafting, or the fishing, or upgrading anything, or what seems to be a dynamic way of changing who controls what on the map, or the base building, or any of the other dozen confusing, poorly-explained systems. I keep seeing people saying they've spent 100 hours on the game and are still in the starter area. The game is intimidatingly huge. It seems like if this game clicks with you, you could play it exclusively for years and years. On the other hand though, I'm finding it perfect for a mindless 15-minute session of pootling about. It's a great game for pootling.

Want
GTA6. Come on guys. It's going to be amazing.
Count Binface to defeat Cunt Frogface

Bin
Political interference in the World Cup. Trump got a sent-off USA player's one-match ban "suspended" so he was able to play in a game he should have been suspended for. This is possibly the most corrupt thing that has happened in a World Cup since 1978, even though that is a crowded field. It is hugely damaging to the integrity of the game, and this is not fixed by the USA getting thrashed by Belgium in the match in question.

I dunno if the thread seems like a blog. I reckon it feels more like a cautionary tale.

99p on loaded.com if you're feeling particularly frugal.

I'm just going to add a Play at the end of the month here.

Play - Dark Souls Remastered
I'm not a Souls guy. I loved Elden Ring, but I've never really got on with any of the other Fromsoft games I've played. Even since Elden Ring, I've tried and failed to get into Bloodborne and Sekiro. So frankly it came as a surprise to me that I not only enjoyed Dark Souls Remastered, but I finished it. I killed every boss, required or optional, apart from the large woman at the end of the Painted World, and some bloke who keeps disappearing down a long corridor. I didn't bother fighting them as I didn't think they needed to die. I even killed the DLC bosses, including the Black Dragon Kalameet, which is generally regarded as the hardest boss in the game. I don't know why the game clicked with me this time. It was my third attempt at playing it. I couldn't even tell you what I liked about it, although I did really like it. It's a brilliant game and worthy of it's reputation. I can see it's problems. People say it's perfectly fair and when you die it's always your fault, but that's not true. The camera kills you, particularly in the areas where the game asks you to do some platforming. The controls kill you. The button for closing the menu is the same button for rolling backwards, so sometimes you close the menu and immediately roll backwards off a cliff. The multiplayer stuff where you have messages left everywhere and players can invade or be summoned is immersion-breaking and atmosphere-damaging. Nothing destroys the idea that you are fighting your way alone through a dark and hostile world quicker than a message on the ground that reads "Feet ahead" before a bare-footed female NPC. However, the combat is incredibly satisfying and the world evocative, labyrinthine, and genuinely strange.

So I know what you're thinking. "You're not good at games, feltmonkey. How much cheesing did you do to complete Dark flipping Souls?" Well I'm going to tell you. I struggled with the Capra Demon (a big guy in a tiny room who kills you in one hit the instant you enter his area. Also he has poisonous dogs that get you.) so I killed him by throwing shit over a wall into his boss arena. I aquired this shit from a giggling merchant in a sewer. She was literally selling turds in a sewer. Presumably she was giggling because she was astonished that her business model was suddenly turning a profit. I also found the notorious Ornstein and Smough (two bosses at the same time - one small and fast that shoots lightning, one huge and slow, and a second phase where you fight one of them who becomes both huge and fast and shooting lightning) very difficult and I ended up summoning a guy to help me. It was the only time I did this, as I don't like interacting with other people even if they can't speak and just kill the baddies for me. Is it cheese to summon? It's part of the mechanics of the game, and I did as much damage as the guy I summoned. I'll let you judge. The other cheesy thing I did was killing a group of enemies called The Phalanx a lot of times. They give you so much xp, so I used them to level up so I was able to use particular weapons or wear armour without fat-rolling. Apart from that I didn't use any more dubious tactics - I just hit things with my sword until they died or I did. I hardly even used my shield, which I think made the game much more fun. I always hated the thing people tell you to do where you hide behind your shield and poke out with a spear. That just isn't fun at all.

Would I recommend it to anyone? Nope. You already know if you're going to like it or not by now. Or maybe you don't - I mean, I thought I knew I didn't like it.

Haha yeah, that was a horrible part of the process. The noise every clip makes coming apart makes you think you've broken it.